What news organizations can we really trust now?
Such an idea ran contrary to my long held sentiment for the NYT as rational and unbiased but I am seeing it more and more.
[1] Chomsky writes about this in Understanding Power.
One tool we do have now is the ability to subscribe to youtubers and similar people who try to make a living from telling you about the news. The benefit here is that you have them search through news for you and then give you a summary or analysis.
Obviously I won’t mention names because someone will immediate chime in to start an argument. You’ll have to do your own digging.
It basically describe the now pretty common practice of trawling social media sites and forums for something which can be made into news, conducted by very large news papers like NYT.
In my view its a kind of low effort data mining when there is news droughts. Nothing to report? Then go and look up the all the employed truck drivers in the nation and see if you can find one that does not have a driver license (it most likely exist one or two). It does not ask if the portion of truck drivers that have lost their license is higher than the overall population, or provide any insight into the profession, but rather just want to attract reader attention by highlighting something which look controversial.
Trust is lost very quickly, but it takes a long time to earn that trust back, once lost.
I class the NYT of today in the same league as CNN, Washington Post, and Reuters; other formerly great news media companies that have lost all my trust. I doubt greatly whether I would ever live long enough to believe in any of these four companies again.
Other formerly-great media companies that are borderline as far as I can tell: BBC and the (Australian) ABC.
Other media companies that have never held my trust: All of the Rupert Murdoch stable. (Including Fox, Sky News, WSJ, News of the World, etc)
EDIT: words fixed
Which US news sources today stay on the neutral/journalistic path in the US? Everything will have a slant of some kind of course, though hopefully there are outlets that are far less egregious.
Edit adt'l: a question appears!
Reuters was one of the most surprising, for me, losses of trust. I always had Reuters 'way up there' in truthfulness, but I was forced to change my mind. These days, they stick to Establishment points of view, not necessarily the truth.
I wonder if they’re less trustworthy or you’re more aware of their untrustworthiness?
At the very least that seems like a conflict of interest and perhaps the WHO should be sending investigators to China without longstanding professional ties to the lab whose name they aim to clear, who weren't already on record with their conclusions a year before they were sent to investigate their colleagues.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-coronaviru...
[2] https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11...
[3] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j....
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/coronavirus-ch...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
Even if you agree with him, it’s fair to point out he had a strong point of view before he ever went on this mission to Wuhan.
It’s also worth pointing out that in at least one way the linked tweet lends credibility to the nyt report: it acknowledges “heated arguments” on the WHO mission.
Finally, if you read the NYT report you’ll see it is building off recent reporting on the WHO trip by WSJ and the Australian Broadcasting Company. The issue of possible (accidental - not engineered by govt) lab origins for this sort of virus, in the past or future, is also a real and widely covered credible issue. There are a lot of comments here alleging an nyt agenda. Maybe you can argue the mainstream press has one, but this coverage is not particularly unusual, either on the WHO trip or Wuhan. (Also, it can be argued the MSM under covered the possible lab origins of Covid for months, scared of being lumped in with people who were saying the Chinese govt made it on purpose.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...
Fortunately, they did. His name is Peter Daszak.
The news media has to compete with the internet for eyeballs.
Honey boo boo on the learning channel was the beginning of the end.
‘“It was my take on the entire mission that it was highly geopolitical,” Dr. Fischer said. ‘
“lack of detailed patient records both from early confirmed cases, and possible ones before that.”
‘“We asked for that on a number of occasions and they gave us some of that, but not necessarily enough to do the sorts of analyses you would do,” said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist on the W.H.O. team, referring to the confirmed cases.’
‘In the end, the W.H.O. experts sought compromise, praising the Chinese government’s transparency, but pushing for more research about the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019.’
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/world/asia/china-world-he...
After following this for over a year, witnessing China manipulating or withholding information, reading the article in question, and reading all of the associated tweets, it is clear every team involved has inherent biases.
The WHO investigation team is just as much political as it is scientific. The team needs to seem cooperative in order to get more information, which they desperately need. The team said they would not come to any outcomes without all of the data first yet they did exactly that by saying, the virus likely came from food that was imported and it is not likely that it came from the lab. China is clearly still trying to cover up. The US is still trying to investigate any possible origin story, but don’t seem particularly keen on a lab origin story. It’s mostly far right Republicans like Tom Cotton who originally proposed and perpetuated the lab origin theory in the first place, not exactly New York Times’ bread and butter butter customers.
NYT does not have a prescribed narrative of a lab origin story. WHO scientist have a very strong interest in continuing to gather information from China through cooperative means. So I’m not surprised they would throw shade on a New York Times article saying that they were greeted with lots of hesitation from China. The only part of this I don’t understand is why there is a the Hacker News post with links to scientist’s tweet that all but confirms the bias and intent already illustrated by said NYT story.
TLDR: WHO scientist are not happy to see themselves being quoted as having difficulty working with the Chinese, as they need to continue working with the Chinese. They would probably like the New York Times story redacted, so they are claiming to have been misquoted... nothing to see here folks, moving along
