I haven’t read most of the pieces awarded here, and I’m sure they’re all excellent. That being said, I want to call your attention to the winner for "Feature Writing", and recommend you to read it. Taub’s produced a heartbreaking, empathetic, and incredible piece, that tilted my perspective on the US government's handling of 9/11, and how the government and big (dis-)organizations work in general.
Given his source material, it would have been easy (and justified) to construct the narrative into a tirade against the CIA. Instead, Taub takes a rather empathetic and detached frame of reference, and the result is a monument to the human toll of ruthlessly-executed ignorance. None of the people (victims or perpetrators) seem to fully understand their absurd roles: their actions driven by jumpy supervisors and acquaintances, who in turn are driven by a mix of fear, ideology and separation from "ground".
And once the veil of ignorance is lifted, there are reputations and legacies to protect, bureaucratic boxes that "cannot" be unchecked. There's no undoing what's set in motion, because "undo" implies reflection and the admission of wrongdoing, which is something that we really struggle with as a society.
It's a tragedy you see play out everywhere, and this is a particularly poignant and tragic case, beautifully presented. If it isn't a case study already, it ought to be one.
The story about a Guantanamo interrogator converting to Islam is hardly something I, as an atheist, would find motivating in any way. It is not the only story of such kind of conversion, but sadly, none of such proves anything positive about that (or any other) religion, or people involved.
I say sadly since those who believe otherwise are directly primed by the beliefs common only in very religious societies, like the U.S., and not in the rest of the world.
How could you design a fitness function for news to ensure that it was accurate?
Papers like The Financial Times have an obvious one: people are using these to inform themselves about business and investment. If FT was giving inaccurate data, it would have an obvious cost to the people who read it.
But for papers like the NYT, what is the incentive to accurately report the news? It seems like by inaccurately reporting things, they'll make more money. This is a problem. How would you fix it?
I agree that if you market your news product a certain way then there is little incentive to be correct (tabloids do this). However, the NYT is not marketed that way.
I get the impression that your question is merely to raise FUD about The New York Times rather than to legitimately ask about quality control. I've downvoted you (as have others), but I'll go ahead and answer you in good faith all the same.
The way a publication can ensure its quality is to charge for it. That is, rather than relying mostly on advertising (which is per article), rely on subscriptions. The kind of audience that pays for news will appreciate higher-quality journalism. That audience also must stick around for the long haul.
That's why the best-regarded outlets tend to be newswires (AP, Reuters), business news (WSJ, Bloomberg), donation driven (NPR, PBS), and long-form stories (NYT, WP).
Indeed, a quick check of NYT's latest 10K shows that they got over $1B from subscriptions (and growing) with an additional $500M from advertising (and shrinking).
Ahh, no? I just used the New York Times and an example because it is by far the most popular newspaper in the country. It’s relevant to this post because they obviously won a bunch of awards, as the usually do.
News and quality of news has been a major part of my life since my first ever semi successful project, which was a news aggregator I started over a decade ago. One of the mechanisms we tried then (before reddit existed as far as I know) was a sortof economy where each poster got a certain amount of tokens to “spend” on submissions and comments, and you could earn more tokens when people “paid” you for your quality contributions.
Obviously it didn’t work.
Since then I’ve tried computational linguistics approaches to this problem, which solves a problem, but not the fitness checking one I’m talking about here.
And finally: my wife is a former political journalist, so obviously news and quality of news is a major topic in my life which I talk about, read about, and write about pretty regularly.
Glad to see smaller publications putting out good journalism and being recognized.
High quality reporting is, still, one of the most effective ways to speak truth to power. Unfortunately the internet has decimated smaller journals and local papers, so local issues might never get reported on. I wish that trend would reverse, but I have no idea how one would do that.
Pay for your news, get a subscription to a local paper, participate in your local political process if you can. We're all so focused on work and what's going on in Washington that we don't allow ourselves to reserve any time or energy to understand local politics, because they're "boring".
My local paper and in fact every paper in California mixes a smattering of worthwhile reporting into non-stop stupidity. Every morning the editors of the LA Times wake up and think of a new way to trash every one of my core beliefs, so it doesn't matter to me that the LA Times published one (1) worthwhile piece of art criticism in 2019. That's certainly not enough to make me overlook the fact that the LA Times has been running a large-scale real estate scam for over 100 years, considering that housing is the most important issue to me.
