I would like to see more proof for this than just one guy saying he heard it from others. It may very well be true, but it would be far more convincing, to me, if some one with actual direct knowledge commented publicly. Surely, if it was so widespread, and unambiguous, it would not be be difficult to get clear evidence of this directive from NYT leadership.
Agreed. And you would think at least some of the journalists would leak evidence of this if they took the integrity of their profession seriously. Again, a lack of evidence isn't proof it didn't happen either.
Journalism isn't a profession. Even nurses and some managerial employees are held to a higher standard of duty. You will have an easier time holding someone who is responsible for fixing ice cream machines to an objective standard of professionalism than you will a journalist.
Some journalists have tried to conjure up "professional standards" that aren't binding, but the fact that they are not binding is why it's not a profession and why those "standards" are just suggestions. Unfortunately, the accumulated cruft of decades of wrongly decided cases grants this pseudo-profession many special rights and no formal duties to counterbalance those.
Leak why? This isn’t exactly controversial to say hey this sector that’s becoming insanely integrated into our society and economy deserves a critical lens. In fact I’d argue that’s exactly their job.
Asking for proof about something that happens on the down-low is a dubious defense. How much proof would you expect to see, unless there was a court case with witnesses and discovered documents and texts?
> it would not be be difficult to get clear evidence of this directive from NYT leadership
Yes, it would be difficult. Do you think the publisher or managing editor is going to admit to it?
A reporter in a position to know is a great source. The news business runs on "a source close to... said" and "a high-placed source said..."
If what the source said seems to contradict other evidence, that's a different matter.
This question can be easily answered with a search for NYTimes and green energy in tech or when Elon initially helped Ukraine using Starlink or any of the multitude of articles on advances in robotics or how new advances in computing help solve problems in healthcare.
I think it's a thickly veiled ad, if it's an ad at all.
It's legitimate news that some parents do it. It's business news that Apple's trying to make it kid-friendly.
The article doesn't extoll the virtues of giving a smartwatch to your kids. I guess you wanted them to trash the whole idea? They do say in the first paragraph, "The smart watch cost $279, and he worried that its recipient would immediately break or lose it."
Ads often mention the price of the product. The article goes on and on about the supposed benefits of giving your kid a smart watch, specifically the Apple brand of smart watch, contrasting it favorably to buying them a phone instead.
At the very least, it's not negative coverage of Apple. Even if you think it neutral coverage (I don't), it's a counter-example to the supposed directive that all tech coverage have a negative tone. And they categorized it as tech news, not business news.
The article is promoting this product as a better alternative than buying a smartphone for your kids. $279 is cheaper than most smartphones. And it's not too hard to find overt Apple ads that list much higher prices. Listing the price of a product in an article singing praises of that product does not constitute the article being critical of Apple.
Perhaps we've exhausted this topic. I view it as mildly positive and very weak journalism, not balanced. Your view is more drastic.
A balanced article would have found some parents who all said, "Hell, no, I'm not buying that for him. He'll lose it inside of a month." There are probably a lot of such parents.
As for "singing praises of that product" -- I think that is totally legitimate. It IS a product that does a lot of stuff and some people might like it for that. Do you expect them to invent some faults with it?
I'd also expect a real journalist to get some numbers on their sales, not just find one user who likes it.
(On the other hand, Walt Mossberg would have tried it for a week and given it a grade, idk what.)
It’s always read as the Luddite paper of record to me. Not only does it hate all over tech as an industry compulsively, it hates all over technology in general ritually. I can’t imagine how such a directive could change the paper visibly.
There's a difference between "things that can be proven in a court of law" and "things that are generally considered true."
For the former, some shop owner has to risk his life testifying, or the cops have to have recordings. A newspaper does not and cannot hold to this standard.
Which is why I included persecute, which is what people do in many cases online. I think it's good practice to not persecute others until you have sufficient evidence.
That can mean not making judgement based on things which are generally true in cases where it can damage another's reputation or result in the internet mob descending on them.
There's two people claiming it. This one and the one discussed yesterday. Hopefully more will come out, but at this point I'm inclined to give them the benefit of believing it.
