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Javier E

Commentary: The problem with Wikipedia - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-dc76641cb8d4_singlePage.html

wikipedia policies

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The site does not allow corporations, individuals or organizations to defend themselves transparently or submit information on their own behalf. This is a serious flaw and a real challenge for a site that has become a fundamental source for so many around the world. This policy results in many articles on the site that are inaccurate or even blatantly false.
  • I decided to provide a resource to the Wikipedia editors and help them get the story straight. I signed up as a Wikipedia editor under the name QorvisEditor. Under this handle, my goal was not to edit client or Qorvis pages, but to become a direct source from which established Wikipedia editors could ask questions about our company and work. Within minutes of signing up, I was blocked by established editors for personally representing the interests of the firm — not for editing anything incorrectly, mind you. This action prevented me from having any direct interaction with any editor in the future, and thus prevented me from providing any first-hand information to any editor. This action also prevents any other Wikipedia editor from having a direct dialogue with the firm.
  • This inane policy would violate the basic tenets of even the most partisan of small-town newspapers or the most crooked court rooms. This dangerous policy violates the fundamental rules of reporting, of debate and of discussion
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Wikipedia thus has a responsibility to find an avenue for living subjects to contribute directly to articles. It is a disservice to not allow direct, transparent contributions by primary sources — especially since these sources often hide their identities in an effort to have their arguments heard.
Javier E

Editor of JAMA Leaves After Outcry Over Colleague's Remarks on Racism - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...jama-bauchner-racism.html

editor racism AMA journal Science research bias

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Following an outcry over comments about racism made by an editor at JAMA, the influential medical journal, the top editor, Dr. Howard Bauchner, will step down from his post effective June 30.
  • The move was announced on Tuesday by the American Medical Association, which oversees the journal. Dr. Bauchner, who had led JAMA since 2011, had been on administrative leave since March because of an ongoing investigation into comments made on the journal’s podcast.
  • Dr. Edward Livingston, another editor at JAMA, had claimed that socioeconomic factors, not structural racism, held back communities of color. A tweet promoting the podcast had said that no physician could be racist. It was later deleted.
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  • Last month, the A.M.A.’s leaders admitted to serious missteps and proposed a three-year plan to “dismantle structural racism” within the organization and in medicine. The announcement on Tuesday did not mention the status of the investigation at JAMA. The journal declined further comment.
  • “This is a real moment for JAMA and the A.M.A. to recreate themselves from a founding history that was based in segregation and racism to one that is now based on racial equity,” said Dr. Stella Safo, a Black primary care physicia
  • Dr. Safo and her colleagues started a petition, now signed by more than 9,000 people, that had called on JAMA to restructure its staff and hold a series of town hall conversations about racism in medicine. “I think that this is a step in the right direction,” she said of the announcement.
  • “In the entire history of all the JAMA network journals, there’s only been one non-white editor,” noted Dr. Raymond Givens, a cardiologist at Columbia University in New York. I
peterconnelly

Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it sta... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

