This understates the reality, dramatically. The biases are extreme, and the bar for accuracy is generally extraordinarily low, especially in new media, but increasingly in old media trying to adapt. Oftentimes there are a number of lies of ommission/misleading statements/snippets taken out of extremely important context in order to make the reality fit into the desired narrative. Frequently they're actively trying to drum up outrage against someone or something. It's becoming a more and more destructive force.

Just go look for the full quotes any time there's a blog shitstorm about something someone famous says. Sometimes, the outrage is justified, but frequently, the context completely changes the meaning of the snippet, sometimes 180 degrees from the way it's being presented in the media.

I'm not at all surprised that the people you mention who've been in the media a lot are annoyed by it, they're right to be.

Also, why are you on a throwaway account?

PS: This reminds me of the old GW Bush "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me... you can't get fooled again". I don't know if this is true, but I've heard it explained that he realized halfway through that he couldn't say "shame on me", or it would be excerpted and used relentlessly against him.

But there shouldn't be any effort involved if all of this is already as obvious as claimed.

An example, since PG was mentioned: http://www.paulgraham.com/wids.html

In this case, a word was edited out of even the context-free snippet.

Feel free to look up the articles surrounding it.

That said even the example you linked isn't that strong. The omission of the word "these" in "these women" doesn't change the meaning of the paragraph because it's qualified by "they haven't been hacking for 10 years". Obviously the modified paragraph doesn't apply to women who have been hacking for 10 years. The alteration only matters if many women have been hacking for 10 years relative to men. Therefore, the altered paragraph accurately conveys the author's meaning.

The same for the ambiguity as to whether "we" refers to society or YC. Either interpretation has very similar meaning ("Women aren't starting Facebook because they don't have 10 years programming experience and neither YC nor society can undo that without a time machine).

Then the author talks about how they misspoke. You can't blame that on a journalist when they quote you.

Even if you don't agree the excerpts are clearly not obvious examples of journalistic malpractice. And most claims of misquoting and distortion are much weaker than even this, often completely baseless.

But even if we take this case as journalistic bad behavior (obviously there is going to be some), I wouldn't conclude, based on this evidence, that there is systemic journalistic malpractice against tech or elites, nor would I default to taking a critical story on tech as false.

There are other areas like foreign policy where you can default to extreme skepticism because people have done concrete analysis and demonstrated a pattern. In tech on the other hand, cases seem to be hard to come by (everyone just "knows" it's true) and people instead resort to name calling and vague accusations. But even in foreign policy where I know the reporting to be untrustworthy I don't discard an article out of hand, I'm just extremely skeptical and search out disconfirming evidence and articles. I can't do that with tech stories because nobody concretely describes why a story is false. The "What I Didn't Say" article is an exception rather than the rule.

The most likely reason why nobody explains why something is false is because it isn't. When the facts are on your side people pound the facts otherwise they pound the table.

I don't know anything about what legal writing requires. Journalism requires editing and making calls about how to fairly and coherently convey quotes because of space and attention constraints because every story can't be a deposition.

We can debate the WIDS article but the most important things to me are 1. that there is actually a concrete objection that can discussed 2. how this case contributes, along with other cases, to produce the alleged pattern of behavior, namely the systematic (and willful?) negative erroneous reporting on tech leaders.

The cases you gave are not tech-elite related and the domains they cover are subject to different influences (e.g. liberal bias), though they may deserve their own scrutiny. I am also not familiar with the reporting on many of these issues and most of your examples don't cite actual articles. But I already agree that video news media (which seems to be mostly neutral or positive on tech anyway) is a joke and I exercise more skepticism when I read about polarized left/right issues, especially coming from a lower status or more uneven publications like Business Insider.

But with respect to tech I have not seen much evidence of these supposed routine fabrications from marquee print media.

The standard for journalism should be stricter than for legal documents. In legal documents, it’s okay to edit the quotes to emphasize the point you want, or edit out throat clearing. But you must accurately represent the context. That’s not what happened with the Paul Graham quote. The author edited a reference to specific people (applicants to YC) and made it into a general reference to women. You would not edit out an antecedent reference like that in a legal document, because it changes the literal meaning. (It doesn’t matter if you think the substance of the meaning remains the same. You don’t get to make that call. If you want to argue that the more specific point is logically equivalent to the more general point, you’re welcome to make that argument.)

Just thinking off the top of my head, the media ran with a quote from Steve Mnuchin that made it seem like he was saying that the $1,200 stimulus checks should last people 10 weeks: https://www.businessinsider.com/mnuchin-criticized-seemingly.... If you actually play the whole video, the parts everyone quoted were actually tens of seconds apart. Mnuchin describes the $2 trillion package of reforms, including many months of adding $600 per week to unemployment benefits. A reporter asked “how long is $1,200 supposed to last people?” This was a deceptive question to begin with: The $1,200 was a stimulus, not a replacement for lost income. It’s not supposed to “last” any amount of time. That’s what the massively increased unemployment benefits were for. So Mnuchin refocused the question on the whole $2 trillion package. He spent several seconds doing that, which almost all the mainstream media sources edited out. Then he finally said that the whole package was supposed to last 10 weeks. Then the story blew up that he said the $1,200 was supposed to last 10 weeks: https://www.themarysue.com/steve-mnuchin-wants-us-to-survive.... AOC tweeted “how much is your rent, $10?” Again—the $2,600 per month in extra unemployment benefits was supposed to pay the rent. The $1,200 was stimulus.

