Is there any public figure on the internet who doesn&#x27;t receive death threats? You could maintain a blog for photos of puppies, and some lunatic would have a deadly-serious problem with it. The web isn&#x27;t working. The saner and wiser a person is, the less likely they are to contribute content. The design of the web selects for morons with neither any reputation to lose, nor foresight to worry.

Is there an author in the United States who has been killed in 2020?EDIT: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:Murdered_American_writers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:Murdered_American_wri...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:Assassinated_American_journalists" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:Assassinated_American...</a>

Anonymity cuts both ways. You can keep your personal details secret for a while. It&#x27;s becoming more and more difficult the more well known you become. On the other hand anonymous people are able to continue making threats, call for violence or otherwise making your life more difficult basically forever without consequences.There are many problems with the way the Internet works. Having anonymous people with nothing to lose broadcasting political opinions and threats is one of them. This creates anonymous angry mob which is very successful at silencing interesting authors and ruining lives of those who have even slightly controversial thoughts.I don&#x27;t know what the solution is. It&#x27;s not clear to me more anonymity is going to solve anything. I believe the world would be a better place if you had to work to have your opinion heard. Do something interesting, work in certain industry for a few years, achieve something, live through something. Just because you are able to make an account on a website doesn&#x27;t make what you have to say in any way interesting or worthwhile.

&gt; But, having your real name attached to posts that are against certain political topics or narrives, can be borderline-lethal in 2020It&#x27;s also unavoidable in 2020 to be doxxed eventually if you have a lot of enemies, unless you take care not to publish any personal details and hide your identity with the best methods available from the beginning. But when you make it easy to identify you with details such as those on the RationalWiki page, all bets are off and it&#x27;s a bit late to mourn now.

It doesn&#x27;t even need to be about political stuff.I&#x27;m a moderator on Reddit for a gaming related television-show-turned-into-internet-streaming company with various shows and format.The related circle jerk subreddit is very vocal and after some minor discussions about normal moderator actions of removing insulting posts, it kind of spiraled out of control and all of a sudden, lots of postings on the circle jerk appear, targeting me.Somewhat amusing in the beginning but some of those posts were somewhat disturbing enough to let me actually consider for the first time how much information is out there for identifying me or persons in my personal circle.My real name is easy enough to find out (I never tried to hide it) but it is kind of generic enough to have lots of hits so you can&#x27;t go from there to where I live or work. But for other people which might even have different personas on the internet, this can be much more difficult.Was certainly a chilling moment and this only on the topic of something completely apolitical.

What kind of &quot;people like Scott&quot;, and what kind of political extremists?I see a dead comment has cited &quot;racial science&quot; and &quot;conservatives&quot;, seemingly out of nowhere. Has Scott written something &quot;controversial&quot; that I missed? Something that would offend the left wing?If so, I can well believe that NYT would take it into their heads to write a semi-hit-piece on someone they perceive to be some sort of Jordan Peterson type.

A lot of political extremists hate people like Scott, and it has caused him a lot of trouble in the past. This is why anonymity is more important now than ever, because just writing a scientific blog about interesting topics can make you the target of witch hunts designed to ruin your life and kill you.It&#x27;s hard to describe how bad these things can get out of nowhere without having been through some of it or seeing it yourself. But, having your real name attached to posts that are against certain political topics or narrives, can be borderline-lethal in 2020, and I can&#x27;t blame him for what he&#x27;s chosen to do. There&#x27;s been plenty of scary situations and chilling effects in the past, and they&#x27;re obviously only getting worse recently.He&#x27;s scared, and rightfully so.

No. There is a slightly higher chance with NYT than say TMZ but still. I&#x27;ve read many people saying the journalist told them it was for a fluff piece or positive article.

I see no particular reason to believe that the piece was going to be positive.

No doubt, it would be just as interesting of an article without his real name.

Journalists obviously never tell their subject their piece is going to be negative. In fact, as far as I can tell from the few people I know who have been in that situation, they appear to routinely say the opposite.

Journalists almost always tell the people they&#x27;re interviewing that the piece will be positive. It means nothing.

Why are you so sure about this? Because the journalist who wanted to disclose his name said so? I&#x27;ve also been interviewed once by a magazine that assured me (and the marketing folks) that it would be a positive piece when in fact it was a hit piece apparently initiated by a major advertiser.

It becomes a lot more explicable if you assume that the journalist was lying and the piece was not going to be positive.

This was in a piece specifically about the blog that was going to be positive, which makes this all the more inexplicable.

It&#x27;s not just the New York Times either. Take a look at what happened to the NightJack blog in the UK (and in that case, it turned out that the Times had illegally hacked the blogger&#x27;s email to get their information and then lied about it in court to dodge an injunction).

Or, as with much else in the woke lexicon[1], they don&#x27;t use the word &quot;safety&quot; in the way that most people understand it.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newdiscourses.com&#x2F;translations-from-the-wokish&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newdiscourses.com&#x2F;translations-from-the-wokish&#x2F;</a>

&gt; why despite legitimate concerns are your writers comfortable doxxing people?This is especially important to ask when a big complaint of the NYT staff about the Tom Cotton is editorial was that it was directly endangering their safety.Apparently the NYT does not have the same concern about other’s safety.

Edit: I&#x27;m 50:50 on whether they take the negative press hit of publishing this anyway. If they publish without name included - everyone still finds out the name of the &quot;flippant&quot; writer. If they don&#x27;t it just concedes that their attitude was wrong to begin with. They are in a tough spot now - hard to feel sorry for them given the asympathetic position they assumed.~~~SlateStarCodex shutting down in direct response to the hubris&#x2F;disregard of one NYT reporter hungry for a story. This parasitic appetite for airtime come-what-may approach to journalism needs to be checked. There&#x27;s no reason the writer couldn&#x27;t leave the real full name out of the article once requested and with legitimate concern aired by the person hes naming.I&#x27;m glad &quot;Scott&quot; is taking this stance if only for the fact that it puts the onus of hard&#x2F;difficult decisions back on the NYT - i.e. why despite legitimate concerns are your writers comfortable doxxing people?The key highlight for me -&quot;When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he just said that me having enemies was going to be part of the story. He added that “I have enemies too”. Perhaps if he was less flippant about destroying people’s lives, he would have fewer.(though out of respect for his concerns, I am avoiding giving his name here.)After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.&quot;

Vice is the epitome of garbage so no surprise there

Wow, hadn&#x27;t heard that linked story before, what garbage for vice to act that way.

That would be counterproductive. The reporter would get abuse from random people, the article would definitely get published with the blogger&#x27;s name, with the twist of &quot;blogger tries to suppress publication of article by leveraging an online mob.&quot;

There is no need to do that. As long as the reporter remains unnamed, for now, they can decide to either not publish the article, or not publish the name, and they will be able to go along with there life, without getting the negative backlash.If they do dox the person, though, their name will be on the article, and you&#x27;ll be able to find it.

I would like to know who the journalist is. Not so they can be threatened or put in danger. But so their reputation can take a hit. Part of the reason people do these things is because they can get away with it without any consequences.

Presumably the NYT article would be under the reporters name.

That&#x27;s been done, unsurprisingly, on Twitter already.

Since it seems that the reporter might have been named after all, did anyone take a quick look at their previous work to check whether they have a history of publishing problematic or misleading &#x27;hit pieces&#x27;? It might be useful to figure out if concern really is warranted here.

Jeong worked for Vice at the time and then the NYT hired her correct?