CNN.com

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • After Jason Moore, from Portland, Oregon, saw headlines from national news sources on Google News about the Buffalo shooting at a local supermarket on Saturday afternoon, he did a quick search for the incident on Wikipedia. When no results appeared, he drafted a single sentence: "On May 14, 2022, 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York." He hit save and published the entry on Wikipedia in less than a minute.
  • That article, which as of Friday has been viewed more than 900,000 times, has since undergone 1,071 edits by 223 editors who've voluntarily updated the page on the internet's free and largest crowdsourced encyclopedia.
  • He's credited with creating 50,000 entries
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In the middle of breaking news, when people are searching for information, some platforms can present more questions than answers. Although Wikipedia is not staffed with professional journalists, it is viewed as an authoritative source by much of the public, for better or for worse. Its entries are also used for fact-checking purposes by some of the biggest social platforms, adding to the stakes and reach of the work from Moore and others.
  • "Editing Wikipedia can absolutely take an emotional toll on me, especially when working on difficult topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other disasters," he said.
  • "I like the instant gratification of making the internet better," he said.
  • "I want to direct people to something that is going to provide them with much more reliable information at a time when it's very difficult for people to understand what sources they can trust."
  • "It is considered cool if you're the first person who creates an article, especially if you do it well with high-quality contributions," said Rasberry.
  • To help patrol incoming edits and predict misconduct or errors, Wikipedia -- like Twitter -- uses artificial intelligence bots that can escalate suspicious content to human reviewers who monitor content.
  • Rasberry, who also wrote the Wikipedia page on the platform's fact checking processes, said Wikipedia does not employ paid staff to monitor anything unless it involves "strange and unusual serious crimes like terrorism or real world violence, such as using Wikipedia to make threats, plan to commit suicide, or when Wikipedia itself is part of a crime.
  • Rasberry said flaws range from a geographical bias, which is related to challenges with communicating across languages; access to internet in lower and middle income countries; and barriers to freedom of journalism around the world.
  • "I've got many other editors that I'm working with who will back me, so when we encounter vandalism or trolls or misinformation or disinformation, editors are very quick to revert inappropriate edits or remove inappropriate content or poorly sourced content," Moore said.
  • While "edit wars" can happen on pages, Rasberry said this tends to occur more often over social issues rather than news.
  • Wikipedia also publicly displays who edits each version of an article via its history page, along with a "talk" page for each post that allows editors to openly discuss edits.
  • "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it," the page said.
  • "If it was a paid advertising site or if it had a different mission, I wouldn't waste my time."
Javier E

Dispute Within Art Critics Group Over Diversity Reveals a Widening Rift - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-aica-rift-diversity-jobs.html

art criticism diversity history crisis culture economics analysis outlook

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine started in 2008 in response to layoffs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s culture section and now runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)
  • Efforts to revive AICA-USA are continuing. In January, Jasmine Amussen joined the organization’s board to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.
  • The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “It just came down to not having enough money,” said Terence Trouillot, a senior editor at Frieze, a contemporary art magazine . He spent nearly three years on the AICA-USA board, resigning in 2022. He said that initiatives to re-energize the group “were just moving too slowly.”
  • According to Lilly Wei, a longtime AICA-USA board member who recently resigned, the group explored different ways of protecting writers in the industry. There were unrealized plans of turning the organization into a union; others hoped to create a permanent emergency fund to keep financially struggling critics afloat. She said the organization has instead canceled initiatives, including an awards program for the best exhibitions across the country.
  • Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories.
  • “It’s crazy that the ideal job nowadays is producing catalog essays for galleries, which are basically just sales pitches,” Dillon said in a phone interview. “Critical thinking about art is not valued financially.”
  • Noah Dillon, who was on the AICA-USA board until he resigned last year, has been reluctant to recommend that anyone follow his path to become a critic. Not that they could. The graduate program in art writing that he attended at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan also closed during the pandemic.
  • David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who knows about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.”
  • While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking. Over the years, newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald have trimmed critics’ jobs.
  • In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. Its sister publication, Bookforum, was not acquired and ceased operations. Through the pandemic, other outlets have shuttered, including popular blogs run by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as smaller magazines called Astra and Elephant.
  • The need for change in museums was pointed out in the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, published by Artnet News in December, that analyzed more than a decade of data from over 30 cultural institutions. It found that just 11 percent of acquisitions at U.S. museums were by female artists and only 2.2 percent were by Black American artists
  • (National newspapers with art critics on staff include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. )
  • Julia Halperin, one of the study’s organizers, who recently left her position as Artnet’s executive editor, said that the industry has an asymmetric approach to diversity. “The pool of artists is diversifying somewhat, but the pool of staff critics has not,” she said.
  • the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished.
kiraagne

