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furthermore, nyt are mostly shills for their advertisers. That is why nyt trashed tesla because GM and Ford advertise. Here is proof they are shills for advertisers. All the tesla killer articles about their advertisers that were absurd... even the writers buried a disclaimer at the bottom of the article:
https://medium.com/@andrewt3000/tesla-versus-the-chevy-bolt-...
Your Medium post does not prove your claim. That's not how newspapers work. There is a wall between advertising and news at the big national papers (less so at local ones sometimes).
Newspapers like horse races. That's why they report on politics the way they do. Tesla's consistent lead in EV doesn't get them readers. But that's not the kind of venality you're falsely accusing them of.
A recent example of say the toilet paper shortage had weeks of misleading information put out. Prior to the reporter finally actually doing some research and breaking that story I have a HN post explaining what was going on. Why? Because doing more research than an average reporter is generally trivial. Their focus is entertainment and tight deadlines plus tiny staff equals junk.
Honestly, I have reasonable trust in Reuters at this point, but I don’t know of a trustworthy news source focused on the general public.
NYT is no more in the business of credible news than the Wall Street Journal or Fox News. That’s simply not their business model. They all take unbiased Reuters coverage and add spin to appeal to their audience and distort the truth in the process.
Which is not to say they don’t happen to report things that actually happened, but the weather channel is a prime example where keeping people entertained is vastly more important than keeping them informed.
There's a lot of people interested in a topic at a given point in time.
The experts will run from a tsunami of individual inquiries. Part of the role of a journalist is the act as a proxy for all that interest so that the experts' opinions can get out there without them facing endless messaging from every member of the public.
Now, one can argue about whether they do that job well or not. But that's a totally different argument than "I'd rather interact directly with someone who is actually an expert".
If you have a society where people must pay for truths but are given lies freely, then should we be surprised when people believe lies? Given those people have equal say in how things are ran as the people willing to pay for truth, doesn't this cause a social level problem?
So, I think you touch on a real problem - but I don't think making lies expensive will lead to a good outcome either.
The internet creates a huge amount of easily accessible false information, but also a huge amount of easily accessible true information (more than at any other time in history).
People just need the ability to tell the difference.
Arguably access to all the information in the world won't save us because the non-free stuff isn't accurate either, and people still aren't trying to actually understand what's true. They're just trying to find stuff to support what they already believe. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_...
Yeah, and "If you value your health, pay for an experience that doesn't spread a highly infectious disease". Oh, but just a few people willing to not spread the disease means you'll catch it any way.
The cost of the people who can't and won't afford the truth and choose lies instead is high for society, even for those who get the truth.
There are wide range of things that have degraded in the US based on the "if you value it, you will pay for it" ethos. This kind of reasoning works for the luxuriousness of an automobile - but even for the safety of an automobile.
These blue-sky pronouncements about truth being a public good do not move the discussion forward. "Truth" is socially manufactured (by that I'm not saying that nothing is true or false), and the process of manufacture has enormous costs.
Of course, this is not “free”, but it’s high-quality journalism that’s not behind a paywall.
I have to wonder: how does your public service media cover events that reflect poorly on the Czech Republic's elite and its government? How did it cover the decision to split from your poorer sister state of Slovakia? How does it cover the vulnerability of the Czech elite to blackmail by the Russian intelligence services? How does it cover the historical issues related to the expulsion of Sudetenland Germans from their homes?
Separately, for what it's worth, the US has national public radio, which is a public service radio largely funded by local listener/donors. It is much better than most media here.
The "truth", or even a plausible interpretation of the facts, is expensive to produce. It is even more expensive when you do it every day covering a wide array of topics.
If you value facts and good analysis, pay for them. It's that simple. Sure, the New York Times gets a lot of things wrong. So does everyone else, including many commenters on HN.
* But a lot of what the New York Times reports, that people disagree with, are things that governments and companies say and do. Those governments and companies have reasons to lie, but the enunciation of the lie is a fact. Judgment is left to the reader, if he has it.
* Publications are also reflections of the societies and political systems in which they are embedded. They speak based on the assumptions and contest of forces in that milieu.
* Most publications are firmly rooted in the attention seeking dynamics of their industry. Many of their errors can be categorized as: amplifying the causes of fear or outrage. Again, if you keep that in mind, their stories are easier to parse.
* Finally, a publication is not a monolith. It is a human organization with good reporters and bad reporters, good days and bad days. The Tesla article written by Stross was ludicrous. The reports by Judy Miller that led us into the Iraq War were abhorrent.
The New York Times should be ashamed of those lapses. But it is putting out a large number of factual reports everyday. Much larger than any equivalent number of human beings in America.