> In a 2016 interview with PEOPLE, Nick spoke about his years-long struggle with drug addiction, which began in his early teens and eventually left him living on the streets. He said he cycled in and out of rehab beginning around age 15, but as his addiction escalated, he drifted farther from home and spent significant stretches homeless in multiple states.
Rob Reiner directed a movie from a semi-autobiographical script his son co-wrote a few years ago. Hard to imagine many things worse than going through the pain of having a kid who seemed lost, getting him back, and then whatever must have been going on more recently that apparently led to this.
The ~1/3 substance use figure holds up (31% regular meth use, 24% report current substance-related problems). But the study found roughly equal proportions whose drug use decreased, stayed the same, or increased during homelessness. Many explicitly reported using to cope with being homeless, not the reverse.
On whether money helps: 89% cited housing costs as the primary barrier to exiting homelessness. When asked what would have prevented homelessness, 90% said a Housing Choice Voucher, 82% said a one-time $5-10K payment. Median income in the 6 months before homelessness was $960/month.
The severe-mental-illness-plus-addiction cases like the family member mentioned exist in the data, but the study suggests they're the minority. 75% of participants lost housing in the same county they're now homeless in. 90% lost their last housing in California. These are mostly Californians who got priced out.
[1] https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...
So, if somebody is inside of the house, we definitely want to try to keep them inside of the house. I also agree with your contention that when somebody hits the streets, they actually turn the drugs. And I believe the evidence points toward the ideas of this being a system That doesn't have a reverse gear on the car. If you keep somebody in the house, they won't go homeless. But if you give homeless a house or lodging, it doesn't return them back to the original function.
But one of the really interesting facts to me, which is in the study that you linked, but also in the other studies that I've red covering the same type of survey data, is almost never highlighted.
When you actually dig into the survey data, what you find out is that there is a radical problem with under employment. So let's do that math on the median monthly household income. I do understand it is a medium number, but it will give us a starting point to think about at least 50% of the individuals that are homeless.
Your study reports a median monthly household income of 960 dollars in the six months before homelessness. If that entire amount came from a single worker earning around the California statewide minimum wage at that time (about 14–15 dollars per hour in 2021–2022, ignoring higher local ordinances), that would correspond to roughly:
- 960 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 69 hours per month, or about 16 hours per week. - 960 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 64 hours per month, or about 15 hours per week.
For leaseholders at 1,400 dollars per month, the same rough calculation gives:
- 1,400 dollars ÷ 14 dollars/hour ≈ 100 hours per month ≈ 23 hours per week. - 1,400 dollars ÷ 15 dollars/hour ≈ 93 hours per month ≈ 21–22 hours per week.
We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.
0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1MH1V (Real Median Household Income vs Median Sales Price of Houses Sold)
However, I think it's intuitively obvious that there is a social contract that people should be expected to work a 40-hour work week. And when we find they can't work a 40-hour work week, and then they are homeless, this would appear to me to be a problem. Feel free to tell me why you would think this would not be a problem.
In your reply to me, your way of dealing with the job issue is to simply take what you initially thought and provide yet one more graph. However, this meaningfully doesn't add anything to the conversation because I already stated that it is clear that there is a correlation between housing and homeless.
As I stated, I'm familiar with Gregg Colburn, who has a methodology which goes well beyond simply doing a Fred graph. In his methodology he basically takes a look at different Geos and the different lodging cost in those geos and then he wraps it back into homelessness. There is no doubt when housing becomes more expensive, people find themselves out on the street.
I already have in my prior comment:
>> You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
In other words, your logic is:
Assume rent should be this amount -> subtract last paycheck to arrive at difference -> assume hourly wages should be this amount -> divide paycheck difference by hourly wage -> assume the result is the number of hours unavailable for work -> assume lack of hours is the cause for inability to live in a home
Note how many assumptions there are. Some questions that may disqualify any chain of this reasoning:
* How much is the median rent in places where a majority of this population lives? Is it potentially higher where they were living?
* Has the rent to income ratio changed at all, especially in their location?
* Were the majority of these individuals making minimum wage before? Could they have been working gigs for less or more?
* Are the lack of “hours” worked really due to lack of work and not another factor (e.g. ability to work, transportation, skill, etc.)?
* How much is this population spending on other costs that have taken precedence over living in a house? Has that changed at all?
With all that said, a stretch is not implausible. In reality, there is no smoking gun, only a myriad of contributing factors, different for each individual.
If you dig into the details, you'll actually find out that all of your assumptions are spoken about in terms of coming out with a reasonable amount of hours worth inside a California based upon the survey data from this research. The detailed report includes the following:
Median monthly household income in the six months before homelessness: $960 (all participants), $950 for non‑leaseholders, $1,400 for leaseholders. State the obvious if the weighted average is 960 and you have two groups, you can run the math to show that the non-lease holders were 98% of the sample.