Before Kyle Rittenhouse's Murder Trial, a Debate Over Terms Like 'Victim' - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rittenhouse-trial-victims.html

law bias language

shared by kiraagne on 28 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.
  • Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.
  • Prosecutors say he was a violent vigilante who illegally possessed the rifle and whose actions resulted in chaos and bloodshed.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This week, as Judge Schroeder ruled on a motion by the prosecution, he also said that he would allow the terms “looters” and “rioters” to be used to refer to the men who were shot
  • The experts said the term “victim” can appear prejudicial in a court of law, heavily influencing a jury by presupposing which people have been wronged.
  • State law in Wisconsin allows a person to fire in self-defense if the shooter “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself.”Editors’ PicksTo Save a Swirling Season, Atlanta Turned to Soft ServeThink You Know the 1960s? ‘The Shattering’ Asks You to Think Again.
  • “In a self-defense case, the people who were shot are to some extent on trial,
  • Prosecutors have repeatedly tried to introduce evidence of Mr. Rittenhouse’s associations with the far-right Proud Boys, as well as a cellphone video taken weeks before the shootings in Kenosha in which Mr. Rittenhouse suggested that he wished he had his rifle so he could shoot men leaving a pharmacy. The judge did not allow either as evidence for trial.
  • Thomas Binger, a prosecutor, argued that the judge was creating a “double standard” and said that the words he sought to have prohibited — relating to rioting and other damage — were “as loaded, if not more loaded, than the term ‘victim.’
Javier E

Many Academics Are Eager to Publish in Worthless Journals - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...datory-journals-academics.html

academic journals peer-review scientific science research publishing

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • it’s increasingly clear that many academics know exactly what they’re getting into, which explains why these journals have proliferated despite wide criticism. The relationship is less predator and prey, some experts say, than a new and ugly symbiosis.
  • “When hundreds of thousands of publications appear in predatory journals, it stretches credulity to believe all the authors and universities they work for are victims,” Derek Pyne, an economics professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, wrote in a op-ed published in the Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian newspaper.
  • The journals are giving rise to a wider ecosystem of pseudo science. For the academic who wants to add credentials to a resume, for instance, publishers also hold meetings where, for a hefty fee, you can be listed as a presenter — whether you actually attend the meeting or not.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Many of these journals have names that closely resemble those of established publications, making them easily mistakable. There is the Journal of Economics and Finance, published by Springer, but now also the Journal of Finance and Economics. There is the Journal of Engineering Technology, put out by the American Society for Engineering Education, but now another called the GSTF Journal of Engineering Technology.
  • Predatory journals have few expenses, since they do not seriously review papers that are submitted and they publish only online. They blast emails to academics, inviting them to publish. And the journals often advertise on their websites that they are indexed by Google Scholar. Often that is correct — but Google Scholar does not vet the journals it indexes.
  • The number of such journals has exploded to more than 10,000 in recent years, with nearly as many predatory as legitimate ones. “Predatory publishing is becoming an organized industry,” wrote one group of critics in a paper in Nature
  • Participating in such dubious enterprises carries few risks. Dr. Pyne, who did a study of his colleagues publications, reports that faculty members at his school who got promoted last year had at least four papers in questionable journals. All but one academic in 10 who won a School of Business and Economics award had published papers in these journals. One had 10 such articles.
  • Academics get rewarded with promotions when they stuff their resumes with articles like these, Dr. Pyne concluded. There are few or no adverse consequences — in fact, the rewards for publishing in predatory journals were greater than for publishing in legitimate ones.
  • Some say the academic system bears much of the blame for the rise of predatory journals, demanding publications even from teachers at places without real resources for research and where they may have little time apart from teaching.At Queensborough, faculty members typically teach nine courses per year. At four-year colleges, faculty may teach four to six courses a year.
  • Recently a group of researchers who invented a fake academic: Anna O. Szust. The name in Polish means fraudster. Dr. Szust applied to legitimate and predatory journals asking to be an editor. She supplied a résumé in which her publications and degrees were total fabrications, as were the names of the publishers of the books she said she had contributed to.The legitimate journals rejected her application immediately. But 48 out of 360 questionable journals made her an editor. Four made her editor in chief. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”
anonymous

