Yes, this is a well-rehashed example where the NYT seems to have erred. But, poignant as it is, it is also increasingly further in the past - people born after some of those stories were written are adults now!

I think that giving more recent examples would strengthen your argument.

Nick Sandmann

Given 18 years and 500,000 dead, the NYT has killed roughly 28,000 people per year for the past 18 years. Next year this number will drop to around 26,000 people per year, and the following year 25,000 people per year. In 2043, assuming no more flubs like the one that lead to the war in iraq, they will have killed 12,500 people per year.

There has been no incident as bad as the reporting that lead to the war in Iraq because the US had recognized that entering the war was a huge mistake and became somewhat resistant to the type of propaganda that lead to it.

Yes I was afraid you were going to re-emphasize the horrors of the Iraq war. But the thread is about whether the NYT can reasonably be called 'fact-free' or not. And if all you can come up with are inaccuracies from 17-18 years ago then I am (sorry to say that I am) simply not convinced - horrific as the consequences of those inaccuracies may have been.

So if the new york times comes out tomorrow and says it has found evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iran and the country goes to war, will you believe them?

It does not matter if the nyt is usually factful. If they can be subverted by powerful interests to push an agenda, they are not trustworthy.

OP also contains: "Investigating facts and reporting them clearly is a solved problem."

I rest my case.

You are absolutely correct, and no news organization is correct all the time - you should strive to consume a diversity of sources.

NYT remains one of the more reliably correct news sources in the US but they all make mistakes - sometimes accidentally sometimes maliciously. Since there are humans involved you need to understand the biases the news sources have and compensate for that yourself.

This is very a reasonable stance, consuming many sources is necessary to understand what sides of an issue may exist. And news organizations may accidentally report incorrect information (hopefully they swiftly retract it when they learn differently).

But shouldn't we not continue to consume sources that have made malicious mistakes? Even if the maliciousness was a bad outside actor feeding incorrect information to ethical reporters, isn't it likely that such a source will make a malicious mistake again? When the consequences are on the scale of directing the country into a fraudulent war, how can we ever trust their reporting on anything of consequence again?

What we're striving for is to consume media sources that produce the least number of mistakes when we're reading them - the number of past mistakes may be an indicator on the likelihood of future mistakes or it may not. I think trying to make any strong statements leaning on historical data should be carefully weighed.

I can't really answer what the best tactic for weighing news sources is since I think that the true measure would need to involve observing the reporters and editors behind each specific article which isn't really feasible. I don't think it's wrong for you to be hesitant about trusting NYT, and feel free to never trust an article written by Miller - I personally think she's shown a lack of care for discovering the truth - but... Eh, balance in all things.

The New York Times regularly issues corrections and itself reported on which sources turned out to be untruthful.

I've been surprised by the frequency of corrections, and how difficult it is to find them.

I think a browser extension that alerted you when an article you read was corrected would be interesting.