Why we do want to think about Least Holders in reality is the renters where 98% of the problems exist. This is a clear application of the Pareto Principle, and so we should look at renters as the core of the homeless issue.
Median monthly housing cost: $200 for non‑leaseholders (0 for many), $700 for leaseholders. Of non-leaseholders, 43% were not paying any rent; among those who reported paying anything, the median monthly rent was $450.
In essence, if you look at the details you'll see where you're assuming are a lot of assumptions are actually somewhat addressed by the detailed report. Unfortunately, I'm going to suggest the detailed report is pretty shabby in terms of forcing somebody to dig out a lot of information which they should offer in some sort of a downloadable table for analysis.
Computationally, we can therefore figure out the minimal amount of hours these people must have been working based on the fact that they must have made at least minimum wage in the state of California.
There's not a lot of assumptions in this. It's based upon the detailed survey data and utilizing California minimal wage, which is where the survey was taken. The issue is digging into the details and computationally extracting information and assumptions that is not blinded by our own biases walking into something.
Again, there is excellent work out of University of Washington to suggest that higher housing costs lends itself toward greater rates of homelessness. That's not under debate here. The issue is from the survey data, it's very reasonable to do some basic computation to put some parameters around the data. It's not assumption, it's critical thinking.
But thank you for actually some very insightful comments and actually digging into the details. And I do agree with your contention that there is some sort of circular system issue going on here (ala Jay Forrester out of MIT).
It is pretty interesting. While you reported everything perfectly, I'll just paste in the detailed section at the bottom as it does add a little more detail and really does give us something to think about. FDR in 1944 suggested that there should be a second bill of rights. In many ways I am attracted to his framework. In his second bill of rights, the very first one was "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation."
It strikes me that having gainful employment in which you feel like you are contributing in some method to a society is incredibly foundational to good mental health. I think FDR recognized this and I don't think he was thinking about communism. I think he was indicating that we need to find worth for individuals. Of course, with World War II and his health issues, the somehow seemed to go by the side.
This is not somebody telling somebody on the street to get a job. It's a question of how do we enable people to get a job? And I believe if there is an opportunity for the government to spend tax dollars, it may be in incentivizing employers to take these individuals and be creative in how they employ them for direct benefits. It's hard for me to imagine that there isn't some economic way of incentivizing business to show entrepreneurship if we incentivize them correctly.
This doesn't mean that you don't figure out how to solve housing. It simply means that we think about things systemically.
"Participants noted substantial disconnection from labor markets, but many were looking for work.
Some of the disconnection may have been related to the lack of job opportunities during the pandemic, although participants did report that their age, disability, lack of transportation, and lack of housing interfered with their ability to work. Only 18% reported income from jobs (8% reported any income from formal employment and 11% from informal employment). Seventy percent reported at least a two-year gap since working 20 hours or more weekly. Of all participants, 44% were looking for employment; among those younger than 62 and without a disability, 55% were."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhy3zI3wvAo
The vast majority (that accepted accommodation) destroyed the spaces and eventually fled back to the streets. It is generally not productive to simply rehome all the homeless en mass. There are first order drug abuse and mental illness issues that cannot be ignored.
The number of people that became homeless due to a bad trip may be non-zero but it had to be really close. That's just not a realistic scenario.
non sequitur
perhaps more importantly, ascribing legal treatment for a class of people ("homeless") based on this particular case is also unwise, at the least
note: this is not commentary on drug legalization, just commentary that "community efforts" were more involved in addressing negative social externalities than they are now - for better or for worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...
Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain how you determined this. Did you for instance survey homeless people in a number of US cities? Or perhaps you used some other method.
Also, People is credible for this type of reporting. They're owned by a major company, IAC, and they don't have a history of reckless reporting or shady practices like catch-and-kill a la the National Enquirer. They likely just have sources that other news outlets don't.
TIL that the 'National Enquirer' was the most reliable news source during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. According to a Harvard law professor who gave the media an overall failing grade, the 'Enquirer' was the only publication that thoroughly followed every rumor and talked to every witness. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6n1kz5/til_th...>
I'm sorry, but it's People. I'm not a celeb gossip, but I don't recall them running bs headlines on this level. C'mon.
I've been following it on my own news app as well, just didn't share a link to it as I thought it might be a bit ghoulish to piggyback on an unspeakably tragic celebrity death for a bit of self-promotion.
Also, frustrating that people have somehow landed in a place where they either trust nothing or trust everything, with no ability to calibrate based on the actual track record and incentive structure of the source. People magazine attributing something to "multiple sources" in a case where they, and their billionaire owner Barry Diller, would face massive defamation liability if wrong is categorically different from, say, an anonymous Reddit post or a tweet.