Then there is a bigger issue of how journalists frame facts and what context they leave out. When New York City was seeing 750 deaths per day, the media was showing beach goers celebrating spring break in Florida. Now, they’re showing “spikes in cases” in Florida and Texas, even though death rates in Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, etc., remain higher than in Florida and Texas (which are bigger states). Quick: without looking it up, what’s the ratio of COVID-19 deaths in New York to Texas? Florida?

To pick another example: news stories about healthcare routinely mention that Western European countries have universal healthcare. Then they talk about wealth taxes and taxes on the rich. Have you ever read a story in the NYT talking about how European countries pay for universal healthcare? (Regressive taxes like payroll taxes and VAT.) Isn’t it weird to talk about healthcare systems and taxes, and reference Europe to talk about the benefits they offer, but ignore Europe when talking about the taxes they levy to pay for those benefits?

Along those same lines, journalists always reference Europe when it’s favorable to a liberal narrative, but ignore comparisons to Europe when its favorable to a conservative narrative. So Europe always comes up in the context of healthcare and gun control. But it never comes up when talking about say corporate tax cuts (countries like Sweden, Canada, France, the UK, etc. have massively cut corporate taxes in the last 30 years). Reporters will write an article where they talk about how Warren or Sanders want universal healthcare, like Sweden has. Then they’ll talk about Warren’s wealth tax. But now they’ve forgotten Sweden—which got rid of it’s wealth tax. I’ve read so many articles that say “we should have universal healthcare, like every other developed country” or “we should have gun control, like every other developed country.” I have never seen “we should have a 20% VAT like every other developed country.”

Journalists also mentioned Europe early in Trump’s presidency when talking about how great it was that Germany, under CDU leadership, took so many refugees in 2015. Did any US media report on the follow up, where the leader of the dominant CDU, Merkel’s successor, said: “We have made it clear that we will do everything we can to ensure that 2015 won’t ever be repeated. We must make clear that we have learnt our lesson.”

Oh, another example. During COVID-19, the media made a big deal about how Trump wouldn’t issue a national shutdown order. And they talked about Germany’s testing. But they never mentioned that Germany never issued a national shutdown order (just like us, Germany left those decisions to the states).

The result of this is that Americans are completely without their bearings. They have no idea of the context in which our political debates take place. I had a Facebook friend recently say, while ranting about Trump, that Angela Merkel was a “progressive.” Merkel leads the Christian Democratic Union. She has championed massive corporate tax cuts in Germany during her tenure. She opposes gay marriage, and supports Germany’s restrictive abortion system (where abortion is technically still illegal, though not prosecuted under 12 weeks, and the abortion rate is 70% lower than in the US). Her successor in the CDU is anti-abortion period. Merkel is the most powerful woman in the world, and doesn’t call herself a “feminist” because of the optics to her conservative base. I wondered what could possibly have made him think Merkel was a “progressive” but then I realized it was because the American media only ever mentions Merkel as a foil to Trump. Merkel hates Trump, progressives hate Trump, so Merkel must be a progressive.

Another example. We have seen a lot of stories recently about the tragic black-white gap in maternal mortality rate. The maternal mortality rate among black women is 2.5x as high as for white women: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/u-s-finally-has...

Invariably, media coverage of the issue starts talking about universal healthcare. But have you ever seen a US media report mention that the gap is twice as big in the UK, which has universal healthcare? https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-47115305. There, black mothers are five times as likely to die in childbirth. In reality, the black maternal mortality rate in the US is the same or slightly lower than in the UK, despite the lack of universal healthcare. In fact, by talking about universal healthcare without bothering to check if universal healthcare actually reduces black maternal mortality, journalists actively divert the reader away from thinking about real solutions to the problem.

We have made it clear that we will do everything we can to ensure that 2015 [when nearly 1 million refugees entered Germany] won’t ever be repeated,” Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer said on Monday. “We must make clear that we have learnt our lesson It’s not that the media doesn’t sprinkle in facts for context. They do, when it’s to contradict a conservative viewpoint. They will never do that extra research to contradict a liberal viewpoint. So you never see a reporter confront someone who says “we need to spend more on education” with the fact that we spend more on education than almost every country in the OECD.

People who read the NYT like to think they have “the facts” on their side. You don’t know all the facts, because the NYT doesn’t tell you.

It's about 2:1 Florida to New York. 2:1 Florida to Illinois, too.

What strikes me about your comment --- besides the fact that it looks like you somehow have the rates flipped between the lockdown states and the southern states --- is that almost nothing you're commenting here is really the subject of much reporting at all. It reads as if you're summarizing the bad takes of opinion writers, not of reporters. If you want to build a case against the Take Factory, I'm right there with you. But, in reality, very little of newsroom journalism involves evaluating how progressive Angela Merkel is.

So you're saying I won't find a single media article about the black/white mortality gap that doesn't mention universal healthcare?

I'm nitpicking here, but you're complaining about journalists bringing their own agenda to the table while yourself giving in to the temptation to hyperbole. Surprise: It's really hard (and often dull as dishwater) to write the kind of utterly deracinated just-the-facts prose you wish the media would produce.

Either PG was spouting an empty tautology, "these women [who aren't hackers] aren't hackers", or he was using "these" as a demonstrative article when speaking about the women YC sees to make a more general point about women and technology.

You can agree or disagree with whether his roasting was justified, but he wasn't roasted for something he "didn't say" imho.