So a news story gets out, millions read it, share or watch it. Then NYT retracts it. Maybe adding a footnote or correction (sometimes they don't even do that [1]) is added to the story. Maybe the story is removed from their site.
However, the faulty information has already registered into the minds of millions of people.
NYT has already intentionally or unintentionally indoctrinated the minds of many readers and with the "retraction" at the same time they can claim the highest standards of journalism.
Unless in good fait, NYT tries to bring as much attention into the correction to the readers they have already impacted, the retraction is journalistic virtue signaling and a very small victory for truth.
Even if they do as much work in publicizing the retraction so many people have already formed a biased view and it'll be hard to undo that.
The only path forward is to fully hold NYT accountable. Fire the editor and journalist in charge of the story would be a start.
Did you listen to the podcast? Because I can't relate at all to this reaction, given nuanced take of the original series.
The story is very much the story of an investigation, and it's made pretty clear that the central character's story is suspect.
The second half of the series follows the reporter as she tries to corroborate the story she was told, and weighs the evidence she sees against her own knowledge. In the end the implication is that she believes part of his story is probably true, but never expresses certainty.
I didn't come away thinking I'd necessarily heard the personal account of an ISIS member. Rather, I felt that I learned a lot about the process of investigative journalism, and how incredibly difficult it is to confirm information in wartime.
The fact that it's even being retracted at all seems like overkill to me, and I think that in a different climate, where the integrity of the NYT wasn't under so much scrutiny, the response would have been more measured.
But generally, news orgs don't commit to doing huge year-long projects/investigations into something they know to be fake. Or, if they do, the story is about the fakery (and the psychology/personality of the person behind it) – it doesn't attempt to pass it off as "maybe true".
The average investigative reporter receives tons of bullshit or otherwise overhyped leads. It benefits no one to elevate each of those into a prestige project.
But the reporter believed it was most likely that part of the story was true. There was corroboration from sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS, and the photo he had on his phone that was taken in Syria.
In retrospect, they are saying the needle moved from "more likely true" to "more likely fabricated."
In any case the story he was telling was believable, and painted a realistic picture of what was happening in the region.
> In the interview with NPR lasting nearly an hour, Baquet says the Times did not have evidence Chaudhry had ever been to Syria. Nor could it show he had joined ISIS, much less killed civilians for the group. The man's account proved to be riddled with holes and contradictions. Even when confronting some of them, the reporting and producing team sought ways to show his story could still turn out to be true.
At this point, you can either believe NPR, "his story was not fact-checked at all", or the New York Times, "we did our due diligence."
One is telling the truth, and the other is lying. You can't believe them both without descending into doublethink.
That the reporter was credulous enough to believe the faker's story to be "most likely" true is the very thing that she needs to answer for.
Sorry, but "sources in US and Canadian intelligence saying they believed he was a member of ISIS" is just not a foundation of evidence, especially since the NYT refuse to describe the sources beyond the vaguest of terms (e.g. we have no idea whether one U.S. source is just agreeing that he's heard rumors from another U.S. source). Do we really need to reiterate the long history of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy doing things like putting children on the no-fly list?
The main thing that matters is the documentable evidence that the NYT had access to. Like his passport stamps and social media. To quote from the NYT's investigation [0]:
> But far from proving Mr. Chaudhry’s jihadist bona fides, at least one of the pictures was a brazen copy of widely available news photography, The Times’s examination found. The original image had been taken months earlier by a photographer for the official Russian news agency, Tass, and had been distributed by Getty Images, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of photographs...
> Other images Mr. Chaudhry provided as evidence that he had gone to Syria — specifically, snapshots he said he had taken of armed men at the beach, whom he described as his “fellow fighters” — also proved to be identical to photographs that had been posted on Twitter years before by Syrian antiwar activists, The Times’s examination found. And as with other images, Mr. Chaudhry misrepresented — or perhaps didn’t actually know — where, and sometimes when, they had been taken.
So either the NYT went ahead with publishing this full fledged project knowing that Mr. Chaudhry, the subject, had stolen photos and claimed them as his own. Or, they went ahead and accepted his social media photos as evidence, without even doing a cursory reverse image search – which is unconscionable given the severe and immediate doubts raised by Mr. Chaudhry's passport.
Journalism is the act of hunting for truth. I don't think any reputable outlet goes into an investigation knowing what the outcome is going to be. Journalists are good at looking at evidence and identifying possible outcomes and many times their assumptions turn out to be true after rigorous research, but this is different then knowing what an outcome of a story is going to be.
Yes, that's right. But reporters almost never publish an investigation while having extensive doubt and just leave it up to the reader as an exercise to evaluate the assertions.
Here are the Pulitzers for International Reporting, for which "Caliphate" was a finalist in 2019:
I challenge you to find another winner or finalist in this category in which the truth value of the published assertions is portrayed as merely optional.
> Yes, that's right. But reporters almost never publish an investigation while having extensive doubt and just leave it up to the reader as an exercise to evaluate the assertions.
Well, it's what the original Serial did. That format has inspired a lot of the podcasting world.
For starters, Serial is universally regarded as an exceptional project – i.e. the exception that proves the rule – and a project that has always been under a considerable amount of controversy. In any case, the podcast itself never insinuated that it could make a case for Adnan Syed's innocence. And more relevant with respect to Caliphate, the foundational facts are not in doubt: Adnan Syed was indeed the ex-boyfriend of the victim, and he was indeed convicted of her murder and serving a life sentence.
Can I ask, how would you feel about conspiracy videos doing the same thing? Those that present a conspiracy and then show a reporter trying to verify the theory that ends with the reporter indicating they believe "part of [the] story is probably true, but never expresses certainty." I just can't help think that if the topic was aliens or 9/11 instead of the Caliphate and the author was fox news or reason magazine, you'd consider it drivel.
I can't remember what it was, but I feel I've seen such documentaries or podcasts before. As long as it's done in good faith, I'm happy about it. Like if you don't get the impression they're actually trying to convince you of anything, but are more just welcoming you through their own process of learning about something and then ending with a bit of an ambiguous, well I still don't know for sure one way or another, but maybe there is more substance than I thought at first.
Edit: I didn't actually listen to Caliphate though, so I don't know if it appears done in good faith or not.
Well, that's certainly not the way I feel. If aliens haven't been visiting humans for years, I don't want to watch a video going through the process of learning about the possibility that they might have been visiting humans for years and then ending a bit ambiguous.
I don't think this was anything like that, though.
The story that they were investigating was completely plausible because it painted a very realistic picture of things that were happening in Syria at the time.
I suppose the one part of this that is potentially harmful and false is that the ISIS member was living free in Toronto (while bragging about it on social media).
Plausibe is fine to a point. The context here is journalism, and with that comes responsibilities. The fact an outfit as reputable as NYT chose not to fulfill its obligations should give anyone reasonable pause. This was a relatively meaningless story. What happens when something more significant is involed? And the stakes (read: possible revenue) higher?
The meat of the story wasn’t even this guy’s account. I think it was then finding a cache of administrative documents from somewhere in Iraq and having a deep look into ISIS government, its operations etc.
> The story is very much the story of an investigation, and it's made pretty clear that the central character's story is suspect.
Maybe don't do that in a newspaper (or related media) that purports to be about factual subjects, and keep it in your memoirs. The NYT was Curveball's main outlet (through Judith Miller) so maybe they were just feeling nostalgic.
Beyond just abstractly infiltrating minds, this story directly bolstered real policy changes with real consequences for Canadian asylum seekers including children.
This whole thing is shameful and embarrassing, or at least it should be.
I recommend reading what folks like Laila Al-Alarian and other non-NYT folks have been saying about this cf*k for some time:
Also worth looking into Rukmini’s funding sources and how she was vaulted into this position of primacy for an eye into the geopolitical machinations that lead to this sort of thing playing out.
Personally I subscribe to the NYT and I only heard about this story because of the retraction and investigation that they published in the newspaper. So at least from my perspective as a NYT customer, they have done enough to let me know they messed up here. They've also reassigned the journalist to another beat, which isn't loss of a job, but fact-checking is a team effort and I don't think it's fair for a journalist to bear the entire brunt of the fallout.
Same here, I'm a paying NYT subscriber, never heard the podcast, but I did see the multiple stories of the retraction on the front page. I would argue far MORE people heard of the retraction than ever listened to the original podcast.
They also advertised it in The Daily, one of the most popular podcasts around, which is how I heard about it since I unsubbed from the Caliphate feed (as it was finished).
That's the modern propaganda M.O. Lie and then retract and demand praise for retracting.
Go look up Nayirah's testimony where a kuwaiti diplomat's daughter lied about iraqi soldiers killing "incubator babies" and the media, working with government, spread the lies intentionally to start the first iraq war.
Go read about the nonexistent WMDs that the media like the NYT lied about to start the 2nd iraq war.
> The only path forward is to fully hold NYT accountable. Fire the editor and journalist in charge of the story would be a start.
That's not going to anything. The news industry "recycles" journalists/editors like the catholic church recycles pedophile priests.
People should simply be taught what Thomas Jefferson knew. "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day"
The problem is that people expect truth and facts from the news industry. People should be taught what the news industry is - a propaganda outlet for the elites. And then let the people judge accordingly. The NYTimes will always be a corrupt agenda driven propaganda organization. You can't change that. What you can change are people's understanding of what the NYTimes is.
I oftentimes wonder why people want to defend the NYT and the only conclusion I can come up with is that they mistakenly believe they're part of the elite.
Simple defense mechanism. They were raised in educated households where its reporting was considered on practically its own epistemological plane of journalism, its writing standards a model around which to improve their own, and it's just really hard to face the fact that an institution you idolized has flaws, because it means you have to admit you were fooled.
The fact that we're even talking about the credibility of the NYT already places it on a higher epistemological plane than the mainstream media (TV news, social media, etc).
You wrap yourself up in your conspiracy theories and your "real truths" and judge the entirety of journalism to be a bad faith operation, that their is no nuance, no good individual actors in the system. That's why I downvote rants and nonsense.
- Moderna's vaccine will be shipped next week across the US
- Pompeo says Russia was behind the SolarWinds hack
I'm not going to conclude from this that the UK relaxed its lockdown, the vaccine will not be shipped, and Pompeo said Russia was not behind the hack.
The happy medium is: know when a newspaper was in a position to know the truth and trust them if they were, or if the article explains its evidentiary basis in convincing detail.
What's your point? You could make the same argument on every propaganda outlet. Do the same thing for fox news, xinhua, al jazeera, rt, etc.
It's naive to think that propaganda necessarily means lies. It's half-truths, excessive coverage, ignoring of topics, etc.
> The happy medium is: know when a newspaper was in a position to know the truth and trust them if they were, or if the article explains its evidentiary basis in convincing detail.
No. That's the childish naive view. You should know that every newspaper is an agenda driven propaganda organization serving the interests of the elites ( after all it is the elites who created these newspapers ) and judge accordingly. No newspaper is deserving of trust or should be trusted because their primarly goal is to deceive. Anyone who trusts a newspaper or a politician is a moron at this point. Just take everything they say with a grain of salt and move on.
Certainly the last thing one should do is worship the NY Times which many here sadly do. But then again old people are their target demographic. Easily scared and insecure.
The fact that you are being down-voted just by acknowledging something that is not controversial at all, illustrates clearly how the elites are winning heavily the battle on the narrative of current affairs. The media should not be trusted, AT ALL.They have their own interests and agendas , very different, from the ones of a common citizen.Never forget that.
For what it's worth, I did see the retraction displayed fairly prominently below the fold on nytimes.com yesterday. So they're not trying to bury it, at least.
I wonder if podcasts are a much riskier medium because of this. When have 12 episodes drilling in ideas based on a faulty premise, it's a lot harder to effectively say "oops," and being longer, there are a lot more opportunities for something to go wrong.
It is interesting to me that (for a podcast at least) there’s presumably more than enough data available somewhere to send a notification of the retraction if NYT was so inclined. Surely iTunes, Spotify, etc. could identify the vast majority of people who downloaded and listened to these episodes. How come my data is only used to target me when it’s beneficial to these major companies and not when it’s beneficial to me?
Tim frequently shared stories with no truth to them, eg. 2020 Election fraud. He also frequently tells his listeners to distrust the “Democrat Media”. His arguments would typically be considered in bad faith on HN. Linking to Timcast from and article about the NYT is definitely pushing an agenda.
No. They need to fire Rukmini. Just because she is considered a "superstar" in the newsroom doesn't mean she gets off the hook for embarrassing the company with a debunked project.
That seem ridiculous and unfair. Feels akin to fixing a security breach by firing the dev who introduced the vulnerability. What they need to do is adopt better processes and put mechanism in place for things like that not to happen again, no matter who the journalist would be.
> Feels akin to fixing a security breach by firing the dev who introduced the vulnerability.
How big is the breach? If it's a minor incident, sure, keep the dev. However, if the dev introduced a breach that caused the company millions of dollars in damages and likely an outside investigation, then that dev will likely be fired for incompetence.
> That seem ridiculous and unfair.
Not at all. That's how the media industry works: Factual errors are a cardinal sin.
The New York Times is the one of the most prestigious journalistic institutions in the world, one who touts its "Paper of Record" title with a reputation for thorough and accurate reporting.
Rukmini, Andy Mills, and their editors are expected to abide by those standards. With Caliphate, that went out the window. Not to mention the numerous red flags raised by other reporters and editors within The Times' Foreign team that pointed to questionable reporting and sourcing by to Rukmini.
Caliphate has collapsed under its weak reporting, forcing The Times to revoke and return several prestigious awards, including a Peabody and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, an embarrassing look for the paper. And, for that, heads should roll, from Rukmini and Mills to the editors overseeing the project.
However, this likely won't happen. Rukmini has already been reassigned to another section and will likely continue her work (in reality, The Times won't let go of one its
"star" reporters, and Rukmini won't find a more lucrative gig at a news organization with as much prestige and resources than The Times). Mills, however, will likely be fired, and not because of Caliphate: There are reports of Mills' predatory behavior toward young, female journalists, and many of them are coming forward. The outcry will likely reach a fever pitch and likely lead to his resignation next year.
What i want is a post mortem. What went wrong in their organization that let it through, and what changes are they going to make to ensure it doesn't happen again?
When we (Finland) actually opened the famed stockpiles, we found we had protective gear for about next 3 weeks. The cited chief executive of Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency, Mr. Lounema ended up promptly resigning, and the whole case was a big scandal in Finnish news for several weeks:
It's not the sort of article for which you'd typically issue a retraction, since there are no incorrect figures cited and they are honest about the limits of their reporting:
There is little publicly available information on the number of masks and other supplies that Finland has or where exactly they are stored.
I'm not sure they are even wrong to have used that rosy, positive tone about Finland's PPE stockpile. Compared to the United States, Finland seem to have had things relatively under control in terms of supplies?
I mean, compared to the United States, Finland seems to have done pretty well since somebody who screwed up actually lost their job. Consider the difference in point of view: our federal government were screwing up constantly with PPE supplies and nobody ever resigned. All a topic for a different story, I guess.
Crisis is coming. Will country X have it in control? Let's ask some top politicians and government agency directors, do you think you'll have it in control? Of course they are going to answer yes. Let's run a big story: "Country X has crisis in control". What is the value of news like this?
What if in March, a Finnish news agency had interviewed US president Trump's office and maybe US CDC Director Dr. Redfield, asked them if US has the pandemic situation in control, and after they replied yes, then ran a story "US has pandemic in control"? Would you say that's ok – after all they'd be honest about the limits of their reporting, and are just citing their sources.