Or maybe we just run every NYT tech story for the past 24 months through a sentiment analysis
Even within what’s said I’d be curious for the exact quote. NYT doesn’t exist in a vacuum, if the exact quote had been “plenty of other outlets have fawning coverage, let’s focus our efforts on casting a critical eye on the industry” that… doesn’t really seem scandalous at all to me?
I don't get why this seems like a big deal or a negative thing. Why wouldn't you want reporters to be critical? Isn't that like the whole point. That's even why we have freedom of press in the 1st amendment, so journalists can be critical.
I don’t really get how people keep misunderstanding the point that it’s not that journalists are being critical, it’s that they’re being selectively critical to propagate their own interests.
The absurdity of the NYT crying over big tech for practices the NYT uses all the time ( dark patterns, user tracking, algorithmic curation, etc. ) should not go unnoticed.
It’s not but a basic Google search should show some of the more clear examples of the NYT using aggressive spyware for ads, AB modifying stories in real time to drive engagement, and subscription policies that are virtually impossible to back out of for people outside of California.
But when the proverbial kettle calls the pot black, what no one seems to admit is, the kettle is not wrong.
Statements are, in the most fundamental sense, either write or wrong. Whether they’re insensitive, irrelevant or hypocritical are entirely orthogonal concepts. People tend to focus on the latter when listening to people speak, and often disregard the for former.
> it’s that they’re being selectively critical to propagate their own interests
Nobody ever claimed they were doing it "to propagate their own interests." The original tweets say this: "Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair."
Ok, define "unfair." Yeah, having all your problems pointed out is "unfair," but that's exactly what journalism is about? Speaking truth to power.
There are plenty of outlets whose only coverage of tech is critical. This sounds like the NYT wasn't interested in articles fawning over tech, which happens all the time and are basically just advertisements.
it’s that they’re being selectively critical to propagate their own interests.
So?
In a republic we need checks and balances. I want all the power centers in the country at each others' throats. I want bankers being critical of oil men. And oil men being critical of big tech. And big tech being critical of politicians. And politicians being critical of judges. And judges being critical of the cops. And cops being critical of the press. And the press being deeply critical of everything. And on and on and on.
NYTimes being critical of big tech is good. We need more of that sniping in all directions. That's what keeps us safe.
The only time we need to worry, is whenever they all speak with one voice. When that happens, I can guarantee we're getting screwed somehow.
Let big tech and the press go at each other, that's only a win for every regular American. In fact if the press is not doing that, then they aren't doing their job as the fourth estate.
I don't get the impression that the NY Times is all that guilty of dark patterns, but I also read it like I do most sites; with javascript disabled, so I could be missing something. But really it seems like one of the better journalistic institutions remaining after decades of generally lowered standards and capabilities for the US writ large. I think Ezra Klein is one of the most thoughtful writers/interviewers in the world today, for instance, so I follow his work there.
If you take a look, its not doing investigations. Its just talking about cool places. Tech used to just be talking about cool gadgets.
I believe them when they say it was "top down" but also it was self-evident that this would happen if tech companies went to a small part of the economy to the biggest in the world.
You can talk about the rivalries between NYTimes and FB/Twitter - but ultimately it just seems like they decided to treat it like a serious matter which was predictable/good. If overnight the airline and hotel companies became the most powerful in the world, then I think the travel section would be more critical and it would have nothing to do with NYT trying to get revenge.
There's an ambiguity between 2 uses of the word 'critical'. Journalism should by default be 'critical' in the academic sense (questioning, probing, analytical). When reporting on powerful entities who throw resources into media management (governments & corporations), journalists should be particularly careful not to parrot PR.
It's clear to me from the context that the Piper & Yglesias are not talking about this - they're saying there was top-down pressure on journalists to be critical in the popular sense of tone or judgement: ie. negative, carping. That's entirely different. The NYT claims to uphold the traditional news media distinction between reportage and opinion. Directives of the type Yglesias & Piper claim would clearly violate that distinction.
Yes and no, it's important to have critical reporting, but imagine say that all reporting on medicine could only be critical, no articles about breakthroughs in cancer treatment or curing disease, all malpractice and ballooning costs. That wouldn't be wrong, but it'd be incomplete?