I subscribe to CalMatters and Berkeleyside and Boom California. Anyone who considers themselves a good local journalist needs to write for those outlets if they want my dollar. I'm not here to enrich the shareholders of legacy newspapers.
ETA: There actually is one good newspaper in California: the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Wouldn't want to miss mentioning America's last newspaper.
Do you have any evidence to back your LA Times real estate scam claim? Seems hard to believe that an organization that large would be able to pull off a conspiracy like that for 100 years without someone coming forward about it.
Can't tell if you are serious or not. The LAT was published by Harry Chandler, owner and developer of the San Fernando Valley and other areas. Chandler used the Times to boost migration to Los Angeles, to take over the Owens River, and to involve himself in many other affairs. For the entire 20th century the Times was Chandler's mouthpiece to remake southern California to serve the interest of his greed. This is all well-documented in dozens of books, many of which are wonderfully good reading. I recommend anything my Mark Arax or Marc Reisner, or this article from Boom: https://boomcalifornia.com/2013/09/23/there-it-is-take-it/
I honestly don't know much about what it takes to win a Pulitzer.
But while scrolling down that page, I was crossing my fingers for APM's podcast In the Dark to win something.
The second season following the Curtis Flowers case is fascinating, infuriating, beautiful, harrowing, and culminates in a US Supreme Court case...
I don't know where that podcast sits on the spectrum of "pulp crime interest" to "genuine reporting" but IMO it's far, far on the side of "genuine reporting".
If I'm reading the Wikipedia page correctly [0], APM's latest season finished in 2018, although it did publish updates in early 2019. IIRC to be eligible for this year's Pulitzer (specifically the one in audio reporting, which didn't exist in 2019), the season would have had to been published in 2019.
That said, This American Life did win a Pulitzer in 2011, but it had ProPublica as a publishing partner, and I believe it was the first time a journalism Pulitzer went to a project that did not publish in print [1].
The American Revolution was simply not about protecting slavery. You can't say the birth of America was a racist endeavor - it's factually incorrect. This is historical revisionism.
It's noted on the Pulitzer page for the award (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/nikole-hannah-jones-new-yor...) that the NY Times issued a correction to the original essay: "A passage has been adjusted to make clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of them." See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the... ("Today we are making a clarification to a passage in an essay from The 1619 Project that has sparked a great deal of online debate.")
Which sounds about right to me. This wasn't ever that controversial a suggestion, nor is it unique to this essay. But it was an easy target for people who wanted to oppose the project as a whole. So we get comments like the grandparent, who apparently views this one idea as the "core" of a project that literally covers four hundred years of history.
It's tiresome. I mean, I read this stuff when it was published (it was really great, and absolutely Pulitzer-worthy), and I swear when the knives started flying I had to go back and find the passages in question because frankly I didn't even remember them.
It's also really upsetting that still, in the year 2020, the idea that black folks experience endemic racism is a partisan idea that has to be opposed by half the population as a matter of faith.
That's an extraordinarily maximalist interpretation of what to me was a relatively nuanced take on a complicated subject. I mean, racial politics has absolutely been one critical driving factor in American history. Surely you'd agree with that part? So maybe grant that framing and re-read it? I think you'd be surprised.
A more correct way of summarising the link you provided is that some historians contend the 1619 Project is at its core flawed, and it has been criticised by many prominent conservatives.
It’s a subject of much debate both in and out of academic circles.
While this list contains everything that is positive and great about journalism, it also embraces what makes journalism reviled. The Pulitzer award going to the 1619 project despite it's mistruths further erodes people's willingness to trust the media to do their basic job - to tell the truth.
The NYT article embraces the conceit from the media that they are they experts - they need not listen to historians, but instead journalists can be the sole arbiter of truth.
The articles "overarching contention that slavery and racism are the foundations of American history" is simply a story that the journalist wants to tell. The journalist ignored the truth in order to tell that story risks kicking out the legs to a true evaluation of America's (and more generally the west's) troubled history with race.
To some, the 1619 project becomes incontrovertible truth, backed by the Pulitzer and the NYT, and anyone who disagrees with it are racist. To others the easily disproved assertions discredit not only this article, but all well-founded criticisms of race in America.
This is how we get two Americas. Every man is entitled to their opinion, but not their own set of facts. If we ignore facts in order to feed our biases, we will never be able to talk about the truly hard issues that we have to master.