I'm not sure we have a big disagreement. These sorts of stories are stupid, but in my view, they're just not worthy of retraction because they don't break the rules or tell outright falsehoods. At least not when they're standalone stories. On the other hand, if the NYT ran a large number of stories like this, not blatantly untrue but offering too rosy a picture of the preparedness of the Finnish government as part of a big campaign to alter public opinion, that would be more of an attempt at deception, and more of a problem. I'm not sure why they'd do that, but we could point at analogous series of stories they've done over the last 30 years. (An awful lot of the NYT's behavior in the early 2000s was fairly awful, even when it was superficially within journalistic standards.)
> What if in March, a Finnish news agency had interviewed US president Trump's office and maybe US CDC Director Dr. Redfield, asked them if US has the pandemic situation in control, and after they replied yes, then ran a story "US has pandemic in control"? Would you say that's ok – after all they'd be honest about the limits of their reporting, and are just citing their sources.
Some of it is about trusting the reader. I would be disappointed in a Finnish reporter who left the US government's employee's rosy assessment unchallenged in the absence of evidence, and in a Finnish editor who decided to run the story, but in 2020, I'd be disappointed in the reader who took such claims by the US Government seriously without evidence.
They have been doing this over and over a lot about tech reporting. Borderline malicious reporting by omitting key details to paint whatever narrative they want.
Why? They see tech as a direct competitor and want as much smearing as they can.
> Why? They see tech as a direct competitor and want as much smearing as they can.
That's absolute nonsense. How in the world does the NY Times compete directly with Facebook, Google, Spotify etc? There's a bit of indirect competition (ad revenue, podcast viewership) but nothing direct.
99.9% of domestic stories that are easier to verify. NYT has plenty of wiggle room abroad, especially when the domestic audience can't understand the language of the region covered.
Just listened to most of this earlier. I don't quite get it.
IIRC, the original series did treat Chaudhry as dubious, but maybe partially truthful . He was caught on a timeline lie, confronted by the journalist, he adjusted his timeline... Also, the whole series was constructed somewhat naively. It follows the journalist's investigations sequentially. The "story" follows leads and narratives that do or don't turn out to be true. You're following an investigation in progress. In that frame, this is just further evidence as the story continues.
Caliphate just isn't framed as a traditional print "feature" where the journalist weighs everything in advance and only references fact-checked reliable evidence once they're done.
I actually felt that caliphate did a better-than-most job at communicating shades of certainty. I wish the NYT did more of this. Journalistic standards are good tools, but they do not (should not, IMO) just sort everything into "true" or "unverified" piles and . Uncertainty about truth is inevitable. Communicate this well, honestly, and we'll all be better informed.
This felt like way more than a retraction. Maybe they're using it as a "teaching moment" about how journalism works. I don't love it though. I can think of much better targets for NYT mea culpa or soul search. Caliphate is not a low watermark for journalism in any way. Maybe I'm missing something.
If they (or any major paper) is feeling reflective, why not reflect on more systemic questions. How about double confirmed rumours from anonymous sources? Two sources, even if both remain nameless and have a personal interest in leaking to the press is considered fine.. I believe. This is common in political reporting. Stuff gets leaked. Journalists get confirmation from another insider.. maybe two. That can be printed. If it turns out to be a fallacious rumour, they still "met standards." Maybe they print a retraction, but no one did anything wrong. Meanwhile, this is the cause of many untruths getting published each year.
> He was caught on a timeline lie, confronted by the journalist, he adjusted his timeline
The fact that they kept going after this (and didn't investigate further) is when you start having serious issues. You can see her attacking the Canadian police once it starts coming to light more and more that he was lying - she was attached to the story (and the fame) and didn't want to hear otherwise. [0]
I am glad that the NYT retracted it, this was a good move, but I think this ought to be career-ending for her.
Maybe I came off as more definitive than I intended. I agree with the retraction. It was required, but it's really more of a follow-on than a retraction. An apology to Canadian police is more necessary, probably. That's a no-fault too though, in my estimation. They had to keep quiet while investigating, and temporarily absorb criticism. That's a hazard of the job though.
I see nothing wrong with this tweet, never mind "career-ending."
"1. Big news out of Canada: Abu Huzayfah has been arrested on a terrorist “hoax” charge. The narrative tension of our podcast “Caliphate” is the question of whether his account is true. In Chapter 6 we explain the conflicting strands of his story, and what we can and can’t confirm"
Shades of uncertainty. This is honest journalism. Whether or not she felt overconfident in any given detail or narrative, the we got to hear the account, suspicions, reasons to dismiss or believe the source (chaudhry). I don't think anyone reasonably concludes that his account is mostly honest or accurate, just that it may contain truth. He literally gets outed and confronted about being a liar.
I am not a journalist. I can tell from that podcast that there are reasons for the strong reaction that look different from a journalistic perspective and a layman's one. I think the difference (to me) is frame.
If in episode 3, she totally believes his account and by episode 6 she's dubious... that's the nature of doing investigative journalism as a temporal series.
> he we got to hear the account, suspicions, reasons to dismiss or believe the source (chaudhry). I don't think anyone reasonably concludes that his account is mostly honest or accurate, just that it may contain truth. He literally gets outed and confronted about being a liar.
They might "complicate the narrative" but they're putting it out there as being at least partially true when it was actually entirely false. It isn't "honest" journalism to keep putting out your sensationalized stories with just a little added "narrative tension."
> I see nothing wrong with this tweet
Read the entire thread - she is basically suggesting that the reason they didn't charge him is because they are incompetent.
Both of my parents are former editors at major national publications. My mom has had to fire people for stuff like this. They think that this was a breach of journalistic integrity and pretty much career-ending.
>>they're putting it out there as being at least partially true when it was actually entirely false.
We know now that it was entirely false. She didn't at the time. The flak at Canadian police had to take is regrettable. They were investigating, had to keep quiet, and couldn't "clear their name" for several months. She owes an apology, but that's somewhat outside of "The Caliphate" itself.
Look... I realize that my take on this is contradictory to journalistic norms. Maybe there is actual tension between practicable "journalistic integrity" and my layman's definition of "honest" journalism.
Frame matters a lot. If you are printing a single column article summarizing the Chaudery saga, standard "journalist integrity" makes a lot of sense. Not verified enough. The primary source is lying about some stuff at least. Don't print.
If you are making an audio series that follows a journalist on investigation... This allows for shades of uncertainty. Callimachi is very confident in the source at first. Later, she catches him on some lies. By the end, he's clearly a dubious source at best. I don't think you can summarize this as "putting it out there." This isn't a Reuters wire. You can have ambiguity.
She should not have jumped to the conclusion that Canadian police were inept. That was bad instincts, and an investigative failure resulted.
In any case, I'm not saying it's journalistically perfect. I'm just shocked that it is being treated as a low watermark. I feel like a lot of reporting can and does clear a "journalistic integrity" hurdle, but scores much lower than Callimachi in my estimation of "honest journalism." I guess we value different things.
Tangent: something about this thread is making me think of "The Wire," All the lines about "good police work."
As other people have said, she'll probably fail upwards. Others in the past have tried to stop her from, well, lying, and have failed, even more so, those people have seen their career negatively affected by that. Via /r/syriancivilwar/ I've come across this article from 2018 [1] which detailed how the former NYTimes Baghdad correspondent Margaret Coker lost her job because she had tried to stop Callimachi.
Ah yes, my parents (who are former national editors) had told me about this sort of discontent among bureau chiefs around her, although they didn't name the particular names.
Just by it happening, it's already career-limiting. I'm not sure every even serious screw up needs to result in a firing squad. That said, this is certainly in the category of things that can certainly end up that way at a major news org. See also Rathergate.
> Just by it happening, it's already career-limiting
Oh absolutely - and I don't think she shouldn't necessarily be a journalist/storyteller anymore (clearly has somewhat of a knack for it) but not at a NYT/Wapo/WSJ.
For all the heat those pubs get, my personal experience with them is that they're pretty meticulous with their reporting. (Which of course doesn't mean they don't sometimes miss the bigger picture even if their facts as reported are correct.)
I had a total nothingburger quote in the WSJ a bit back and the whole process took 2 phone discussions, some back and forth messaging, and a fact check on email (presumably to put on record). For something that was completely banal.
> The fact that they kept going after this (and didn't investigate further) is when you start having serious issues
Honestly, the biggest error they mentioned in the correction in my opinion was with the photos. Turns out they ended up reverse image searching some of the photos he had posted, and many of them were stolen from other sources. That right there would've been another huge red flag.
Yeah, this was my reaction as well. The reason I found Caliphate interesting was not the details of Chaudhry's story, which I experienced as were portrayed as dubious and in need of verification throughout; I certainly finished the podcast feeling uncertain whether Chaudhry had actually done any of the things he claimed.
Instead, the reason I've recommended this podcast to friends is that it spends most of its time on a fascinating exploration of the journalistic process. How does reporter verify claims made by people about events in a war zone? The people you interview have a reason to lie to you, sneaking across borders doesn't generate passport stamps, and reliable records are hard to come by.
This latest news feels like an interesting addendum to all that; I'd have expected any other podcast publisher to do an additional episode or two covering the new evidence and grappling with what that changes about the conclusions one can draw (certainly Serial has done a number of updates on new evidence about its past stories).
That said, my sense is that the NYT is taking this extreme action in part because they in retrospect are unhappy with the fact-checking process for the podcast, and I could see that sort of concern motivating this type of retraction/disowning despite all the uncertainty the podcast itself presented.
>> Also, the whole series was constructed somewhat naively.
I would use the word naively if it weren't journalist Rukmini Callimachi, who has created her entire career on the basis of secret terrorism in the Muslim community. At this point, that is her entire narrative and she finds anything to support it and ignores whatever doesnt support this specific narrative.
Interestingly, he never covers similar things in other religious communities and focuses only on Muslims. She is this generation's Daniel Pipes.
Her association with the NYT is also shameful, because she is more Fox News quality w/r/t balance
I don't mean "naively" in the "the author is neutral" sense.
I mean that it is not framed like an encyclopedia or conventional investigative journalism print. It is framed as the story of the investigation. It isn't "my conclusions after investigating this for 2 years." This frames has a lot of room for shades of uncertainty than conventional ones.
In that sense, this is actually a better
Meanwhile, I don't think she has any obligation to investigate terrorism in other religious communities at all. The editor might have an obligation similar to do that, depending on newsworthiness. But I don't see how it applies here anyway. Once ISIS/L established territory in Syria they became the most newsworthy topic of the decade. Ot's normal that careers are made on the biggest story of a decade.
I'm not saying she has no biases. Journalists have biases. Political biases, biases to certain archetypal narratives, the importance or truth of their own story, etc. But, moreso than most, Caliphate did portray a detail rich picture. You can make your own judgements with facts she provides, even if they are different to hers. That's honest journalism.
>>Her association with the NYT is also shameful, because she is more Fox News quality w/r/t balance
I guess this is the reason I wrote the comment originally. It's disingenuous to portray this as a low watermark for NYT (or most other big newsorgs). There are many worse offences.
Since you are comparing to fox news and balance, I assume you are comparing to "opinion reporting," and such. If we include that, then half the ship is under water. Opinion writing is outside of the journalistic standards allegedly violated here. But by layman standards, Callimachi is far more honest and balanced than any opinion at NYT... and obviously cable news stuff.
>> Meanwhile, I don't think she has any obligation to investigate terrorism in other religious communities at all. The editor might have an obligation similar to do that, depending on newsworthiness. But I don't see how it applies here anyway. Once ISIS/L established territory in Syria they became the most newsworthy topic of the decade.
This is pretty circular logic. Her topics are newsworthy because she is covering them, and adjacent un-covered topics happen to become not-newsworthy because she is ignoring them. The NYT editorial staff is def at fault, but she is she, as their designated "Terrorism Reporter [who only covers a certain type of terrorism]" She literally gets to define terrorism by example and undefine it by what she ignores to cover.
As an example, most people in the US I've spoken to dont consider the 2011 Norway attacks "terrorism" because they have not been covered as such. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks) The coverage makes the news and everything else disappears into history when the supposed paper of record conveniently ignores part of the narrative.
As an another example, consider the Russian-Chechnyan conflict.
If the newspaper decides to cover only Russian atrocities, that becomes the news and that is how popular opinion forms and that is what drives US foreign policy.
If instead the newspaper decides to cover only Chechnyan atrocities, that becomes the news and that is how popular opinion forms and that is what drives US foreign policy.
>>This is pretty circular logic. Her topics are newsworthy because she is covering them, and adjacent un-covered topics happen to become not-newsworthy because she is ignoring them.
Who's logic is circular here? ..or do you mean that reality follows a circular logic?
I totally agree that some news is "media generated" and newsworthiness becomes circular. Celebrity news, a lot of political news, some hard news cause celebre. Plenty of room for gray area and disagreement about which news issue qualifies as "media generated."
OTOH, reality still exists. Not everything is media generated. The moon landing was objectively newsworthy at the highest level. A national election is objectively newsworthy. So is the rise of ISIS, the successful recruitment of so many volunteers from so many places. Practices within their territory. The scale, impact, etc of the "caliphate" story make it totally newsworthy. More than any other terrorism/radicalism/insurgency/cult story of the decade by a long mile.
That's the topic of Caliphate. "Abu Huzafya" is not the story. He is a (false) character in the story. A detail. He wouldn't have been newsworthy in his own right even if he had been real. ISIS was the story.
There was a "media generated" local, side narrative about "why is this guy free?" Canadian police couldn't clear it up straight away, because the investigation was still going. Unfortunate, technically "media generated.... but ultimately irrelevant to any big picture.
Lots of talk about NYT and bias but by far their biggest is their bias towards interventionalism. Any journalism project under their umbrella that nudges its readers/listeners in this direction is going to face the absolute bare minimum amount of scrutiny.
Does it matter? The NYT is not as relevant as it was in the near past, nevermind a generation or two ago.
And the NYT has no standard for peer review, and in the digital age routinely edits its works after publication without any discernible changelog. See the 1619 scandal.
It does matter. The NY has actually grown its subscriber base during the Trump years and remains a major cultural force. Witness the immediate take down of Pornhub after a single article in the NYT, after conservative activists had spent years railing the exact same issue. For better of for worst, mostly for worst, the NYT remains a powerful force, long after it lost any semblance of journalistic integrity.
> The New York Times has retracted the core of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate after an internal review found the paper failed to heed red flags
Clearly it would have been better for them to have done their jobs correctly in the first place, but in what way are they not displaying journalistic integrity in this instance? Their retraction of a 2-year-old story was on their homepage (below the fold) yesterday.
Mistakes are inevitable (though in this case avoidable). Owning up to publishing something erroneous is the way you display journalistic integrity. I'll trust what you tell me today, if I can trust you to tell me the details you got wrong tomorrow.
> Their retraction of a 2-year-old story was on their homepage (below the fold) yesterday.
Ultimately, whether she stays on their payroll is the decider for me as to whether they have journalistic integrity.
I was discussing this with my parents (both former editors of major publications) who have had to fire people for creating composite characters like this. The lack of basic fact checking, followed up by attacking the Canadian authorities [0] once it started to come to light that the story was untrue is very unsavory. I think this should be career-ending.
Several years ago, Rolling Stone published story about a rape that allegedly occurred at a University of Virginia fraternity.
It was the Washington Post and not Rolling Stone themselves that discovered holes in the story. But Rolling Stone owned up to it and engaged the Columbia School of Journalism to investigate the lapses in their reporting and fact-checking processes, resulting in a damning report which RS published in a subsequent issue.
I don't expect NYT to be perpetually fact checking stories after publication, but when they "get busted," I absolutely expect them to re-investigate and publish their findings.
Rolling Stone absolutely did not "own up to it," they repeatedly tried to minimize the damage the article had done to the individuals and groups portrayed in it, and further, even after the Columbia report, stood by all its editors, fact-checkers, and even the writer herself!
It's worth listening to the 30 minute explanation on their podcast feed if you want a legitimate explanation to that question. They really try to account for it.
