There is this odd dynamic where if you need the additional legitimacy of an old media organization to get your story out, there must be something fishy about it. Like it's a palace gossip leak, and nothing with real consequence or risk.
If your story is really worth your safety, there is the much greater risk that editors will spike it, the way they did with pretty much every major whistle blower story of the last decade. Hollywood was protected for years, intelligence leaks were regularly spiked, and often journalists themselves were complicit actors in the official retaliations. I'm sure the NYT will still have a security role of some sort, but the idea that it could actually equip reporters at a corporate level with the tools to do the kind of opsec you need to facilitate stories at the level of the Intercept, Wikileaks, and other insurgent media seems unlikely.
the US media serves at the pleasure of the King. only a fool would attempt to blow the whistle with the NYT (or NPR).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pulitzer_Prizes_awarde...
The NYTimes still does journalism, and still has an important role, but the need for such a direct cybersecurity role seemed diminished (and management seemed to agree) - and would probably get in the way of less sensitive work if you had to put everything past them.
To some others in this thread, "troll," seems to have come to just mean a provocative outsider view.
What most journalists do does not require a higher degree security to achieve it, so yes, that is disappointing.
I don't necessarily agree with the poster above, but it is obviously not an instance of trolling, also it is not offensive or damaging to anyone.
Suppressing the symptoms and pretending they don't exist won't make the root cause go away. If anything, it will only make the eventual consequences hit us more violently. People will say that the blow-up was sudden and unexpected, but in fact they've been ignoring the warning signs all along.
This is stating fundamentally that manipulation, propaganda, brainwashing etc does not work. Which is patently false. So obviously there is a spectrum. Seeing as it's very possible to steer people through words, the remaining debate is regarding what is dangerous and not.
Those things have the desired effect only when the manipulated sentiments result in concrete actions such as voting or not voting for someone, buying or not buying something, treating somebody in a certain way, etc.
I want as much as anybody else to block the effects of these menaces. But the way to do it is to block the pathway from propaganda to sentiment to action (to use a pharmacological analogy), not to suppress the sentiment.
The whole idea of the free press depends on supporting the free expression of ideas, sentiments, arguments, and testimonies and only suppressing actually detrimental actions. As Justice Louis Brandeis famously noted, the answer to bad speech is more speech, not less. Start trying to bury some people's ideas just because they might encourage others to behave in a certain way, and it's not a long way from there to book-burning territory.
I'm not trying to twist your words, but does this not entail vote suppression (for example)?
> As Justice Louis Brandeis famously noted, the answer to bad speech is more speech, not less.
While sounding good in theory, the problem with more speech is that what's true doesn't gain as many clicks and eyeballs as what's "engaging". Put that on top of the fact that producing researched quality reporting takes factor X more effort than producing something false that _sounds_ interesting/engaging, and with complete disregard to whether it's true or not.
It then follows that there will always be more low quality news (or in reality non-news aka "crap") to drown out real news, given the basically free transfer costs of the internet.
I wish I was optimistic enough to think that people in aggregate wanted to be educated, but I think our current timeline indicates that is not so. And as long as that's the case, stemming the tides of crap is the only viable option I see, however hard that is to do right.
Book burning was bad because it was suppressive of legitimate ideas. I'm not sure what would have been the association if we only burned books suggesting that eating Tide pods was a good idea.
No, I'm not advocating vote suppression. I'm advocating education. Which, as you said, looks like a lost cause, at least in the United States. But if there's no way to win this war without suppressing and silencing somebody, well, so be it. Letting people consume crap doesn't seem all that bad compared to violating civil rights.
Moreover, the sentiment expressed in the parent post that we've been talking about doesn't seem all that different from your observation that there will always be more crap than real news and that people in general don't want to be educated. They're both statements about the current state of journalism and news consumers, albeit with different kinds of exaggeration and flourish. We could talk all day about the causes of this problem and how we might fix it, but allowing people to vent their frustration about a problem is not part of the problem.
Worldwide we are seeing an attack on journalism and the free press. Cutting security resources as a short term profit-boosting exercise can have disastrous consequences. Many people all over the world risk arrest or even death for sharing information with journalists. If they can't be sure that the journalists have an excellent security apparatus backing them, it will be too risky for them to come forward.