Wow, i’ve read all her 3 long blog posts about what happened and it angers me so much. I knew Vice was shit, but I had higher expectations from NY Times, Google or Twitter.Here are the other parts:- part 2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@therealsexycyborg&#x2F;shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-part-2-over-the-wall-and-into-the-fire-5e8efc5c1509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@therealsexycyborg&#x2F;shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...</a>- part 3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@therealsexycyborg&#x2F;shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-part-3-defunding-deplatforming-and-detention-140fed4b9554" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@therealsexycyborg&#x2F;shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...</a>There was a positive outcome too, though, check out this video where she helps save someone’s life (SFW): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4VKZTmTP7oY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4VKZTmTP7oY</a>

A New York Times reporter was also involved in that incident.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@therealsexycyborg&#x2F;shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-my-experience-with-sarah-jeong-jason-koebler-and-vice-magazine-3f4a32fda9b5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@therealsexycyborg&#x2F;shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...</a>

Or with your tween kid sitting next to you.

FYI: probably shouldn’t look up Naomi Wu during work hours lolll

Maybe, revealing the true (or full) name is seen as a journalistic contribution? (As in &quot;I&#x27;m not just reporting on what is there for everyone to see, I also did some actual research. See, here&#x27;s the real name nobody was meant to know.&quot; – Obviously, this would be more proof of an issue with professional self-esteem, rather than of anything else.)

&gt; Can&#x27;t think of any, unless the reporter was also misrepresenting the subject of the story or the angle he is taking.That is exactly what was happening there. There is no other plausible explanation for the behavior.

Is there any conceivable good reason for the NYT to publish the name in an article on the claimed topic, despite the author&#x27;s wishes to the contrary? Can&#x27;t think of any, unless the reporter was also misrepresenting the subject of the story or the angle he is taking.

Wow, Vice actually outed her as gay, in China. There’s not much room to fall any lower now, unless they learn how to hack voicemails.

FWIW the CEO of Lambda School had the following to say on Reddit regarding whether the piece would really be positive (&quot;you&quot; in this quote is addressed to Scott):&gt; I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but they’re going to say you’re a far-right racist who supports eugenics, based on you not immediately supporting the firing of Hsu. I know this probably sounds improbable to you because the author was pleasant, but they’ll have a quote from you they’ll strip of nuance and context to make it clear that you’re evil. Probably something about why you want to remain anonymous and they’ll paint it as you wanting to be anonymous because your views are beyond the pale or a dog whistle or something.&gt; ... It was absolutely going to be a hit piece and they don’t tell you that upfront because they need your participation.&gt; Pui doesn’t care, she’s cracking open champagne right now. This is what she thinks their job is. Exposing everything because reasons and feeling good about it.&gt; It will absolutely be a hit piece, probably call SA a racist, and will be unapologetic. To expect anything different is impossible if you’ve spent a lot of time around this particular brand of new age journalist.&gt; ... The editor SA is referring to is a known quantity in many circles, including mine, as is the author of the piece (I know people who were asked for comment; all refused). This is a win in their book, and they couldn’t care less about whether SA’s life will be destroyed.

&gt; He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article. Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. ... When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he just said that me having enemies was going to be part of the story. He added that “I have enemies too”. Perhaps if he was less flippant about destroying people’s lives, he would have fewer.Wow. This is similar to Vice reporting on Naomi Wu and threatening to dox her while claiming to write a positive article about her: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Naomi_Wu#Vice_article" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Naomi_Wu#Vice_article</a>

And you can cancel a PP based sub directly in PP, no waiting. NYT would get a we hook notice.

Switch to a Paypal method of payment, and then remove the card you chose to add. Your NYT subscription will fail to renew.

This is the more punitive action, and I will note that a credit card company will side with you as long as you made a decent effort at canceling. I considered it when I waited 3 hours for a chat without a response, but ended up doing the PayPal way because it required less dealing with a bank in this time of Covid-19 delays.

Most companies pay about $15 per chargeback (independent of if they win or not).Especially for low value things, even a few percent chargebacks will be really costly.Source:. Was selling $1 physical items online... The business was profitable until a few percent of packages started going missing in the mail, and rather than contacting us, customers would just chargeback, forcing me to double the price of the service.

Credit card chargebacks really hurt, and are the appropriate response to a situation where they continue to take your money.

If you are residing in California, subscriptions are supposed to be cancel-able online by law.

Switch your payment method to PayPal and then cancel from the PayPal side. I got burnt by trying to cancel the NYT a few years ago so I made sure not to give them any of my financial details this time around.I decided to cancel last month due to the Tom Cotton Op-Ed and couldn&#x27;t figure out an easy way to do it on-site so I just cancelled from the PayPal end. On a lark, I decided to try and cancel from the NYT end as well just to see how difficult it would be. I connected to the live chat and finally got connected to a representative after TWENTY FIVE HOURS on hold and was given 20 minutes to respond before being cut off.

I just tried the runaround with the chat assistant, then got tired of waiting and did the PayPal trick. I am supposed to be charged on the 29th, I&#x27;ll see if it goes through (though I suspect it won&#x27;t).

Switch billing to PayPal, cancel the PayPal subscription.I did that a week ago, worked great.

I had to (or it seemed like I had to) go through a web chat queue and beg multiple times to cancel my crosswords subscription (which was the only NYT subscription I’ve ever had, and there’s nothing wrong with the crossroads product, I just wasn’t able to dedicate enough time to it).Scummy business practices like that make it very difficult for me to recommend any of that company’s products to anyone, even though I’m sure the people actually making the products have little or no influence on the people who control the transaction mechanics.

I think I replied to one of their daily roundups and asked for them to cancel it. If they can&#x27;t even filter out deranged calls for violence from their opinion pages, I&#x27;m not going to pay them to publish anything.

Created <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cancelnyt.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cancelnyt.net</a> in case someone not aware of the Paypal trick (or not on HN&#x2F;this thread) is still trying to figure this out

Somewhat related — does anyone know an easier way to cancel one&#x27;s NYT subscription than going through the rigmarole 
of waiting for&#x2F;talking with multiple &quot;customer service&quot; reps?After NYT&#x27;s all-too-credulous parroting of Barr&#x27;s mischaracherization of the Mueller report I tried to cancel mine, but spent over an hour on the phone with no progress, and gave it up. I should have persisted — I don&#x27;t want to give them my money any more, and this is all the more reason to cancel. At the same time, I don&#x27;t have the time or patience to subject myself to phoning them again in the near future. Surely there must be an easier way? Certainly there should be.

Reminiscent of CNN threatening the creator of a GIF that Trump retweeted with doxing if he didn&#x27;t behave: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;2017&#x2F;7&#x2F;5&#x2F;15922224&#x2F;cnn-blackmail-doxxing-hanassholesolo-reddit-wrestling-gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;2017&#x2F;7&#x2F;5&#x2F;15922224&#x2F;cnn-blackmail-...</a>

I dont think the NYT is what it purports to be.Still run by the BBC&#x27;s Mark Thompson I see.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;VUdcIou" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;VUdcIou</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;CIMxvS-WEAER49I.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;CIMxvS-WEAER49I.png</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;CINJUoqUwAEkSip.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;CINJUoqUwAEkSip.jpg</a>

A journalism license? I struggle to come up with a worse solution... No.

You don&#x27;t have a self-governing body for journalism?

&gt; society body emerge with a coalition of Pulitzer Prize winners ... backed by the biggest news media companiesIf biggest media companies were interested in upholding any ethical standards - the would have been doing that already. Allowing them to create a coalition and giving that coalition any more power would make things only worse.

Pulitzers have lost a lot of credibility because of Hannah Jones&#x2F;1619.