I'd recommend reading the three articles below, which constitute the public back-and-forth between the prominent historians who have been critical of the project and the NYT.
I'm not sure how you can read these (especially the brutal Atlantic article) and come away believing that the Times is acting in good faith w/ regards to the publication and defense of the 1619 Project.
When you look at the arguments offered up by the Times, they seem to be holding themselves to some standard other than objective truth.
Just look at their arguments in defense of Hannah-Jones' claim (which she states as a fact) that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery". The NYT offers their support of this argument in paragraphs 7-10 of the Editor's Response [0](the second half). The author does not even attempt to support the claim was factually correct. He makes no argument that this is the belief of any single individual, let alone a believe as common as Hannah-Jones makes it out to be. Instead he states the existence of a single anti-slavery ruling, and the fact that news of it appeared in the newspaper. QED, defending slavery was a primary motivation for the revolution!
To my eye, the author seems to be merely attempting to establish the argument's plausibility, as though the simple act of defending an argument is an acceptable substitution its for objective truth.
History is and always should be about inquiry, about discovery of truth first and foremost. Making statements of fact about history without a regard for the truth is dangerous. There's a word for that, you know.
And people are pushing to put this into public school curriculum!
> and it has been criticised by many prominent conservatives.
...and Socialists:
"Both Wood's and McPherson's remarks were published by the World Socialist Website, a left-wing, socialist website, which claims that the 1619 project's "aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal 'identities'—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race."[41] The site has also published interviews on the project with historians Victoria Bynum[42] and James Oakes,[43] and promoted a lecture series critiquing the project's alleged "racialist falsification of American and world history."[41]"
I felt that Greg Grandin's Myth of the Frontier was actually the second-best counter-narrative to the standard accounts of American relations with its neighbors published in 2019. The most interesting was How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-...
One of the more interesting sections for the Hacker News crowd is how technological advancements in World War II like artificial rubber and international standards allowed the US to cede the huge amount of land it directly controlled after the war (which is not to say that US influence completely disappeared in these places).
The press gets a bad name a lot of the time, especially by those who are in positions of power and who are subject to the press, but the reality is that a lot of the press and many journalists do incredible work that shed light on various stories that might go unnoticed if it was not for journalism and the press. Obviously there are bad actors that degrade what the press does or stands and those actors usually are louder and get put in the spotlight but there are so many incredible journalists that really do uphold the intended role of the press; to inform, criticize, and stimulate debate. I’m glad that parts of the press, those who really do hold up journalistic integrity and care about their work/role, are recognized especially in the current state of the world where the press, even good actors, are often blamed or criticized for doing their job and are somehow framed as the “bad guy.”
But there seems to be a lot of dark patterns used by the press, and in the recent years it has only seemed to increase: Click-baitism, Gellman-Amnesia, rudimentary fact checking fails, feelings-journalism, a general sense of self righteousness and superiority, act self-defesively, seeking power to act as gatekeepers of information (They seem to like to push a 'gatekeepers are good narrative'), and are often too trusting of government, police and armed forces.
Even recently when I watch the Trump briefings, I see journalists speaking as if in anger because the President is belittling them: especially when he played his compilation video: they where quick to dub it as a campaign video, and networks cut it from the broadcast: but mostly in contained clips of TV news downplaying the Covid-19 situation. No whatever the motivations of Trump are, the media seem to act self-defesively, even with anger and resentment around him. Trump may hate the press, but the feeling appears to mutual now: but really the press shouldn't love or hate anyone.
Also I see lot of journalists ask Trump a question and then constantly interrupt him while He is answering: this dose not look good on TV for the journalists credibility is my view.
Fascinating. The head of the worlds most powerful and extensive intelligence service, and largest and best funded medical agencies justifies his actions by saying some random journalists didn’t know any better either? And you blame the journalists for calling him out on that?
Only it seems the press lack humility and an understanding of their own fallibility as a human institution, and seems very self-righteous. Trump may not deal with them fairly, but that doesn't mean the press has to do likewise. Press seems more bent on defending their honour, than being the conduits of information to the public.
Seriously, so much this. You only realize how valuable good journalism is when you don’t have it, as is unfortunately very common in most parts of the world.
Journalists play an extremely important role in keeping a check on power and as such are critical to the health of a democracy. The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make people a lot angrier than it has so far; without a good, unbiased press there is simply no way to have an honest conversation about the most important problems that a country faces and the different plans by which to address them (as is becoming very clear by the botched response to the Coronavirus pandemic).