They relied on the gut-check from other terrorism experts, what was publicly available about Canada's investigation, and got a verification from a field commander in ISIS who said that he remembered the fraudster but the fraudster didn't serve directly under him like he had claimed. In retrospect, the hook of the story was so strong that they hadn't subjected it to the level of scrutiny of their other ambitious projects. He contrasted it with the Trump tax return story, where he had personally reviewed so many versions of that story that he had memorized the details. When they gave the same investigation to another investigative team who was familiar with the terror beat (with the benefit of hindsight), that team concluded that the story was a hoax.
It feels like the NYT is the USA equivalent of the BBC, where it has a big audience for the medium and on the surface seems like it should be trustworthy but often is a mouthpiece for those in power via insider sources ala Judith Miller for the NYT. Even that one writer Haberman who covers Trump often amplifies totally fictional favorable Trump stories on social media.
Similar to how many people just up vote or down vote a comment. It is far easier to believe something you want to be true than to believe something you don't want to be true.
We all do this. Most of the time its harmless but when it is a news organization it can become harmful and there will still be people who believe the story is true or that it is based on a truth.
Fortunately the internet has given us more of both, the stories we want to be true but are not and the stories that are true we wish there we not. Now we have many more eyes on both so that they can be called out for what they are.
There's a lot of NYT and liberal fans that will defend the paper against any transgression, but I contend the NYT is not a newspaper, but an entertainment organization. They don't retract or change anything unless they absolutely have to, and probably in this case were forced to. There is no journalism anymore, it's all mass entertainment.
The NYT is compromising on comprehensive, un-opinionated, fact discovery, and is instead catering to an audience. The former makes a news org, and the latter (under the guise of reporting) makes for a tabloid. It's hard because there are some pieces that are unbiased and thorough, and NYT and their supporters can point to those in its defense. But a news org should be required to do that with almost 100% consistency. Anything less is an entertainment org that is taking advantage of being considered a news org.
I would contend that there aren't really any at the moment. There's an opening for comprehensive fact-based reporting with a reputation for not taking a side.
As I remember the series, they presented pro and con arguments about believing him near the beginning, and never expressed certainty that it was true, but felt it was likely enough true that it was worth reporting.
Then when more facts came out, it was retracted.
This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.
We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors, which many publications wouldn't do, rather than punishing them for not figuring it out in the first place. No one is perfect. They never will be. What we want is people who are willing to call themselves out on their own errors. Wanting people to never make them is impossible, and just encourages them to pretend they are perfect by never doubting themselves and never revealing the truth when it is eventually available.
> As I remember the series, they presented pro and con arguments about believing him near the beginning, and never expressed certainty that it was true, but felt it was likely enough true that it was worth reporting.
I remember this, too, and it's the second part I take issue with. A judgment call of "likely enough true" when the reality is "entirely fictional" points, in my opinion, to either a lack of judgment, or a lack of journalistic ethics. As others have pointed out, very basic fact-checking was all that was needed to figure out this guy was a complete fraud.
We should not be praising the New York Times for letting its standards slip because the story was so cool, then eventually - years later! - realizing they'd let them slip a little too much and half-heartedly apologizing.
What’s your opinion on their incentives for letting that quality control slip? The need for sexy digital content to remain relevant? Cost-cutting to remain competitive? A change in identity from “news” to “entertainment”? Something else?
The podcast was an experiment at the time, and the people making it were outside the structure in which the print journalists were operating. The story was sexy, guard rails were not entirely in place, and everyone was enthusiastic about making the podcast so they overlook details they shouldn't have. They touch upon this here:
Yes, but from what I heard from my parents (who are ex-editor of major publications) there was a lot of skepticism from bureau chiefs on the war beat. The NYT is a diverse organization and there are factions.
Different department in the company; different procedures. The podcast was handled outside the standard hierarchy because they wanted to experiment and out of the turf wars.
I'm not saying that's how it should be, but apparently that's how it was.
All of the above? Throw in corrupted management that doesn't realize you can't coast on an old reputation forever, and if you keep letting quality slide eventually there will be a watershed moment.
As an aside, I think you can see this happening in California right now. California (and more specifically SF) has been winning for so long that now public officials have drunk their own cool-aid and seem to think Cali/SF is some sort of magic place and it's all the things they've done which have made it tech mecca. Except probably it's not, and that will become obvious as everyone slowly wakes up to that.
I don't think it needs that much explanation. The New York Times and other institutional press have often done this same thing. Which is, they report from "credible" sources without physical evidence of any kind. A source is considered credible by how much clout it carries with other major institutions or because of a history of trust. i.e. Even though intelligence and the military get things wrong all the time even to the point of outright lying, they are "credible".
This has lead them astray many times in much more significant matters. Once reported, they treat contrary evidence as innuendo in all but the most severe cases of contrary evidence. I think they only bothered with a significant retraction effort here because the evidence of their error was so compelling and public.
Callimachi was an absolute rockstar at the paper. She had been nominated for multiple Pulitzer Prizes and this, amongst other things, would lead to another nom. I suspect there was a deference to a veteran reporter at the top of her game, a feeling of sunk cost and risk analysis that said "this is so good that we have to publish it".
I think it was a case of the NYT quite openly deluding themselves.
Reading the slate article, I cannot imagine what contortions your mind goes through to arrive at the characterisation you're offering here.
First of all, the whole article is about the editor-in-chief explaining why they cannot and will not consider themselves as the "Anti-Trump" paper, and how they'll teach their readers to live with the fact that Trump was elected (once).
As to "find a racial angle to as much as possible", I believe you're referring to the following:
As Audra Burch said when I talked to her this weekend, this one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred, but it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world. We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.
To interpret "Us[ing] all our muscle" as "doing nothing else" or "pushing it into everything:" takes a strong mixture of motivated reasoning and bad faith.
First, he mentions class along with race, so the focus is already split in two.
Then, he specifies what is meant by "all our muscle": reassigning some talent with different perspectives to the politics beat, and asking others to "write more deeply" about not just race but country, race, and other divisions.
It doesn't take any contortions to see. Just read what Baquet said:
> And I do think that race and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story. Sometimes news organizations sort of forget that in the moment. But of course it should be. I mean, one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that. Race in the next year—and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion with—race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story. And I mean, race in terms of not only African Americans and their relationship with Donald Trump, but Latinos and immigration. And I think that one of the things I would love to come out of this with is for people to feel very comfortable coming to me and saying, here’s how I would like you to consider telling that story.
Anyone who's read the NY Times regularly over the years has noticed this shift. Zach Goldberg has put numbers to the phenomenon,[1] but the trends are so large that you don't need a detailed statistical analysis to notice them, as a casual reader of the newspaper.
That's not an expression of an intent to make race the story next year. It's his believe that race is a core issue hurting the American soul these days, and that he is committing the paper of record to cover the topic in proportion to its significance.
Edit: I previously included a paragraph here pointing to this issue being brought up even though it's one among many as evidence for race being a top issue. But reading some past comment of yours, you seem more reasonable than I expected, on that issue and in general.
Our disagreement may just be smaller than it appears, or concern "the media" more than the issue of race. If one were to stipulate that BLM was a major story, and maybe even that some of the President-unelect's words and deeds can be interpreted as not entirely lacking a resemblance with something that may, in a certain light, be considered to possibly fall under the umbrella of "being a racist", or even just that he was frequently misinterpreted in such a way by a bit more than half of the population... then race is, de facto, a major issue. Add to that some coverage that's been criticised as tone-deaf, and my starting point of considering the Times to not be the worst, and I think there's a good-faith interpretation of Banquet's intentions.
If, instead, you believe journalism in general, and the Times specifically, have been circling the drain for decades, it may sound different.
Given the actual trajectory of the NY Times' reporting over the last few years, I don't share your interpretation of what Baquet is saying. The trends pointed out by Zach Goldberg (which I linked to above) are really striking, though not surprising to people who have read the Times for a while.
The 1619 Project, which the Times presented as its flagship project last year (and which Baquet discusses in the transcript), is a case in point. The really wild historical claims they made, and then the way they dismissed a pretty impressive group of historians (Gordon Wood, James McPherso, Sean Wilentz ... these are really major figures in the historical profession) who asked for corrections, while at the same time hiding the fact that their own fact checker had asked for the very same correction, and finally the way the lead author of the project attacked the historians on social media - the whole thing was really shocking. That's not how the NY Times is supposed to behave. To me, it signaled that they really didn't care about accuracy - this was their big statement, it was selling well, and they weren't going to let a few historians spoil it for them.
I would say there's been a decline in American media since Bush the younger. As a kid the NYT and WSJ were both quite good. The WSJ sucks off the Republican party and the NYT publishes a bunch of crap. Neither really gets to the root of problems in the country.
For an internal publication the economist has definitely slipped. FT under Japanese ownership meanwhile is still quite solid.
As a kid I couldn't see the political motivations and BS the media was peddling. Rose-tinted corneas slowly fading over time the more I could argue and see nuance.
FT is good. Bloomberg is surprisingly good. I was a regular NYT reader a decade ago and now my go to is Bloomberg. Pro-tip: the “business” wing of any media outlet is better than the “general interest” wing. Presumably business people want have a more vested interest in knowing the truth and not being pandered to.
Bloomberg has gotten things wildly wrong as well; the most obvious example being the "Big Hack" story. I think we all have unrealistic expectations of journalism venues.
All that smoke about hardware supply chain implants and in the meantime someone is analysing all the software items that are widely deployed and have pervasive access... SolarWinds won't be the last.
With so many grifters and snake oilers in the security space it must be really hard for the mainstream press to tell what is puffery.
> For an internal publication the economist has definitely slipped. FT under Japanese ownership meanwhile is still quite solid.
Glad that some other HN-er has also noticed that. I've been an Economist reader for about 15 years now, and lately (the last 3-4 years, maybe?) I've started to notice that slippage you mention.
Among the most obvious cases for me was that "Corbyn as Lenin" front-page [1], which was absolutely disgraceful (if it matters I'm not an UK citizen and I don't particularly fancy Corbyn nor his policies), plus many of their Trump articles have been also pretty disgraceful, at least according to the Economist standards (the comic from one of the latest issues sends Trump directly to the garbage bin? like, what the hell is that?).
For comparison, I find the FT quite unchanged, and that's good.
(It's odd to me that your post simply requesting clarification is being downvoted)
I'm not the OP and just starting to dig into the 1619 project so take this with a grain of salt. There's a few parts that seem to extrapolate too far, or view everything from a pre-determined lens of race to chose their narrative.
One example is the claim that the U.S.'s lack of universal healthcare is the result of racism. The project goes on to detail how the Freedman's Bureau (which provided healthcare to former slaves) was prematurely closed, making the case it was because "legislators argued that free assistance of any kind would breed dependence and that when it came to black infirmity, hard labor was a better salve than white medicine."
I'm sure there were legislators that took that view, but other sources point out the organization was only intended to last for one year after the Civil War. When an extension was proposed, the main objections were that it was too expensive and would infringe on States rights. (Unironically, some of the same arguments used today).
Race is certainly part of the fabric of the nation's history and colors many of the problems faced, but I'm not sure race can be used as the root cause of every malaise as the project seems to allude.
Yep I think the project suffers from their own focus on racism has made them as biased as their competition. It's one thing to point out the influence and connections to racism/slavery/people of color on American history and society but it's incorrect to include it at the top of the food chain as the primary motivator of everything down through American history. That's just a naive and lazy argument. I love when people point out the hypocrisy of those who want to sweep such topics under the rug, but to consider them as the primary reason this country exists and why we are the way we are is ludicrous.
The fact-checker the Times hired zeroed in[1] on this claim (though there were others of import):
>At one point, she sent me this assertion: “One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth. At the time there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of colonies in both North and South.”
>I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.
> one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery
> one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
These two statements are totally different. “One of the primary things the Democrats want is to defund the police” is obviously not true. “One of the primary things some of the Democrats want is to defund the police” is obviously true, but means something totally different.
> Desmond begins his article by drawing on the Harvard historian Sven Beckert who argues that “it was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world.” Yet Desmond neglects to mention that this claim has been widely rejected by specialists in the economic history of slavery.
The Jacobin piece even discusses better arguments the NYT could have made, such as slavery being a reason for the US’s particularly strong protection of private property. That’s debatable, but at least it’s within the realm of the mainstream thought among historians.
The central claim of the lead essay seems to be that "[The US's] founding ideals were false when they were written". Perhaps you mean "a" central claim?
Maybe the “central novel claim” of the essay. All schoolchildren know Jefferson was being a hypocrite in declaring “all men are created equal” while owning other people. That was taught to us when I was in school in Virginia, a curriculum that otherwise venerated Jefferson. The idea that the founders were primarily motivated to break from Britain to protect slavery is what attracted so much attention, because it was novel. Unfortunately, it was novel because most historians don’t think that’s true.
There is a real story here: people don’t appreciate the scope of things that were affected and influenced by the institution of slavery. But the New York Times went far beyond that in its bombastic claims: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/magazine/1619-project-liv...
> The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of American history (and the American present) by proposing a new point of origin for our national story. In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.
Deepening the understanding of American history is good. But claiming that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery” is demagoguery. America didn’t rebuild Europe after WWII because of slavery. It didn’t become the most successful immigrant country in the world because of slavery. Silicon Valley, the moon landing, and our raft of Nobel Laureates didn’t grow out of slavery.
> Maybe the “central novel claim” of the essay. All schoolchildren know Jefferson was being a hypocrite in declaring “all men are created equal” while owning other people.
I'd encourage you to ask that question of modern Republican leadership.
> But claiming that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery” is demagoguery.
No. Its a critical response a commonly held romanticization of the founding and early history of the US (an incredibly stupid romanticization given the amount of criticism the founders had for each other).
It's also a response to work by a variety of groups to erase the impact and negative stigma around Slavery. To re-romanticize it as heritage and something to be proud of.
I'm also not sure that you're correctly quoting the article (or perhaps it changed, but it currently reads)
> Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.
I'd be curious to know which of those things you believe didn't grow, in some part or another, out of slavery. And whether the moon landing, silicon valley, or our many nobel laureates weren't in turn influenced/attracted/created by our economic might and industrial power.
> America didn’t rebuild Europe after WWII because of slavery. It didn’t become the most successful immigrant country in the world because of slavery. Silicon Valley, the moon landing, and our raft of Nobel Laureates didn’t grow out of slavery.
Directly? Perhaps not. But are you really going to claim that the immense wealth among white Americans didn't grow out of the subjugation of slaves (and native populations) and theft from those groups? Slavery jumpstarted the US economy, and much of the early US economy (even that of the North) was only successful due to slavery as an institution. That wealth still, today, hasn't really trickled back into the hands of Black Americans.
> America didn’t rebuild Europe after WWII because of slavery.
You're correct in that slavery was not the impetus for rebuilding Europe. But to ignore slavery (and, by the 1940s, the various post-slavery racist policies to subjugate and extract value from Black Americans, whether sharecropping or reconstruction era prison slavery in the south), yes there's a fair argument to be made that much fo the accumulated wealth of the US is due to that wealth not being distributed to slaves in the early years.
Consider the raw numbers: 1/6 of America's population in 1860 was slaves. That means that, as a reasonable guess, 20% of America's workforce wasn't compensated for their work on a national scale, and that was true for decades. Think about what a massive transfer of wealth that would be, compounded over the century and a half since.
> Silicon Valley
This is particularly ironic given Shockley's views on eugenics and race.
To put a concise point on it, I think this is something most people agree with. What the project seems to do, however, is change that understanding that slavery contributed to all those problems and instead claims it is the root cause of all of them.
Root cause and proximate causes can relate to the same problem but if we conflate the two we may get a very different understanding of how to fix it. I’m not convinced that every problem highlighted passes the “if not for” test. (E.g., if not for slavery, the US would have universal healthcare).
