|
Discendo Vox posted:The NYT change tracker is great, and it exists because the NYT is the most prominent not-obviously-trash outlet that constantly does this sort of fuckery, as well as a number of circular journalism tricks. Fox News and Politico and the Hill and any number of other outlets do this stuff to some extent, but it's remarkably common at the grey lady, and unusually outrageous. there's recent coverage of an interview question with mayoral candidate Andrew Yang that I may use to demonstrate circular reporting and framing effects. What baffles me is the role of the headline writers. To begin with, their work gets read by a lot more people than the actual news stories, but they are, so far as I know, anonymous or at least obscure at most outlets. Has anyone ever actually written a plausible defense of this practice? Would the journalists writing the actual stories really do such a worse job of writing headlines? (The cynical explanation, of course, is that the story-writers would use headlines that weren't clickbaity enough, and that the obscuring of responsibility by the use of anonymous or near-anonymous headline writers is, from a news outlet's perspective, a feature rather than a bug.) Second of all, has anyone ever attempted to defend these kinds of headline/abstract changes, beyond wishy-washy generalizations? I can't help but wonder whether the responsible writers/editors are conscious of engaging in "spin" when they make changes like that.
|
#
¿
May 12, 2021 21:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 15:49 |
|
|
BougieBitch posted:In at least some of the cases above it matches a general "breaking news" practice of adding more details to the same story as things develop in the same day (sticking to the habits from their paper publications, they generally make a new article for developments on subsequent days). I imagine there's some practical or institutional limit to the length of headlines or abstracts, so the argument is basically that the newest information is often the most newsworthy and therefore needs to be added to the headline and abstract as more paragraphs are added to the article itself. Of course, when that conveniently removes important contextual information like "who started it", or "which side are the deaths on" they aren't held accountable because there's no one reviewing these decisions for systematic bias or anything, it's just "practical" to use the version of the headline that gets the most engagement I understand all that, more or less. Most headline/abstract changes from the @nyt_diff account are genuinely updating a story with new information, correcting grammatical errors, or trivial stylistic changes. But every so often you get edits that are clearly directed at changing the framing of a story.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2021 23:02
|
|
|
It feels unfair to call the lab leak hypothesis a "conspiracy theory" when it's considered a serious possibility, though not necessarily the most likely possibility, by plenty of experts up to and including the WHO Director-General. You do acknowledge that "We do not know with 100% certainty, and pretty much cannot know, that Covid-19 wasn't a lab escape," but I think there's a fundamental difference between the uncertainty here and the generalized, "can you be absolutely certain that the Queen isn't a lizard person?" kind of epistemic uncertainty exploited by conspiracy theorists (in the pejorative sense).
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2021 14:37
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:The essay literally alleges an international conspiracy. I guess the "One can imagine the behind-the-scenes conversation" passage can be taken that way. But the core argument seems to be a convergence of interests rather than active collusion. In any case, you asked "So how does the conspiracy theory of a lab escape operate?" before introducing the piece in question, implying that every possible version of the lab leak hypothesis, not just Wade's, is a conspiracy theory. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 15:49 on May 15, 2021 |
|
#
¿
May 15, 2021 15:41
|
|
|
is pepsi ok posted:The point then is to accept that all media is propaganda, and to follow that propaganda which furthers your goals. I agree with much of your post, but this is going way too far. You should at least make an effort to find the actual truth, even if you can never do so perfectly.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2021 19:23
|
|
|
How often is "genocide" even used in straight news articles when talking about, e.g., Chinese human rights abuses in Xinjiang, anyway? I realized I don't really keep track of what events the media regularly refer to as genocide, so I did a Google News search for "genocide." On the first page we have:
If these results are representative (which, to be fair to the media, they probably aren't), it would seem that for the media, genocide is something that happens almost exclusively in the past, not the present.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2021 23:01
|
|
|
I think Popper's concept of "falsifiability" is considered somewhat out-of-date in philosophy of science anyway. Perhaps what we should really be asking is "Is the Propaganda Model part of a degenerating research program?" (I honestly don't know the answer to this question.)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2021 01:15
|
|
|
Are Chinese human rights abuses in Xinjiang even being referred to as genocide in straight news stories, though? (Again, I honestly don't know the answer to this question.)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2021 22:40
|
|
|
Corky Romanovsky posted:Some appear extra messed up if you don't realize the page in question is a "latest story" type thing. Sometimes it's just updating the story to focus on new developments, yeah. And most often it's not even that, just minor grammar/style tweaks. But other times it does come across as a deliberate change in framing (from the reason produce market workers were striking to the possible consequences of the strike for consumers, for example) that's a lot harder to justify. I think what really rankles about that sort of thing, which I discussed earlier in this thread, is that it doesn't really matter how hard it is to justify because nobody has to justify it. The headline writer is anonymous or nearly so, and there's no ombudsman anymore.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2021 18:28
|
|
|
The Kingfish posted:Hall’s is an opinion piece in the Washington Post, meaning it is directed at the Post’s liberal-centrist readership. With that in mind, the way his op-ed advances the goals of the national intelligence community is obvious: its framing places Cuba and Russia in opposition to CRT and contrasts their indoctrination-based education system with our own, which is predicated on a good-faith effort to provide children with unvarnished facts. The fact that Hall’s piece is ostensibly directed towards conservatives is a spoon full of sugar to help liberals swallow the pro-American propaganda. Maybe WaPo wouldn’t, but NYT did: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-caution-from-russia-on-syria.html Similarly, an op-ed that caused some controversy: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opinion/hong-kong-china-security-law.html (This is not a defense of any particular op-ed. I’m not a big fan of op-eds in general, honestly.) Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jul 31, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2021 19:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 13, 2024 15:49 |
|
|
https://mobile.twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1421545885331197952 Interesting thread about headlines. Maybe has too rosy a view of how things used to be, but I agree with his general points.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2021 22:19
|
|