> The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make people a lot angrier than it has so far
It would make me a lot angrier if the most popular news outlets were indeed "good, unbiased press" and not spin doctors and propaganda distributors for [insert political machine].
Very much this. What most people consider "the press", the main stream media, has converted almost completely to infotainment, opinion, and propaganda for vested interests.
John Gruber (of Daring Fireball, Mardkown fame, etc.) coined the term "claim chowder" and started keeping a list of dubious tech reporting. I've been keeping a mental list myself and its almost painful how often a highly circulated story obviously will have a shelf life of weeks or days before being completely invalidated. As long as it makes it through the spin cycle, though, I suppose it doesn't matter to show runners, editors, and others pushing the narrative.
When news outlets run significantly fabricated stories (sometimes for months or years) and then run a genuine story how can they be believed? When news outlets never issue retractions, corrections, or apologies for misleading the public, how can they be trusted. When they actively attempt to remove or change content from their public archives in order to put themselves on the right side of history or direct the way history is being made, how can they be treated as protectors of freedom against tyranny. When they destroy the lives of who accidentally entered their crosshairs to sell ad space, how can they be considered good.
That's an insanely broad brush. The mainstream press includes the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, and NPR. Please explain how they fabricate narratives, how they destroy the lives of those who accidentally enter their crosshairs, and how they retroactively alter their archives to change history.
I'd expect your summary dismissal of the mainstream media from a Trump supporter. I'm surprised to see it on HN. So please elaborate.
When was the last time you read a positive story on Putin in the NYtimes?
All those outlets are compromised expect maybe NPR. Eric Weinstein calls it the gated institutional narrative, it is on you you still consider the mainstream anything more than shadow of what they represented in the past.
Theres nothing positive about Putin because he is a murderous dictator. There’s nothing positive about Kim Jong Un or Orban or MBS either. The NYTimes’ journalistic integrity is not measured by positive coverage of dictators in fact if anything it’s the opposite.
* allegedly CNN removing the Larry King episode from Google Play with a call from Tara Reade’s mother
* implicitly or explicitly suggesting unrelated archive footage represents the story being reported (Italian hospital footage in a story about New York hospitals, firing range footage presented as foreign conflict)
* the my pillow guy, who retooled to support health workers being railroaded simply for standing next to Trump
* the sudden and nearly universal admiration for GWB
* NYT editing an article, without notice that originally claimed HRC implied the Russians were grooming Tulsi Gabbard.
I have a terrible memory for specific details, so those just the ones I can think of recently. I primarily listen to NPR in the car. Their bias is staggering. They present opinion as fact frequently, often misrepresenting parties in opposition.
The reliable media often back up the claims with resources, motivations and you have the history to verify.
If a person makes a blanket statement like "press is biased" or "is a spin-doctor" for X, we need to ignore that move past it.
We tend to identify reliable sources over time, and there are plenty of reputed, reliable journalists and newspapers in the world. Just like reliable politicians. Kudos to them.
Most of the biased reporting doesn’t happen through false claims but through selective reporting. The information that fits the narrative is pushed, the information that doesn’t never gets published. It is possible to lie by remaining factually correct. Ask any lawyer or advertiser. And I see very few if not no major media outlet that doesn’t indulge into that selective reporting all over its pages. Ignore me and move past me!
Thousand times this. I grew up in USSR, and was tuning to Voice of America and Radio Liberty to keep myself informed. I moved to US not so far ago, and current state of mainstream media here is so much reminds me of Pravda, Trud and Izvestia newspapers, along with countrywide and regional TV channels. Damn shame, especially when you consider VoA and Radio Liberty are state-sponsored and state-controlled
You’re playing into his game as soon as you start talking about “the media”.
There is no one “the media”. The journalism produced by cable news opinion segments is not the same as that produced by national print outlets, which is also not the same as a local newspaper. Equating them all is something Trump and his friends would very much like you to do.
OP mentioned "the most popular news outlets". I expect that there's pretty good intersubjective agreement about which entities are in or out.
It's true in one sense that there's no such thing as "the media". If "the media" is just "the set of people who write things about current events that other people read", then I, too, am a member of the media. Groovy.
