The NYT didn’t have to be right, they only had to sell newspapers and clicks. The burden of evidence for publishing a hit piece is much lower than that for making an actual business decision.

I’m no fan of Boeing but the truth is, betting your entire business requires a much higher burden of proof than journalism does.

"The NYT didn’t have to be right, they only had to sell newspapers and clicks."

This is totally wrong. The New York Times depends on its reputation for accuracy.

If they are wrong, their reputation won't suffer that much. They can just say, "We based our story on the best information available to us as outsiders."

Which, to me at least, is a perfectly legitimate thing for a newspaper to do. Yes, they should check facts and vet sources, but their primary responsibility is to do the best they can and get the information out there for the public.

It's pretty clear that Boeing's leadership could have had better info than the NYT, yet they either didn't, or they ignored/hid what they knew.

When it comes to constructing narratives and interpreting the basic evidence, a newspaper is constrained only by the need to tell and sell a story, not by the need to choose a positive course of action in order to identify and solve the fundamental problems entailed. It's not about the basic facts, it's about what you do with them.

That certainly didn't play when Judith Miller [1] given the bull horn at the NYT allowed the Bush Administration to march us directly into a bullshit war. They are indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller

That seems backwards, I would think they would depend on accuracy for its reputation.

Their record of accuracy has suffered quite a bit in the past few years.

> The burden of evidence for publishing a hit piece is much lower than that for making an actual business decision.

That's not reflecting reality at all. In a big enough company you don't really decide, you do both. Alternatively, you choose all three of the options. There's often no reason to fully go for one thing. This as in a big enough company there's enough resources that someone somewhere else does something else, likely the opposite of some other decision.

Eventually something will fail, or it'll succeed. The things which succeed will hopefully be implemented everywhere.