<story><title>My Resignation from the Intercept</title><url>https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IfOnlyYouKnew</author><text>That one factoid, namely that two of their writers were of the wrong persuasion almost 20 years ago, seems to be the extend of criticism people can actually come up with when put on the spot. Even though they had plenty of opposition against the war on staff and on paper, and very few of their readers were likely to change their opinion on that topic. And, not being having the presidency and Congress at that point not being neccessary for a declaration of war, their mostly Democratic audience had little to no influence on events.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party, which &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; made the decision to invade Iraq. And also to lie to the world, its citizens, and, yes, those people at the Times that were naive enough to believe them.</text></item><item><author>jerry1979</author><text>NYT also helped sell America into Iraq.</text></item><item><author>dmix</author><text>&amp;gt; Mind you I&amp;#x27;m not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now&lt;p&gt;WaPo and NYT aren&amp;#x27;t trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website.&lt;p&gt;WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it&amp;#x27;s not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>This is why the Economist, FT and the WSJ still have a somewhat positive reputation. They&amp;#x27;re expensive and tend to write about things that are important, not sensational.&lt;p&gt;All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I&amp;#x27;m not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it&amp;#x27;s also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we&amp;#x27;re going to get are &amp;quot;tabloids for politics&amp;quot; - and that is what we see. It&amp;#x27;s just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening.&lt;p&gt;Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the &amp;quot;opposite side&amp;quot; media as tabloid-like, it&amp;#x27;s been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it&amp;#x27;s still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam&amp;#x27;s Razor to their own.&lt;p&gt;This does mean that there&amp;#x27;s a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it&amp;#x27;s critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jkhdigital</author><text>The Bush administration offered the choice, and a bipartisan majority of congress took it. No need to invoke tribalism and blame an impersonal mass of people--we know the names of the specific individuals involved.</text></comment>
<story><title>My Resignation from the Intercept</title><url>https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IfOnlyYouKnew</author><text>That one factoid, namely that two of their writers were of the wrong persuasion almost 20 years ago, seems to be the extend of criticism people can actually come up with when put on the spot. Even though they had plenty of opposition against the war on staff and on paper, and very few of their readers were likely to change their opinion on that topic. And, not being having the presidency and Congress at that point not being neccessary for a declaration of war, their mostly Democratic audience had little to no influence on events.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party, which &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; made the decision to invade Iraq. And also to lie to the world, its citizens, and, yes, those people at the Times that were naive enough to believe them.</text></item><item><author>jerry1979</author><text>NYT also helped sell America into Iraq.</text></item><item><author>dmix</author><text>&amp;gt; Mind you I&amp;#x27;m not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now&lt;p&gt;WaPo and NYT aren&amp;#x27;t trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website.&lt;p&gt;WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it&amp;#x27;s not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>This is why the Economist, FT and the WSJ still have a somewhat positive reputation. They&amp;#x27;re expensive and tend to write about things that are important, not sensational.&lt;p&gt;All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I&amp;#x27;m not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it&amp;#x27;s also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we&amp;#x27;re going to get are &amp;quot;tabloids for politics&amp;quot; - and that is what we see. It&amp;#x27;s just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening.&lt;p&gt;Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the &amp;quot;opposite side&amp;quot; media as tabloid-like, it&amp;#x27;s been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it&amp;#x27;s still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam&amp;#x27;s Razor to their own.&lt;p&gt;This does mean that there&amp;#x27;s a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it&amp;#x27;s critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brigandish</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party&lt;p&gt;2008 brought a Democrat president along with an increased Democrat majority in both houses, so if they weren&amp;#x27;t faulted at the time (and they were) then they were certainly faulted just a few years later.</text></comment>