I 100% agree and talked about this a lot in j school. Would love to see some type of society body emerge with a coalition of Pulitzer Prize winners (the only real framework that possibly stands to live past the inevitable calls about its legitimacy from the News Corp -owned bodies of media, honestly) and ideally backed by the biggest news media companies in the world. I would love to see a further membership based element where members of the public and journalists could critique reportage and possible ethical lapses all publicly, adhering to principles set by the society itself.Honestly I think it&#x27;s time journalists take back some of the responsibility and importance of their roles that&#x27;s been stripped by colleague and company malpractice (and the side effects of a business model twisted inside out in rapid succession), as many DO recognize their importance. But like politics any real &quot;talk&quot; of media quickly devolves into sports-like tribalism and never gets beyond hating the &#x27;players&#x27; not the game itself.

And then there&#x27;s Washington Post whose entire editorial board signed a letter asking the US Gov to arrest and charge their own source. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;edward-snowden-doesnt-deserve-a-pardon&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;17&#x2F;ec04d448-7c2e-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;edward-snowden-doesn...</a>

Scott Alexander may not have been the original source, but he is a definitely _a_ source as it seems he was in touch with the reporter. The reporter has an undeniable ethical duty to decide whether to publish his full name after he raises concerns about his safety.I see limited to no news value in publishing his name and substantial risk of harm, but I&#x27;m a frequent reader and admirer of the blog.

Scott Alexander was a source for the article. He just wasn&#x27;t the source for his name.

Scott Alexander was not the source. Journalists generally don&#x27;t reveal sources and some have gone to jail to avoid doing so.

I&#x27;m not really putting much on the table but journalist are in my low tier of respect, if there&#x27;s any.There&#x27;s so many instances of abuse, lying and laziness that seems low standards are common through the profession and countries.In general I tend to see them as activist, with very few exceptions of people that tries to approach truth.Nowadays it really doesn&#x27;t matter if they write for a local newspaper or WAPO, it&#x27;s just so common that your default approach should be looking at every piece as propaganda.

First fix the economic incentives. They are badly broken after the paper press lost to internet news.You can&#x27;t expect the journalists to uphold ethical standards when the market rewards garbage rage-inducing clickbait.

I don’t see it as much different than the general societal norms that we tend to teach children, like “try to be nice” and “it’s okay to avoid people who aren’t nice.” Is that a violation of freedom of speech, or some top-down regulation? I don’t think so.It probably shouldn’t be “licensing” in the sense of using state or otherwise organized violence to seek out people who violate the norms. We generally don’t teach people to punch anyone in the face who is rude. But having general standards of conduct don’t seem to bad to me.

There is no accountability, no repercussions [1] for causing any amount of personal and economic damage. No real need to offer retraction and corrections even when reporting isn&#x27;t just unethical, but also blatantly wrong.If you want an easy example look at this Super Micro spy chip story [2] by Bloomberg Businessweek. It&#x27;s absolutely unsubstantiated [3], caused 40% drop for SM share price, but two years later it&#x27;s still up.[1] except that one time Tiel funded a lawsuit[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;features&#x2F;2018-10-04&#x2F;the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;features&#x2F;2018-10-04&#x2F;the-big-h...</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;22&#x2F;super_micro_chinese_spy_chip_sec&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;22&#x2F;super_micro_chinese_s...</a>

It seems to me that protecting sources and mandating some degree of truthfulness (like don&#x27;t outright lie about verifiable facts, as some statements are not disprovable) are orthogonal to dictating the subject of the stories?The AMA and bar associations are not without their issues either (they end up driving prices up since they have a monopoly on their service), but it seems to me that people don&#x27;t have to worry about doctors doxxing their patients on social media or lawyers making deals behind a client&#x27;s back as much. When it does happen, these professionals are usually ejected from their profession, which is a pretty big disincentive.

A standards body maybe. But do you not see some ethical concerns of licensing that tells people how to conduct journalism? Freedom of the Press, but only for those who the governing body deems fit?The whole point of a license is to reduce the gamut of people who can practice a profession to just those people who do it the way the license specifies. In a world such as ours, and a country such as the US, it will inevitably become the target of corruption and a position of immense power over the media. Even if it could be a good idea, I don&#x27;t believe we live in a world where it would be executed in a way that maintains freedom of the press.

Not in some countries but it&#x27;s the 1st amendment of the US Constitution that protects freedom of speech and the press. So it&#x27;s considered pretty important here.

Aren’t they already a legally protected profession?

Licensing of reporters would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Licensing seems like a solution to problems like this but the cure would be worse than the disease. Control over the licensing body would guarantee control over information, so it would become a prize to be fought for and the whole thing would be politicized. The best case scenario is we end up with the same mess we have now. Worst case is one side captures control and now their side gets to be the only &quot;legitimate&quot; one.Same problem with so-called fact-checking. It&#x27;s politicized, which means it adds nothing over the chaotic political debate we already have, except a false veneer of objectivity.

&gt; make the title licensedThis is possibly one of the easiest ways to create a police state if you make journalism &quot;regulated&quot; (i.e. government approved) ((or if you&#x27;re a nutter, corporation approved))

&gt; There is already a sort-of licence. Being employed by a company as a journalist, especially if the company is a recognised media &quot;name&quot;.But this obviously fails as seen in this instance (and many others). Companies have interests that do not align with the public&#x27;s interest of ethical standards. Much like we&#x27;ve generally understood (but unfortunately not really everywhere) that letting other industries regulate themselves isn&#x27;t a good idea, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s any different in the media.

There is already a sort-of licence. Being employed by a company as a journalist, especially if the company is a recognised media &quot;name&quot;.But the people this is deliberately not recognising is bloggers. And to be honest, I&#x27;m seeing better journalism being done by (some) bloggers than (some) paid journalists now (not their fault - the business model for journalism is a mess, while the model for blogging is working).

Personally, I&#x27;d rather journalism wasn&#x27;t licensed in this way. I get the intention behind it, but it&#x27;d basically outlaw freelance journalists, independent journalism sites, blogging, etc, and make it easier to justify arresting people at protests because you don&#x27;t like what they&#x27;re recording.Also an easy target to politicise, and dangerous to society if the far left&#x2F;right end up running such a board and dictating that their opponents are wrong.

Doctors were once upon a time not very highly trained, medicine was a crapshoot, now things have changed. I&#x27;m sure it was a tremendous upheaval at the time. That it&#x27;s a lot of work doesn&#x27;t mean it can&#x27;t be done.A more interesting argument against doing this is considering the tradeoffs if implemented:* e.g. the AMA has pretty successfully restricted the supply of doctors and driven the prices of medicine up,* people are so paranoid about giving medical or legal advice they have to say things like &quot;I&#x27;m not a doctor but... I&#x27;m not a lawyer but...&quot;etc.

Licensing only works if you have to be in a certain jurisdiction to operate in it. Given that more &quot;journalism&quot; is online, if Murdoch or the Barclay Brothers or whoever don&#x27;t like the restrictions of your licence, they can just employ journalists somewhere else. If they need boots on the ground, they can employ independent contractors.How do you prevent independent journalists selling pieces to certain outlets without unfairly placing the burden on the journalist? Is it a list of proscribed publications? How does a publication get on the list? What happens to all the &quot;good&quot; journalists who work for an organisation when it gets put on the list?What, exactly, is a journalist? Does it include columnists who write opinion pieces? If not, how do you prevent an outlet from running more and more &quot;opinion pieces&quot; masquerading as news? If you get defrocked for doing something your employer considers highly profitable, they can just rebrand you as a columnist.What does it mean to be licensed? What does having a licence allow you to do that you can&#x27;t do without one? Is this your &quot;press pass&quot; allowing you to ask questions at briefings? There have been cases recently when this has been revoked on a whim. Is it just to get a byline in a printed newspaper? Again, they can rebrand unlicensed journalists as runners, and print the piece under the name of a real journalist.Journalism is not a terminal career like medicine or law. If you get thrown out of one of those professions, you lose your livelihood. There is nothing else that you are as well trained for that pays as well. You have to start at the bottom of something else. Most journalists are not particularly well paid. Former journalists can earn as much, if not more, writing press releases and advertising copy.

