I get your point but it's still a good thing that the authors are writing about tracking. It's probably a different team working on the website and I'd hope articles like this open people eyes even internally at the verge

Indeed the firewall at old-fashioned newspapers (between editorial and advert sales) was vital to their independence and dissolving this (today you can buy "native advertising" which only the most careful reader will realise isn't editorial) has been part of their downfall. You actively want the people who write the stories to be shielded from whatever the people making money to pay for those stories do. Every time a journalist even feels like they shouldn't write a story because it'll lose their paper (or TV channel, or website) money that's a problem.

That doesn't mean the media aren't worth criticising, but it means you should aim for it to be possible for that critique to come from within.

Funding models other than advertising are good, but they're not realistic for very broad media. I might give money to a person who writes (or talks or makes videos) about a subject I care very deeply about, but who is going to give money to the people doing a morning breakfast show or a mid-size city newspaper? Those things are expensive and advertising remains a realistic way to fund them.

Traditionally news organizations have maintained a separation between editorial and advertising departments so that advertisers had no ability to influence what the editors wrote.

People should really, really read manufacturing consent.

Journalists writing critically about tracking should be seen as pretty clear evidence against a bunch of the conspiracy theories you often see floating around[0]. To turn this against them seems strange.

Ignoring for a second that "putting trackers on the website", writing these articles, and deciding to publish them are the actions of at least three different people/groups, I don't quite get what you are accusing "them" off?

It's perfectly possible to criticise trackers or advertising and still feel the need to use them for economic survival. I'd be surprised if less than 90% of the people in this thread critical of tracking have Google Analytics tags even on their personal websites, where it doesn't serve any purpose except vanity.

And that's OK. Running trackers and criticising them is still better than just running them, in the same way that smoking & regular exercise is better than just smoking.

[0]: HN being particularly dense (pun not entirely intended), and willing to get itself into the most weird contortions of logic to find mechanisms of how some writer might gain some immediate financial gain from some article.

There was a similar discussion last week (or so). It was basically said that even if "the media" does track us, it's still a good thing "they" allow some autors to write about privacy.

That's my (new) opinion on this.