Side note: I appreciate all the thoughtful responses you’ve taken the time to give in this thread
> Slavery jumpstarted the US economy, and much of the early US economy (even that of the North) was only successful due to slavery as an institution.
That's a very bold claim to make, especially given that the half of the country that was heavily dependent on slavery lagged far behind, economically.
> That means that, as a reasonable guess, 20% of America's workforce wasn't compensated for their work on a national scale, and that was true for decades. Think about what a massive transfer of wealth that would be, compounded over the century and a half since.
It enriched a relatively small but very wealthy planter class, but there's a very strong argument to be made that it prevented economic development in the South. At the very least, something has to explain why the northern states economically developed so much more rapidly than the South during the first half of the 19th Century, and slavery is a very likely explanation.
> That's a very bold claim to make, especially given that the half of the country that was heavily dependent on slavery lagged far behind, economically.
When you're restricting yourself to first order effects, yes. But do you think that northern states didn't, like, benefit from the southern economy. Eli Whitney was a northerner through and through. Cotton, however, was able to be acquired cheaply due to slave labor.
> It enriched a relatively small but very wealthy planter class, but there's a very strong argument to be made that it prevented economic development in the South. At the very least, something has to explain why the northern states economically developed so much more rapidly than the South during the first half of the 19th Century, and slavery is a very likely explanation.
Yes, the northern recovery was easier because they didn't fall into a local maximum and have their economy entirely depend on slave labor to function. That doesn't mean that the northern/US economy didn't vastly benefit from cheap tobacco (and particularly tobacco exports), cotton (and exports), and sugar production. (The price of cotton went up significantly in the direct postwar period, but went back down eventually due to Sharcropping and increased production in the south, as well as increased competition from Egypt and other nations).
We now, I think, generally recognize the interconnectedness of economies. Pretending that prior to 1865 economies weren't also interconnected seems strange to me.
There are two separate issues here. First, you need to be careful to avoid double-counting. If cotton sales account for 5% of the economy, you can't go and add to that the money Eli Whitney makes from selling cotton gins to southern plantations. The cost of those cotton gins (rather, the amortized depreciation in the value of those cotton gins) is already baked into the sales price of the cotton. The economy is interconnected, but at the end of the day if the value of exported cotton produced by enslaved people is 5% of the economy, then the whole economy can't be singularly dependent on that industry.
Second, whether the workers on the plantations are paid labor or enslaved people doesn't change the economic calculus for Eli Whitney. He sells cotton gins either way. Back then cotton could be, and was, produced by free labor. When the Civil War disrupted the American cotton industry, free labor in India and Australia and Egypt filled the market gap: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-wa....
> The economy is interconnected, but at the end of the day if the value of exported cotton produced by enslaved people is 5% of the economy, then the whole economy can't be singularly dependent on that industry.
I don't think I made such a claim. That said, this claim isn't correct. If the non-exported cotton was a key ingredient in the industries that make up the other 95% of exports (and the non-export economy), the economy would be dependent on that industry. Now I don't think that every aspect of the US economy was dependent on cotton, but textile exports, for example, wouldn't be included as cotton exports, and textiles used at home, wouldn't be either. So this metric does underestimate the economic impact of an industry.
> Second, whether the workers on the plantations are paid labor or enslaved people doesn't change the economic calculus for Eli Whitney. He sells cotton gins either way. Back then cotton could be, and was, produced by free labor. When the Civil War disrupted the American cotton industry, free labor in India and Australia and Egypt filled the market gap:
I agree. This doesn't change the core point: his fortune was built off of slave labor. There exist alternate timelines where it might not have been, but we don't live in those timelines. Trying to tease counterfactuals out of history isn't really good academics. The flow of history is complex enough that smart people can come to contradictory conclusion. Thus, what happened: the US cotton economy was built on the backs of slave labor. Anything else (even conjecture that I agree with, that the US economy would have been stronger sooner with less slavery as it was essentially a local maxima and prevented other forms of innovation) is conjecture.
> If the non-exported cotton was a key ingredient in the industries that make up the other 95% of exports (and the non-export economy), the economy would be dependent on that industry.
Almost all US cotton production was exported, mostly to England. Also remember that at this time, the vast majority of the economy is self-sufficient farmers. My wife’s family wasn’t buying southern cotton out in Oregon. They were living off the land.
Circling back to the Jacobin article, most historians reject the idea that cotton production with slave labor was a big part of the American economy. The contrary claims come from a handful of scholars like Ed Baptist, and as shown in the link above he’s methodology is flawed and rests on double counting.
> Trying to tease counterfactuals out of history isn't really good academics.
You asserted above that immigration into the US and Silicon Valley, for example, can be said to have grown out of slavery because slavery is the source of America’s economic and industrial might. On one hand, the factual premise is false. Slavery was a small part of the economy before it was abolished. And the wealth that drew people to the country was mostly created after slavery was abolished.
Apart from that, you’re invoking a peculiar sort of causation. Someone comes to America as an immigrant and starts a company in 1970, and according to you that “grew out of slavery?” That’s a very “original sin” view of slavery, where the country is forever tainted by the fact slavery existed at one time, regardless of whether there are any traceable benefits to people living today resulting from slavery.
There is a metaphysical sense in which that is true but I don’t think most people would interpret “grew out of” that way. More important, thats not how the 1619 Project authors appear to view the causation either. That’s why they rely on this flawed article claiming that 50% of the US economy was from slavery. Their narrative depends on making slavery seem more economically significant than it was, and making people believe they derive tangible benefits from it today.
> Also remember that at this time, the vast majority of the economy is self-sufficient farmers
By 1850, 40% of the population was employed in non-agriculture, GDP of non-agriculture was higher. Its unclear if this number included slaves as part of the population or not, but either way that suggests that either a minority (though a plurality), or a slim majority at most, was employed in subsistence agriculture style work.
But I want to reiterate that I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion, just with the line of reasoning that 5% of exports implies only a small amount of the economy.
> And the wealth that drew people to the country was mostly created after slavery was abolished.
I'm not sure I see the point here beyond "slavery was a long time ago", and given the historically exponential nature of wealth and economic growth most of it will have been acquired recently. That doesn't mean that perturbations to the initial conditions don't matter, just the opposite: their impacts will be magnified many times over.
I'll reiterate: could America have flourished without slavery? Probably (there's some questions about early America and investment in the new world without slavery, which I think the 1619 project raises, but if you start from 1776, yeah at that point United States could probably have done fine without slavery, and it's a tragedy that the founders didn't make that choice). But the founders didn't make that choice, so we're left with a United States that did have an economy dependent on slavery. And it was dependent enough on slavery that half the states were willing to fight a war over slavery (I mean also the racism and white supremacy, but economic anxiety was at least one component even then).
> That’s a very “original sin” view of slavery, where the country is forever tainted by the fact slavery existed at one time, regardless of whether there are any traceable benefits to people living today resulting from slavery.
But, like, there are. I mean you've admitted as much with things like the wealth gap. A significant portion of the white/black wealth gap in the US can be traced back to slavery (and a lot of the rest of it to racist policies since then, some of which still exist today). That's a tangible benefit.
I'm willing to concede that the 1619 project is perhaps to focused on slavery specifically, and might better be phrased as "the US was founded on white supremacist principles that continue to exist and benefit many of its citizens at the expense of others, even today, with slavery as but one of the most visible," but I get the feeling you'd object to that also.
And those kinds of policies do influence the kinds of people we let immigrate, and who gets VC funding, and who gets hired, and and and.
As for "original sin", I think drawing attention to broken systems is important, especially those systems we hold in extremely high regard. The aura around the US as the city on a hill or whatever that people like to push tries to absolve people of responsibility to fix broken systems, either by pretending that there are no problems now, or that there never were any problems to begin with.
Yeah sure, an immigrant who came here in the 70s didn't contribute to the creation of slavery and the systems that grew out of it, but as long as those systems persist, they'll be the beneficiaries (or victims, depending) of those systems. And yeah, some of those systems run deep in the American ethos.
> might better be phrased as "the US was founded on white supremacist principles that continue to exist and benefit many of its citizens at the expense of others, even today, with slavery as but one of the most visible," but I get the feeling you'd object to that also.
I would certainly object to it, as would most historians, I think.
The principles the US was founded on - that is, the principles that drove the colonies to declare independence from Britain and the unique ideas about government that they incorporated into the state constitutions (and eventually the federal Constitution) were not "white supremacist." Most of the world practiced slavery at the time. The empire they were breaking away from was the #1 slave-trading nation in the world at that time. Slavery was a pre-existing fact when the United States was founded. It wasn't the motivation for the founding.
In fact, at the time, the principles of the revolution were widely regarded as being in conflict with slavery, which is why the United States became one of the first centers of anti-slavery activism in the world. And it's why the northern states became some of the first places in the world to abolish slavery. Even slaveowners in Virginia began questioning slavery at this time. Jefferson, despite his own ownership of slaves, wrote the clause that forbade slavery in the Northwest Territories, and even proposed a new constitution for Virginia that would have freed anyone born after 31 December 1800. This was extremely early, in an international perspective, in the global anti-slavery movement. Britain wouldn't ban slavery until the 1830s.
When later Southern leaders tried to defend slavery, they found the founding principles to be an embarrassing stumbling block. The famous Cornerstone Speech, given by the vice president of the Confederacy, was very self-consciously formulated as a repudiation of the Declaration of Independence, replacing "all men are created equal" with a new supposed "great truth" that people are created unequal. From the "Cornerstone Speech":
> The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [...] Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong.
The fact that the American Revolution did not eliminate slavery does not mean that the principles of the revolution were white supremacist, any more than Athenian democracy's founding principle was mysogeny, because Athens didn't overturn male-dominated society. The American revolution took a society that already had slavery, servitude, etc., and introduced new democratic principles, abolished many forms of servitude, generated opposition to slavery and outlawed slavery in half the new country. Slavery was not something the revolution introduced or ideologically strengthened. Quite the opposite.
Precisely. And you highlight the problem with judging history by current moral standards. That collapses history in on itself and it becomes impossible to even understand what happened.
The cornerstone speech illustrates how the principles embodies in the constitution weren’t just some platitude but were in fact disputed. Other parts of the cornerstone speech are especially illuminating:
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.... Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics.
The Confederacy attacked the founders as zealots and fanatics who didn’t accept the “scientific fact” of inequality of the races. Such thinking would persist well into the 20th century with eugenicists promoting scientific racism. Even today, the idea that everyone is created equal—even as an idea, forget about the implantation—is not universally accepted, especially outside the west.
> Most of the world practiced slavery at the time. The empire they were breaking away from was the #1 slave-trading nation in the world at that time. Slavery was a pre-existing fact when the United States was founded. It wasn't the motivation for the founding.
And "The US was founded on white supremacist principles" can both simultaneously be true.
> Even slaveowners in Virginia began questioning slavery at this time. Jefferson, despite his own ownership of slaves, wrote the clause that forbade slavery in the Northwest Territories, and even proposed a new constitution for Virginia that would have freed anyone born after 31 December 1800. This was extremely early, in an international perspective, in the global anti-slavery movement. Britain wouldn't ban slavery until the 1830s.
Sort of, some antislavery sentiment in the UK predates the revolution. In 1772, slavery was ruled to be prohibited in England under English common law. It was still allowed in British colonies, but calling any founder a "leader" in this regard doesn't hold up to scrutiny. No law needed to be passed banning slavery in England, because it was already illegal prior to the founding of the US. The 1930 law you cite banned slavery in British colonies, but it had already been illegal in England for 60 years, and the slave trade was made illegal in 1807. In other words, in every aspect (partial abolition, total abolition, etc.) the UK led the US.
Article 1, Section 9 of the US constitution likely delayed that British law (the US and UK banned the slave trade simultaneously). Are you really going to tell me that Article 1, Section 9 isn't white supremacist? It literally prohibits the government from banning the slave trade until 1808.
> but calling any founder a "leader" in this regard doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Many were far ahead of the general sentiment of the time on slavery.
> In 1772, slavery was ruled to be prohibited in England under English common law.
The ruling was narrower than that. Strictly speaking, it said that slaves could not be taken from England to the colonies against their will. There were similar "freedom suits" occurring in the colonies at the time. However, the anti-slavery movement on both sides of the Atlantic was small at this time. Slave-owning interests in Britain had far more power in government than the small anti-slavery movement. Their plantations were in the West Indies, which the 1772 ruling had no impact on. In its most expansive possible interpretation (which was not the interpretation that Lord Mansfield, the judge, took), the 1772 ruling affected a relatively small number of slaves in England who worked as domestic servants. It didn't affect the massive plantations in the colonies, many owned by the English aristocracy, where the real economic interest lay.
> In other words, in every aspect (partial abolition, total abolition, etc.) the UK led the US.
This isn't a competition, but to paint Britain as an anti-slavery power at the time of the revolution would be absurd. In the run-up to the revolution, Britain vetoed even limited attempts by American colonies to constrain the slave trade. Virginia, for example, attempted to tax the slave trade out of existence in the early 1770s, only to find its law vetoed by the Crown. In general, the British and American anti-slavery movements were in close contact and fed off one another. The American Revolution, and the wave of anti-slavery acts across the northern states, are generally seen as having strengthened the British anti-slavery movement.
> Article 1, Section 9 of the US constitution likely delayed that British law (the US and UK banned the slave trade simultaneously). Are you really going to tell me that Article 1, Section 9 isn't white supremacist? It literally prohibits the government from banning the slave trade until 1808.
It was a result of a compromise between pro- and anti-slavery forces. It was widely understood that that provision put an expiration date on the slave trade. In other words, it can equally be viewed as an anti-slavery measure, delayed by 20 years in order to appease South Carolina. Long before the federal ban on the slave trade went into effect in 1808, however, every state except for South Carolina banned the trade.
> the northern recovery was easier because they didn't fall into a local maximum and have their economy entirely depend on slave labor to function.
Directly, the Northern economy didn't depend at all on slave labor. It depended on wage labor, supplied in large part by large numbers of immigrants. Almost all immigrants settled in northern states, because there was very little opportunity for them in southern slave-owning society. The jobs and economic growth were almost all in the industrializing North.
The South exported most of its cotton (Britain was the largest importer, I think), so if we're talking about who relied indirectly on slavery, there's a much better argument for Britain being the primary beneficiary than the northern states.
Economies are interconnected, but that's not the core of your claim - the one I object to. The claim that I object to is that slavery is responsible for the US' economic development. From what I've read, it appears much more to have severely stunted economic growth in half the country for decades, while the half that relied on free labor rapidly industrialized.
It appears to me much more that the Southern plantation economy depended heavily on industrial growth in Britain and the northern US, but that British and American textile mills were capable of sourcing their cotton elsewhere if need be (including from economies that used wage labor). The South was much more similar to modern countries that depend entirely on one or a few low-tech exports, such as oil or lumber. Such economies are at the mercy of the international price of their one product. They face tough international competition, because their product isn't particularly complicated, and it's relatively easy to increase production elsewhere in the world. An economy that only exports oil may make a few magnates wealthy, while leaving the economy as a whole stunted and most of the population poor.
> The American founding envisioned a political order in harmony with the design of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” seeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as embodied in and sanctioned by natural law and its traditions. The formation of a republic around these principles marked a clear departure from previous forms of government, securing rights through a form of government that derives its legitimate power from the consent of the governed. Throughout its national life, our Republic’s exploration of the full meaning of these principles has led it through the ratification of a Constitution, civil war, the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and a series of domestic crises and world conflicts. Those events establish a clear historical record of an exceptional Nation dedicated to the ideas and ideals of its founding.