JAMA Editor Placed on Leave After Deputy's Comments on Racism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ma-bauchner-race-medicine.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • JAMA Editor Placed on Leave After Deputy’s Comments on Racism
  • After a staff member dismissed racism as a problem in medicine on a podcast, a petition signed by thousands demanded a review of editorial processes at the journal.
  • Following controversial comments on racism in medicine made by a deputy editor at JAMA, the editor in chief of the prominent medical journal was placed on administrative leave on Thursday.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “Structural racism is an unfortunate term,” said Dr. Livingston, who is white. “Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help
  • Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”
  • The podcast was promoted with a tweet from the journal that said, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?”
  • The response to both was swift and angry, prompting the journal to take down the podcast and delete the tweet.
  • Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA,
  • The A.M.A.’s email to employees promised that the investigation would probe “
  • Dr. Livingston later resigned.
  • “It’s not just that this podcast is problematic — it’s that there is a long and documented history of institutional racism at JAMA,”
  • “That podcast should never have happened,”
  • The fact that podcast was conceived of, recorded and posted was unconscionable.”
  • “I think it caused an incalculable amount of pain and trauma to Black physicians and patients,” she said. “And I think it’s going to take a long time for the journal to heal that pain.
  • “staff and leadership are overwhelmingly white and economically privileged,” and he committed to reviewing its editorial process.
  • “We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.”
  • how the podcast and associated tweet were developed, reviewed, and ultimately published,” and said that the association had engaged independent investigators to ensure objectivity.
  • The email did not offer a date for conclusion of the investigation.
Javier E

Science and Truth - We're All in It Together - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...h-were-all-in-it-together.html

science truth publishing crowdsourcing comments provisional knowledge

shared by Javier E on 07 May 12 - Cached
  • Almost any article worth reading these days generates some version of this long tail of commentary. Depending on whether they are moderated, these comments can range from blistering flameouts to smart factual corrections to full-on challenges to the very heart of an article’s argument.
  • These days, the comments section of any engaging article is almost as necessary a read as the piece itself — if you want to know how insider experts received the article and how those outsiders processed the new
  • By now, readers understand that the definitive “copy” of any article is no longer the one on paper but the online copy, precisely because it’s the version that’s been read and mauled and annotated by readers.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The print edition of any article is little more than a trophy version, the equivalent of a diploma or certificate of merit — suitable for framing, not much else.
  • We call the fallout to any article the “comments,” but since they are often filled with solid arguments, smart corrections and new facts, the thing needs a nobler name. Maybe “gloss.” In the Middle Ages, students often wrote notes in the margins of well-regarded manuscripts. These glosses, along with other forms of marginalia, took on a life of their own, becoming their own form of knowledge, as important as, say, midrash is to Jewish scriptures. The best glosses were compiled into, of course, glossaries and later published
  • The truth is that every decent article now aspires to become the wiki of its own headline.
  • t any good article that has provoked a real discussion typically comes with a small box of post-publication notes. And, since many magazines are naming the editor of the article as well as the author, the outing of the editor can come with a new duty: writing the bottom note that reviews the emendations to the article and perhaps, most importantly, summarizes the thrust of the discussion. If the writer gains the glory of the writing, the editor can win the credit for chaperoning the best and most provocative pieces.
  • Some may fear that recognizing the commentary of every article will turn every subject into an endless postmodern discussion. But actually, the opposite is true. Recognizing the gloss allows us to pause in the seemingly unending back and forth of contemporary free speech and free inquiry to say, well, for now, this much is true — the ivory-bill still hasn’t been definitively seen since World War II, climate change is happening and caused by mankind, natural selection is the best description of nature’s creative force. Et cetera.
Javier E