People just don&#x27;t buy newspapers anymore since the net is full of news articles. Your business model is basically attracting as many people as possible to your site. Advertisers were always the largest customers but today the reader is completely exempt from business relations.

This is a tragedy, Scott Alexander is such a thoughtful writer.I wish journalists would come up with some professional standards and make the title licensed, like doctor or lawyer. Right now we all recognize how important journalism is but journalists themselves run the gamut from ethical investigative journalists to clickbait manufacturers. Imagine if journalists also had to adhere to the equivalent of attorney client privilege for sources.

&gt; He is a bit obsessed with people who criticize him on the internet…… is he? I think you&#x27;ve been reading a different blog to me; I have read all of SlateStarCodex. Can you give some examples?

Exactly this. And the community plays into it. They imagine themselves to be Galileo —- persecuted by the state and society just for telling the truth.

He&#x27;s most likely aware that he can&#x27;t handle that level of judgment. Lots of people can&#x27;t! That&#x27;s why he&#x27;s elected not to become a public figure, and why it&#x27;s so toxic for the NYT to try and make him one against his will.

I&#x27;d take what Scott Alexander has to say about this with a grain of salt. He is a bit obsessed with people who criticize him on the internet, going as far as to write about his borderline paranoid suspicions behind people making fun of him online in several of his blog posts.Some people can&#x27;t handle the judgment that comes with being a somewhat public figure, and Scott is one of them.

I think it&#x27;s just in general dangerous and disruptive for the entire world to know who you are online. They will find you and threaten you and everyone you love. Sure only 1% of them are actually dangerous but it only takes one bullet or knife in the back from a psychotic person to end everything. Or just someone doing some crazy made up nonsense like pizzagate. The loonies are out there.

Point taken regarding the Hsu case. Maybe I jumped the gun there.I don&#x27;t want it to be the norm for any journalistic organ&#x2F;employee to function&#x2F;perform the way this one did. There are many ways to accomplish adoption of that norm, including (but certainly not limited to) firing people who do that.

There is a clear division to be made between firing someone for what they do on their own time vs. actions they take in the course of their employment for you.When being a responsible journalist is your job, it&#x27;s not unreasonable to expect to get fired for not being a responsible journalist.

I don&#x27;t think, given Scott&#x27;s recent defense of Steve Hsu, that he&#x27;d really want people fired for doing ill-advised things, even if they could be reasonably construed as dangerous, unless harm was demonstrated. It&#x27;s still disappointing that the journalist is making this choice.

Proposition: The NYTimes editorial board has long addressed the matter of revealing identity of anonymous bloggers on interent.From a political point of view, anonymous (and more critcally, independent) bloggers are a threat to the (local&#x2F;global) establishment&#x27;s propaganda organs. This may in fact be editorial policy, as you suggest. It doesn&#x27;t matter of the blogger is &#x27;friendly&#x27; in terms of political views.

Furthermore, Scott has repeatedly argued against trying to get other people fired as a way of expressing disagreement.

&gt; I don&#x27;t think this is a &quot;that one writer&quot; issue.I think the problems with journalism are bigger than this one writer. Simultaneously, I would like to see NYT take a stance against its writers doing what this one did to Scott.&gt; I don&#x27;t think Scott is saying this is a &quot;that one writer&quot; issue.Point taken, but I didn&#x27;t claim to speak for him.&gt; Any such choice is down to newspaper-wide policy.Agreed. I wrote another comment in response to &#x27;rachelshu, adjusting my original comment to something more reflecting my actual views.

&gt; That NYT writer should be fired.I don&#x27;t think this is a &quot;that one writer&quot; issue; I don&#x27;t think Scott is saying this is a &quot;that one writer&quot; issue. Any such choice is down to newspaper-wide policy.

Please see my revised position in a comment to &#x27;rachelshu.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23611133" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23611133</a>That said: I don&#x27;t understand how I&#x27;m repeating a mistake here. &quot;Cancel culture&quot; has become a problem because people get fired from their day jobs (or suffer other consequences) for opinions not pertaining to their day jobs, which are expressed outside their work hours.In contrast, the NYT writer engaged in crappy professional conduct.I agree that the writer is not the root problem. I&#x27;ve changed my mind about whether firing should happen; other solutions addressing journalistic incentives, or this journalist&#x27;s team, or whatever, would probably go further.

Fired? Let&#x27;s not repeat the same mistakes we&#x27;re complaining about. How about: that NYT writer should be persuaded and treated empathetically.It&#x27;s not the writer anyhow. It&#x27;s the editor and probably a policy, though I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;d have no trouble bending their policy if they wanted to.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;he95ak&#x2F;blog_deleted_due_to_nyt_threatening_doxxing_of&#x2F;fvq3il7&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;he95ak&#x2F;blog...</a>

Response to my own comment because I can&#x27;t edit it:Scott Alexander has been giving more information in the SSC subreddit, including the comment I&#x27;ve quoted below. Having read what he has to say, I&#x27;ve changed my mind, and don&#x27;t think the journalist should be fired.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;he95ak&#x2F;blog_deleted_due_to_nyt_threatening_doxxing_of&#x2F;fvq3il7&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;slatestarcodex&#x2F;comments&#x2F;he95ak&#x2F;blog...</a>&gt; I honestly got the impression that the reporter liked my blog and wanted to write a nice story about it.&gt; When I told him I didn&#x27;t want my real name in the article, he talked to his editor and said the editor said it was NYT policy all articles must include real names.&gt; I got the impression he felt bad about it but had spent weeks writing the article and wasn&#x27;t going to throw out all that work just for my sake.&gt; When I threatened to take down the blog, I think he did the decision-theoretically correct move of not giving in to threats.&gt; Overall I think this is a story about the NYT having overly strict real-name policies that unfortunately put a guy in a bad situation.

I clicked on this expecting it to be Scott Alexander blogging about somebody else getting doxxed. I flipped like a boat when I realized what I was reading. Holy shit!I was just in SSC&#x27;s Open Thread a few hours ago opening comment permalinks in tabs to respond to them.That NYT writer should be fired. I hope Scott recovers soon. SSC is my favorite place on the Web.

Meh they also lost my respect with how they treated Snowden. Killed my account for digital subscription after this editorial. He revealed a far bigger evil than anything he ever did to get the info or what was revealed. They know if he comes back to the USA he will go to prison for life without parole. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;edward-snowden-doesnt-deserve-a-pardon&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;17&#x2F;ec04d448-7c2e-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;edward-snowden-doesn...</a>

I have increasingly lost faith in NYT as my faith in WashPo has increased

This is incredibly disheartening, I will miss the weekly reads - journalists position themselves as fighting the good fight for the truth. But increasingly just seems that in a world where there relevance is dropping fast they are willing to do anything for clicks. If you want to be the arbiters of truth perhaps start with a solid base of ethics.

Remember when Newsweek found this random guy named Dorian Nakamoto and told the world that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin? They were almost certainly wrong and the guy got harassed for years.

Note that the author also requests that people be polite in doing so. Everyone please model the behavior you want to see in this reporter.Update: Thanks OP for updating to include a note about this.

You may find this relevant: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Telephone_keypad#Letter_mapping" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Telephone_keypad#Letter_mappin...</a>

You press the number on the dial pad which also has the letter in question. Just once.This is just a popular (in the US?) way to make numbers easier to remember.

This refers to the letters that are on phone keypads: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Telephone_keypad#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Telephone_keys.JPG" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Telephone_keypad#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:T...</a>

<pre><code> 1 | 2 | 3 
 | ABC | DEF 
 -----|-----|-----
 4 | 5 | 6 
 GHI | JKL | MNO 
 -----|-----|-----
 7 | 8 | 9 
 PQRS | TUV | WXYZ
 -----|-----|-----
 * | 0 | # 
 | + | 
</code></pre>
Now 0800-INFO becomes 0800-4636 — you just press the key corresponding to the letter once.

mobile phones have letters on their dial pads also.

