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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34642 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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The idea of the piece is that they're right and honest about most things, not that they're right and honest about every thing. Yeah, wrong about russiagate, but right about most of the ukraine invasion, 'who won the presidential elections', TSMC's american investments, china's lock downs, and tens of thousands of other things, small and large.

But this is meaningless - the actual importance and weight of their "mistakes" (I am honestly unsure as to the precise blend of incompetence/malice responsible) vastly outweigh their accuracy when it comes to talking about how the fire brigade rescued a kitten or a dog was trained how to surf. If a financial manager made a thousand trades which earned one or two dollars in profit and a single trade which lost seven billion, "they were right most of the time" is not an argument that would convince me to give them my money or support.

Additionally, I don't think they have been right about some of those things - their coverage of the Ukraine war at the very least is something I'd consider highly misleading, but that would be a separate topic that multiple essays could be written about and I won't go into it here.

Someone who wants to "reform" the media to fix their blindspots on race, right-wing politics is not endorsing those stances.

I do not want to reform the media - I want to replace it, and that replacement is currently ongoing. There's a huge variety of alternatives to the media that don't just try to target a different segment of the market but actually outcompete them on the quality of their analysis. Ultimately I don't think it is possible to reform the media without effectively destroying it - the existing incentive structures and culture ensure that the media cannot actually do the job they claim is their raison d'être. Of course, the Hanania article doesn't apply to me anyway - there's nothing blind about my distrust or hate of the media, nor are my complaints hysterical.

And can you give an example of NYT/Rand differences in ukraine that are so 'vast'?

Sure. Read this report https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html and then go read the NYtimes coverage of the war - I cannot give you any specific articles, however, because I have hit my limit of "free" articles from the NYtimes and hence cannot actually do the due diligence required to make sure I'm not sending anything particularly egregious. As I'm sure you can probably guess, I'm not interested in paying them any money, so I'm not going to be subscribing any time soon.

you can bypass a nyt paywall by prepending archive.is/ to the ur fyi

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