Jonah Lehrer plagiarism in Wired.com: An investigation into plagiarism, quotes, and fac... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...tual_inaccuracies_.single.html

Plagiarism Journalism ethics truth values cultural science

shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 12 - Cached
  • I am convinced that Lehrer has a cavalier attitude about truth and falsehood. This shows not only in his attitude toward quotations but in some of the other details of his writing. And a journalist who repeatedly fails to correct errors when they're pointed out is, in my opinion, exhibiting reckless disregard for the truth. It is thus my opinion that Lehrer plagiarized others' work, published inaccurate quotations, printed narrative details that were factually incorrect, and failed to address errors when they were pointed out.
  • Lehrer's transgressions are inexcusable—but I can't help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I'm 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer; he rose to the very top in a flash, and despite having his work published by major media companies, he was    operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.
Javier E

Wikipedia China Becomes Front Line for Views on Language and Culture - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-on-language-and-culture.html

china wikipedia language culture

shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Wikipedia editors, all volunteers, present opposing views on politics, history and traditional Chinese culture — in essence, different versions of China. Compounding the issue are language differences: Mandarin is the official language in mainland China and Taiwan, while the majority in Hong Kong speak Cantonese. But mainland China uses simplified characters, while Taiwan and Hong Kong use traditional script.
  • users across the region have experienced “some form of cultural shock,” which triggers arguments. “Users from different areas have received different education, and have been influenced by different political ideologies,” Mr. Wong said. “We discovered that the things we learned as a kid were totally different from each other.”
  • Today, the site has five settings: simplified Chinese for mainland China; orthodox Chinese for Taiwan; traditional Chinese for Hong Kong; traditional Chinese for Macau; and simplified Chinese for Singapore and Malaysia.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “This software feature could also be seen as an embodiment of Wikipedia’s neutrality principle, in that it brings together editors from different political systems and enables productive discussion and collaboration between them,”
  • most Internet forums have a parochial focus, but that Chinese Wikipedia offers rare opportunities for all Chinese-speaking people to engage in discussion. “There is some form of integration across the region,” he said. “But that does not mean that mainland China assimilates Taiwan or Hong Kong. Every area stands on the same ground.” He pointed out that the flexible language options put all countries on an equal footing. For example, this year Macau was given its own setting, despite having a population of only 500,000.
  • “There was more bickering in the early days, but the discussion matured at a quick pace after 2009,”
  • “When I first joined the Chinese Wikipedia, I was an ‘angry youth,”’ said Wilson Ye, a 17-year-old Wikipedia editor from Shanghai who started writing entries four years ago. “I was furious when I came across terms like Taiwan and the Republic of China. But after more interactions, I understand how people in Taiwan think, and I become much more tolerant.”
  • Isaac Mao, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, attributed the maturation to the fact that more users are learning what Wikipedia is all about. “It all came back to the ‘five principles’ of Wikipedia, including authenticity, accuracy, neutral point of view and the use of references,” Mr. Mao said. “If there are disagreements over management and editing, people can engage in discussion based on these principles. Such atmosphere has been built up in the Chinese Wikipedia community gradually.”
grayton downing

Accused "Fraudster" Heads Two Journals | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36299/title/Accused--Fraudster--Heads-Two-Journals/

journals scientist fraud bias knowledge

shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Dmitry Kuznetsov, a Russian biochemist whose published work has been repeatedly alleged to be fraudulent, is now the chief editor of two science journals. The appointments are raising questions about the scientific integrity of the publications.
  • one of the worst fraud records in the history of science,” said Dan Larhammar, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden who has written about problems in Kuznetsov's work. “That should be a major concern to” the publisher that recruited Kuznetsov as editor-in-chief, he said.
  • “As a result of these claims [by Kuznetsov and colleagues] a couple of students have spent several years of their life on a wild goose chase,” Coey told The Scientist.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • researchers in various fields of study have also voiced their concerns about the quality of Kuznetsov’s research
  • the questions concerning Kuznetsov’s work, researchers who have published in one of the journals he edits, the British Journal of Medicine and Medical Research, report having no abnormal interactions with the editors during the review process. “I found my experience with that journal to be no different than with any other,”
  • Swanson said he has no way to judge the validity of the accusations against Kuznetsov, and that it would be unfair to jump to conclusions. If the allegations are true, however, “it certainly hurts the reputation of their journal, and I suspect they would rectify that problem (again, if there is truth here) fairly quickly. Most reputable researchers would not want to submit to such a journal.”
sissij