Sorry for the unrelated question, but I&#x27;m not from the US and I&#x27;m curious, what does this mean?844-NYTNEWSDo landlines phones have letters in the US? Is it pressing a number several times?And also mentioning that I&#x27;m grateful for SSC to exist. I rarely comment but it&#x27;s a refreshing community.

Yes. Doxxing people whose only crime is producing good but complex content for the world to enjoy is cyberbullying. If bullies are on the right side of history I have no interest in the metric.

In short: yes.To expand: nobody here is harassing the journalist. The journalist harassed the blogger. The commenters are providing polite, critical feedback.

Do you guys really feel that you&#x27;re on the right side of history by harassing an investigative journalist?

If you&#x27;re pissed off by this, as I am, here&#x27;s how the author politely suggests that you direct your support:&gt; There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS&gt; (please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks.)

Seconding this. A threat is only credible if known.

You HAVE to contact them to cancel, there&#x27;s no way to do it without talking to a human that I can find.

Please contact them and clearly state why you are doing it. Enough people contacting them can change the editor&#x27;s mind.

Of all the things the NYT has done over the last couple of decades this is a strange one to cancel your subscription over.

I&#x27;ve cancelled my NY Times subscription and encourage everyone here to do the same.

The link and title was changed. It was originally another site and a worse title.

It&#x27;s displayed after the title though. There&#x27;s even a site guideline about this: &quot;If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Edit: Looks like they updated the link and title. Thanks!@dang, you might consider somehow incorporating the name of the blog into the title. I almost didn&#x27;t click on this because &quot;his blog&quot; is quite generic. Slate Star Codex is frequently posted on HN and is fairly notable.

Such has a long tradition in France, and lasted well into the 20th century.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_French_journalism#Modern_France:_1871-1918" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_French_journalism#M...</a>

The nature of news, gossip, and propaganda predates 19th century France. The Roman god Fama, attendant to Jupiter, trumpeting his words, heedless of truth or falsity:&quot;At the world&#x27;s centre lies a place between the lands and seas and regions of the sky, the limits of the threefold universe, whence all things everywhere, however far, are scanned and watched, and every voice and word reaches its listening ears. Here Fama (Rumour) dwells her chosen home set on the highest peak constructed with a thousand apertures and countless entrances and never a door. It&#x27;s open night and day and built throughout of echoing bronze; it all reverberates, repeating voices, doubling what it hears. Inside, no peace, no silence anywhere, and yet no noise, but muted murmurings like waves one hears of some far-distant sea, or like a last late rumbling thunder-roll, when Juppiter [Zeus] has made the rain-clouds crash. Crowds throng its halls, a lightweight populace that comes and goes, and rumours everywhere, thousands, false mixed with true, roam to and fro, and words flit by phrases all confused. Some pour their tattle into idle ears, some pass on what they&#x27;ve gathered, and as each gossip adds something new the story grows. Here is Credulitas (Credulity), here reckless Error (Error), groundless Laetitia (Delight), Susurri (Whispers) of unknown source, sudden Seditio (Sedition), overwhelming Timores (Fears). All that goes on in heaven or sea or land Fama (Rumour) observes and scours the whole wide world. Now she had brought the news [to Troy] that ships from Greece were on their way with valiant warriors: not unforeseen the hostile force appears.&quot;-- Ovid, Metamorphoses 12. 39 ff

Can anyone identify the name of the novel please?

There&#x27;s a novel by Balzac (forgot which one), which shows the behind-the-scenes of mid-XIX century Paris journalism. It&#x27;s essentially the same as you described, but also, the journalists don&#x27;t flaunt their views, but rather their masters&#x27; (the owners of the papers).

I think it&#x27;s fair to say that there are plenty of journalists who don&#x27;t engage in wantonly twisting stories, and honestly try to uphold morality and democracy. There are also others for whom your criticism is completely valid.For example, I&#x27;d consider some of what Scott does (did?) on SSC as &quot;journalism&quot; in that he&#x27;s writing about recent news in an informative way.

This might be a controversial opinion, but I have just one word to describe most journalists nowadays: &quot;scum&quot;.They seek exciting and sensationalist stories without regard for any consequences in the real world. They twist their stories to manipulate the readers towards their viewpoint.But worst of all, they have the gall to present themselves as the upholders of morality and the paragons of democracy. Any criticism you may have for these people is deemed &quot;anti-democratic&quot;, which in most peoples heads already is a trigger word for &quot;evil&quot;, no amount of arguments can sway them.

Slate Star Codex is one of the most interesting blogs on the internet. If we doxx this voice, who do we doxx next?

Trying to make sense of this reminds me of reading monad tutorials. To dense with references (self- and otherwise) and analogy for me to make sense of.It&#x27;s definitely possible I&#x27;m just not smart enough to understand this, but how does one go about learning to comprehend stuff like this?

That isn&#x27;t TLP, it&#x27;s one of TLP&#x27;s millennial disciples. They mentioned working as a trainee doc in the ER but TLP was a psychiatrist at a large university hospital.Also I don&#x27;t think TLP quit because he was doxxed necessarily. If that were the case, he wouldn&#x27;t have kept paying the site hosting fees all this time. I think he decided the blog had become too much about his identity as a sort of minor messiah figure in the eyes of his readers, which is sort of against the founding principles of the blog itself. The character or voice he created for the blog was gaining too much power. Having his real name revealed was only a secondary concern.He probably still writes somewhere though... probably, he&#x27;s a well-respected&#x2F;beloved voice on some obscure phpBB board or similar (real TLP heads will know he used to read&#x2F;post on Metafilter back in the day.)

psst: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hotelconcierge.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hotelconcierge.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a>Might or might not be the same guy, but it&#x27;s close enough to not matter.

I had no idea The Last Psychiatrist stopped writing because he got doxxed. I enjoyed his blog and was sad it stopped updating.

It’s not really the same. One person is a pseudonymous blogger who requested to keep their pseudonimity. The other is a reporter for the best known newspaper in the world. But I agree it’s a bad look, I have removed the comment.

This behaviour is very much not going to help. One of the many reasons doxxing is bad is because &quot;speculation&quot; is so often wrong. Anyway, it rather diminishes the force of an argument that the NYT is in the wrong if a mob publishes someone&#x27;s name in a spasm of outrage over the fact that the NYT wanted to publish someone&#x27;s name.

I thought he was smarter than this. Of course talking to the press would put him in the spotlight and the press doesn&#x27;t like pseudonyms (it might be accused of making it all up). Just suppress the narcissistic instincts and don&#x27;t talk to the press if you like your privacy. As for the NYT&#x27;s actions... It&#x27;s as good as many other occasions to rethink one&#x27;s attitude towards that paper.

Why is Scott&#x27;s real name even relevant to the article? He has good reason not to want it published, and his real name is of no interest to most readers given that his entire public online presence is in the name &quot;Scott Alexander&quot;. Knowing that Lewis Carroll was really called Charles Dodgson may be a piece of trivia that makes you win a pub quiz one day, and it may be of niche interest to someone who reads one of his mathematical papers and realises that the author is the same as the author of Alice, but Scott&#x27;s real name won&#x27;t even win you a pub quiz and has similarly niche publications that are not of remotely general interest.

The term &quot;doxxing&quot; is used in communities where it&#x27;s normalized to harass people and try to ruin their lives because you think they&#x27;re a jerk. In such a community, exposing someone&#x27;s real identity against their will is a hostile act.Unfortunately, all of American society is now such a community, so all investigative journalism about someone&#x27;s identity is now also doxxing. I&#x27;m not any happier about that than you are, and hope we can return to better norms so that investigative journalism is less of a danger for its targets.

