> That doesn't imply that their journalism is low-quality or inaccurate

Anecdote: in some early reporting, I noticed a citation to a paper that didn’t support the purported argument. (It said the opposite.)

I emailed the author, one of the founding journalists at Pro Publica and an award winner. He basically thanked me for the feedback and then left the article unchanged.

Pro Publica is reputable for a small publication. But they are not authoritative.

What exactly was thing the subject matter? Was it something he could have reasonably disagreed with?

> Was it something he could have reasonably disagreed with?

No. He cited a paper showing the opposite effect from what he claimed it to be.

Be specific. Which article and which citation? Otherwise this is insinuation or even slander.

Edit to add: what you've done here is defame every member of the ProPublica staff, past and present (because you don't name a particular writer or article). There is no way for anyone from ProPublica to refute this.

If you want to critique ProPublica honestly, quote a particular statement they've published.

> Be specific. Which article and which citation? Otherwise this is insinuation or even slander

I’m literally calling out a liar. Not sure how you missed that.

But sure. This is the article [1]. Excerpt from my e-mail to the author:

“I came across your post through Dealbook today. In your article you mention that it is ‘argued that [Sarbanes-Oxley] would hurt initial public offerings, which it didn’t.’ You link through to a working paper on the SSRN at ‘didn't’. From the paper linked to:

‘Although the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the 2003 Global Settlement have reduced the attractiveness of being public for small companies, we argue that the more fundamental problem is the increased inability of small companies to become and remain profitable.’

The paper, in whole, posits that structural changes in the attractiveness of exit by acquisition versus IPO are the salient factor behind a secular decrease in IPO activity…Furthermore, the paper directly concedes (see quote above) that SOX negatively impacted IPO activity. This is not how you represented it in your article.”

Eisinger’s response: “Thanks, [JumpCrisscross], for your thoughts.”

> what you've done here is defame every member of the ProPublica staff, past and present (because you don't name a particular writer or article)

I’m calling Jesse Eisinger unreliable. Since he’s a founder in good standing at Pro Publica, I’m calling out the publication. Honest journalists don’t get free passes for negligent or crooked bosses.

Pro Publica is worth reading. It is not authoritative—it does not hold itself up to journalistic standards, a rot which starts at the top.

(I’ve used the above exchange to block Pro Publica from influencing lawmaking on Cheyenne, Albany, Sacramento and D.C. I would want anything they say independently corroborated before being acted on.)

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-sox-win-how-financial...

Not sure where you extract is supposed to come from, the paper argue that

> Many have blamed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the 2003 Global Settlement’s effects on analyst coverage for the decline in IPO activity. We find very little support for the conventional wisdom, and offer an alternative explanation

No wonder you got ignored ..

Edit: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1954788

> Not sure where you extract is supposed to come from

The paper. The one that was cited. (It was a working paper at the time.)

Nevertheless, your quote drives the point home. The paper rejects “the conventional wisdom” which “states that low public market prices are due to either lower valuations caused by the lack of analyst coverage, or to lower earnings as a public firm because of SOX and other costs.”

The Pro Publica article says that paper shows SOX did not reduce IPO volumes. That’s false. The earnings channel is rejected. But otherwise, the paper is about acquisition versus IPO.

It’s understandable incompetence. It turns into a lie when presented and rejected.

> No wonder you got ignored ..

If a journalist ignoring me means I can let their work be ignored in multiple state and national capitals, I will take it as a win.

(And with the benefit of hindsight, the article was dead wrong. I built a bit of a career on the private markets starting in 2012, as it happens.)

Thank you for this. Count me as one more person who's been influenced by your exchange with Eisinger.

Edit: My layperson reading of the source makes me think the ProPublica article would be accurate if its link to the source had the text "which it mostly didn't" rather than "which it didn't". I don't have a problem with the article as it's written, but this is a good reminder that journalists writing for a general audience will often omit qualifiers, sacrificing accuracy for readability. (I, on the other hand, cling dearly to my qualifiers.)

I'm just speculating here, but it could be that he doesn't want to risk doxing himself. If he emailed them from his personal email address, which contains his real name, the journalist could out him.

It would be extremely counterproductive for a ProPublica writer to maliciously dox someone who pointed out a logical inconsistency in their writing, if the writer's intent is to bolster their own trustworthiness. Any journalist crazy enough to do this would be forever out of a job because no source would ever speak to them again.

There's a lot of paranoia out there so this is good to know.

"Don't dump toxic waste into fucking manholes" is "left-wing" now?

You're gonna have a real head spin moment when you find out who founded the EPA!

Its more basic then that. This is follow laws as they are written. It should not be a left/right issue. If you dont like a law, that's why its a democracy.

Of course not. But there are a myriad of wrong-doings from all sectors of the economy. Choosing to focus exclusively on the wrongdoings of interests that are obstacles to the coalition of unions, bureaucracies, and allied media that economically benefit from ever-increasing public spending (from 20% of GDP in 1950 to 38% today) is a case of shaping public opinion by selection.

Pure whataboutism, come on. Yes, other things deserve investigation, but so does this. And there's plenty of right-wing media — in fact I'd argue too much such that there's a lack of balance in US media.

>Yes, other things deserve investigation, but so does this.

I was not trying to imply that this does not deserve investigation. I just thought that it was relevant to point out the agenda or ideological bias of the source because it helps to know these kinds of things.

>And there's plenty of right-wing media — in fact I'd argue too much such that there's a lack of balance in US media.

Journalists are overwhelmingly left-wing in their ideological leanings.