No. "Critical" (in the defensible sense) reporting of breakthroughs would involve checking of the science behind the breakthrough, probing the ethics and finances, etc. Ideally this should always be how tech journalism is conducted, otherwise it actually isn't journalism at all, it's just PR or trade writing. With fast news cycles this may not be practical for every single column cm, but it must be the default.
"Critical" in the pop sense (making a worthiness judgement) is not altogether avoidable, but it should be marginal in journalism. This is what Opinion is for.
What Yglesias & Piper are saying, in effect, is that the NYT made a top-down directive that tech coverage should be negatively-slanted Opinion.
I wouldn't really argue about that now, personally, but I know a lot of people who are still on Facebook for whom have compelling reasons to stay and I think that was much more true in the past.
That said, Meta isn't the only tech company. Twitter, for example, a place journalists love for the direct-to-consumer style reporting.
> from an editorial integrity perspective there's a big difference between 'it's good to write hard-hitting exposes' and 'it's good to have a top-down editorial directive about the tenor of coverage'.
Being critical when the facts warrant it is great. Deciding in advance what the tone of coverage will be before you know any facts, and forbidding ipso facto any positive coverage, is not the whole point. That's an appalling abdication of journalistic ethics actually.
It's the difference between a movie critic who carefully critiques movies honestly and one that decides to write a negative review before even seeing the movie. Both of them are being "critical", but in very different ways. I think the NYT probably wanted to be the former but drifted into becoming the latter.
> decides to write a negative review before even seeing the movie
Nobody claimed this was happening. Just because the NYT says "we're only doing investigative pieces on tech," doesn't mean that they start fabricating lies. It just means they don't do fluff pieces. This is the preferred approach - for example, I don't want coverage of the cuddly PR that the oil industry puts out, I want investigative pieces that uncover malfeasance.
You may have mis-parsed what the poster was saying. Imagine going to review the Ghostbusters reboot, but even before stepping into the theater, you decide you are going to write a negative review. That doesn't require fabricating lies, but most would say its an unfair/dishonest way to do movie reviews.
That's not the whole point in my mind. What I'm looking for from journalists is a balanced, accurate, and objective reporting. That does involve being critical, but it also involves reporting on the positive aspects. A directive to cast an entire industry in a negative light regardless of the actual issues at play is NOT good journalism.
There is no such things as objective reporting. Everyone recounting an event be it journalists or historians will inject some bias in its récollection.
What you should want is journalists to be thorough in their fact checking and open about their editorial line and where their interest lies.
What’s annoying me here is that it’s both top-down and covert.
I understand that's the current thinking in journalism, but I actually disagree with it. I think giving people free license to editorialize is harmful. Even given that it's true that it's impossible to be bias free, I think it's important to try to be bias free. When you stop trying things get even more biased which is exactly the problem with journalism today.
It is highly biased and inflammatory and actually encourages people to be more tribal rather than try to come together and compromise despite their differences. I'm ok with not agreeing with the journalism industry here. I think they had it right 20 years ago.
Just because journalists are human and as such can't be completely objective, doesn't mean they shouldn't strive to be objective. This is what civilization is built on, constraining our base impulses and acting with logic and empathy.
I wish more journalists would be critical, especially where it counts (e.g. interviewing politicians). But for a top-down directive to be negative, regardless of the truth, no - that's unacceptable.
This should not be a surprise to anyone who has been reading the New York Times' technology journalism for the past several years.
In fact, I'd argue that even before any such "directive" was made, the bias in high-profile papers was already predominantly anti-tech, except in rare circumstances where praising a technology sector or tech company served the overarching political narrative of the moment (e.g., then-nascent social media was a good thing when Obama leveraged it to success; and a toxin when later less palatable politicians did the same).
This is not limited to the New York Times. Even tech-oriented journalistic venues such as The Verge have a decidedly snarky and grim view of many technologies. And they are effective at steering discourse, even among notionally technology-savvy people. Consider, for example, how antagonistic coverage of autonomous transportation by major media outlets has yielded widespread pessimism and doubt. Presently, you have non-trivial numbers of otherwise intelligent technology-forward journalism consumers convinced that autonomy is an unsolvable problem.