Newpapers have always had an agenda, and interests to forward, so the &quot;when&quot; is &quot;always&quot;.

When &quot;journalism&quot; became &quot;activism&quot;

When did &quot;investigative journalism&quot; become &quot;doxxing&quot;? Terminal internet brain.

The bar to be a doctor is higher than having internet and a blog.

Me, sure. From then on they&#x27;d have to earn my trust - not just get it because they&#x27;re doctors...

* What if every hospital had an overt political stance and forced doctors to make diagnoses based on those politics?* What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health?* What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics?Unfortunately all US media, and most international media, is equally bad and built on bad intentions for varying levels of nefarious purposes.

Would you trust a hospital with a reputation for employing doctors that never get pulled up or fired for their bad work?

How many bad doctors do you need to meet before deciding that they&#x27;re also human? As the saying goes, &quot;trust, but verify&quot;.

Doctors are heavily regulated. Journalists aren&#x27;t.I&#x27;d expect a doctor that failed to maintain professional standards to be struck off, and I&#x27;d expect the professional management services to proactively get them struck off before they could do anything dangerous.Professional journalism has a long, long track record of opposing any consequences to their actions whatsoever.I love the idea of professional journalists. But the reality of them just does not work in practice in our current media industries.

If you buy a frozen pizza and it tastes terrible, should you continue buying and eating them for a week until you have enough data points?If a single sample of corn in a shipment is contaminated with aflatoxin should you keep testing it and trying to find the good corn?If a program corrupts your data on first use should you keep trying it on different data before rejecting it?

Can you find any recent examples of good journalism?

That was bad journalism. Would you also stop trusting all doctors after meeting a bad one?

Most of the reported news is N=1 events. If the news reported averages instead, it wouldn&#x27;t sell

Also stopped reading any news and reports from big media about 3 years ago.Just curious are there any independent investigation journalists that work on the patreon&#x2F;subscription model? Would consider donation them rather than NYT or WSJ.

And there&#x27;s the rub. What is &quot;quality investigative reporting&quot; in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply &quot;toe the line&quot;?In theory I would gladly support the theory of &quot;quality investigative reporting&quot;, but the reality is a propagandist machine where opinion pieces replaces actual unbiased, adjective-free objective news.Some examples of &quot;oligarch news&quot;:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI</a>As a former developer who worked closely on Thomson Reuters News feed (in the 00&#x27;s), I&#x27;ve seen how there is almost zero fact checking for the information that appears on news feeds. Instead, news outlets trust the &#x27;upstream&#x27; feeds and then quote the reports verbatim.To be fair, there are those who are really awesome at doing research and releasing information that are part of the MSM. Unfortunately, there are plenty others who are not affiliated with MSM news outlets and hence aren&#x27;t regarded as &quot;reporters&quot; per-se. These latter ones are regularly attacked via &quot;fact checking&quot; websites as a way to discredit them.An article on the latter is here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.corbettreport.com&#x2F;episode-381-who-will-fact-check-the-fact-checkers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.corbettreport.com&#x2F;episode-381-who-will-fact-chec...</a>In short, there&#x27;s a bunch of information out there and without each and every news report clearly citing original sources, then MSM or not, it must be regarded as suspect.So for &quot;quality investigative reporting&quot;, the actual reports must rigorously cite objective sources.

How would you measure good journalism? In OP’s case they could only see a given journalist was bad by personally witnessing the falsity. You don’t get many opportunities like that unfortunately.I do think some journalism is good. Many reporters at the Financial Times come to mind for example. But I found your reply did not really address the nature of OP’s complaint.

&gt; Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society.Statistical significance is not the only epistemological tool around. I would even argue that, outside of some scientific fields, it is really not that important (and might even lead to a lot of wrong conclusions in the context that is used nowadays, but that is a different discussion altogether).We are not some dumb statistical machine. We have an entire model of the world in our heads, and one single observation can have profound implications on it. The journalist reports to an editor, who maintains a system of job promotions, and all of this is connected to an institution that holds very real power. The OP observed this journalist manipulating the story, not in a random direction, but in their view in a direction that would appeal to the status quo. It is normal to update one&#x27;s map of reality when confronted with first-person experience of an event that goes against what you&#x27;ve been told, and when the simplest explanation for how the world works changes in light of this direct observation.And this is also how your mind works, and this is also how you formed your views on reality, including repeating the &quot;N=1&quot; cliché. None of it has anything to do with p-values.

I was going to say that we could defer to whistleblowers instead but I realized that that term has also been loosely used. That said, it’s not journalists but news organizations that shouldn’t be trusted.

&gt; I hope you&#x27;ll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting.Where do I find quality investigative reporting?I support the Guardian and two regional&#x2F;local newspapers and I&#x27; also forced to pay for the state run broadcaster here but I have to say that I also find myself reading a number of other sources to figure out what is really going on (for the Scandinavians here I&#x27;m one of those who will happily look to both Klassekampen and Document, in addition to vg.no and nrk to figure out what is really going on in certain cases, and I understand I am not alone in this).Once you know a bit of history and a number of different angles you realize some things are horribly complicated and big media is making things worse by pushing misinformation, and by conveniently omitting facts. My favourite example from my favourite (i.e. least despised) local mainstream media source: X fired at a number of positions in neighbouring country Y yesterday. &lt;Long article about this&gt;. &lt;Towards the end:&gt; This happened after a barrage of rockets was fired from these positions shortly before. And that is the most honest of them. The rest seemed to just omit the fact that part Y fired first.PS: The reason I support some of them is 1) because I feel it is the right thing to do. 2) because I feel at least one of them have actually managed to do some great quality investigative reporting as well as some great feature stories in between. We talk about certain companies and public healthcare organizations getting some much needed sunlight.

I&#x27;m all for quality investigative reporting, but that is not something that 99% of journalists do.I&#x27;ve been interviewed by journalists a few times and I&#x27;ve seen at least a half-dozen other people be interviewed. The articles published are totally disconnected from what was actually said. Heck, I&#x27;ve had a journalist make up a quote and attribute it to me.Don&#x27;t talk to journalists. If you must, record everything.

Quality investigative reporting is even more tricky because it&#x27;s even harder to double-checkIn my country, there&#x27;s a supposedly quality investigative reporting outlet. I did trust them for years. Then one time they did report on something I happened to know more details from other sources. Their reporting was complete BS bending facts to come to opposite conclusions.Months later it turned out that political party loved favoured by those journalists had an internal struggle and the dude in article above happened to be on the &quot;wrong&quot; side. The report was about his overseas business, not political affairs. As a bonus point, &quot;good&quot; side was involved in bribery scandal.Another investigative outlet recently published a series of reports on another politician that comes from unfavourable party in among mainstream media journalists. So far all of those reports seem to have little substance and they seem to be in she-said, he-said gray area at best. I&#x27;m pretty sure the dude do have skeletons under his bed. But investigative journalists seem to just post whatever rumors they got and see what sticks. Which is not exactly helping their quality investigative reporting image.

Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it.I hope you&#x27;ll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course agree there are many kinds of people who call themselves journalists many of which don&#x27;t improve our society. We must fight this battle, as we must fight every battle, because that&#x27;s the only way things change for the better. Do not let cynicism win.

After getting in trouble with the law and getting the story in the paper as a kid, I realized people like a simple narrative which matches with their expectations.  Reality is complicated and people just don&#x27;t have time for it.  Not the cops, not the media, and not the readers.

They should use the Slashdot epithet.  “An anonymous coward familiar with the discussion said ...”

