This post released evidence, which I was sitting on for almost 1.5 years now, that America’s largest newspaper probably went out of their way to conceal information that would embarrass the Ukranian regime and instead printed obvious propaganda in favor of the Western side of the proxy war.
I’m incredibly disappointed with the comments here. This was something we all saw at the time, maybe fewer people than I thought had the professional background needed to recognize it while it was happening, or critical thinking skills either weren’t applied or weren’t sufficient to see how openly hostile the major media outlets became.
In large part, it was my fault for not tagging it well, resulting in attracting randos who were more interested in the semantics of the title than the object-level arguments of the post, due to inability to understand or evaluate the arguments (or even read them, which seems to be what happened here).
However, I knew that I wouldn’t have access to internet and thought that just putting it on the “world modelling” tag would leave it on the front page long enough that people who knew what they were talking about would read it. This was a mistake; every post I’ve put up so far had more tags, that attracted more specialists over time. Perhaps the “world modelling” tag attracts people who have learned over time to prioritize prediction market wording/resolution criteria over actually modelling reality, a problem that people don’t have to worry about as much on dath ilan. I also could have posted larger chunks of the articles rather than assuming that people would click one of the links and take my word that the other two would be similar.
I should have gotten webarchive links of many more NYT articles in March 2022, sadly at the time these 3 seemed more than extreme enough to illustrate the point, and I didn’t think to gather more. If you’re investigating media accuracy, make sure to get as many webarchive links as possible at the time, not just the most extreme examples, these firms have basically unlimited leeway to edit articles after the fact and LLMs might soon be involved.
I’m going to write up another copy of this post, making sure to put tons of effort into the title and only use words that nobody could possibly take issue with. It will also fix the actual problem with this post (which only Viliam came close to noticing), which is that I poorly/vaguely described connection between the smoking gun NYT evidence, and its implications for geopolitics and the survival of democracy.
Here’s the closest thing to your argument in this post that I’d endorse:
Ukraine did not allow its men to leave.
NYT did not mention this fact as often as a “fully unbiased” paper would have, and in fact often used wordings that were deliberately deceptive in that they’d cause a reader to assume that men were staying behind voluntarily.
Therefore NYT is not a fully unbiased paper.
The part I disagree with: I think this is drastically blown out of proportion (e.g. that this represents “extreme subversions of democracy”). Yes NYT (et al) is biased, but
I think this has been true for much longer than just the Ukraine war
I think that yes all this is bad, but democracy is managing to putter along anyway
Which means that in my eyes, the issue with your post is precisely the degree to which it is exaggerating the problem. Which is why I (and perhaps other commenters) focused our comments on your exaggerations, such as the “routinely and brazenly lied” title. So these comments seem quite sane to me; I think you’re drawing entirely the wrong lesson from all this if you think the issue is that you drew the wrong people here with your tagging choices (you’d have drawn me no matter what with your big-if-true title), or didn’t post large enough excerpts from the articles. But if you plan to firm up the “implications for geopolitics and the survival of democracy”, I look forward to reading that.
This post released evidence, which I was sitting on for almost 1.5 years now, that America’s largest newspaper probably went out of their way to conceal information that would embarrass the Ukranian regime and instead printed obvious propaganda in favor of the Western side of the proxy war.
I’m incredibly disappointed with the comments here. This was something we all saw at the time, maybe fewer people than I thought had the professional background needed to recognize it while it was happening, or critical thinking skills either weren’t applied or weren’t sufficient to see how openly hostile the major media outlets became.
In large part, it was my fault for not tagging it well, resulting in attracting randos who were more interested in the semantics of the title than the object-level arguments of the post, due to inability to understand or evaluate the arguments (or even read them, which seems to be what happened here).
However, I knew that I wouldn’t have access to internet and thought that just putting it on the “world modelling” tag would leave it on the front page long enough that people who knew what they were talking about would read it. This was a mistake; every post I’ve put up so far had more tags, that attracted more specialists over time. Perhaps the “world modelling” tag attracts people who have learned over time to prioritize prediction market wording/resolution criteria over actually modelling reality, a problem that people don’t have to worry about as much on dath ilan. I also could have posted larger chunks of the articles rather than assuming that people would click one of the links and take my word that the other two would be similar.
I should have gotten webarchive links of many more NYT articles in March 2022, sadly at the time these 3 seemed more than extreme enough to illustrate the point, and I didn’t think to gather more. If you’re investigating media accuracy, make sure to get as many webarchive links as possible at the time, not just the most extreme examples, these firms have basically unlimited leeway to edit articles after the fact and LLMs might soon be involved.
I’m going to write up another copy of this post, making sure to put tons of effort into the title and only use words that nobody could possibly take issue with. It will also fix the actual problem with this post (which only Viliam came close to noticing), which is that I poorly/vaguely described connection between the smoking gun NYT evidence, and its implications for geopolitics and the survival of democracy.
Here’s the closest thing to your argument in this post that I’d endorse:
Ukraine did not allow its men to leave.
NYT did not mention this fact as often as a “fully unbiased” paper would have, and in fact often used wordings that were deliberately deceptive in that they’d cause a reader to assume that men were staying behind voluntarily.
Therefore NYT is not a fully unbiased paper.
The part I disagree with: I think this is drastically blown out of proportion (e.g. that this represents “extreme subversions of democracy”). Yes NYT (et al) is biased, but
I think this has been true for much longer than just the Ukraine war
I think there are much stronger pieces of evidence one could use to demonstrate it than this stuff about the Ukraine war (e.g. https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192)
I think that yes all this is bad, but democracy is managing to putter along anyway
Which means that in my eyes, the issue with your post is precisely the degree to which it is exaggerating the problem. Which is why I (and perhaps other commenters) focused our comments on your exaggerations, such as the “routinely and brazenly lied” title. So these comments seem quite sane to me; I think you’re drawing entirely the wrong lesson from all this if you think the issue is that you drew the wrong people here with your tagging choices (you’d have drawn me no matter what with your big-if-true title), or didn’t post large enough excerpts from the articles. But if you plan to firm up the “implications for geopolitics and the survival of democracy”, I look forward to reading that.