Been seeing a lot of libs say they can't trust the NYT and mainstream news any more but I'm sure there's plenty of reasons to not trust them already. Recent or historical examples

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]40•4 months ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_controversies

    Straight from the top

    Russian Revolution, 1917–1920

    Lippmann and Merz alleged that the newspaper referred to events that had not taken place, atrocities that did not exist, and that it reported no fewer than 91 times that the Bolshevik regime was on the verge of collapse. "The news about Russia is an example of what people wanted to see, not what happened," Lippmann and Merz wrote. "The main censor and the main propagandist was the hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors."

    • D61 [any]5•4 months ago

      I did a project on this lady in my early college days for a public speaking class.

      The instructor honestly thought I was going to go into journalism after my presentation.

  • @pudcollar@lemmy.ml21•4 months ago

    The Intercept and NYT love beefing with each other. Here's one where the NYT lied trying to depose Evo Morales https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/

    • @SSJ2Marx36•4 months ago

      NYT did a big story about how Hamas allegedly weaponized sexual assault during operation Al-Aqsa Flood, but the person who did the story was not a journalist and every person she talked to in Israel gave her zero evidence and the main source they ended up quoting was an IOF propaganda mill that has a long history of just making shit up. It failed the most simple fact checking imaginable, stuff like "Hamas killed a pregnant woman" and then checking Israel's list of civilian deaths and not finding a single pregnant person.

      As a cherry on top, many of the crimes that were attributed to Hamas in that piece and related journalism were actually crimes that were well documented - when the IOF committed them in Lebanon.

    • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]24•4 months ago

      They brought in a woman who used to work for Israeli intelligence with absolutely zero journalism experience to write an expose on how Hamas SA'd and beheaded everyone they could.

      • D61 [any]5•4 months ago

        We were this close, holds up fingers really close together, to a reality where the Israeli Occupation Forces had to go out and behead corpses to turn these false claims into a reality...

        ... instead we get a slightly less bad reality where there's an official corpse cum catching crew that we can joke about.

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]14•4 months ago

    FLIGHT 007: THE REST OF THE STORY

    spoiler

    AS THE director of worldwide television for the U.S. Information Agency, I was summoned to a secret meeting at the State Department over the Labor Day weekend 13 years ago to discuss a TV production. Entering a small conference room through a heavy metal door with a combination lock at its center, I was given an audio tape. I was instructed to produce a video document based on the contents of the tape that would be shown two days later at the U.N. Security Council.

    Korean Airlines Flight 007, with its 269 passengers and crew, had strayed off course over a Soviet missile installation in the far Pacific and was shot out of the sky by Maj. Gennady Osipovich, in his Sukhoi-15 fighter. Minute by minute, top secret American intelligence stations near the Soviet border had monitored Osipovich's pursuit of Flight 007 as it cruised on the last leg of its journey to Seoul, and its destruction at 2:26 p.m. Washington time, Aug. 31, 1983. Working with other producers, we fashioned a slick video which was played at the Security Council Sept. 6, and beamed around the world by satellite -- marking some thing of a new era of government-to-people diplomacy.

    The video was powerful, effective and wrong.

    This was referenced in Blowback Season 4.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]13•4 months ago

      What replaces 1980s-style disinformation in the future may make it seem wholesome by comparison, and the press must be ever more vigilant.

      It turns out all you need to trick the audience is simply claiming you saw beheaded babies and sexual assault when it didn’t happen. No need for sophisticated spying devices.

      • D61 [any]4•4 months ago

        There's an episode of The Orville, where the crew see what the political process is for a horribly xenophobic race... and its just AI generated videos of politicians saying and doing things they didn't do....

          • D61 [any]3•4 months ago

            I first watched it years ago, years after it started, and was honestly pleasantly surprised.

            I expected "Family Guy" but got a slightly more down to earth Star Trek. It can be a bit wishy-washy with its political/moral messaging at times but most of the time it felt like it was trying to be honest to the characters.

            I liked it enough to watch it a few times over the years and i would recommend it if you dug ST:TNG.