The New York Times retells stories that have appeared elsewhere without crediting the original sources

Palko discusses a recent political story that was pretty much ignored by the New York Times until it reached a level of news saturation that they suddenly decided to give it some coverage: “At that point, the paper jumps in, and afterwards tries to retcon the timeline to make it look like they were the ones who broke the story all along.”

This reminds me of an earlier story he shared about the NYT ripping off another news organization and not giving credit. That one was an article published in 2023 in the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail, “A hospital’s mistake left two men estranged from their heritages. Now they fight for answers,” which was retold by the Times six months later in an article, “Switched at Birth, Two Canadians Discover Their Roots at 67.”

That Canadian thing was annoying, but particularly repulsive was the way the Times reporters congratulated each other about it:

“This is an incredible story, which was brilliantly reported by @onishinyt. Thanks to @jeevanvasagar for bringing it to our attention on The News Meeting.”

“Times reporter ⁦@onishinyt is responsible for more extraordinary stories than any other journalist I can think of. The guy is an absolute legend.”

“A remarkable, very moving story of two Canadian men, one Métis (half French, half Indigenous Canadian) who discovered aged 67 that they had been switched at birth. Beautiful writing by @onishinyt for @NYTimes”

It’s indeed a very moving story, and I guess “⁦@onishinyt,” that “absolute legend,” wrote it beautifully. And thanks to “@jeevanvasagar” for “bringing it to our attention.” I guess “@jeevanvasagar” has the “scrape the Canadian media for interesting stories” beat in the Times newsroom.

To be fair, the NYT story contained original reporting. I just think it does a disservice to readers, as well as the reporter of the original story, to hide the source. And it’s obnoxious as hell to go on social media promoting the Times version without even once crediting the Globe and Mail or the original reporting on the story.

A general problem with the conventions of journalism

I wonder if part of the problem is the conventions of journalism, not just the Times. In the news business, the convention is that everything being reported is “news,” that is, new. So if you run a story, you have to bring out a new element to it, or report some new development or some new angle, or you need to pretend you broke the story yourself. You can’t just openly re-tell a story from somewhere else.

I’ve noticed this not just in the newspaper but also in books and podcasts, that when they write about a story, they just tell it straight up, without ever acknowledging whatever was the original source. Even the legendary BBC does this! Sometimes I can find the original source by googling the details, and I just about always feel that the book or podcast would be stronger had they talked about how the story first came to light.

A different problem with the conventions of academic writing

An analogy that might be helpful here is to compare with the conventions of academic research writing. A research paper (as distinguished from a review article) is supposed to present new, important, and surprising results. Even when the results are not new, you are supposed to present them as such, and this leads to distortion in the writing. Not the same distortion as in journalism–in academia, unlike journalism, you are supposed to cite previous work–but a different distortion, whereby claims are inflated and evidence that goes against the claims in the paper is discounted. If you have data of any kind of complexity, there will be some evidence pointing away from your main conclusion, and exclusion or downplaying this evidence is a form of bias in reporting.

Summary

These conventions of news reporting and academic writing are different–in the news, citations to previous sources are avoided, while in academia they are encouraged–but both media have the bias that everything’s supposed to be new and special.

In the news media, the resulting problem is that important stories don’t get followed up when unless there is a series of news hooks, or conversely that old news is presented as new. In scientific research, the problem is that random patterns in data are presented as important discoveries with general implications.

And then the defensiveness comes in: for the news media, this is the practice of not recognizing earlier reporting; for science, it’s when people grab on to a claim and don’t let go, even in the face of statistical analyses explaining how their results are consistent with noise.