<story><title>The Most Common Error in Media Coverage of the Google Memo</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-most-common-error-in-coverage-of-the-google-memo/536181/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Chardok</author><text>Regardless on your opinions of the memo, this article nails it right on the head; Gizmodo and other major news outlets handled this &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; irresponsibly, posting their version that had no citations, and leading the reader, even at the very beginning, into forming the opinion that this was simply a guy being &amp;quot;anti-diversity&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Whatever your thoughts on the subject are, it needs to be pointed out that this type of journalism is absolutely &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; neutral (even though they will swear up and down that they are) and should be, at the very least, condemned for doing so. This is and will be an increasingly difficult problem, especially when people just read a headline and a summary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spookyuser</author><text>So true, I thought the last paragraph of the article was particularly apt.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;When journalistic institutions widely publicize material of this sort, only to abdicate the vital work of rigorously addressing its substance, they make its least plausible claims more likely to be normalized. They leave the project of assessing its merits and flaws to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other venues where the loudest voices tend to prevail, instead of offering their own careful reporting and expert analysis.&lt;p&gt;I buy this point so much because after reading about the controversy on the crazy 1000 comment thread here on HN and the other threads on reddit, there was no top level comment that made the same well reasoned claims this very article did, which IMO is so far the best I have read about the whole debacle. This is what journalists doing their job looks like.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Most Common Error in Media Coverage of the Google Memo</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-most-common-error-in-coverage-of-the-google-memo/536181/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Chardok</author><text>Regardless on your opinions of the memo, this article nails it right on the head; Gizmodo and other major news outlets handled this &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; irresponsibly, posting their version that had no citations, and leading the reader, even at the very beginning, into forming the opinion that this was simply a guy being &amp;quot;anti-diversity&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Whatever your thoughts on the subject are, it needs to be pointed out that this type of journalism is absolutely &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; neutral (even though they will swear up and down that they are) and should be, at the very least, condemned for doing so. This is and will be an increasingly difficult problem, especially when people just read a headline and a summary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moxious</author><text>I found this entire row to be just depressing.   Earlier today there&amp;#x27;s a medium post about a guy who won&amp;#x27;t read the memo -- absolutely refuses -- because he doesn&amp;#x27;t want this &amp;quot;anti-diversity&amp;quot; message polluting him.&lt;p&gt;This, when one of the memo&amp;#x27;s explicit points was about excessive dogma around the issue, and inability to have an open and honest conversation about it.  The opposition isn&amp;#x27;t all shrill politically correct authoritarians, but some of them really do come off that way.</text></comment>