In a sense, it's totally understandable. For over a decade now, almost 2, the internet has put traditional news media in continuous peril of losing their reliable revenue and eyeballs: ads, local reporting, community postings, national, and international journalism have seen playing fields entirely leveled and reshaped due to (mostly) free technology interconnecting billions of people.
> the bias in high-profile papers was already predominantly anti-tech
As opposed to what? Publishing tech companies' press releases verbatim? Advertisements for apps?
Journalism exists to speak truth to power - you say "anti-tech" but the reality is that tech companies have been trying to convince us for years that what they're doing is some exercise in advancing humanity, "disrupting" industries (read: breaking laws) and "connecting the world" (read: undermining democracy, manipulating psychological triggers for addiction). It's a good thing that journalists have at least managed to remain critical - I would prefer to shine a light on billionaire VCs and the companies they're funding rather than doting coverage.
Journalists have also propagandized in favor of every expansion of the state and every every war western democracies have chosen to engage in. Journalists deserve to be mistrusted.
Journalism exists to tell what is going on and why. They are not part of some post-modern maxism class struggle.
Except as part of interviews, they should not be speaking to power at all, they should be explaining things to their readers, so they can make an informed decision. Sometimes that means telling them what the powers that be are planing to do and explain it better than they can, sometimes it means digging through expenses and reveal that power corrupts.
I don’t think autonomous driving is unsolvable. But every single company in that field has shamelessly lied about the time tables for the availability of the tech. And there’s been zero accountability for it. Remember how 2020 was supposed to be the year we get fully autonomous vehicles?
The only thing unfortunate about the coverage is that the media was entirely complicit and exercised no skepticism or pushback against these seemingly impossible time tables for deliveries of such a clearly complicated and as yet unsolved problem. They just blindly regurgitated the tech industry marketing pr around it. Has any single car company ever demonstrated a car that can drive while it’s pouring rain out?
I agree with you in general about media bias, but with regard to autonomous vehicles you've picked the exact thing media should have been skeptical about. It's the critical, even skeptical view, that is appropriate.
I don't think people got the impression that it is unsolvable, but hopefully people understand that it is difficult, and far from solved at the moment. That's not the feeling you'd get if you just blindly accepted tech companies' press releases.
Of course, major media outlets like NYT telling reporters to bend stories away from the reporter's own experience, and slant them towards an editorial position, is disturbing at the very least.
I disagree, I believe all press coverage should be critical. NYT and others have spent decades writing fluff pieces and thinly veiled press releases for tech companies, and they are some of the larger champions of techno-optimism in past decades.
Critical doesn't mean bad, it means taking off the rose-colored and not taking "we're changing the world!" narratives at face value.
Former NYT writer here.... NYT, as far as I know, has always had a "top-down" directive that coverage be critical. That's, you know, the job of journalism and all. Non-critical pieces are opinion, not reporting.
This is exactly that attitude. It's both awesome that I can facetime my dying grandma in HD and Apple is deliberately non-conforming with it's messages and charging port behavior. Tech isn't bad per se. Some things are super dangerous. Some things are literally awesome.
The post title here is misleading. What's being described here by Yglesias
isn't a directive to be "critical" (in the colloquial sense meaning "negative"), but more a directive to be skeptical and investigate:
> Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair.
A lot of tech people would like tech coverage puffy, un-skeptical, and positive, but that's totally inappropriate for an industry as influential and frankly difficult to understand (for a layman) as tech. It sounds like now they coverage like they cover the government, which to me is totally appropriate.
Careful! "Critical" is paraphrased. The thread says "tough investigative lens"!
"Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair."
Of course that will often lead to critical articles, but it is not precise to paraphrase the actual meaning here IMO.
"Critical" in journalism doesn't mean antagonistic or agenda-driven. It just means to not treat it like fluff. The Style section is not critical. Cooking is not critical. I can imagine Tech used to be soft news (David Pogue era) but had to pivot as it became so central to daily life.
The claim has been filtered through a game of telephone. It may well be the case that NYTimes management directed their journalists to produce critical coverage of tech in the sense that TillE means, which then got corrupted into the "no positive coverage" meaning of 'critical'.