Reminds me of when I was in elementary and one day I was sick and all my classmates met the governor. The media was obviously there and one classmate was asked to write something to say to the governor. The media claimed he was 11 but his age was 12. The teacher taught us that the media isnt always necessarily telling you the truth. There is way more bias in the media these past few years than I have ever seen so confirming sources is more important than anything. I dont usually trust &quot;anonymous sources&quot; unless there is accompanying hard evidence.

Wealth is one of the classic ones that journalists like stretching. My mom, a classical musician, got asked about her wages, and after some back and forth (since they varied by the job, of course), she was given this more specific question: &quot;what&#x27;s the most you made from a gig?&quot; The sum she replied with, of course, made it into the resulting magazine article as an hourly average. Cue the stinkeyes from colleagues.

Those are not journalists. They are outrage-farming ad impression generators.

My friend&#x27;s cousin got involved in some shady activities and some regional newspaper ran a full page article on this. That&#x27;s where a 2 bedroom semi detached in a not so glamorous part of a small town became: a large villa in a leafy part of the town...

I think unfortunately journalists are trained to take phrases out of context so that they sound &quot;sensational&quot; &#x2F; trigger emotional responses in the readers. You quickly find that out if give out interviews - you need to be very mindful how things may sound if taken out of context.E.g. a while ago a newspaper here took me an interview&#x2F; they were building a story about people that had somewhat remarkable results in school &amp; ample opportunities to leave (e.g. I participated in IOI and had 2 medals), and still chose to stay in the country - what were their motives, how it turned out for them. During the interview, I mentioned something along the lines that &quot;I earn well enough to afford everything that I want, and my friends&#x2F;family is here, I&#x27;m used to the local culture, etc&quot;. As a result, &quot;I can afford everything&quot; became basically the headline.

You can always agree for an interview on a condition of receiving final draft before it gets published and having a say on it. Whether they agree or not depends on how many other sources they have for that story.

It baffles me when people trust the &quot;news&quot;, _especially_ if they only consume news within their own little bubble. I was interviewed a couple of times on technological topics (once by a NYT journalist), and was once in the middle of events that were reported on, so I knew what actually happened. In all three cases what was printed was total clickbait horseshit that had nothing to do with reality. So if a journalist wants to talk to me now, I will only do it if it generates clickbait horseshit that&#x27;s good for me somehow.

In underprivileged communities in the UK, kids are raised from a young age not to trust a &quot;journo&quot;.

A book that opened my eyes is 
Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life by Rolf Dobelli.

The problem is that the press drives policy decisions, so you cannot disengage completely. You would need to find a direct line of communication towards representatives without the press. We have the means for that theoretically, but it needs a lot of engagement. I think most people would benefit when cutting out classical papers.

&gt; I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years agoThis. Sometimes we joke that &quot;all news is fake news&quot;; but it is actually true!

I had a similar experience with reporters. I worked on a commercial product, on release someone just opening store had a sale, some reporter interpreted that sale as dumping a failing product and wrote that story. No amount of proof to the contrary would get them to retract. Whether or not it effected sales I have no idea but I learned some reporters are scumThere is also the phenomenon of reading articles about topics I know well and haven them be completely wrong which leads to to at least entertain the idea that the same is true for topics i don&#x27;t know about. No idea what the solution is.

Unfortunately every single media outlet has a narrative to propagate. Being that an imposed one or from their own convictions. Can&#x27;t find a single source of information being totally objective.

Gell-Mann amnesia effect:&quot;&quot;&quot;
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.- Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002)
&quot;&quot;&quot;This isn’t to say that all journalists are “bad apples”, but as the full aphorism says, “A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel”.

&gt; How do you &quot;check the facts&quot; if you don&#x27;t trust professional journalists?&quot;Professional journalist&quot; shouldn&#x27;t invoke any more trust than &quot;professional fund manager&quot;.Surely they&#x27;re not all bad apples, but they&#x27;re not inherently incentivized to have integrity, so you must assume that they do not have integrity, for your own safety.

&gt; &quot;I don&#x27;t trust anything they write without checking the facts.&quot;I am not sure you are aware but your statement makes no sense whatsoever.How do you &quot;check the facts&quot; if you don&#x27;t trust professional journalists?What sources do you use for those facts, say on the outcome of a political meeting, the current best advice on how to avoid catching covid, the economic situation or impact of new legislation on a specific economic sector?The world is complex, fast-moving and there are trillions of possible information sources. With your expressed view you have to either live in conscious avoidance of any kind of news and only go to perceived primary sources (which journalists might help you understand the biases of...) or, more likely, you simply believe whatever sounds right to your existing views and biases.The latter in fact is the cheap and lazy way out and typically justified by a view like yours - &quot;I don&#x27;t trust journalists&quot; translates in most cases to &quot;I don&#x27;t trust journalists unless their writing exactly reflects my viewpoint.&quot;This is a really dangerous approach and the root cause of most current problems in developed countries. Instead the best course of action would be to be conscious of inherent biases, try to read different press to get s wholistic picture rather than just whatever reinforces your viewpoint and then, when something is really important, try to look for primary information.Journalists are doing an important service to society. There are bad apples (and it seems you met one) and tasteless apples or apples that want to do the right thing but just get it wrong (eg because budgets are so tight that not enough apples can be hired...), that doesn&#x27;t mean you should distrust all apples.

Could I ask what the CNN article got wrong? I&#x27;m curious how different their story was to the actual attack.

This may be slightly off topic here, but I attended a birthday party of a friend last year. Long story short, there was a guy at the same pub who OD&#x27;d and my wife and I helped him until the ambulance arrived. There was a &#x27;reality&#x27; TV cameraman with them and we didn&#x27;t want him filming us so I asked him  to stop. His tactic was to shove the camera in my face and make snide remarks to provoke a reaction. When I put my hand up and stepped back, the guy tilted the camera back really quickly and took a knee panning it up at me, and started saying things like &quot;you hit me! That&#x27;s assault&quot;. To this day I have no idea what ended up being shown, if anything, but it was an eye opening experience about the abject dishonesty involved in reality TV. I can just as easily see that applied to TV journalism.

I had a similar experience in Iraq. I had saw an attack happen and then heard the CNN report about it a few hours later and it wasn&#x27;t even in the realm of what happened. It was surreal.

But living in a bubble doesn&#x27;t sound that great either. I prefer the Economist - they clearly have a very strong bias in some political &amp; economical stories, but that bias is predictable and consistent. At least their factual reporting seems on the point.

I woke up to the fact that most newspapers are like that in the last 2-3 years. That resulted in me eliminating one publication after the other.Today only one has remained, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a german-language publication from Switzerland. Lets see how long it holds up.

Having seen the inside of a few events and the reporting produced in response, I&#x27;d say a healthy dose of scepticism is usually warranted when reading about something you have no personal involvement in.In fact one of the worst experience for me in terms of trust for the media was working at a startup. The willingness of journalists to produce puff pieces, or print press releases virtually verbatim, on the basis of 5 minutes of SQL queries cobbled together and cherry picked to produce the desired result was frightening.

You know what&#x27;s even more sad? Journalists on average, are more intelligent than an average human being.An average journalist distorts the truth knowingly and is a scumbag. An average person parrots lies and is convinced of them, and if you point it out, he&#x2F;she&#x27;ll be upset with you.This is how religions continue even in the face of the best thinkers for centuries, coming up with the most considerate, foolproof arguments for why it&#x27;s bullshit. At some point we have to ask: do people even want to be able to tell truth apart from bullshit, or do they just want to be led and told what to do by someone they like?

