

The Story the New York Times Won't Touch - jakarta
http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/sausage/2010/02/20/story-new-york-times-wont-touch?page=full

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jakarta
It is particularly interesting to note that blogger Felix Salmon got credited
for bringing attention to this. My guess is that we are going to see more
cases of bloggers breaking stories like this since they are often more free of
conflicts of interest.

Before, you mostly had to worry about political bias in newspapers, but here
we are seeing selectivity being employed when reporting plain old business
news.

I don't have many memories of this happening in the recent past, a poignant
example would be when CBS refused to air a story on 60 Minutes about how
Tobacco executives perjured themselves about their awareness of nicotine’s
addictiveness. CBS killed the story because it could have jeopardized their
acquisition by Laurence Tisch (who at the time owned Lorillard). Michael
Mann's wonderful film, The Insider, centers around that debacle:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Insider_(film)>

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dantheman
I don't think it's that bloggers are more free of conflicts of interest, but
that there are more bloggers so there is a higher percentage whose conflicts
of interest are not relevant to a given story.

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philwelch
It goes beyond "not relevant" to just plain "in line with". The Lewinsky
scandal was broken by a right-wing blog in 1998.

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jsm386
Breaking a story that someone else is sitting on is interesting - but it still
requires (in the Lewinsky scenario) reporters doing actual investigations.
Newsweek had the story. Drudge broke that they were sitting on the story.
Drudge also isn't a blogger. He's a news aggregator that very occasionally
does original reporting (which usually consists of leaks of book galleys, and
stuff about to be published...often leaked to him on purpose by reporters to
drum up interest and drive clicks to the story a few hours later, and in many
cases political operatives pushing narratives, especially during campaigns)

Felix Salmon also fudges the notion of reporter vs. blogger. He is employed by
Reuters, and he blogs for them. How do you draw the distinction between
blogger and reporter?

I'm not trying to take away from the important transformation that is
occurring, but I think that to put it in a binary divide of bloggers vs. old
media/MSM reporters is too broad.

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philwelch
In 1998, there wasn't really the concept of a blog or a blogger. My point is
that mass-consumption journalism is falling short of the ethics that it is
supposedly built on, but the explicit bias and naked greed of mass-production
journalism actually balances out to something more usable, if you're
information literate. No one has to pretend to be impartial anymore. But they
can and do argue with each other, allowing the audience to watch and make
their own judgments.

If you're not information literate, maybe you need a perfectly impartial press
with no conflicts of interest. Tough shit--human nature rarely allows us such
a luxury. The history of news has more Hearsts, Pulitzers, Murdochs, Drudges,
Huffingtons, and Arringtons than any kind of ideal journalists.

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patio11
I yield to no one in my partisan criticism of the NYT, but the failure here is
likely not "we can't offend our corporate overlords" so much as it is "we
don't have a single reporter on staff qualified to understand what was
happening here." There are three options for getting stories: running them
down yourself, following up on other reporters' work, and being leaked the
story by someone wanting to do damage to someone else. For huge swathes of the
human experience, the NYT just lacks the expertise to accomplish door #1.

This is the same reason why the NYT didn't break ScamVille, despite having
published press releases about it. They simply don't have anyone on staff who
understands affiliate marketing, Internet advertising more complicated than
their own brand ads, social media ("sure sounds sexy though!"), etc.

The incentive structure in traditional journalism is a) have a big enough
megaphone to get leakers to come to you and b) get good at owning the stories
that other papers break while defending your own stories. Note that "get
really good at breaking stuff" is much, much harder. This is why you'll see
more and more bloggers with deep, deep talents in narrow fields break things
in the coming years.

(One example: CBS got into a flap about the authenticity of some papers
purporting to demonstrate something negative about George Bush a few years
ago, and stuck to their guns about them. Then a cycling blogger who -- random
hobby time -- also happened to be an expert in computer fontsetting realized
it was impossible to produce the papers on the typewriters available at the
time and, in a visual which should have won him a Pulitzer, created an
animated GIF switching between frames scanned from the purportedly typewritten
document and the same text typed into the default settings of MS Word, showing
they were pixel-wise identical except for scanning artifacts.)

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baguasquirrel
This is a shame. There was once a time when the NYTimes was seen as a paragon
of journalistic excellence. The same could be said for the Wall St. Journal.
Heck, there was once a time when the Tuesday Science section was something to
look forward to.

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lvecsey
Is there a petition to End the NY Times? You know, to put it out of its
misery.

I think the only subscribers left are ones that just see it as a duty to keep
their subscription as a "donation" of sorts, for fear of it vanishing. It
looks to just represent a mental crutch.

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brown9-2
I don't understand the legalities in question here, but can JP Morgan really
change the terms of a loan after the loan has been made?

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jrockway
Conspiracy, or just a boring story?

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bootload
_"... Conspiracy, or just a boring story? ..."_

Both. What is not reported is sometimes just as important as what is reported
because you have to ask why?

 _"... Changes in war reportage since the Vietnam War are a microcosm of the
perception management that is embedded within society. ..."_ ~
[http://old.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1298/pg3/inde...](http://old.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id1298/pg3/index.html)

If business is war, could it not follow that under reporting of the battles
business undertake in court also be a casualty. Noam Chomsky noticed this with
East Timor, an Australian neighbor. The country was at war with Indonesia but
barely reported. [0]

[0] Chomsky, Radical Priorities, 1981 ~
<http://www.chomsky.info/books/priorities01.htm>

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mambodog
Maybe that's because of how Indonesia dealt with journalists:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balibo_Five>