Chinese Mistake Satire on Trump for Real News - The New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-trump-media-satire.html

new york times social media language

shared by sissij on 09 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • A frantic President Trump, holding court in a bathrobe, ordered his aides to wrap the White House telephones in tinfoil, several Chinese publications reported this week, citing The New Yorker.
  • Internet readers were puzzled. The state-run news media — and China’s army of censors — are not known for making jokes. Was this for real?
  • Others were more discerning. “This was made up and meant to be funny,” another user said. “Surprising it was treated as news. Editor, could you be more professional?”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It was not the first time that American humorists have unintentionally duped the Chinese news media.
  • sissij on 09 Mar 17
     
    I think this is not that the editors in China are being unprofessional. It is just they are not used to the satire in America. The news style in different country is very different. It reminded me of an online course I took over the winter break about social media. The teacher in that course highlighted that the social media in western culture are not tightly controlled by the government so their language are more personal. The social media in China is tightly controlled by the government so the language it uses is usually very formal and serious. --Sissi (3/9/2017)
Javier E

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters

trans debate nyt objectivity bias

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
sissij

Watch How Casually False Claims are Published: New York Times and Nicholas Lemann Edition - 1 views

theintercept.com/...yt-and-nicholas-lemann-edition

new york times social media bias

shared by sissij on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  •  wrote my favorite sentence about this whole affair, one which I often quoted in my speeches to great audience laughter: “there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation; or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.”
  • demanding that they only publish those which expose information necessary to inform the public debate: precisely because he did not want to destroy NSA programs he believes are justifiable.
  • As is true of most leaks – from the routine to the spectacular – those publishing decisions rested solely in the hands of the media outlets and their teams of reporters, editors and lawyers.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • There have of course been some stories where my calculation of what is not public interest differs from that of reporters, but it is for this precise reason that publication decisions were entrusted to journalists and their editors.
  • it is so often the case that the most influential media outlets publish factually false statements using the most authoritative tones.
  • Ironically, the most controversial Snowden stories – the type his critics cite as the ones that should not have been published because they exposed sensitive national security secrets – were often the ones the NYT itself decided to publish, such as its very controversial exposé on how NSA spied on China’s Huawei.
  • Snowden didn’t decide what stayed secret. The press did.
  • journalist-driven process that determined which documents got published
  • But Snowden never said anything like that.
  • sissij on 13 Jan 17
     
    The reporting on Snowden shows that how bad our new system can be. Although it is arguable that this article can be false as well because we can never know the exact truth except the Snowden himself. Our flaws in logic and perception makes us very vulnerable to bad news. There was time in social media called the "Yellow News". During that time, the news publications weren't taking their responsibility as a guide to the general population. We surely need better news and prevent the era that we publish our news based on its "hotness" instead of accuracy. --Sissi (1/12/2017)
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture news trump