The founding principles weren't fulfilled in 1776, but the history of the country has been one of progress in that direction. That was conventional wisdom among Democratic political leadership when I was growing up (and I'm only 37) and almost certainly still is the conventional wisdom among most rank-and-file Democrats.
> It's also a response to work by a variety of groups to erase the impact and negative stigma around Slavery. To re-romanticize it as heritage and something to be proud of.
The claim isn't directed to one group's heritage and its contribution. On its face, it is directed at "nearly everything that has truly made American exceptional." It literally ties the entirety of the American story (or nearly all of it) to slavery.
> I'm also not sure that you're correctly quoting the article (or perhaps it changed, but it currently reads)
I copied directly from the post I linked. Its an August 13, 2019 article promoting a kick-off event for the 1619 project.
> I'd be curious to know which of those things you believe didn't grow, in some part or another, out of slavery. And whether the moon landing, silicon valley, or our many nobel laureates weren't in turn influenced/attracted/created by our economic might and industrial power.
Almost none of those things grew out of slavery. Our "legal system" for example was imported wholesale from England--based on principles of the Magna Carta dating back to 1215. Any slave trade into England itself was banned in 1102. Are there imprints on our legal system from slavery? Sure. But its factually incorrect to say our legal system "grew out of slavery."
The notion that our "economic might and industrial power" grew out of slavery is the central economic misconception in the 1619 Project, and I think it's responsible for a lot of the bombastic rhetoric. America is not rich today because of slavery. Jacobin corrected that assertion: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c... ("Desmond begins his article by drawing on the Harvard historian Sven Beckert who argues that 'it was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world.' Yet Desmond neglects to mention that this claim has been widely rejected by specialists in the economic history of slavery."). As Jacobin points out, cotton production, the industry where most enslaved people were employed, accounted for 5-10% of the economy.
> But are you really going to claim that the immense wealth among white Americans didn't grow out of the subjugation of slaves
Absolutely. You can't make a country richer by enslaving part of the population, and you don't need slavery to make a country rich. This is obviously true: in the 20th century countries like Japan, Singapore, and South Korea experienced industrialization and economic development just as rapid as what the United States experienced in the 19th century, without slavery. The United States economy, in fact, continued to grew just as fast after the civil war as before it: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7LfU4Qu52oo/UUolq1OZROI/AAAAAAAAD.... If slavery had been critical to the U.S. economy, you would've expected a massive economic collapse right after the civil war. But there wasn't even a blip.
> If slavery had been critical to the U.S. economy, you would've expected a massive economic collapse right after the civil war. But there wasn't even a blip.
Do you believe that the newly emancipated slaves retreated to their own self-subsistence farms directly after the civil war or what?
I think you're actually making OP's point: free laborers were capable of doing the same work that unfree laborers had been forced to do.
This isn't my field, but I have read a few papers about the question of how profitable slavery was. Most of the debate seems to be over how profitable it was to the plantation owners, and whether they personally would have made larger profits by investing their money elsewhere (e.g., by hiring wage laborers to work their plantations, or by investing in manufacturing).
The question of slavery's impact on the development of the economy as a whole is completely different from that. Given how backwards the South remained, while the half of the country that abolished slavery surged ahead economically, it's difficult to see how one could argue that slavery caused the US' economic development.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this in Democracy in America. It's well worth reading, to see a contemporary Frenchman's impressions of the stark difference in economic development between the Southern slave and Northern free societies: https://www.tota.world/article/1860/
The point I was trying to make that "free" and "unfree" isn't as binary as some people like to think. The former slaves weren't free from the economic coercion their destitution entailed. Just because you aren't someones literal property anymore doesn't necessarily make you free or in any position to demand a livable wage. The planters were well aware of the disposablity of the wage labourer and even used that it their pro-slavery propaganda that went something like "We actually need to take care of our property, unlike you, who just replace them".
> Absolutely. You can't make a country richer by enslaving part of the population, and you don't need slavery to make a country rich
Correct, but I didn't claim either of these things. I asked if the immense wealth among white Americans didn't grow out of the subjugation of slaves. Imagine 100 people who are equally wealthy. Now, imagine you take 1/6 of the people, remove all of their wealth, and disperse it among the remaining 5/6. Perhaps you skim a few percent off the top due to inefficiencies of the scheme. Are you saying the 5/6 people here didn't benefit? Sure seems like they did!
> The claim isn't directed to one group's heritage and its contribution. On its face, it is directed at "nearly everything that has truly made American exceptional." It literally ties the entirety of the American story (or nearly all of it) to slavery.
You...you read the full quote, right?
> Almost none of those things grew out of slavery. Our "legal system" for example was imported wholesale from England--based on principles of the Magna Carta dating back to 1215. Any slave trade into England itself was banned in 1102. Are there imprints on our legal system from slavery? Sure. But its factually incorrect to say our legal system "grew out of slavery."
There are a number of uniquenesses to the American legal system that trace themselves to slavery and racism. And I'd argue that many of those things are the things that make the American legal system "exceptional" and unique.
> The founding principles weren't fulfilled in 1776, but the history of the country has been one of progress in that direction. That was conventional wisdom among Democratic political leadership when I was growing up (and I'm only 37) and almost certainly still is the conventional wisdom among most rank-and-file Democrats.
See, I read the opposite from this. "Consent of the governed" is incompatible with slavery. You say that this was simply the principles "not being fulfilled" at the time, but then how can you say that we were founded on a set of values that the constitution then proceeds to explicitly reject? The constitution provides for the 3/5ths compromise, but didn't encode a right to vote (for anyone, that was left up to the individual states) until reconstruction.
> but the history of the country has been one of progress in that direction
This is sort of a meaningless platitude. "Sure you still don't have the rights to life, liberty, and happiness yet, like most people do, but you're closer now than your ancestors were 150 years ago" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the US.
> Now, imagine you take 1/6 of the people, remove all of their wealth, and disperse it among the remaining 5/6. Perhaps you skim a few percent off the top due to inefficiencies of the scheme. Are you saying the 5/6 people here didn't benefit? Sure seems like they did!
Slave ownership was strongly concentrated. A relatively small class of plantation owners got rich off slavery. They didn't redistribute the proceeds across the entire white population. Economically, the slave-owning South, as a whole, lagged far behind the North, and slavery is a likely cause for that economic backwardness.
> didn't encode a right to vote (for anyone, that was left up to the individual states) until reconstruction.
That has nothing to do with slavery. The Constitution was written at a time when democracy was viewed with suspicion, and moreover. Nevertheless, the United States was, at the time, rapidly becoming one of the most democratic polities in the world. One way to see this is to look at the state constitutions written in this era.
My comment here wasn't about slavery. It was about the claim that america was founded on the principle of government by the consent of the governed.
I think your response proves my point.
> One way to see this is to look at the state constitutions written in this era.
Well, minus the whole slavery thing enshrined in half of them (not to mention landownership requirements that lasted until the civil war in some places, and the net reduction in voting rights in the early 1800s).
Like even at its founding, the US was only marginally better than the UK in terms of enfranchisement. About 2% of Philidelphians were eligible voters. That's the capital of
a free state with only a few slaves.
> . A relatively small class of plantation owners got rich off slavery. They didn't redistribute the proceeds across the entire white population. Economically, the slave-owning South, as a whole, lagged far behind the North, and slavery is a likely cause for that economic backwardness.
The south, for the 17th time were not the only people who benefitted. Northern businesses that depended on various plantation based exports also gained.
But even still, I agree that your average white farmer didn't gain a lot, that's true of capitalist economies, not slavery in particular. The gilded age didn't fix wealth inequality.
The bigger question is whether or not the relatively rich and influential southern plantation owners had an outsized impact on, say, the development of universities and such.
> It was about the claim that america was founded on the principle of government by the consent of the governed.
This was absolutely a central principle of the revolution. The objections to taxation by Parliament rested on the colonists' lack of representation in that body.
> Like even at its founding, the US was only marginally better than the UK in terms of enfranchisement. About 2% of Philidelphians were eligible voters.
Perhaps at the founding of the US that was true, but Pennsylvania passed a radically democratic state constitution in 1776 that was highly innovative and unusual in many ways (e.g., a council elected by the people every 7 years to review all laws passed since the last council, with the power to veto any law they considered unconstitutional). The new state constitution granted the right to vote to any man who paid taxes, which by 1787 was nearly 90% of the adult white male population.
> Northern businesses that depended on various plantation based exports also gained.
How did they gain from slavery? They could but cotton from anywhere, and if the South wasn't delivering, they could import it from other countries. The argument works much better in reverse: Southern plantation owners depended critically on the rapidly expanding British and American textile industries. The planters were delivering a relatively low-tech, raw product. The textile mills didn't particularly care how it was produced, and they had multiple sources they could buy it from.
> The gilded age didn't fix wealth inequality.
But it did deliver much more economic development than the old slaveocracy.
> This was absolutely a central principle of the revolution. The objections to taxation by Parliament rested on the colonists' lack of representation in that body.
Right, but the replacement didn't functionally address the broad issue of consent of the governed. It replaced a government of wealthy white gentry with a wealthy white gentry in a different location. Your average American citizen didn't actually gain much, if anything, in terms of representation. Only the upper class did (which is, in many ways, the class we're arguing about).
> Perhaps at the founding of the US that was true, but Pennsylvania passed a radically democratic state constitution in 1776 that was highly innovative and unusual in many ways
And it was practically unique in that regard. The NJ constitution had a wealth requirement and, despite originally granting women and free black people the right to vote, it later rescinded those rights!
Not to mention a Constitution like South Carolinas, which required slave ownership to hold public office.
But more importantly, while the US was busy regressing from the founding principles it only halfheartedly upheld, other nations were busy drafting and creating new constitutions that better uphold those ideals. And tot he point I keep returning to: our deification of the original constitution prevents many necessary improvements in that regard.
> But it did deliver much more economic development than the old slaveocracy.
I don't think I've said otherwise. You seem to think the argument I'm making somehow relies on slavery being a lynchpin of the American economy. It doesn't. It only requires that it have been present.
> Right, but the replacement didn't functionally address the broad issue of consent of the governed. It replaced a government of wealthy white gentry with a wealthy white gentry in a different location. Your average American citizen didn't actually gain much, if anything, in terms of representation.
You're completely wrong about this. You just have to look at the constitutional changes in the states and the huge growth in participation in politics in the 1780s. The revolution was a mass movement, and it had a profound effect on how the general population viewed politics and on what sort of government they were willing to accept.
> And it was practically unique in that regard. The NJ constitution had a wealth requirement and, despite originally granting women and free black people the right to vote, it later rescinded those rights!
Pennsylvania wrote the most democratic state constitution, but it was not at all unique in overhauling its system of government to become much more participatory. New Jersey's 1776 state constitution lowered property requirements, replaced the royal governor with a governor selected by the elected legislature, and reduced his powers (e.g., no veto power), and as you point out, removed racial and gender restrictions to voting.
> But more importantly, while the US was busy regressing from the founding principles it only halfheartedly upheld, other nations were busy drafting and creating new constitutions that better uphold those ideals.
The US was one of the only democratic republics in the world well into the 19th century. That's the context for Lincoln's statement that the United States was "the last best hope of earth." The 1848 revolutions in Continental Europe had been crushed, and the US appeared to many to be the only major democratic country left standing.
> It only requires that it have been present.
If that's the extent of your argument, then your argument is fairly meaningless. Everyone knows that slavery existed in the South. What I and others object to is the claim that the US became wealthy because of slavery. It seems much more likely to me that the US was economically held back by slavery.
The claim that got them the most in trouble with historians was this:
> one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery
Gordon Wood responded,
> "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves."
Gordon Wood is known as the expert on colonial pamphlets and ideology more generally during the Revolutionary era, so him saying this carries a lot of weight. Gordon Wood and a bunch of other very well known historians wrote to the NY Times to ask for corrections. The editor of the magazine, Jake Silverstein, published their letter next to his rebuttal, in which he argued that defending slavery was indeed a cause of the revolution.[1] What he didn't say was that the NY Time's own fact checker had objected to the claim. That only came out later.[2] The embarrassment of that revelation finally caused the NY Times to slightly weaken - but not entirely drop - its claim about the revolution.
The claim about the revolution caused the most controversy, because it has huge consequences for how one interprets American history, but it was hardly the only false or highly questionable claim. A few others:
* The US has worse labor protections than Brazil because of the US' history of slavery (Brazil was the largest slave nation in modern history, and abolished slavery well after the US did).
* Presenting New Orleans as the financial capital of the antebellum US (NY city alone had nearly as much banking capital as the entire South, and far more than New Orleans).
* Claiming that double-entry bookkeeping was invented on Southern plantations (that would be a surprise to Luca Pacioli, the 15th-Century Florentine mathematician who wrote a treatise on double-entry bookkeeping).
Just fundamentally, I would tell anyone who doesn't already know the history well not to try to learn it from the 1619 Project, because you really can't trust any of the factual claims in the project. People would be much better served by reading more standard historical works (including some of the very accessible works written by critics of the 1619 Project that deal with slavery - James Oakes and James McPherson come to mind).
I noticed a sort of almost prurient interest in salacious details about ISIS among liberals around the time the podcast came out, so I think that was part of it, they just knew something along these lines would be popular and sell. (Conservatives may have had much the same interest, I don't know, but if they did they weren't going to the NYT to get their fix.)
The "ISIS as unconscionable bogeyman" story also helped sell the U.S. intervention in Syria, which was an ongoing objective on the NYT's part.
> A judgment call of "likely enough true" when the reality is "entirely fictional" points, in my opinion, to either a lack of judgment
Completely justified and reasonable judgement that something is "likely to be true" can be sometimes be incorrect because that's what the word "likely" means.
I disagree. "Likely" is a probability statement, not an escape valve. If I say "it is likely the sky will be purple tomorrow", and then it is not, I still must answer: Why did I think it was likely? That's a judgment call.
I would agree if it was a NYT column entirely about him, but this was a podcast talking about the ins and out of ISIS and exploring the process of investigation. I would argue that Chaudhry was just one part of the story, and his purpose was actually to show how hard it is to verify facts when it comes to ISIS.
Callimachi's apology on Twitter[1] is itself okay, I think. It's the NYT article[2] that I read as weirdly congratulatory/"look how committed to journalism we are!" while discussing a fairly massive journalistic failure.
The problem with Fauci saying we shouldn't wear masks is that there was not some initial data which indicated that this was the right choice, it was just an incorrect assumption based on nothing (or worse an outright lie based on a desire to "preserve supply", as this was known to be a respiratory virus well before his statement).
Saying nothing when you have no data is fine, asserting / prescribing something ("you don't need to wear masks") when you have no data is not. Err on the side of caution, hedge against risk. This is basic stuff and top public health officials need to be held to a (much) better standard.
I think your analogy perfectly captures why we must criticize it.
Both Fauci and the Times made an elementary mistake/miscalculations that reflects terribly on trust people place with them.
The media then lambasts anyone who uses this to sow scepticism about these institutions, calling them conspiracy theorists instead.(which is true for certain cohorts, but wielded as a blanket statement)
My trust in various academic institutions has gone down by orders of magnitude since the UCL/NE Journal and many of the other covid fiascos. The statistical and scientific rigor employed by experts and epidemiologist seems to be massively lacking.
Similarly, a series of missteps by the NYT has led me to (a much larger degree than the previous analogy) lose trust in its reporting. Sadly, there do not seem to be any alternative sources outside of either reading the papers directly or finding specific individuals I place high amount of trust in.
Both are all too time consuming for someone with a full time job.
That isn't at all true. If you took 5 minutes to actually read the detailed rationale published by CDC, you would see why they opposed masks.
People tend to use mask wearing as a replacement for social distancing. They aren't. They are a risk mitigation method for cases where social distance is unavoidable. CDC opposed mask wearing specifically because people would interpret it as a less-effective security blanket. They only reversed their stance when it became apparent that the US public weren't willing to use social distancing effectively.