Professionally relevant information - insider sources, other information that is important for you for whatever reason - from original sources. If there aren&#x27;t any original sources (e.g. politics, history etc) - cross reference multiple interpretations that present story from different angles, e.g. Fox vs CNN, Guardian vs BBC, Washington Post vs Al Jazeera vs Russia Today. Of course for some stories there are sources that are better suited than others due to their focus (e.g. throw in Democracy Now for anything about grassroots movements, various scientific&#x2F;medical news are discussed most in-depth by specialized podcasts, etc).And then there is information that isn&#x27;t important (it doesn&#x27;t affect you and you can&#x27;t act on it) and you&#x27;re just seeking it out of habit (addiction really).

Genuine question, how do you (or others) check the facts? Where do you get facts from?

The NYT isn&#x27;t reputable anymore. Haven&#x27;t been for a while. Case in point, this article they might publish.They fired most of their senior editors in 2017 because they were both too expensive and enforcing old school journalist standards and integrity which doesn&#x27;t generate clicks like hot handed opinion pieces followed by reverse opinion pieces does.Though mind you that senior group was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, so take their integrity with a grain of salt.

&gt; NYT is a reputable journalThe people who lied us into Iraq?

&gt; I hope that the journalist gets revealedThe name of the journalist in question is no secret; spend 5 minutes browsing Twitter or the SSC subreddit and you&#x27;ll figure it out.

&gt; I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired.Not going to happen. The reporter was doing his job. No one will lose their job just because your favorite blogger agreed to go on the record for an interview and is not upset that his identity will be revealed.

First and foremost, I hope that the journalist gets revealed and fired. NYT is a reputable journal and shouldn&#x27;t tolerate such unprofessional and potentially dangerous behavior. The person breached a few lines of ethical journalism, and for no justified reason:First, purposefully using an incorrect name (and Scott Alexander&#x27;s online identity is Scott Alexander). In many other cases, even if the name is known publicly, and it is (or was) a legal anme, a journalist does not need to write it.Second, for everyone having vocal opinions, it puts them in real danger. If revealing someone&#x27;s identity (or a threat of such) makes someone close their blog, the journalist have already made their damage.Third, it erodes trust in journalists. Such journalists make any other journalism harder, as people have justified reasons not to talk. Not every person wants to increase their risk.I hope that until the journalist gets fired, no activist, whistleblower, a person who wants to speak about professional malpractice, controversial artist etc. won&#x27;t talk to NYT. For their own safety.

Just by luck I&#x27;ve been interviewed on camera a few times, and each time Im astounded, how im not really beeing interviewed, im rather beeing asked questions phrased a certain way, so they have a certain response that fits a narrative.

Most news is worthless. What&#x27;s important will have more perspective available six months from now (or, better, six years from now); what&#x27;s not important is just parlor room gossip.Reading e.g. the politics section of the NYT religiously for the past couple years, your biggest takeaway would be that Trump is an idiot who doesn&#x27;t belong in office. Which, as far as it goes, is true, but there&#x27;s no need to pick up a bad habit like reading the NYT in order to know that.It&#x27;s probably necessary to know enough about this week&#x27;s going-ons for social reasons, to the same extent that it&#x27;s necessary to know who&#x27;s playing in the Super Bowl, but there are more useful ways to spend your energies.

One underrated option is to just not read the news:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;2013&#x2F;apr&#x2F;12&#x2F;news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;2013&#x2F;apr&#x2F;12&#x2F;news-is-bad-ro...</a>Getting the news from &quot;both sides&quot; is just getting two bullshit spins on the same topic, but the truth isn&#x27;t in the middle.You can get &quot;just the facts&quot; from outlets like Reuters. You may find that this isn&#x27;t really entertaining and that really you do consume news for other reasons than getting informed. You may recognize that you actually want &quot;the spin&quot;, you want the emotional turmoil, the sensation.From that perspective, consuming news is more like a consuming a drug: A guilty pleasure that should not be overindulged in.

For UK sources, I&#x27;d suggest adding The Spectator. They&#x27;re not perfect (some of their columnists strike me as fairly obvious shills), but overall I&#x27;ve found them the most intelligent right-of-centre source.For the Americans reading, they have a US site too, might be worth checking out?

News organisations pander to their audience, so I think it&#x27;s really important to understand what that audience is. If you happen to be in that target audience, then of course there&#x27;s a real risk you&#x27;ll end up in an echo chamber that becomes increasingly far away from anything resembling a consensus reality.I&#x27;ve come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different target audiences. I occasionally read the Daily Mail (my mother gets it, don&#x27;t judge) and the Guardian. My main source of general news is the BBC news site, but I also regularly read The Economist. From time to time I pop on to the Fox News site, partly to remind myself that the Daily Mail could actually be a lot worse. I listen to LBC in the car (A London based politics and current affairs talk radio show).Genuine question - I&#x27;d be interested in how others approach this. Is my set of sources too skewed one way or another? Am I missing a decent balanced source, or should I add a credible source on any particular political leaning?

My favourite example of all time of journalistic shamelessness is ABC reporting that Robin Williams&#x27;s were &quot;respectfully asking for privacy&quot; following his death, while a banner at the top of the same page advertised live aerial footage of Robin Williams&#x27;s home:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thebestpageintheuniverse.net&#x2F;c.cgi?u=abc_classy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thebestpageintheuniverse.net&#x2F;c.cgi?u=abc_classy</a>

Doesn&#x27;t the UK have strong laws about libel and slander? Or do they not apply to Ireland?

The father of one of my neighbours recently died in a house fire. It was a tragic accident, nothing sinister. The whole family could be described as boringly average with nothing of note about them. The family refused all requests for interviews from the media.That didn&#x27;t stop the Irish Independent (big national paper here) from publishing gory headlines about the families pain. They also managed to source family photos (both old and more recent ones) and published pictures of the whole family. The family could deal with the headlines, but that someone leaked family photos to the paper really hit them hard.The story was so sensationalised and gory and completely off the scale. A few column inches would have sufficed, instead it was double page spread implying the family was in turmoil. The paper turned an already painful family situation in to an absolute nightmare.

For me, it’s difficult to “trust”. I assume I know next to nothing about India vs Pakistan or the Mexican drug war and that Journalism isn’t going to change that. At best it’s a source of stories like any novel, at worst it’s trying to mislead.In the case of Mexico’s drug war, most Americans are probably very misguided as to how dangerous it is for tourists and also how much of it is seen by the average Mexican on a given day. I feel I’ve learned infinitely more in one conversation on Tandem with someone who lives in Mexico than I ever will from a newspaper.If I read about riots in my city, I know there was something going on but I can’t really trust that the news correctly identified the place, people, or motive. I may have the desire to learn more and so I will reach out to someone who was there our lives in that neighborhood.I had a waking up moment in 2003 during the Iraq war protests. I learned that the NYT, which was my favorite because each issue was a literary work that could be read from front to back, reported as though they’d never been to NYC. If they couldn’t get basic details right when the story was literally on the same street (Broadway) then I don’t know what they’re actually capable of reporting.

How do you get the news? Who do you trust?

Even if the reporter was half decent (let&#x27;s assume he&#x2F;she was), it would most likely be the Editor that have twisted the story around, for whatever reason or excuse. It happens in all kinds of business. Go talk to an auditor (ANY) auditor and they will have plenty of horror stories where the reviewer rewrote a paragraph &quot;to better reflect the message&quot;, in which rewrite the message was changed.

The Economist is the rare case of a news source that&#x27;s not too bad, at least at present.  We can&#x27;t let ourselves become complacent, however - just see what&#x27;s happening to the NYT.

May as well ask here, I pretty much only read the weekly Economist to get my news at this point. I think I have their slight biases dialed in at this point. Anyone want to make a case for a different primary news source&#x2F;argue that The Economist is bad?For context, I like The Economist because it&#x27;s mostly unemotional, information-dense, and the magazine comes in a single weekly thing to read.

I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper.It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse.I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly stopped reading newspapers, and don&#x27;t trust anything they write, without checking the facts.

I Am Deleting the Blog