I think this is probably what happened, but without any better source for this supposed directive, it's impossible to say for sure.
> I think it is broadly good to be on the lookout for hard-hitting exposes and write them where you see them, and broadly bad for your ability to do journalism if you have decided the tenor of your story before reporting it out.
And yet it's clearly selectively critical, based on the editorial positions of the paper / readership. The end result of course is a biased portrait of reality.
Tech Companies are the most valuable companies in the world right now.
Their CEO's/founders are some of the richest most powerful people in the world right now.
As a Technologist, I do find it unfair that there is a lack of "awe" in terms of the technological progress. But I think on a global societal scale, the non-technological impact of the largest corporations in the world and the richest people in the world is more meaningful than the impact of their technologies.
Put another way, the impact that Uber/AirBbnb has on employment, housing prices, and the health of cities and communities is much bigger than the impact they have on my ability to get a convenient ride to a destination, or to rent lodging on my vacation.
Why wouldn't they? They are more powerful than tech in being arbiters of truth, and the fact that they convinced everyone, even tech workers, about it proves that they are higher in the pecking order
> They are more powerful than tech in being arbiters of truth
This is just the classic short-term thinking on their end. If that directive becomes widely known, their trustworthiness and status as the arbiter of truth in the public eye will not remain as such for much longer.
Unfortunately, their accounting treatments of software are different, so a direct comparison was quite difficult.
NYT sells ads and also subscriptions; Twitter sells ads and wants to start selling subscriptions. Yeah, NYT pays an editorial staff, but they've been downsizing that pretty relentlessly. The hypothesis is that the two business models will be converging.
Exactly. They've got great investigative journalism when focused on direct competitors, who they assure us are all peddlers of misinformation.
It's also laughable to watch them do the daily Meta hit piece, pretending they're the good guys and were never advertiser funded. A gate-keeping, deeply-embedded mono-culture of an institution funded by 5M well-off subscribers, going after a platform that 2.9B people use on a daily basis to connect with each other.
It's not that they are doing it, it's that they do it and pretend they are taking the moral high ground.
If I understand Yglesias' point, tech executives got annoyed that twitter would grant verification to journalists that gave them negative press attention? Why is everyone so obsessed with blue checks? Don't tech executives have their own PR departments?
The twitter thread doesn't mention any specifics, but I've seen self-driving cars mentioned in other comments as something "unfairly maligned" by major newspapers. So far as I can tell, the self-driving efforts of Tesla, Uber, and other startups have failed to deliver again and again on the promise of having a car that can drive itself without human supervision. Is that not deserving of criticism?
Not to mention how Google in particular has gone to war to not pay newspapers a single dime for reproducing their content. Business is business, and a lot depends on interpersonal relationships. Strong-arming somebody usually doesn't endear them to you.
Skepticism of new technologies has been around forever. The way to earn public trust is to actually deliver on things that make people's lives better.
The thing is, what else can NYT, or any mainstream paper do ? The mainstream papers lack the talent or expertise to cover technology rigorously. There are specialized technical publications (e.g., at the level of lwn or anandtech), a few middle of the road ones (e.g., at the level of verge or ars), and then garden variety blog spam and youtube content. NYT has to find some niche that works for its core competence and its reader base. And that would be broad coverage with political undertones. That seems like what they do - mostly useless stuff with occasional well-sourced articles that may have tie ins with public policy.
Not sure that this is entirely a bad thing. I would read any glowing article about a tech company suspiciously (was it a paid placement?)
I wonder though if this was fallout from the media's fawning coverage of Holmes pre-Carreyeou, and Facebook's fall from grace with the Cambridge Analytica story.
If you see coverage of any countries not part of the western countries, you will see a similar pattern in NYT, BBC, etc. This just looks like a domestic equivalent with one industry in cross-hairs.
I feel like journalism needs to be re-invented in a way that accounts for our modern understanding of human psychology. We might need to define new standards and processes that counteract against a natural inclination towards various biases, herd effects, conformity, double standards, partisanship etc. The current system seems quite dysfunctional.
> Journalism is supposed to be critical, no? Otherwise it is just rehashed press releases.
But the people who put out those press releases, like tech executives and investors, want it just be rehashed press releases. They actually got their wish for a looong time, and came to feel they were entitled to it.