Western governments recommending against masks is one of the biggest government fuck-ups I've ever witnessed and now there's no lack of people trying to cover it up and find excuses for it.
The quote below is from "Professional and Home-Made Face Masks Reduce Exposure to Respiratory Infections among the General Population". There's enough studies looking at this for SARS and influenza- including for the general population - that it is highly irresponsible to err on the side of not using masks even if there's no clear evidence for population usage for SARS-2.
"Opportunistic data collected
during the SARS epidemic in Asia suggested that population-wide use of face masks may significantly decrease transmission of not only SARS but also influenza [3,4,5,6,7]. As part of pandemic preparedness, many are contemplating the contribution wide-spread use of masks could have [8,9]."
3. Lau JTF, Tsui H, Lau M, Yang X (2004) SARS transmission, risk factors and prevention in Hong Kong. Emerging Infectious Diseases 10: 587–92.
4. Lo JYC, Tsang THF, Leung Y, Yeung EYH, Wu T, et al. (2005) Respiratory infections during SARS outbreak, Hong Kong, 2003. Emerging Infectious Diseases 15: 1738–41.
5. Wilder-Smith A, Low JGH (2005) Risk of respiratory infections in health care workers: lesson on infection control emerge from the SARS outbreak. Southeast Asian Journal of Tropical Medicine and Public Health 36: 481–488.
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Most of the people in the USA denying mask use are right wingers who choose to listen to politicians rather than scientists, that's the 90% problem, not what you're pointing out. Their leaders tell them masks don't work and they listen. Others listened to scientists and we're better for it but if half the country is ignoring it, it greatly reduces the effectiveness of masks. The CDC backtracked within a month or two that masks could be a good idea even homemade ones to limit the aerosols. To say anything else is nitpicking, we've have 6 months and people still deny it. Nothing you pointed out would have changed it since Trump double downed on not wearing a mask and his luddites followed behind him.
It's absolutely insane (or a transparent deception) to make the argument that CDC in March saying "don't wear masks" is the problem here for eroding trust, when the right political wing was opposed to scientific voices even before that, and 9 months later so many people are opposing mask wearing now? How can one say out of one side of their mouth that the CDC was wrong then, and out the other side day that the CDC advice is wrong now?
If CDC was wrong about masks in March, why are people who say that still opposed to wearing masks?
It's insane to hold the people who claim to be scientists to a higher standard than the people who don't?
With regards to our lovely two-party system, both sides (yes I know) typically only cite "science" when it suits them. In the defense of "the left" (sorry I hate talking about politics as if it's one-dimensional), it does seem like data supports their policies more often than it does the right, but again, a false dichotomy is the wrong way of looking at this.
Remove politics from the discussion and science is still facing a crisis: reproducibility crisis, proposing unfalsifiable theories, spending more time worrying about positive results than finding the truth, politics influencing science (not just the other way around as it should be), the profit-driven concerns of higher learning institutions, etc, etc.
The CDC is not the man on the street. The man on the street can distrust an institution that suggests something unscientific when they are requesting trust from the public.
Doesn't matter if said man on the street thinks the earth is flat, has a mental disorder or likes tennis more than soccer.
An institution should not be judged on the merits of the people judging them.
Also, people not wanting the government to force them what to do with their bodies is not quite the same as them not believing that there is a health risk when not wearing masks. Stop conflating the two. Engage the argument instead of the strawmen (or don't, but be honest about it.)
>CDC opposed mask wearing specifically because people would interpret it as a less-effective security blanket.
At the very least, they did a poor job of communicating this in the public sphere. The sound bites many Americans got was to not wear masks, which is quite different than "wearing masks is not a suitable substitute for social distancing". For better or worse, most Americans probably aren't going to search out CDC publications as their primary source for detailed information.
He has indicated PPE was part of the rationale:
"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs,"
To be fair, he's been in a very difficult situation and I can only imagine the number of verbal miscues I would have made if placed in a similar scenario.
>At the very least, they did a poor job of communicating this in the public sphere. The sound bites many Americans got was to not wear masks, which is quite different than "wearing masks is not a suitable substitute for social distancing".
CDC isn't to blame for this. At this point there was a TON of political interference and bureaucratic restrictions on what they were allowed to say, and they were reined in very early. There were lots of entire careers and stuff some people call "my life's work" held in the lurch there.
A very good point. It was what I was dancing around in my statement about Fauci being in a difficult situation.
I may be being too critical, but I think certain professions of public trust need to be held to higher standards in this regard. Meaning, while I can commiserate with the idea that careers hang in the balance, they owe it to the public to be honest. It's why certain roles are "professions" and not "jobs" (there is generally a professed oath to serve the public good). This is where I would hold them deficient in their communication and, unfortunately, a threat to a career isn't sufficient to avoid one's professed ethics. Misspeaking is one thing, misleading is another.
How many public appearances has Dr. Fauci made since January? So much shade being thrown in this thread for a few missteps during a complicated situation. Meanwhile the President of the United States, with access to the world’s best intelligence and expert recommendations on the subject, denied the severity of the pandemic for months after it became an international crisis. He did it for his own perceived political benefit.
I've tried to give the benefit of the doubt in my higher comments about how difficult the situation was/is.
What I don't think is excusable is lying to the public as a public health official. The PPE part seems to show "We can't trust the public, so we should lie to them." It's an ends-justify-the-means position, which is a dangerous mindset in someone who influences public policy.
If it were just "a few missteps" that's one thing. Making the wrong call under uncertainty in a dynamically changing situation is excusable. Having the (lack of) ethics to think the appropriate response is to lie to the public is much less so.
> I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs
I don't trust Fauci because of this. He lied, he doesn't see it that way, he he doesn't seem to acknowledge how it undermined trust.
I also don't like his approach. It's very preachy. That's not what we need right now. We need someone saying "please stay home, but we know some of you are going to see loved ones for the holidays, so we added testing capacity and locations so it's super easy to get tested."
Getting tested prior to gatherings isn't enough to stop the spread.
You need tests and periods of isolation, with the periods of isolation being the more important component (that many people don't have much ability to choose right now).
What happens a lot is that people get tested, think they are safe, then after becoming infectious spend a bunch of time with people.
So advertising expanded testing isn't really a viable public health message.
I need to see a citation for that. My gut tells be that if people had mostly accurate at-home tests they took ~daily, it would actually reduce spread massively, especially when it can be asymptomatic.
I'm sure that would have impact, but it isn't what you described above, you described advertising more locations and capacity to make people feel better about visits and gatherings.
I also expect that compliance wouldn't be all that high for at home testing (people skipping tests, deciding they still feel good enough, etc). It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to establish that access for people that would use it well though.
Also, there's a difference between working to increase testing so that more people do get tested before a holiday and making that the center of your message. They need to be careful to not mislead or give the impression that they are misleading, but they could limit the messaging to a statement about working to expand testing.
We can’t just spin up testing capability, though. Normalizing violations of social distancing, then claiming that we will have a safety net for all the people who will hear that and think “oh, staying home? That’s for other people to do” when we can’t actually support everyone doing that is not helpful at all.
> We can’t just spin up testing capability, though.
Back in March and April, I'd agree. It's December now, so there's no excuses for this. There's also no excuses for the problems with the vaccine rollout.
The real solution would have been to tell people to wear masks and invoke the Defense Production Act with 3M and other manufacturers so that medical-grade masks were directed to the right place. People were screaming at the administration to do this at the time (Jan/Feb).
What made them believe the US public was willing to socially distance in the first place? Was that backed up with data or was it another baseless assumption?
Stating your rationale doesn't mean your rationale is backed up with evidence.
Again, top public health officials need to be held to a higher standard. That means understanding how populations behave, not just understanding the medicine. That means consistent messaging. The message throughout should've been:
> This is a dangerous virus, and the best way not to get it is to avoid contact with any other people at all. However, if you absolutely need to come into contact with other individuals, risk can be reduced if everyone is wearing a mask. Masks are not anywhere near 100% effective, but they do help, which is why you should be avoiding human contact and only be going out with a mask if absolutely necessary.
In the early months of the outbreak there was almost no evidence, and yet we reasonably expected the experts to give their best shot at an answer. They looked at the probabilities as best they could estimate them from the characteristics of similar diseases, that's all the evidence they had at the time, and updated their guidance as they got more data.
The problem has always been that this disease is very unusual in many different ways. This has quite understandably caused many best efforts at estimating it's behaviour to turn out to be wrong.
It's really not enough though. Populations (and arguably esp. the American population) are not automatons that you can just direct and they will follow orders when you first tell them to go left and then soon after tell "oops, actually you should've gone right".
Messaging needs to be consistent and err on the side of caution... this was the exact opposite of both of those things.
SARS-CoV-2 is actually not that unusual – the mRNA COVID vaccines that have been developed are based on the spike protein that is common to all "coronaviruses" (hence the name) and was previously isolated from SARS-CoV-1 (i.e. SARS). At the very least we knew it was a coronavirus early on, so there is no reason you wouldn't assume it was respiratory in nature, just like SARS was.
We knew it was respiratory right from the start, but that doesn’t mean the virus load on small droplets is enough to cause transmission. There’s an awful lot more to it than that. As for credibility, suppose they had recommended everyone wear masks and it turned out to have no appreciable effect. What consequences would that have had, especially amongst those claiming the whole thing was a scare?
> This is a coronavirus, just as SARS was before it. This one seems both more lethal and more contagious than SARS, so we are recommending everyone wears a face-mask (even one you've made yourself) when you go to any public place until we understand more about the virus.
Is slicing the context off his statements honest? Fauci did not just say there was no need. He was very specific and clear that he didn't have enough evidence to recommend it.
No, masks were mandated for health personnel dealing with COVID from day one. It was simply a lot of bad faith/ascientific messaging by WHO and national authorities early on.
This also to a large extent fuelled the anti-makser movement you have trouble reigning in now. Absolutely moronic.
It would have certainly happened. It could also never have reached such a magnitude had health authorities not proclaimed for 3 months that masks are the new facehuggers.
And most anti-maskers are against it because of government overreach. Unrelated to science.
A third party has emerged. The "we'll believe and parrot anything because it's what we're told".
They act in the following realm (whether they are aware or not):
Cotton/cloth masks don't work. But it qualifies as a mask so checkbox! Moral superiority is on my side whether science is or not doesn't matter.
PPE was recommended for people dealing with Covid positive.
Fauci lied (and admitted to it) that masks weren't effective and suggested that the average person should not wear them.
To be fair, I heard the whole medical community here (I'm in one of the largest medical centers in the world) laugh and scoff at normal people wearing masks (because they weren't trained and it isn't effective).
And now we have no N95 for the general public and idiotic cloth masks (that don't work).
So it turns out they weren't far off I their scoffing... But for the wrong reasons.
Now we see them (and other anto-science) normals flip and ignore the data on bad masks. "Something is better than nothing". False sense of security and just more lies and moral superiority.
> What made them believe the US public was willing to socially distance in the first place? Was that backed up with data or was it another baseless assumption?
Maybe all of the other examples of Americans coming together against a common threat from the last couple of centuries?
The messaging wasn't consistent. The POTUS ranted and raved on Twitter ad nausium about how its all a hoax.
Everyone was saying that except Trump and the people in the Administration whose mouths he taped shut, next thought he'd look bad if a pandemic existed so he said things like "there's a dozen cases now, they'll be none soon; this will be over by Easter". Then when he was briefly reined in, we had a belated national effort to lockdown with "30 days to stop the spread".
> They only reversed their stance when it became apparent that the US public weren't willing to use social distancing effectively.
Do you have citations for any of this stuff? Because I have seen places where Fauci and the CDC admitted that their main reason for discouraging masks was to prevent a run on PPE, and I've never seen one where they have explained that it was part of some broader strategy like this. In fact, my memory of the time where they were advising against masks is that social distancing was much less emphasized in the public health messaging than hand washing and avoiding face touching.
The reason Fauci (and others) said not to wear masks early on is because there was a shortage and they wanted to be sure medical professionals could have access to masks.
Medical professionals have known for a century that masks help prevent the spread of disease - particularly an airborne or aerosolized.
Other countries told everyone to wear pieces of cloth around their face in the early days of the pandemic hitting their country. There was no cloth shortage, and this was a basic precaution that could (and should) have been taken without badly affecting the supply of respirators for medical personnel. This is to say nothing of the lies[1] told in service of this policy: principally that masks aren't effective for controlling spread among the general public when there was no contrary evidence and the prudent prior would've been to use masks (for a fucking respiratory disease!) until proven ineffective.
Policymaking and public health guidance is complex. There are details of the population's behavior that can't be fully controlled, but can be influenced, and maintaining credibility is crucially important here. Burning public trust with lies (or worse, basic inability to think critically under conditions of uncertainty) early on in the pandemic was a lot more damaging than the incidental effect of a cloth-mask recommendation on early N95 supply would have been.
[1] Worse than and more plausible than lies is simply incompetence. The medical industry is famously bad at critical thinking: I've known people who came out of (top-ranked) med school _less_ able to reason under uncertainty and deal with statistics, because of the culture of oversimplification they're indoctrinated with. I have no opinion on whether this is wise for the field overall, but it's an especially poor fit for a fast-moving, low-information environment like the early days of a pandemic.
If this was a valid reason for lying, or misleading the public, why wouldn't they continue doing it with the vaccine? Why not have Fauci say, "no, the vaccine is ineffective" or "people don't need a vaccine" right now, when the vaccine is in short supply, in order to ensure all medical professionals have access to the vaccine without additional demand from the public?
If the virus is in microdroplets in your breath, something in front of your face when you breathe out is going to slow some of those droplets down, making them less likely to be inhaled by others nearby. This is just physics. If it can fog your glasses its helping. If it makes you smell your own breath its helping.
A scarf is better than nothing, just like a homemade mask is better than a scarf, just like a purpose built mask is better than a homemade one.
Mitigating risk by using methods approaching zero efficacy is useless.
"This is just physics".
No this is just your intuition. Scarfs don't protect you or others. Neither do gaiters. This has been tested. They may work mildly for UV protection... But there you can be fooled as well.
They just don't work. N95s provide a level of protection but they are not full proof. The further away you move from N95 the more useless they get. Cotton etc. don't protect. They are overcome by physics.
I am appalled that he lied and owned up to it later.
But from his perspective (and it may have been not just his choice) what were the alternatives if his goal was to preserve frontline medical workers? (Regardless if this policy actually saved anyone).
I can see why it was done and at the same time feel lied to and that that is wrong.
I don't think he "lied", he just weighed the pros and cons and gave an advice, which may not have been the best. Later as the pros and cons changed, he updated his advice. Did he even claim that "masks don't help stop the virus"? That would've been a lie but I don't think he said anything like that.
You can call it "ulterior motives", I called it "weighing the pros and cons". While the host in your video claims "he lied to us", again he only said "you don't need to wear masks for now", he never claimed they don't work or that they wouldn't help, just that you don't need them yet.
His reason for recommending not wearing masks was "to save PPE capacity for frontline medical workers". Not any of reasons he gave at the time.
This is a definition of ulterior motive.
I'm not making a judgement whether he was right/wrong by giving that advice (which the WHO did as well for the same reasons). Just pointing out that he did lie.
I personally don't like being lied to by people that represent a lot of power (doesn't matter what they're motives are. Lying is used to deceive for ulterior motives). That is just an indicator that I can't trust public facing scientists because the truth is not a priority, rather only the outcome that they desire (whether personally or as a group.) But that's not new.
> it was just an incorrect assumption based on nothing (or worse an outright lie based on a desire to "preserve supply", as this was known to be a respiratory virus well before his statement)
Fauci was obviously lying. Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions. There is lots of public research confirming this. Here are a couple examples:
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24229526/ - this is a paper from 2013 testing the efficacy of homemade masks versus surgical masks finding that both have some effect but surgical masks are better. If you look under "similar articles" you'll find 4 there about masks reducing the spread of airborne viruses from before 2020.