But this is an isolated demand for rigor. If you look at who's employed by "the most popular news outlets" (which can be relatively objectively determined through subscription numbers), you cannot help but notice that they are a rather distinct class. They come from particular schools, live in particular cities, have particular points of view including suppositions so basic that they often do not even realize that they hold them, understand themselves to be accomplishing particular professional and social objectives through their work, and so on and so on. None of these qualifications are strictly categorical, but as a statistical matter they are so robust as to be tedious. Which is all fine, so far as it goes, but the concept of "the media" is "a thing" inasmuch as it allows you to concisely name patterns and regularities that exist in the world. And there are an awful lot of patterns and regularities to be noticed.
Incidentally, Orwell made precisely the same point (about a distributed, decentralized press that coordinates through shared cultural background and sense of what's simply Not Done) in a proposed preface to the first edition of Animal Farm. The free, decentralized, totally-not-a-thing British media declined to print it.
I would need to see some sources on “They come from particular schools, live in particular cities...”
Even if this were true, (which I’m highly skeptical of) why would this even a bad thing? I mean, if we’re talking about elite papers such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.. it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear a number of them went to elite universities – a number elite doctors likely come from difficult medical schools.
I’m also not convinced “they” all share the same beliefs, not convinced of this at all. I mean, if you want to declare that media sources who prefer the Democratic party exist, sure but for every single one of those there’s at least one Fox “news” equivalent. The simple fact of their existence doesn’t mean certain people have a monopoly on information. This argument would be as ridiculous as when people in 2017 were screeching (US) liberals run the world all while the president, both congressional houses, and the supreme court were conservative... the concern wasn’t based in reality, at all, and it’s the same with their panicky “liberal news” conspiracies, I see no evidence which shows conservatives voices aren’t being heard, none.
Anyway, I’m dubious about the idea that almost all news people come from the same class, same schools, and same cities. Unless you’re simply saying elite journalists come from the best journalism schools, at which point it shouldn’t really surprise anyone.
I would find it more surprising if journalists didn't share certain demographic regularities. As an exercise, I looked up the educational backgrounds of the current NYT masthead on wikipedia. Here are the results:
Columbia
Harvard, Harvard
UMich
N/A (the art design guy)
Notre Dame
Princeton
Yale
Columbia
Tufts
Stonyhurst, Oxford
UVA
Are those results out of line with what you were expecting? I can't say that they are for me. If anything, I consider it exceptionally broadminded of The Gray Lady to hire an ND grad.
Please recall that I never claimed this was a good or a bad thing. In some sense I regard domination by elites as inevitable, but I do think it's preferable to be explicit about it, and failing to recognize "the media" as a coherent social category tends to frustrate that recognition.
The political affiliation of journalists is a well-studied topic. Polls consistently find that Democrats outnumber Republicans and liberals outnumber conservatives by wide margins, ranging from 4-1 to 20-1 [!] depending on survey methodology (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3279453). A study which compared rates of citation of various think tanks by media outlets, vs. by Congress, found that every media outlet surveyed except Fox and the Washington Times stood to the left of the Congressional median (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25098770?seq=1).
Again, I'm not making any normative claims about any of this. I'm just surprised at the resistance to taking it for granted.
I'd argue most of what is sold as "the press" is not that. Click-bait, PR mouthpieces, unverified "news", inflammatory news and padding are the majority of what people see.
According to him it's only ever biased if it's critical of his actions or policies. That injects more noise into claims of bias and can lead people to take them less seriously than they realistically should. Bit of a boy who cried wolf situation.
Public opposition to any institution by the President of the United States is a political threat. Or rather anyone person who holds so much influence publicly attacking something is a threat.
I wholeheartedly disagree. The president doesn't lose his right to free speech because of his job or how much influence he has. There is a clear distinction between criticizing the practices of an institution versus criticizing its existence categorically.
A lot of people are purposefully blurring the lines here and it's really dangerous. The same argument could be used to say that the press has undue influence, and should therefore be regulated in what it is able to say or how it is able to report.
The press in America has the same freedom of speech as individuals do: near unlimited. They come together. If you start picking and choosing, free speech is no longer a right.
This argument make no sense. Rights don’t exist in vacuum. The person occupying the Presidency swears an oath to the country and in the process he assumes both the power endowed by the State and the responsibility to use it wisely. Yes of course he can’t say any damn thing he wants to say publicly if it engenders the institution of the presidency he has sworn to protect. The right to free speech is not absolute.