I wonder how many other top-down directives they might have. I'm sure there was one about only portraying mRNA vaccines in a positive light, for all age groups.
a few years ago the New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage. Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair. Almost never curious about technology or in awe of progress and potential. This was a very deliberate top-down decision. They decided tech was a major power center that needed scrutiny and needed to be taken down a peg, and this style of coverage became very widespread and prominent in the industry.
From journalist Kelsey Piper on Twitter in response:
People might think Matt is overstating this but I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it.
It's shocking to me that the NYTimes would make such an editorial decision, and it's disappointing to hear this about one of the newspapers that I trust the most. Certainly there are many aspects of the tech sector that ought to be criticized and exposed to the public, but I don't think it's good for truth-seeking to take an editorial stance that tech should generally be covered negatively.
Unfortunately the NYT editorial board has become quite political in a way that I don't think journalists should. I finally stopped reading them after their highly biased coverage and openly stated support of the Canadian alt-right occupation of our capital.
They had statements in their articles such as "the majority of the funding for the protests came from Canada" when the actual number was 54% came from Canadian sources. Maybe from a strict mathematical definition that is still a "majority" but it's certainly not what anyone imagines when they hear the word. There were many other biases in the form of omissions or wording like this in their reporting too.
Interestingly, a few years ago I did notice that the NYT and also other newspapers started attacking tech companies relentlessly. At the time it really seemed like there was a coordinated intentional effort. Interesting to see that at least in the case of the NYT that is true.
In any case, I no longer trust the NYT as an accurate source that strives to be unbiased. They clearly have an agenda that is more to the right than I'm comfortable with.
The NYT is the mouthpiece of the centrist establishment. If the NYT is too "right" for you then you probably want WashPo or HuffPo. And if those are still too right, you're an ultra-progressive and I don't knwo what they read.
I do like WashPo, though HuffPo is far too left. I generally prefer places that are as neutral as possible. As a Canadian I find CTV news to actually be very good, despite not being a very large news outlet. They are down the middle and avoid inflammatory headlines.
edit: Interestingly I also like the Globe and Mail, and people debate whether that is slightly right or slightly left.
It’s hilarious that your critique of them is that they are far right. They might be doing something right if they have somehow managed to piss off both the left and right.
I never said they are far right. I said that they are more right than I am comfortable with. I now consider them to have right-center bias, with some instances where they go a bit further. Also, it's a fallacy to think that pissing off both sides somehow mean they are doing something right. It can also just mean that they are not good at any particular thing.
> I finally stopped reading them after their highly biased coverage and openly stated support of the Canadian alt-right occupation of our capital.
It certainly seems like you wouldn't have any bias when discussing this topic as well.
> They had statements in their articles such as "the majority of the funding for the protests came from Canada" when the actual number was 54% came from Canadian sources. Maybe from a strict mathematical definition that is still a "majority" but it's certainly not what anyone imagines when they hear the word.
What non-strict, non-mathematical definition of the word majority do you propose?
I'm not a journalist and my comments are not an attempt to be. On what word to use, I would use "54%" or maybe "roughly half." Either paint an accurate picture to the reader of the reality.
What did anyone expect? Everyone's been getting smoke blown up their ass for years now by 'revolutionary' app makers that did very little except skate around regulations and make speculators money. The entire industry looks sleazy no matter which way you cut it. My only surprise is that the editors felt the need to say anything.
It is not shocking to me, and like I commented in a separate comment here you see it in NYT's coverage of international politics. That is harder for people from US to notice as they don't have the ground truth to tell apart the nuances.
This is very easily disproven if you just go read the news they write. They are appropriately critical of things that deserve skepticism but they still write fun stories about cool internet stuff when they want. Consider this love letter to the Roku screensaver
One of the newspapers that I ... might possibly occasionally distrust a tiny bit less than some other inaccurate, biased and misrepresentation-laden newspapers and media sources.
I frequently notice major errors and misrepresentations in the NYT and elsewhere, so I can only assume that it's a general property - even in stories where I lack the background information or expertise to identify them immediately.