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
Javier E

Facebook's Troubling One-Way Mirror - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-troubling-one-way-mirror.html

facebook psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • If you bothered to read the fine print when you created your Facebook account, you would have noticed just how much of yourself you were giving over to Mark Zuckerberg and his $340 billion social network.
  • In exchange for an admittedly magical level of connectivity, you were giving them your life as content — the right to run ads around video from your daughter’s basketball game; pictures from your off-the-chain birthday party, or an emotional note about your return to health after serious illness. You also gave them the right to use your information to help advertisers market to you
  • at the heart of the relationship is a level of trust and a waiving of privacy that Facebook requires from its users as it pursues its mission to “make the world more open and connected.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • how open is Facebook willing to be in return?
  • not very.
  • that should concern anyone of any political persuasion as Facebook continues to gain influence over the national — and international — conversation
  • Increasingly, those users are spending time on Facebook not only to share personal nuggets with friends, but, for more than 40 percent of American adults, according to Pew Research Center, to stay on top of news
  • It now has an inordinate power to control a good part of the national discussion should it choose to do so, a role it shares with Sili
  • There was the initial statement that Facebook could find “no evidence” supporting the allegations; Facebook said it did not “insert stories artificially” into the Trending list, and that it had “rigorous guidelines” to ensure neutrality. But when journalists like my colleague Farhad Manjoo asked for more details about editorial guidelines, the company declined to discuss them.
  • Only after The Guardian newspaper obtained an old copy of the Trending Topics guidelines did Facebook provide more information, and an up-to-date copy of them. (They showed that humans work with algorithms to shape the lists and introduce headlines on their own under some circumstances, contradicting Facebook’s initial statement, Recode noted.) It was openness by way of a bullet to the foot.
  • a more important issue emerged during the meeting that had been lying beneath the surface, and has been for a while now: the power of the algorithms that determine what goes into individual Facebook pages.
  • “What they have is a disproportionate amount of power, and that’s the real story,” Mr. Carlson told me. “It’s just concentrated in a way you’ve never seen before in media.”
  • What most people don’t realize is that not everything they like or share necessarily gets a prominent place in their friends’ newsfeeds: The Facebook algorithm sends it to those it determines will find it most engaging.
  • For outlets like The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post or The New York Times — for whom Facebook’s audience is vital to growth — any algorithmic change can affect how many people see their journalism.
  • This gives Facebook enormous influence over how newsrooms, almost universally eager for Facebook exposure, make decisions and money. Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, called this a “profound and alarming” development in a column in The New Statesman last week.
  • , Facebook declines to talk in great detail about its algorithms, noting that it does not want to make it easy to game its system. That system, don’t forget, is devised to keep people on Facebook by giving them what they want
Javier E

Even the Editor of Facebook's Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy - Adrienne LaFrance - Th... - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373649

ethics facebook mood study manipulation research

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • "A lot of the regulation of research ethics hinges on government supported research, and of course Facebook's research is not government supported, so they're not obligated by any laws or regulations to abide by the standards,"
  • many universities and research institutions and even for-profit companies use the Common Rule as a guideline anyway. It's voluntary. You could imagine if you were a drug company, you'd want to be able to say you'd done the research ethically because the backlash would be just huge otherwise."
  • The backlash, in this case, seems tied directly to the sense that Facebook manipulated people—used them as guinea pigs—without their knowledge, and in a setting where that kind of manipulation feels intimate
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the idea that Facebook is altering what you see to find out if it can make you feel happy or sad seems in some ways cruel.
  • "I think part of what's disturbing for some people about this particular research is you think of your News Feed as something personal. I had not seen before, personally, something in which the researchers had the cooperation of Facebook to manipulate people
  • I think it's an open ethical question. It's ethically okay from the regulations perspective, but ethics are kind of social decisions. There's not an absolute answer. And so the level of outrage that appears to be happening suggests that maybe it shouldn't have been done...I'm still thinking about it and I'm a little creeped out, too."
Javier E

Conflict Over Trump Forces Out an Opinion Editor at The Wall Street Journal - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...516318

wsj trump partisan crisis

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • According to a source close to Lasswell, the relationship between Lasswell and Gigot broke down in June when Gigot blocked Lasswell from publishing op-eds critical of Trump’s business practices and which raised questions about his alleged ties to Mafia figures. Lasswell asked Gigot for a book leave for the remainder of the election. Gigot, who had been critical of Trump, took a “sudden turn” on the candidate, the source said.
  • When Lasswell reached out to Gigot after the election about coming back to the paper in the new year, the source said, there was a period of weeks of silence before Gigot fired him over the phone.
  • “People really, really liked and respected Mark … Some were quite disappointed to see how he was treated,” the source said. “It’s clear that there’s a divide at the Journal [over Trump], and I think that this is indicative of a larger sort of tension that’s going on there right now.”
Javier E