Similarly, the press give up the right to say any foolish claims without substantiation when they assume their official roles as journalists. They promise to back what they say with evidence and facts; that stops them from making baseless claims. Is that restricting their free speech? Free speech does not exist in a vacuum.
It does make sense. There is obviously a question of where the boundary lies and that's what we're exploring.
I think you do have a point. But consider what you're trying to apply it to here. The president is not saying "I think we should nuke Korea" or "the press should be abolished." He says "CNN? That's fake news." It's a criticism leveled at an organization that has had a rampant hyperbolic partisan slant and has printed fake news, making the criticism accurate.
Calling the media out for this behavior could be seen as holding it accountable. These types of criticisms mean nothing in terms of any meaningful action that could restrict the press.
I think more people need to question from where they have gotten the perspective that these attacks are particularly threatening towards a free press in the US. Was it from the press?? Go figure.
Sorry, don’t buy it. There are legitimate criticisms of CNN. But his criticism isn’t restricted to just CNN, but to literally any media outlet that will umflattre him including NYT, WaPo and Fox News. Fox News in fact chided him quite frequently during the Republican primary until he beat them down into submission. He tried to do something similar with other media outlets and has been quite enraged that they haven’t changed their tune as drastically as Fox News did.
I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.
Again, what you're describing is a personal vendetta between the press and the president. They cover him and he responds, and they attack each other. It's normal. Ask any celebrity. You are not describing a situation that is indicative of a threat to the press.
> I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.
His "criticisms" are not limited to specific outlets. He has publicly called the press "truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!"[0] which feels like a broader attack on the press as an institution.
I think this is an error of taking literally what is figurative. It's common parlance to call the mainstream pop press "the press." That's how generalizations work and anybody reading that knows it without needing it explained.
If you were one of the Central Park Five, wrongly accused of rape, or if you were a climate change activist, facing climate-denying articles, and said "the press has got it all wrong and are the enemy of the people" how would you interpret that? As anger, representing a valid critique that should be explored? Or that this person is literally calling for the end or restriction of journalism as a practice? It seems obvious. The only way to interpret it as the latter is to interpret it in such bad faith that it borders on malevolence.
I disagree with the assessment. Nearly all of the points here are either contextless, are meaningless statements in themselves, take as literal the figurative, or are about aggressions that could only be accused of influencing others' view of the press' bias, rather than offering any real threat to rights.
I wouldn't call it "[accusing the press of being] biased and doing a bad job" if the most powerful president of the western world calls the press The enemy of the people[1]
As a matter of fact such statements are borderline incitement of violence when you look at some of his heavily armed, but not necessarily smart supporters.
What you argue here is borderline historical revisionism.
I mean if you already believe that the press is mostly Right in their reporting, it might be difficult to convince you otherwise. But there are so many instances of fake news related to Trump reporting that it's really not inaccurate to call it that.
If literally everything you said was twisted in a way to misrepresent you don't you think you'd get a little tired of it, roll your eyes at it, and shrug it off sometimes too? That's not an absolute defense for doing this exclusively, but he doesn't do this exclusively. He calls it out, then answers.
But this is altogether besides the point of what I was responding to, which is that this kind of talk is existentially dangerous to the press as an institution. You could claim Trump is a liar and a deflector and is doing bad things and says a one-liner instead of justifying, and that would be a fair criticism. But then it would be a danger insofar as it means we have a lack of responsibility and accountability in our leadership, not insofar as it poses a threat to the freedom of the press.
If you change the article URL from 2020 to 2018 and search for "Trump" you can see the Pulitzer they handed out for "deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election". In 2020 that has toned down to a Pulitzer for "skewers the personalities and policies" or "illuminates the personal impact [of his anti-immigrant policies]".
The quality of the hard-hitting journalism seems to be winding back, maybe Trump wore them down?
Alternatively, you should expect hard-hitting journalism in the "Explanatory Reporting" and "National Reporting" categories, but should expect skewering in the category of "Editorial Cartooning".
> You only realize how valuable good journalism is when you don’t have it, as is unfortunately very common in most parts of the world.
Where do this come from? There is EXCELLENT journalism all over the world. Even in places with high censorship (which are the exception, not the rule) there a great and brave journalism.
Indeed there is of every kind, from community people to big media, of course, the official organs are biased, but they don't encompass all journalists, the same way American journalism is not just CNN and Fox News.
