This is frustrating. NYTimes is supposed to be the paper of record. But you have to do simple fact checking on puff pieces like this one.
Comments like this mean that editors likely knew Manjoo wasn’t offline, but allowed the piece because somehow they thought that 15 tweets/day was offline.
So they are either liars who misled, or even more worrisome, aren’t able to discern reality enough that saying “I unplugged from Twitter” is compatible with daily tweeting.
It would have been so easy to add some editorial note on what the author meant by unplugging so users weren’t misled.
It is frustrating because as a consumer, I would like an objective source of news. Not to pick the best worldview I like and let them filter reality for me.
It’s also annoying because the fake news people will constantly point out these frequent inaccuracies in even reputable papers.
I'm not sure anyone here is reading the actual articles, or even the titles.
This story has the headline, "The Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the internet. Except he didn’t".
But that's not what Manjoo claimed at all. He never said he was offline. The title of the Times article is "For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned." The story isn't about being disconnected from the internet, it is about getting the news the next day, in print, instead of from nytimes.com, news alerts, twitter posts, etc.
It's not a question of whether he tweeted, it is a question of where he got his news.
You and Manjoo are presenting a straw man. No one is accusing him of lying about being disconnected from the Internet. The criticism is that he explicitly used the word “unplugged” in relation to Twitter. Furthermore, there’s a paragraph in which he describes what he didn’t give up — which included podcasts and email newsletters. It takes an act of willful obfuscation to not have added something about him checking Twitter throughout the day. It doesn’t help his case that he tweeted news-related Twitter things, such as telling people to read some thread about Sean Hannity.
Comments like this mean that editors likely knew Manjoo wasn’t offline, but allowed the piece because somehow they thought that 15 tweets/day was offline.
So they are either liars who misled, or even more worrisome, aren’t able to discern reality enough that saying “I unplugged from Twitter” is compatible with daily tweeting.
It would have been so easy to add some editorial note on what the author meant by unplugging so users weren’t misled.
It is frustrating because as a consumer, I would like an objective source of news. Not to pick the best worldview I like and let them filter reality for me.
It’s also annoying because the fake news people will constantly point out these frequent inaccuracies in even reputable papers.