The LAPD "no person of interest" thing is also just standard procedure. Cops don't publicly name suspects until charges are filed. Totally normal that the official process is slower than journalism.
I don't read celebrity news, how should I know People's track record?
Update: Looks like the parent post has been flagged. I thought that might happen (or the author might edit it) which is why I quoted the original.
They could simply name their source(s) if they wanted to be taken as credible. I don't think a brand has any inherent value and hasn't for many decades. The nytimes helped cheney launder fraudulent evidence for the invasion of iraq for chrissake.
Fwiw, maybe it is true. But reliable truth sailed a long time ago.
They'll reveal those sources to a judge if it comes to it. They won't reveal them to the public because nobody wants to have their name attached to something like this.
It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
There's no real advantage to accepting PEOPLE's claim at this point. It's possibly wrong, and we'll probably know the truth in good time.
Meanwhile, actual newsrooms did reasonable work: the SF Standard put nine reporters on it and ultimately broke the real story. Other local outlets pushed back on whether SF crime was as "horrific" as tech execs claimed.
Most importantly: speculating about the type of crime (random vs. targeted) isn't defamation. Naming a specific living person as a killer is. That's a categorically different level of legal exposure, which is why outlets don't do it unless they're confident in their sourcing. If this kind of reckless misattribution happened as often as people here seem to imply, defamation lawyers would be a lot busier and these outlets would be out of business.
> It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
I wouldn't have felt bad if it did turn out to be wrong, I certainly left room open for doubt. But what I know about media outlets is they aren't often willing to put themselves in positions where they could get sued into oblivion.
There are obvious exceptions, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Candice Owens, but I think those exceptions have a level of insanity that powers their ability to make wild accusations without evidence.
Not if they want sources again in the future. Assuming they have credible sources, it will prove them correct in due course. The vast majority of people aren’t grading news outlets on a minute-by-minute basis like this: if they read in People first it was his son, and two weeks from now it’s his son, they’re going to credit People with being correct and where they learned it first.
And if People burned the sources who told them this, industry people would remember that, too.
Then don't report it. Nothing about this story is so worth reporting on.
> they’re going to credit People with being correct and where they learned it first.
All credibility goes to the journalist. People is just a brand that hires journalists of a wide variety of credibility, like any publisher.
That's not how any of this works. Publications have editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and legal review. A story like this doesn't get published because one reporter decides to hit "post." It goes through layers of institutional vetting. An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
And "wide variety of credibility"... what? Do you think major outlets just hire random people off the street and let them publish whatever? There are hiring standards, editors, and layers of review. The whole point of a professional newsroom is to ensure a baseline of credibility across the organization.
Seems like you've reverse-engineered the Substack model, where credibility really does rest with the individual writer, and mistakenly applied it to all of journalism. But that's not how legacy media works. The institution serves as a filter, which is exactly why it matters who's publishing.
This certainly a popular narrative, but... C'mon, there isn't a single publication in existence that is inherently trustworthy because of "institutional vetting". The journalist is the entity that can actually build trust, and that "institutional vetting" can only detract from it.
> An individual blogger has the same legal liability in theory, but they don't have lawyers vetting their posts, aren't seen as worth suing, and may not even know the relevant law. A major publication has both the resources and the knowledge to be careful and the deep pockets that make them an attractive target if they're not.
This is also another easy way of saying "capital regularly determines what headlines are considered credible". That is not the same thing as actual credibility. Have you never read Manufacturing Consent?
Granted, I don't know why capital would care in this case. But the idea that "institutional integrity" is anything but a liability is ridiculous.
The propaganda model is explicitly not "capital determines what headlines are credible." Chomsky and Herman go out of their way to distinguish their structural critique from the crude conspiracy-theory version where owners call up editors and dictate coverage. That's the strawman critics use to dismiss them.
The five filters work through hiring practices, sourcing norms, resource allocation, advertising pressure, and ideological assumptions - not direct commands from capital. The bias is emergent and structural, not dictated. Chomsky makes this point repeatedly because he knows the "rich people control the news" framing is both wrong and easy to dismiss.
It's also not a general theory that institutional journalism can't accurately report facts. Chomsky cites mainstream sources constantly in his own work - he's not arguing the New York Times can't report that a building burned down.
Applying the propaganda model to whether People magazine can accurately report on a celebrity homicide is a stretch, to put it mildly. You've taken a sophisticated structural critique and flattened it into "all institutional journalism is fake, trust nothing."
That's a telltale sign of a news organization that doesn't have access to backroom sources.