It is highly insulting and arrogant to assume there is no brave journalism there where people have lost their jobs or their lives by reporting inconvenient truths.
How knowledgeable are you on this subject ? Do you read Russian ? Chinese ? Watching native TV channels, listening podcasts in Russian and / or Chinese ?
fascinating fact: the pulitzer prize, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, is named after a newspaper publisher infamous for yellow journalism. by the end of his career, however, joseph pulitzer had reformed himself and started producing outstanding journalism.
Each story was impactful, either at a local, national or global level. Congratulations to the winners. We need more courageous and thoughtful journalism.
Ben Taub has been putting out some fantastic work, especially for someone so young. His article on Iraq's post ISIS policies was incredibly sad but very informative.
Incredibly prolific, especially given his how well-received his track record has been. Takes some serious guts to take a year off from Princeton to _self-fund a trip to Syria during the middle of a war_ to learn how to be a war correspondent.
I believe these are cases where the publication itself didn't nominate the piece or author for consideration as typically happens, but the board decided to consider it anyway.
He was hoping to sway the story away from what he already knew was being written. He made the phone call to Sonka unscheduled and had never called before. In fact, it was a surprise because most of Sonka's work was not complimentary. Having the governor who was against news media (Trumpian) give a friendly call was very strange.
Is it possible to win Pulitzer Prize with just 1 submission - (e.g. amateur submission in 1 of the categories)? Or does one require a track record of some sort for the year?
Putting aside the likely bias towards established organizations (big and small), most winners in the journalism article categories submit a series of articles, because practically speaking, several small articles often lead up to the big investigation (e.g. Watergate) [0]; or, one big investigation leads to a series of followups, including coverage about the impact and consequences from the story, e.g. Snowden files [1].
That said, there are one-shot amateur Pulitzer winners, most notably in the photography categories. The Pulitzer winning photo of the Kent State massacre was taken by a photojournalism student [2]. And one of the most famous early Pulitzer photos was taken by a non-journalism amateur: 24-year-old Arnold Hardy in 1947 [3].
I think the contemporary category where you will find the most examples of single-article winners will be Feature Writing, but I'm not aware of any amateurs who have won it: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/211
I don't understand the usage of awful here. Are you using it to suggest the journalism is good and deserving of recognition (confusing) or that the Pulitzer is an award for bad journalism?
I believe that illiilliiililil is expressing a somewhat complex set of opinions:
1) They genuinely don’t like the 1619 project.
2) They understand that the Pulitzer is supposed to be an award for good journalism.
3) They believe that journalism about some subjects is more likely to win a Pulitzer without being the best by illiilliiililil‘s standards. You could compare it to the concept of an “Oscar bait” movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_bait
I’m not sure I agree with this criticism - I think exploring tough subjects can lead to great work that is especially deserving of praise.
On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” This is not true
The 1619 should have been in time magazine or national geographic, not the new york times. Because its not news, its pseudo-anthropology designed to create a legitimate citation source for teachers and academia in general.
Now high school students can write nonsense in an essay and cite the New York Times as a source, and get A+ from their teachers. This is the real purpose of it
Very surprised that Pat Bagley wasn't even nominated, his cartoons have been all over the place in the last year, particularly on social media. Which I find particularly interesting as he isn't from a major market like CA or NY (he's published in a Colorado newspaper I believe).
The Pulitzer Prize was created by the founder of yellow journalism ( AKA 1800s fake news ) - Joseph Pulitzer. Is this a prize that journalists or journalism should be supporting? It would be a like a physics award created by a flat earther.
Given his source material, it would have been easy (and justified) to construct the narrative into a tirade against the CIA. Instead, Taub takes a rather empathetic and detached frame of reference, and the result is a monument to the human toll of ruthlessly-executed ignorance. None of the people (victims or perpetrators) seem to fully understand their absurd roles: their actions driven by jumpy supervisors and acquaintances, who in turn are driven by a mix of fear, ideology and separation from "ground".
And once the veil of ignorance is lifted, there are reputations and legacies to protect, bureaucratic boxes that "cannot" be unchecked. There's no undoing what's set in motion, because "undo" implies reflection and the admission of wrongdoing, which is something that we really struggle with as a society.
It's a tragedy you see play out everywhere, and this is a particularly poignant and tragic case, beautifully presented. If it isn't a case study already, it ought to be one.
(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...)