The result is something you could call "silence by selection": investigative reporting on corporate or conservative money is constant, but similar investigations of public-sector unions’ financial pipelines, pensions, and political leverage are almost non existent.

When mainstream coverage discusses "special interests", it targets corporations or billionaires, not the public-sector class which is the single most powerful political bloc in every advanced Western democracy (and which is the reason why every major urban area in the US is controlled by Democrats).

> I was not trying to imply that this does not deserve investigation. I just thought that it was relevant to point out the agenda or ideological bias of the source because it helps to know these kinds of things.

As noble as your intentions may be, it's unnecessary and muddies the conversation if you keep adding cherry-picked information about your view of the politics of those involved.

Also, "left-wing" and "right-wing" are not particularly useful terms as they are ill defined and vary from place to place (e.g. the U.S. left-wing is considered very right-wing in most of Europe).

The views of the politics of those involved is not controversial. They are very much part of the American left, as their X feed makes abundantly clear.

As I understand it, X is a cesspit of right-wing hate and vitriol, so I wouldn't trust their evaluation of "left". As I said, it's really not a useful term to use and you're diverting the discussion away from the issues involved to a discussion of politics instead. Your comments come across as if you're trying to push a specific narrative.

Please don't take my words for it. See their X feed and judge for themselves whether they have a partisan agenda:

https://x.com/propublica

I think where an outlet stands in the larger political landscape is useful context and there's nothing distracting or inappropriate about bringing it up, so we can agree to disagree.

I don't plan on visiting that site whilst it's being run by a blatant Nazi. There was a literal world war to stop that kind of evil and yet people seem to have forgotten. I hope you are not one of those people - I'm always suspicious of anyone that continues to use X/Twitter.

It's funny, Musk has enough money to end world hunger and instead he decides to be a complete arsehole.

I couldn't open their X because it's a technological abomination, but their Bluesky doesn't paint the image of a blatantly left-wing and super partisan channel that willingly ignores reporting on the public sector.

Amongst the top 10 things I saw them complaining about a state government, public regulators not doing their job well… it's not dramatic.

Maybe it's my European lens indeed, but it seems like a generic centrist media outlet, with maybe an anti-elites edge, which I'd expect from the Fourth Estate.

"Amongst the top 10 things I saw them complaining about a state government, public regulators not doing their job well… it's not dramatic."

Not doing their job of sufficiently constraining the private sector, which is just part of the same narrative of advocating for more state control.

Hmm, I don't agree that journalists are overwhelmingly left-wing. I can see how that'd be true since they're highly educated and that correlates.

But the sad reality is that most media channels in the US (maybe everywhere?) are corporations owned by a handful of very conservative people. Their agenda reflects that. Local media is almost fully right-wing. You can be a leftie journalist, but usually you won't go against editorial guidelines. At least that's why I've learned in school (studying media).

Statistically, they lean heavily left, and what makes more sense as an explanation for that is that it is because most major outlets’ editorial workforces are themselves unionized.

Editors, drawn from the same milieu, share these priors.

And yes, people with degrees lean left too, because academia leans heavily toward the Democrats. Academia is part of the public-sector ecosystem. Universities are funded by the government, staffed by people whose careers depend on public funding, and bureaucratic growth. Their personal financial interests line up with left-wing politics.

Once one party is fused to the institutions that hand out degrees and public paychecks, of course it will show up as "more educated voters".

Why does left or right even matter? This is ordinary stuff that should be covered?

If you've read the article, you can see how

- they were told to stop, and refused

- lied about what they did to make the problem look smaller

- reversed corrective action as soon as they thought the inspectors left

This has nothing to do with bias. A right wing outlet should've covered this too. They might have used some different words but I don't see how this can be anything other than intentional. In the end their own legal department had to step in and acknowledge that they won't do any other projects before putting in remediations.

The systematic bias arises from story selection, not from whether a specific investigation is accurate.

So I am absolutely not suggesting this story is not accurate or that Boring Company isn't at fault.

In the long run selective coverage creates an inaccurate picture of reality: constant stories about private greed, almost none about institutional self-dealing within the state.

Given that the current president is right wing, wouldn't the left have a vested interest in talking about self-dealing in the state?

Regardless, we are on a news aggregator here. Whatever selection bias this source has should be counteracted by hn drawing from many sources. At least on the source level. HN is going to of course be biased towards stories hn finds interesting.

>Given that the current president is right wing, wouldn't the left have a vested interest in talking about self-dealing in the state?

If there wasn't a permanent bureaucracy of sorts, then yes, but in this case there is in fact a permanent bureaucracy, what some call the deep state, which is a constant regardless of which party is in power. And this political bloc overwhelmingly supports the Democrats and is threatened by potential cuts from Republicans.

Covering self-dealing within the state would give the Republicans' efforts to cut some of these programs and departments moral legitimacy in the public eye, so left-wing news sources would not do that.

So what outlet would choose to not cover this? One that doesn't care?

I think you misunderstand the whole concept of journalism. They report, you interpret. Left wing or right wing might matter in what words they choose, to influence your perception.

Not reporting something like this is not bias, that's just not caring.

I never said that they shouldn't cover this. In fact, it's maybe reasonable that people with agendas do investigative journalism that only covers the malfeasance of one side and faction. I'm not really sure. I certainly wouldn't discourage any outfit to do credible reporting on any story just because it might help or harm another side or just because they might or might not have biases. But that being said, I do think it's worth pointing out that the outfit does have a bias. What's the harm of letting people know?