I won't call them fools, but I will say many seem less interested in truth than in bias confirmation.

Decrying liberal/conservative media bias while being stuck within that same spectrum is an entirely impotent critique to me if you don't understand the structural incentives that make all media outlets opposed to reporting truth/facts to the public (cf. *Manufacturing Consent).

Which alternative sources? NewsMax? Reason.org? The Intercept? Or some crank youtube channel run by a single person?

NYT. Wins: too many to count. Losses: 3

I don't quite see your point.

We all know about the NYTimes' failure in the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War but what about a story like Hoosick Falls where a chemical company had been dumping perfluorooctanoic acid into the drinking water?

I have been reading the paper for decades and I can say that for every Iraq War failure there are hundreds of Hoosick Falls stories that involve important investigative journalism.

The NYTimes makes mistakes but it is a net good to society. There is a current trend in popular culture where if a solution is not perfect then it shouldn't be implemented at all. There will never be an objective media and you should be highly skeptical of any media that claims that as their advantage.

This isn't my concern though. The next layer of error beyond "good guy or bad guy" is "net good or net bad". My concern is that the NYT isn't just wrong occasionally, but wrong in systematic ways representing unconscious bias or direct manipulation.

Hoosick Falls was a clear good. We need more news organizations with the weight and investigative will to take on that sort of work. The NYT is excellent at this, and I hope it continues to be.

But... well, the NYT toed an establishment line in 2003, contributing to a deadly, misjudged war. In 2004, they sat on a major warrantless surveillance scoop for two years until a reporter forced them into it via book publication. After the Snowden leaks, they creatively claimed that he had decided which documents to publish without press input (the exact inverse of the truth). A Times reporter published a major article from the information Snowden provided, then argued for his prosecution because the article she wrote had nothing to do with illegal privacy violations. The list goes on at enormous length, and I only regret not keeping links to have handy on demand.

So I'm not comfortable saying "1 Iraq to 100 Hoosicks". My objection is that the errors that do occur point align with each other, and align with a narrative of expanded state power and foreign intervention. There may not be any objective media, but it's still important to speak up when the losses and the wins fall on different lines.

I would encourage you to read the actual papers and the later analysis to come to your own conclusion. The OPEDs leading up to the war are particuarly interesting. If you have a NYTimes membership (I'm sure they have some form of free trial) you can access the "timesmachine" which is great UI they built to navigate archived papers back to the 1800s

There is a lot of rhetoric flying around on both sides today. As in most conflicts I find the reality to be much more nuanced and less clear cut. The temptation to omit details to fit the narrative is in my opinion the only thing you can count on from all media sources.

See http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one... for more details.

You are of course correct that omitting details to fit the narrative is what's going on here. This particular case is more egregious that most in that "details" is "two out of the three equally important numbers in the study's results".

Or in the context of Irak, maybe they did not formally lie, but did know that the persons they quoted did. Which would count as the same for me.

>NYT. Wins: too many to count. Losses: 3. I don't quite see your point.

You're illustrating it.

What's your point? You're not making it.

-Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell 14 June 1807

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_spe...