Rise in Scientific Journal Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-prompts-calls-for-reform.html

science ethics methods cheating bias reseach results

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 12 - Cached
  • before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.
  • he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.
  • Members of the committee agreed with their assessment. “I think this is really coming to a head,” said Dr. Roberta B. Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health. And Dr. David Korn of Harvard Medical School agreed that “there are problems all through the system.”
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • science has changed in some worrying ways in recent decades — especially biomedical research, which consumes a larger and larger share of government science spending.
  • the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent.
  • because journals are now online, bad papers are simply reaching a wider audience, making it more likely that errors will be spotted.
  • The National Institutes of Health accepts a much lower percentage of grant applications today than in earlier decades. At the same time, many universities expect scientists to draw an increasing part of their salaries from grants, and these pressures have influenced how scientists are promoted.
  • Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall looked at the rate of retractions in 17 journals from 2001 to 2010 and compared it with the journals’ “impact factor,” a score based on how often their papers are cited by scientists. The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate.
  • Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent.
  • Yet labs continue to have an incentive to take on lots of graduate students to produce more research. “I refer to it as a pyramid scheme,
  • In such an environment, a high-profile paper can mean the difference between a career in science or leaving the field. “It’s becoming the price of admission,”
  • To survive professionally, scientists feel the need to publish as many papers as possible, and to get them into high-profile journals. And sometimes they cut corners or even commit misconduct to get ther
  • “What people do is they count papers, and they look at the prestige of the journal in which the research is published, and they see how may grant dollars scientists have, and if they don’t have funding, they don’t get promoted,” Dr. Fang said. “It’s not about the quality of the research.”
  • Dr. Ness likens scientists today to small-business owners, rather than people trying to satisfy their curiosity about how the world works. “You’re marketing and selling to other scientists,” she said. “To the degree you can market and sell your products better, you’re creating the revenue stream to fund your enterprise.”
  • Universities want to attract successful scientists, and so they have erected a glut of science buildings, Dr. Stephan said. Some universities have gone into debt, betting that the flow of grant money will eventually pay off the loans.
  • “You can’t afford to fail, to have your hypothesis disproven,” Dr. Fang said. “It’s a small minority of scientists who engage in frank misconduct. It’s a much more insidious thing that you feel compelled to put the best face on everything.”
  • , Dr. Stephan points out that a number of countries — including China, South Korea and Turkey — now offer cash rewards to scientists who get papers into high-profile journals.
  • To change the system, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall say, start by giving graduate students a better understanding of science’s ground rules — what Dr. Casadevall calls “the science of how you know what you know.”
  • They would also move away from the winner-take-all system, in which grants are concentrated among a small fraction of scientists. One way to do that may be to put a cap on the grants any one lab can receive.
  • Such a shift would require scientists to surrender some of their most cherished practices — the priority rule, for example, which gives all the credit for a scientific discovery to whoever publishes results first.
  • To ease such cutthroat competition, the two editors would also change the rules for scientific prizes and would have universities take collaboration into account when they decide on promotions.
  • Even scientists who are sympathetic to the idea of fundamental change are skeptical that it will happen any time soon. “I don’t think they have much chance of changing what they’re talking about,” said Dr. Korn, of Harvard.
  • “When our generation goes away, where is the new generation going to be?” he asked. “All the scientists I know are so anxious about their funding that they don’t make inspiring role models. I heard it from my own kids, who went into art and music respectively. They said, ‘You know, we see you, and you don’t look very happy.’ ”
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