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20584862/ - demonstrates 2010 study showing the strong effect of N95s against small particles in the breath (on which the virus is borne) and comparing it to homemade masks. Concludes homemade masks would offer marginal protection. Again, in similar articles you'll see another three from before 2020 on the efficacy of masks.
Masks were well and widely known to be useful at slowing the spread of airborne contagions - especially N95 masks. People knew homemade masks had some effect too.
There was probably good reason to want to save N95's for medical professionals. There was no reason to say masks weren't helpful for the general public though, that was an absolute lie. Fauci and others had all the information they needed at the start of the pandemic and could have said "Masks are useful, that's why we need the best masks for our medical workers. We've put together information on how you can make homemade masks that are X% effective and what you can buy and use."
That's not evidence, but a claim that you provide no evidence for. Even if he was wrong, you don't have evidence that he made a mistake or that he lied.
> Masks are and were well understood to be useful in mitigating the spread of airborne contagions.
IIRC, most medical experts agreed with Fauci at the time. The analysis of someone on the Internet doesn't mean much.
I don't think that's a reasonable expectation of someone in Fauci's position. Wearing a mask or not is a binary decision, when people ask if they should wear masks of someone in that role they reasonably expect a binary answer of what they should do and at any given time he took his best shot at answering that question.
What he said in March was that he didn't believe there was any reason for most fo the public to wear a mask, that's because he didn't have any evidence that it was effective at that time. Evidence is a reason, absence of evidence is not a reason for action. This is very simple. I happen to have thought even at the time that we should be wearing masks, but that was just an opinion and at that time the opposite opinion was also reasonable. We were still working things out.
Accusing him of lying in service of some conspiracy theory really is going too far.
This reasoning is nonsense. The early days of the pandemic aren't going to have a high-N RCT, so reasoning from higher-uncertainty sources of knowledge is important. An obvious prior for a fucking _respiratory_ disease is that masks reduce population spread, and the no-cost recommendation to wear masks in the early pandemic is one of the few policy levers that would have actually saved lives.
We knew all along how viral respiratory diseases including corona viruses are transmitted, and that masks have some effectiveness in preventing spread for such viruses. In the absence of direct evidence one way or another for masking effectiveness COVID itself, the reasonable assumption would have been that masks are indeed effective until proven otherwise.
Substitute "crystal healing", or "hydroxychloroquin" for "population-wide mask usage to contain a viral disease". To the medical sciences, these three are (were) more alike than they are different: they all are interventions that may or may not achieve a desired outcome, and may or may not have some unwanted side effects.
In January/February 2020, there was about as much evidence for either of those propositions. The evidence on masks was thin, and limited to use by professionals in a medical setting. Existing studies of their use as practiced in parts of Asia were inconclusive.
Yes, I know: Masks seem like a really good idea. The whole concept makes sense. There's a theory as to how they work.
But medicine stopped believing any theory as to what may or may not be useful around a hundred years ago, after killing countless people with bloodletting, mercury, vapour-vaping, whatever... All those interventions may seem ridiculous to you, but they all followed some entirely believable logic that accounted for all the known facts as long as one did not actually run a double-blind trial.
It's instructive to look at the fate of two of those interventions: masks and that quinine. We now know the former works and the latter does not. And I'll be immodest and mention that I considered masks to be effective from day one, while spending only about a week drinking Gin Tonics for health reasons, until the full extend of the seediness of that French doctor pushing it became public (and I had to go back to a different set of reasons for the drinks).
But at about the same time along each treatment's timeline, there really was more actual, or at least claimed to be factual, evidence for the Malaria-malarky than there was for masks. And while I'm supremely excellent at predictioneering, I utterly fail when trying to distill some set of specific rules to follow.
Maybe there's wisdom in numbers? Do a survey in the US right now, and you'll probably get 55 % to advocate for masks, 42 % believing in the insect-repellant. And that's about four months after the science on those questions has been settled.
Actually, there's no reasonable pathway for crystal healing to help here. On the other hand, it's entirely plausible and there's real-world experience to support (1) masks filtering harmful particles and (2) hydroxychloroquin being useful against an immune system run amuck, which is the way 'flu' often injures patients. So, no, only two of the three were similar.
Zero credit to those who would equate all three or who would dismiss either of the latter two without diligent, unbiased investigation and solid empirical evidence.
Yes, I don't disagree. I chose crystal healing because it's silly. I supported masks because it seems to make sense.
But none of that is evidence in the double-blind trials sense of the word. And you're actually making my case: there was a plausible mechanism for hydroxychloroquine, as well as for masks. But only one of them works, while the other probably killed a few people, and wasted a whole lot of time.
This reasoning is implicit in the apologists for our early pandemic public health incompetence, but it's incredible to see it concretely articulated.
How do you add absence of high-quality, narrow evidence for effectiveness + strong prior for effectiveness + ~zero-cost intervention and land at "don't recommend cloth face covering"?
All the other examples you gave fail one of these criteria: there's no prior suggesting that Crystal healing is valuable, HCQ has side effects and presents costs/supply chain challenges that _cloth_ doesn't, etc.
An example from the other side is vitamin D: there's been enough weak evidence that anyone scientifically literate has been keeping an eye on their vitamin D since the early pandemic, given that: there's moderate evidence it's protective + there's a high chance you're deficient anyway + D toxicity is pretty hard to achieve.
One side effect that was mentioned at the time was people engaging in risky behaviour thinking they'll be protected by the mask.
Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business. They neither recommended masks nor warned against them, but laid out the facts: "we don't (didn't) know. We're scrambling to get data. We'll let you know"
I'm honestly baffled that the concept of a trial is so alien to people, and that nobody seems to be capable of the tiny transference of recognising that masks are no different than a pill. I could come up with a possible reason Aspirin might work: maybe it's the fever that kills, Aspirin lowers it. The risk is known and rather small. Should medical science recommend everyone to take Aspirin? Does it seem entirely implausible that a significant number of people would say/think "It's not the best time for a wedding, but everyone has taken triple doses of Aspirin so it should be fine"
> Medicine also isn't in the "we recommend it because there aren't many reasons against it" business. They neither recommended masks nor warned against them, but laid out the facts: "we don't (didn't) know. We're scrambling to get data. We'll let you know"
This is false.
> Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
http://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm
Moving the goalposts. I didn't say general population, I said masks. Efficacy will be tested where it can be observed. I.e. very unlikely that a trial with high confidence will ever work on the public.
Also, given your arguments, what is your position on the efficacy of lockdowns vs. their negative effects?
Some news sources call out when they make mistakes and own up to them. And they get piled on for being wrong.
Other news sources (ahem...) say misleading stuff frequently and never correct it, never retract it and continue to mislead their audience.
This whole concept of pile one because someone admitted their wrong has to be the least healthy event I've ever seen. And yet instead of it going down as upholding editorial standards, it will be a case of "see they're wrong, don't trust them".
As an example, a significant portion of an American political party spent years believing (still believe last I checked) a former US president was born in Kenya.
Yes, it takes courage to admit you were wrong in front of a global audience. I blame them for not having the proper fact-checking procedures in place for the podcast, but I applaud them for owning this and for their apparent willingness to learn from this.
> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.
This is technically true, but doesn't convey well that it was quite clear that N95 masks worked well, and he suggested they didn't work because they were in short supply and he wanted to preserve the ability of medical personnel to use them, not because there wasn't data that they worked. The data that came in were about cloth masks also being largely effective, thereby alleviating worries about a lasting shortage. Before that became apparent, Fauci was forced to choose between an immediate shortage of masks for hospital workers, and long-term credibility if such a situation arises again.
If that’s the case, I think he miscalculated. The damage from losing trust in the government has the potential for causing more damage than a temporary shortage of N95 masks
Bad analogy. From all indications, Fauci said what he said in good faith whereas Callimachi seems to have been desperate to confirm that her source was credible in the face of a preponderance of evidence that he was not [1]:
> The assignment, Mr. Flood recalled thinking, was both hopeless and quite strange in its specificity [...] Ms. Callimachi was singularly focused. “She only wanted things that very narrowly supported this kid in Canada’s wild stories,” he told me in a phone interview.
> Mr. Flood didn’t know it at the time, but he was part of a frantic effort at The New York Times to salvage the high-profile project the paper had just announced.
>This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.
Dr. Fauci works for a public health organization and nytimes is a for profit exchange listed company. So this comparison not fair.
The way I remember the mask debate is in March 2020 there was a shortage of PPE and health workers were in great need of masks. To avoid a mad rush of people hoarding masks just like they hoarded toilet paper, the Coronavirus Task Force was emphasising social distancing, hand washing more than wearing masks.
Now, the Caliphate story was outed as a lie by Canadian authorities. The nytimes did not verify their sources, they were caught lying which is why they had to retract their story.
> We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors, which many publications wouldn't do, rather than punishing them for not figuring it out in the first place.
I mostly agree, since I think the heart of your statement here is the times admitted they made a mistake, and that is good behavior. That's dead on.
I disagree a little bit, because I don't think they should be praised for acknowledging their mistake and correcting it: I think that's the minimum expectation we should have for journalists. I agree that it's a sign of integrity (professional integrity, specifically) to own your errors, but I don't think it's particularly courageous to do it; more that the opposite would be cowardly.
Some people here are saying they shouldn't be praised for the retraction because retracting an error is merely doing what a publication should do. This is wrongheaded, because it ignores the fact that in the actual world in which we actually live, rather than a fantasy world that we would all like to live in, it's a rarity. We need much more of it than we have. Punishing the Times at the moment they do good by issuing a retraction will just encourage more publications to be in the camp that do not admit error. The cost of admitting error will be seen as too high.
That isn't to say that the Times shouldn't be held to account when errors are found by others. It should, and so should every other publication. But when they find and retract their own errors, it is absolutely wrong to punish them at that moment.
> Some people here are saying they shouldn't be praised for the retraction because retracting an error is merely doing what a publication should do.
We should be praising five-year-olds for brushing their teeth, but from adults we expect it by default. And while NYT went down in quality in the last few years, let’s not treat it as if it is a five-year-old.
They are still better than most of their competition, even the non-lunatic ones like Bloomberg or Forbes. We should praise the system when it works, when you have a systemic failure it's too late.
100% agree. We are in this cultural state that it is better to dig in your heels on something wrong than to say, hey, I made a mistake. This is my new take based on new data.”
>Wanting people to never make [errors] is impossible, and just encourages them to pretend they are perfect by never doubting themselves and never revealing the truth when it is eventually available.
This isn't specific to this story, but it is truly bizarre that changing your opinions or beliefs based on new information is viewed as a negative trait by modern American society, especially in politics.
We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors, which many publications wouldn't do
It's always fun to watch the tech bubble jump ugly on traditional media when it falters. Meanwhile, the front page of HN is full of Microsoft getting hacked by the Russians and Facebook pretending it exists to benefit society and democracy.
Show me where he's admitted to "deliberately lying". In every interview I've seen he's said the opposite, e.g. [1]
> "I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm's way every day to take care of sick people," Fauci told O'Donnell.
> "When it became clear that the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks," he said.
> "And also, it soon became clear that we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores," Fauci added. "So in the context of when we were not strongly recommending it, it was the correct thing."
It's frankly worse because he won't even admit he was lying. We knew about asymptomatic spread back in January and he's mischaracterizing his own "masks don't work" message. It just further erodes any reason to trust him.
"Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks"
"There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face." - Dr Fauci, March 8th 2020
>It's frankly worse because he won't even admit he was lying
Ah, the old classic. Should we start by cutting off a pinky? Or maybe bamboo splinters, for an international flavor?
He has been clear that he was speaking before transmissibility was known. First there was "no reason," then there was a reason. It's not hard, if you're not trying to intentionally misrepresent his words for some reason.
“…when people were saying you don’t really need to wear a mask well the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community and many people were saying this were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment including the N95 masks and the surgical masks were in very short supply and we wanted to make sure that the people namely the health care workers who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm ways to take care of people who you know are infected with the corona virus and the danger of them getting infected we did not want them to be without the equipment that they needed so there was not enthusiasm about going out and everybody buying a mask or getting a mask we were afraid that that would deter away and the people who really needed it”
> We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors, which many publications wouldn't do, rather than punishing them for not figuring it out in the first place.
We can do both, praise and criticize. While I agree with your statements, they NYT also have another job: Report the news accurately. That's why they exist and it's critical to our society.
We shouldn't overreact to one error and I think the NY Times is generally more reliable than most. A metric for overall reliability would be very valuable, especially in the disinformation age. That would be an interesting project for a leading journalism school. But how to measure it? Omissions, including context, are just as significant inaccuracies as misstatements (imagine the story 'The U.S. declares war on Japan!' without context). How could the study objectively set a standard for what facts and context should be included?
"This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in."
Only that's not what happened. This is a bad analogy, or a good one depending on how you view the overt false narrative-creation of much of today's media. Fauci didn't "change his mind" with more evidence. He readily admits to overtly lying because he made a determination that some lives were more valuable than others. That. Is. Frightening.
This isn't intended to be a political statement, simply a fact that you are memory-holing.
Oh come on. You can't just hide behind "narrative tension" and problematizing the story when you're putting out false information that should have been fact checked more aggressively.
When it first began to come to light that the subject was likely lying, the creator of the podcast actually said that he was likely telling the truth and it was instead the Canadian police that were incompetent because they couldn't "prove he'd gone to Syria" [0].
They were pretty clear they thought it was a true story. I don't think adding some mild disclaimers once it starts coming to light that the story is not true abdicates them from responsibility for what they put out there.
Even at the time, NYT bureau chiefs (ie. experienced war reporters) were uneasy about the nature of the podcast. Absolutely the Times should be praised for calling out their own errors, but it is definitely embarrassing and (in my opinion) should be career-ending or damaging for the architect of the podcast. She wanted it to be true, so she didn't dig.
>This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.
From what I understand he intentionally lied to the public because he wanted front line workers to get them first. This was doing the toilet paper panic. I believe he expressed this himself in an interview.
"He also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE."
> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.
Those aren't similar situations at all.
Fauci's comments are based on the data that's available at a particular time, about an ongoing, evolving situation, so it makes sense that his advice will change as the situation evolves.
On the other hand, this news story was was about a series of events that already happened and were no longer on going. All of the facts were out there but the journalists just didn't do their research.
So it's great that they're retracting the story, but they never should have published it in the first place.
> We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for alling out their own errors
Hilarious. I predicted "we should be praising them for 'admitting' their mistakes" was going to be the top comment. And here we are.
I bet you don't feel the same way about fox news or alex jones.
> This is akin to Fauci saying he didn't think we should be wearing masks, and changing his mind as more data came in.
It wasn't more data. It was politic pressure.
> Wanting people to never make them is impossible
Stop building up a straw man. Nobody is criticizing the NYTimes for not being perfect. People criticize NYTimes for being state propaganda. You know they spread pro-war propaganda and then "oops, we were wrong". Now praise us for admitting we were wrong bullshit. "Oops, our intentional lies/propaganda led to millions of dead men, women and children. But at least we are man enough to admit it" schtick that the dumb masses love.
Is this the standard we want for journalism though? There is so much that goes on in the world that doesn't get reported in the NYT which is backed by concrete evidence why do we need a speculative journalism?
> We should be praising the Times for having the courage and integrity for calling out their own errors…
Absolutely — this is just basic "how humans work". Anyone complaining about this positive action (performed with the understanding of the PR cost) doesn't understand how to get what they purport to want in the world.