I think it's a not-so-rude awakening to follow individuals rather than organizations. For example, Matt Levine could be the one you trust for finance, or Jason Schreier for news on video games.
It's potentially easier to understand an individual's biases on a per-article basis than something like the NYT, especially if you follow them and their perspectives over time.
I've thought it was one of the most overt editorial decisions by most media companies. Vast numbers of people survived a pandemic due to big pharma's vaccines, big tech's business tools, Amazon's logistics, businesses built on cloud tech, and using cars instead of public transport. There has been nowhere near enough credit given to those life saving services, and it seems obvious why.
> They decided tech was a major power center that needed scrutiny
I mean, that is for sure true.
The tech has been enormous force against freedom, democracy, human rights and science. If it wasn't for Facebook and Twitter, we wouldn't have had Brexit, Trump wouldn't have been elected, antivaxx wouldn't become mainstream stance and millions more people would have survived the pandemic, oh and women in US would still have access to abortions.
Then there's Google and their mission to end privacy. Then there's Uber and Amazon and their mission to end labor rights. Then there's Airbnb and their mission to make cities unliveable. Then there's ... you get the point.
I mean the NYT is wrong about everything. Krugman said the Internet was never going to be a thing, post Covid the editorializing was inflation wasn’t possibly a thing, the government should go bigger with stimulus and print more money. Their whole paper ages like milk, the only reason it persists is apparently Americans have no short term memory.
It's wild that HN, forum that seems disproportionately in favor of unregulated speech should feel uncomfortable when a newspaper chooses a critical editorial stance.
You agree that, by your own lights, editorial stances of newspapers are none of your business, yes? Free speech, yes?
Everyone says 'both sides' but that's not actually the case, is it? Shoe, meet other foot.
I don't think anyone here is calling for the government to restrict the NYT's editorial tone. They're saying that this behaviour is unbecoming of a newspaper of the NYT's reputation, and that their trust in this institution has been damaged as a result.
No one needs to -- the Free Speech Debate is not really about the government, is it? Elon didn't buy Twitter to protect it from the fed. He bought it to protect it from what he calls a "woke mind-virus" -- aka, progressive politics.
This article is trending because -- and I'm generalizing here -- HN skews center-right (what I like to call 'business-right'.) As a result, it has fallen prey to the false narrative of corrupt left-wing mainstream media unfairly maligning good honest billionaires.
Without being inconsistent, I can simultaneously hold these views:
1: "Free speech is important; the NYT should be allowed to say whatever they want, maybe even including shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, whether using their own platform or Twitter's, and neither the government nor private companies should restrict them";
== A pro-free-speech stance
and
2: "the NYT embarrassed themselves by shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, caused public harm, and damaged the trust and reputation that they held with their audience, and I don't think it was wise of them to do so. I'm disappointed, I hope they fix this and do better next time."
== A the-NYT's-editorial-tone-is-within-my-rights-to-criticize stance
(Note: I'm not meaning to imply that a policy of deliberate non-objectivity-skewed-negative in reporting on tech is equivalent to shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre. Just taking the example to the extreme limit, for clarity.)
If the NYT editorial board forces its journalists not to say certain things, that's their right, but I would expect that to be disclosed upfront in the stories on that subject.
Matt Yglesias is not a reliable source for this kind of claim. Nor is this even believable if you actually have been reading the NYT instead of just listening to the imaginary bogeyman peddled by the far right.
The NYT is a center right paper that is generally friendly and welcoming to big money (see greenwashing "advertorials" by Shell and many others), it is not the leftist rag that right wing hacks like Yglesias constantly paint it as.
So?
These companies became so big and powerful, they are basically our new governing bodies. They should be critically treated. Exactly like the political entities they are.
You do understand that critical thinking is literally the point of journalism, right?
In 2022, I'd certainly give the same directive. Our industry can and should be held to account, just like any other seat of power. (Because that's what we are now, whether we like it or not.)
I take great pride in achieving a -2 point rating on a post because it means that I've spoken truth to the powers that read HN.
I take even greater pride in talking about commenting of comments, _contra_ the guidelines, because a rule that you cannot discuss collective moderation decisions is like forbidding your subordinates from telling you that you have spinach in your teeth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33456708