5 Ways the New York Times Fails

Sins of Modern Journalism at the Times and other Outlets

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The New York Times is the gold standard of journalism. This acclaimed organization has been reporting the news for over 160 years, breaking huge stories, and winning scores of Pulitzer prizes in the process. And yet, despite the amazing work that the paper did and continues to do, it’s pretty far from perfect. Here are a few reasons why New York Times stories are sometimes lazy or wrong or both.

Failure 1 — Generalizing from Low Sample Sizes (the N=1 problem)

It’s unfair to expect reporters to be expert statisticians, but even a layman should know that you can’t extrapolate from a single data point. And yet it happens all the time in Times reporting. Just last week there was an article, (based on a single source) which uncritically parroted the claim that Google makes 4.7 billion dollars a year from Google News. As the Columbia Journalism Review points out, this claim itself was based on a single gross estimate that a Google exec made back in 2008. That 4.7 billion number is entirely fiction.

That same week another Times story discussed how YouTube could radicalize young viewers with conservative propaganda. This would be a valid and interesting story, except that it was based…