The Times isn't a child in need of operant conditioning; you've anthropomorphized a newspaper. But even if we admit the logical leap from an organization to the humans which collectively direct that organization, we must still contend with the fact that unqualified praise will be associated with the entire sequence of actions that led to it, rather than (perhaps) a single action that was only undertaken after making lots of unpraiseworthy actions.
I'm of the opinion that, when it comes to journalism, courage and integrity are table stakes. They need not be praised because they are expected, and their absence should be ruthlessly punished. Even with this premise, one can tolerate mistakes and errors without needing to praise non-mistakes and non-errors.
No, they shouldn't be praised for calling out their own errors--let alone be aligned with "courage"--just as one shouldn't praise an encyclopedia or scientific journal for correcting errors: it's supposed to be de facto matter of course.
The criticisms, however, are against their politically loaded decisions to run certain content in the absence of legitimate sources of truth. If this were an occasional thing, sure, accidents happen. But this has become the modus operandi of what once was the paper of record.
Between the absolute backpedaling of the 1619 Project, copious amounts of Russian influence narrative, and countless "anonymous sources" that turn out to be nobodies or absent integrity, the NYT is an embarrassment to journalism.
They do what you described, though: they build in back doors into their reporting so they can legitimately claim that they weren't "wrong" on a purely logical--but functionally bullsh*t--standing.
No, I don't believe they deserve "praise" for "courage and integrity", because they've left those--and other markers of high character--in the past as they cry their death throes in the changing media landscape.
Good on NYT for coming clean, but this is precisely why I don't trust institutions to vet their own product. "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" is a mission statement for pathological organizations to get away with gambling on the market and socializing their failures.
They didn't come clean, it's clear from the article they were busted.
They strongly resisted multiple challenges to the obvious problems with his accounts by other writers and organisations culminating in him being arrested for fraud.
I'm sorry but this is such an unfair take. If they were posting corrections like this daily or weekly, then you could argue for EAFP. But your comment implies that they do zero vetting and just publish whatever they want. It completely misses the nuance that "getting permission" isn't a black and white issue. It's a spectrum and you're rarely ever at 100%. You sometimes gotta make the call to publish a story at 95% or so, and in rare occasions it just turns out to not go your way.
You're implying that they should never post a story unless they are 100% certain, which means most stories would never get published, defeating the entire point of journalism. Obviously the threshold needs to be high, you don't want to post every single rumor, but just because they have 1 or 2 correction a year does not mean "they'd rather ask for forgiveness than get permission".
Of course, the NYT got rid of their public editor--i.e. their ombudsman. But I disagree a bit, an ombudsman is more reactive; it's not reasonable for them to vet every story before it's printed. That's the job of the editors and their editors.
This seems a pretty major failing. Of course, they always seem that way after the fact. And TBH a lot of stories run that can't be verified beyond the tiniest shade of a doubt that are substantially accurate.
My only experience with ombudsmen is ignored emails until top stakeholders face the pain, then immediate action to resolve their and only their issues.
This is so disappointing. I really enjoyed Caliphate; it was fascinating, and I trusted the NYT to be able to vet its claims. Now I know I enjoyed a piece of nearly-fiction, and I feel cheated, because I still want to know about the subject matter.
I'm not sure retracting a years-old podcast is going to be enough to rebuild trust. I need to hear how the NYT is going to engage some actual experts on this, and I want to hear their perspectives on the story Calpihate presents. The fundamental questions the podcast asked are still very live: What was it like to live under ISIS? How did that organization operate in the areas where it had control? And so on.
Editing to add: I'm not sure how to trust further work from Rukmini Callimachi. The fact she's still working at the Times, with no information on how they'll be vetting her work, is concerning.
I'd recommend the 2019 pseudo-blacklisted documentary Salafistes^1 (released as Jihadists in the US) if you want an unvarnished view of Salafist Islam.
Did we listen to the same podcast? It still had a lot of information and value even if you entirely remove Chaudhry's story. And even for his story, it was very clearly presented as not fully certain. I wouldn't call it "nearly-fiction", it's closer to your average True Crime podcast where you are presented with the known information and it's up to you to decide if you believe it or not.
It absolutely did have a lot of other information in it. However, the mistake here was so substantial that it's hard for me to feel like I can trust the rest of its reporting. Remember, it was not presented as true crime - it was presented as investigative journalism. I don't hold average true crime podcasts, which are usually non-experts quoting secondary sources in an obviously non-expert context, to the same standard.
> "We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes,"
This should serve as a warning to anybody who trusts “anonymous sources familiar with the matter”.
Unfortunately this seems to have become the basis for a lot of entertainment reporting like what you find in the NYT. The allure is just too strong, and the economic necessity of keeping people coming back for their fresh 2 minutes hate is too powerful.
I worry that the damage to public understanding of the world that people have is going to take a long time to reverse.
> This fall, as Canadian authorities were wrapping up an investigation on Chaudhry, Callimachi similarly championed her series. On Twitter, she raised questions about the competence of Canadian intelligence officials in the Chaudhry case. The Times defended her piece to The Washington Post and others, saying the reporting proved to be true and that doubts about Chaudhry's account were central to the podcast's narrative.
This isn't "coming clean", it's getting busted. They had a chance at the former several months ago, and they forwent it.
Just curious, my understanding is that Canada's case is only getting started. Yes, they charged him for "hoax", but it could very well be a trap: Chaudhry has to either provide proof that he is an ISIS fighter, or admit it was all a hoax.
Either way, we won't know for sure until the case is over. So far it's just alleged.
If they were ever doing their jobs this never would have seen the light of day. Even the most basic amount of research showed it was unsubstantiated.
Same with 1619 which is “problematic”.
Their desire to push a narrative outweighed their desire to be factually correct.
The scandal here isn’t they removed something quietly. It’s that if they failed their jobs here, where else are they failing and just haven’t been exposed yet? This isn’t the first time they lied to you, it’s just a time they were caught.
> If they were ever doing their jobs this never would have seen the light of day.
Yes, it could not be more obvious that people fucked up.
Now you have an opportunity to decide whether you're more interested in nurturing your retroactive rage and inciting it in others, or if it might make more sense to reinforce the responsible media behavior that you say you want. In my experience, the latter is more effective and better for mental health.
You know I'm sure we can fault their fact checkers on this, but given what certain other news sources do (like constantly twist the truth and support the actions of a tyrannical President) I'll keep sailing along and trusting the Times. Stuff happens.
I was once a subscriber to the NYT and am within their ideological range to enjoy most of their reporting. I feel as if since 2016 they've lost a lot of credibility. Their reporting feels like editorials, and their internal issues often become public. It seems like a highly political newsroom (i.e., "what facts ought we to report" instead of "what are the facts to report"). I subscribe to a more local newspaper now instead.
>I was once a subscriber to the NYT and am within their ideological range to enjoy most of their reporting. I feel as if since 2016 they've lost a lot of credibility. Their reporting feels like editorials, and their internal issues often become public. It seems like a highly political newsroom (i.e., "what facts ought we to report" instead of "what are the facts to report"). I subscribe to a more local newspaper now instead.
>Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.
In other words, it isn't just a question of The New York Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump in 2016), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.
As if retraction is enough. The entire main stream media has lost all credibility. And if you are on the opposite side of the political spectrum of the 95% of media, then you are aware of a lot more fake journalism done by the media and yet get called names by people.
Even now, reading through the comments, it seems like a lot of people are congratulating NYTimes for finally admitting their entire podcast was bust. After all the damage has already been done, majority of the retractions don't even get to most people who read/listened to the original fake journalism and NYTimes is only retracting now because they got caught and they ignored all the multiple challenges which were raised originally.
> The entire main stream media has lost all credibility.
This is such baloney. Yes, the main stream media does have certain biases that may swing what they choose to report on, and how they choose to report it.
But fundamentally the main stream media still cares about fact and truth. When confronted with evidence the story was falsified, the NYTimes convened an investigation, issued a retraction, returned the Peabody, and reassigned the reporter. You may argue "too little, too late", but they addressed their mistake.
Compare that with much of the "alternative" media, that when presented with clear evidence of fraud or lies, usually just doubles down and screams those lies on repeat.
It is so hard for media mastheads to build and maintain trust, and so easy to destroy that trust which can then take years to rebuild.
Many people still operate on the last century paradigm of a few 'trusted' impartial news sources 'telling it like it is'.
Once these huge organizations lose credibility we find ourselves in the situation Soviet union era citizens were in with the official party organ Pravda - not believing a word of the official line and reading between the lines for clues...
I think we do have those organizations with trust.
If you want facts only news, go to apnews or reuters. They are the mastheads of impartiality, or at least as much as possible with humans.
However, the NYT is what I consider as investigative journalism that includes informed speculation. A lot of stories that otherwise never would have seen the light of day were broken by the NYT, however at the time of publishing there was a degree of uncertainty given the nature of the story. The uncertainty means they could be wrong, even if the odds are high at 90% correct. However, I would argue both are valuable, just understand which you are reading.
I'd suggest apnews & reuters have lost much impartiality credibility, resulting in the rise of populism. We have Trump & Sanders as a result over the last ten years and a vacuum where a reliable trusted and impartial media should be.
I think that these "impartial organizations" have always had some credibility issues (although it has accelerated with journalism's decline).
The democratization of information brought by social media has led to the "fake news" epidemic, but has also allowed smart people to coordinate and discover instances where these organizations are lying, whereas in the past it would take years to come to light.
Told over the course of one year in 11 cinematic episodes, ‘Caliphate’ marries the new journalism of podcasting -- stories told with sound design, musical scoring and high production values -- with traditional boots-on-the-ground journalism.
This worries me. Hard reporting may find very boring stories. The need to make them "cinematic" really tempts the reporter and producers to make the story more sensational than they are. In this case, they appear to have made grave errors.
Edit: I would also like to highlight the following twitter thread:
Indeed, in addition I personally have never thought of podcasting as something with sound design, musical scoring, and high production values. Some of my favorite podcasts are really just a few people talking over skype or sharing a mic. Literally, the opposite of the description which is clearly just an old media outlet trying to maintain relevance.
It's very poor, the lack of double checking prior to publication of the podcast. I listened to it all and he was easily the weakest cast member.
NYT have admitted their mistake, returned their award. However, it's not on todays front page, but "Here are 10 great The Daily's" is, which is insidious and in poor taste.
The dumbest mistake is that something as hideous as a caliphate does not need some wannabe braggadocio to explain this.
Show me an objective publication and I'll show you a person with confirmation bias. I've come to accept that every media outlet is pushing an agenda, intentionally or not. It may be impossible to escape.
I think the best we can do is be cognizant of the intentions and ideological slant of the people and institutions and be extremely skeptical of these PR firms masquerading as objective media.
I don't think that's true, there are just a scant few publications that actually value real, classic journalism these days.
One example is Reuters. They report facts, stated exactly as things happened, without editorializing and injecting their own opinions on top of every other sentence.
In other words, they let you form your own opinions, instead of giving you theirs. That's called journalistic integrity, and it's the reason they're the only news source I actually pay for.
Even if you only report facts as they happen bias is injected by what facts are reported and what stories are covered or omitted. The reporter will naturally be drawn to stories that match up with their perspective on the world. It's very difficult for us to actively and constantly challenge our own assumptions and seek out evidence that contradicts them.
I've thought about this a lot. I think that if an outlet is reporting on some statistical fact. Like the frequency of mass shooting deaths for example they should also place that in perspective against car accidents, cancer, heart disease etc. Contrast that with crime and murder trends over a large swath of time etc. This way people can properly contextualize and rank the real risk in the situation and separate it from the sensationalism.
But even if all of that is carried out. There is still bias from what the reporter chose to write a story about.
I think the worst offenders of situations like this are the investigative NPR style stories where a reporter seeks out an individual's story as a means to emotionally manipulate the reader into a particular policy position. It's far better to look at the larger statistical picture. You can find a sob story to emotionally manipulate people towards quite literally any policy position imaginable.
Negative. I'm saying that you should be extremely skeptical of everything. Notice how you are attempting to dismiss my premise by categorizing me as a "right wing nitwit"
This is the worrying bit for me.
"Even when confronting some of them, the reporting and producing team sought ways to show his story could still turn out to be true."
It says they didn't seek to mislead the public and yet they were pulling the story at the seams to make it fit.
Journalism should operate entirely on the scientific method. Assume false until you have nothing left to poke holes wit.
> "She's a powerful reporter who we imbued with a great deal of power and authority," he says. "She was regarded at that moment as, you know, as big a deal ISIS reporter as there was in the world. And there's no question that that was one of the driving forces of the story."
Did they actually meet the guy at the time, or know where he was? What is the ethical status of that -- if he was admitting to murders to them, don't they have an obligation to turn him in? I didn't think journalist-source privileged would cover beheading civilians?
>> In posting real-time analyses on social media about unfolding terrorism attacks, Callimachi has helped to cement her reputation as a leading source on terrorism.
Seek karma for too long and eventually karma will seek you
It's the NYT. If the Judith Miller nonsense didn't reveal to you what they're like, and you're still listening, you deserve the crap information you get.
Why are some people so obsessed with every little thing that NYT gets wrong? It's the same with California, any bit of bad news out of California is blown up into a national story.
To me this obsession with NYT and California is obvious propaganda. It's what 1984 would call "two minutes hate".
Possibly, and I am just spit ballin' here, it is because to some people the ideas brought forth by the NYT and California's government generally come with an air of them knowing what is best for everyone else, what you should and shouldn't believe, and what is and isn't a problem. To many, right or wrong, it comes across as judgmental or condemning so they are eager to point out any faults.
I'm fine with calling out the NYT for making a mistake or worse enabling substandard journalism. There has been a review of this content, a large organization that has a lot of reporters generating content. The NYT could have done a better job on this. Kudos for the NYT for admitting its mistake. It's not the first, it won't be the last.
I just have one problem with some of the commentary here - I'm willing to wager a sizable portion of the commenters on this board who are experiencing schadenfreude because they hate the NYT most likely get their news from a significantly less reputable news source that would never admit to making a mistake or perform a correction.
Maybe you hate the NYT because it's too liberal and you listen/watch/read the WSJ or Fox News or Breitbart. Maybe it's because you think the NYT isn't 'liberal' enough, and you read Jacobin or Common Dreams or watch MSNBC. This isn't about your concern over adherence to the truth. Many of these comments is about your joy when you point a finger and laugh like Nelson from the Simpsons when the news source that doesn't completely and consistently deliver the information that fits your exact and already hardened world view has anything that diminishes it's credibility.
This is like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald accusing the media of covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story. Both want to destroy the same political contingent but for completely different reasons.
If you are holding the NYT to a standard that your own news source does not adhere to you are the problem.
I don’t think this is true at all. I would guess 95% of what is in nytimes is true.
Are they always right and never have a political slant , of course not.
It is interesting to see that when nytimes do print something that is obviously false for political purposes it is usually leaving right not left. The most obvious example being the build up to the Iraq war.
Are you mixing up "it happens that the media is untrustworthy" with "nothing the media produces is trustworthy"? If so, may I suggest a logic course before venturing forward?
So a news story gets out, millions read it, share or watch it. Then NYT retracts it. Maybe adding a footnote or correction (sometimes they don't even do that [1]) is added to the story. Maybe the story is removed from their site.
However, the faulty information has already registered into the minds of millions of people.
NYT has already intentionally or unintentionally indoctrinated the minds of many readers and with the "retraction" at the same time they can claim the highest standards of journalism.
Unless in good fait, NYT tries to bring as much attention into the correction to the readers they have already impacted, the retraction is journalistic virtue signaling and a very small victory for truth.
Even if they do as much work in publicizing the retraction so many people have already formed a biased view and it'll be hard to undo that.
The only path forward is to fully hold NYT accountable. Fire the editor and journalist in charge of the story would be a start.
[1] https://twitter.com/Timcast/status/1187036978463891456