At some point Hanlon’s razor becomes a middlebrow dismissal, and a bit of a red herring. It’s a good rule of thumb for not getting mad at your boss, but useless when analyzing the actions of powerful institutions.
It really doesn’t matter whether we can prove some kind of ‘malice’ in the hearts of NYT journalists.
It does seem unlikely that they are any more malicious than any other corporation.
However that is utterly irrelevant to whether their institutional biases or lack of analytical capacity make them harmful given the power they hold.
Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics.
The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve.
Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom.
I don’t think that changes the sense of what I said.
‘Collusion’ can be a conspiracy of people actually meeting in smoke filled rooms, or it can be simply giving the benefit of the doubt to ones ideological bedfellows.
> Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics. The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government
I’ve seen this claim from people who work or have worked in the industry.
> it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve.
That’s a problem. What you are callings journalism skepticism, I consider to be journalism criticism.
It’s reasonable to assume that Journalism is just as susceptible to institutional problems as any of the institutions it purports to be a check-and-balance on.
I’m not anti-journalism, but I’m appalled by the lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for it negative impacts.
> Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom.
Being ‘better than Facebook’ is at this point, not much different from being better than a cigarette company. I agree without but I’m not why you’re even mentioning this, but it’s not a good thing to compare journalism with.
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> I’ve seen this claim from people who work or have worked in the industry.
That seems dismissive — it’s been the consensus from those who do not work in journalism for centuries. The point I was making is that the journalism industry tends to be taught and worked by people feeling a mission to help citizenry vs. power.
> appalled by lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for its negative impacts
Having worked in finance, I’m not certain journalism is “just as” susceptible as any.
Or is it that journalism is a higher standard as the aim is positive impacts for the public? What % of reporting is positive impacts, and what % of reporting is negative impacts? Should we account by all media, or just those with investigative journalism newsrooms?
Certainly mission oriented industries, healthcare, global aid, religious institutions, grapple with this more than capital oriented industries, by the nature of those drawn to them before they know better.
Whole drama-watch blogs exist dedicated to following particular newspapers (or, rather, the humans who work there) grappling with it, often played out in their ombudsman and editorial pages and dissected by the bloggers (the 5th estate watching the 4th, which I consider useful).
Meanwhile, “lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for its negative impacts” seems to be the general stance about Silicon Valley too. Not ironically, awareness often emerging through San Jose Mercury News.
Speaking of which, I mentioned Zuckerberg as he specifically commented on the so-called “Fifth Estate” vs. “gatekeepers” in the “media”:
"People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a 'Fifth Estate' alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands."
I’m not advocating for or defending “media”, especially opinion media. On the contrary, I’d argue the golden age of news media died during my lifetime, and what’s left is on life support. That worries me, as I hold the capital-P “Press” — when performing the mission of neutrally (not in a fake two-sides way, but factually) informing the public — is vital.
Clever conspiracy seems less likely than sloppy stupidity. This didn’t need “collusion” for the same bad outcome.
”Collusion is a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation between two or more parties to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading or defrauding others of their legal right.”
In what way was NYT in a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation with the government to influence the country to go to the Iraq war?
NY Times has said, “The lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not the Times’s finest hour. Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism. Many Op-Ed columns promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous.”
Media Matters covered this at the time, and also quoted Slate, attributing the collusion as between Bush administration and Chalabi, and NYT report Miller and Chalabi, with Chalabi as the common element:
“Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-sti...
This is not saying Miller colluded with the White House, but that the method of corroboration was flawed, as both paper and government were relying on the same (false) source such that fake news checked out.
Insufficient skepticism of a very high ranking source is not the same thing as collusion with another party also over-reliant on the same source. And journos protecting a source or CIA keeping a source secret are also not secret cooperation. The result is the same for similar reasons, you want future sources to be willing to share, but this doesn’t imply collusion.
TL;DR: Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Most “conspiracies” are probably just people being coincidentally dumb, incompetent, or lazy.