I had the opposite experience. I read an article I know a lot about once and, although factually correct, the whole thing was wrong because of what they left out and because of the smug 1st world conclusions they drew as a result. I don't know if they left out those facts because it didn't fit with the tone of the magazine of if they failed to do their research properly. I came to the conclusion that it was the former and from that point on I just couldn't trust anything I read from that magazine. They have this way of making the reader feel smug about the knowledge that they are picking up from the magazine without ever challenging the reader's core beliefs. What I am saying is that the magazine is never disagreeable for the reader. It's like only having friends who share your world view. How much are you missing out by not extending your reach?
Doesn't seem to be a reasonable stance to label an entire publication to be untrustable just because you feel it left out from an otherwise factual and subjective data point that you feel strongly about. If sounds a lot like you wanted an echo chamber but as you didn't experienced a specific echo then you just preferred to move onward.
Cherry picking facts that strengthen only one side of an argument is as bad, or even worse than getting the facts wrong. "Wrong facts" are easily caught. Facts that are omitted or those that are presented without context are only discernible to someone who knows the subject, and otherwise appears balanced and well argued to anyone who isn't an expert.
Pointing out the omission of facts isn't "wanting an echo chamber".
> I don't know if they left out those facts because it didn't fit with the tone of the magazine of if they failed to do their research properly
> I came to the conclusion that it was the former
OP is explicit that they left out facts that didn't "fit the tone of their magazine". That's pretty much the definition of cherry picking. And leaving out facts always has the advantage of falling back on plausible deniability.
I don’t think it’s an echo chamber to tell both sides of a story. Maybe you can’t tell every possible fact from every viewpoint but deliberate exclusion can be just as bad as false facts. NYT hides one side of the story because it doesn’t fit their editorial viewpoint. It would be better solved to get more political diversity into the news room.
> I don’t think it’s an echo chamber to tell both sides of a story.
But that was not OP's complain. The OP just feels strongly about an issue, and just because a publication known for publishing terse and non-in-depth but otherwise correct articles managed to not cover a detail the OP's feels strongly about... That doesn't mean it is biased, doesn't it?
In the end,if you think about it, the OP is just complaining that the publication doesn't share his personal bias, and the OP feels so strongly and is so adamant in pushing his personal world view that a single slip in a single article published in a single edition is interpreted as an offense so aggravating that he accuses the whole publication of not being trusted.
This alone says more about the accusers than the target of these baseless accusations.