There was like "submarine expert number 2, name redacted" and in expert 2's testimony he said something like "you may recall from my film, Titanic, that..." and I mean it could be anyone or maybe is definitely James Cameron
It seems much more likely that they had identified them, but they hadn't gone through the full set of procedures (notifying family members, etc.) that are required before officially releasing names.
In any case, tragically, their daughter lived across the street and found them.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/director-rob-re...
Maybe the cops were reading People in between scarfing down donuts and chain-smoking Marlboros.
Also worth considering that Rob Reiner might have played his part in the roots of Nick's troubles ... after all Rob was his father and the drug problems started when he was still a child.
Yes, you can be attentive and engaged, ensure they're mentored and guided, are given discipline and instruction, etc. But they're still autonomous units that are going to do what the fuck they want to do.
Of course there are cases of abuse that can damage a child but that should not be a base assumption in this case (his other children appear to be fine).
This isn't to say that we don't all bear responsibility for our conduct as best we can, but sometimes it's way more than that. It's like accusing a schizophrenic of not trying hard enough to "be normal".
I hope they meant that the military could give them the discipline and structure their parents were unable to.
Of course it depends on what military we're talking here, considering the situation in the world today.
Spinal Tap
The Princess Bride
When Harry Met Sally
Sleepless in Seattle
Stand By Me
etc
A great loss, RIP
And he was quite excellent in The Wolf of Wall Street (playing I think Leonardo's father?)
Very sad development.
Amazing how many classics he worked on throughout his career.
Talking about Rob Reiner:
https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/people/rob-reiner?c...
https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/rob-rein...
Rob Reiner: The 60 Minutes Interview (2 months ago)
Really sad end to a great career and as far as I could tell, a decent human being.
I loved the original but its pacing wasn’t all that great. I also felt II had better cohesion too.
Spielberg is an apt comparison.
https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/g-s1-87790/fresh-air-...
It's a crowdsourced home-movie version produced by dozens of actors in the midst of pandemic lockdown, recording on their phones and using home made props. The actors rotate through the individual roles so you get a real range of performances. I found it delightful.
Worth checking out the opening scene to get a sense of it
It’s got a framing and woven-in narrative of the author stand-in tracking down this book his dad read him, discovering it was mostly awful, dry crap, and editing it down (and translating it) to a “the good parts” version like his dad read to him. The (kinda pathetic and melancholy) adult story going on is interesting to an adult reader, and… creates the opportunity to read the actual novel with a “the good parts” approach when reading it to a kid (this has to have been on purpose, it works great).
The author (William Goldman) was a screenwriter so the action scenes are snappy and great and the dialogue tight, but he also filled the book with jokes that only work in print, so you won’t just be getting a repeat of the movie on the humor side (though many of those jokes are in it, too).
Some sequences are greatly expanded and especially notable are large and effective back-story chapters for Fezzick and Inigo.
> Police are treating the deaths as apparent homicides. According to the L.A. Times, authorities have questioned a member of Reiner’s family in connection with the death. As of Sunday night, the LAPD have not officially identified a suspect, but Rolling Stone has confirmed that Reiner’s son, Nick, was involved in the homicide. A source confirmed to Rolling Stone that the couple’s daughter, Romy, found her parents’ bodies.
Alternative source:
> Senior law enforcement officials report that both had stab wounds
Tragic.
My best friend died in a family murder like this. A decade later the wounds of the survivors haven't healed.
At least Carl didn't live to suffer this.
Related, I love how close Mel and Carl were until the end: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2020/feb/20/love-and-free...
It's arguable thats a sign that they're doing a good job.
Few profession I have more respect for than journalists and police.
Most of them are trying to fight evil and make society better and are disliked for it.
They are a gritty grizzled bunch.
I’m with you on journalists, but the police have so many bad apples that I think the profession itself attracts the wrong kind of people.
Certainly their editors and the publisher/owner, but journalists themselves?
If you own the owners of media, you own all the journalists by virtue of the fact that to be a journalist requires someone to get a job as a journalist. In a place like the US you might have a handful of top people freelance and still be able to eat, but that is very rare.
Also, is it even journalism at that point?
0: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1157241415688...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1pnccia/trump...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1pn8nny/rob_r...
These are currently at the top of that sub. The comments are very encouraging.
I would like to think that if Mr. Reiner saw that his death actually brought the country together, he would smile.
1. Users on /r/conservative (& other conservative forums) show a surprisingly negative reaction to something done by the GOP
2. Over the next few days, their media starts repeating individual social media responses that seem to find agreement. They don't have to make sense, they just have to terminate the thought.
3. In the communities more and more voices spread those same responses while shouting down reasonable commenters from 1., declaring them "non-MAGA" or "RINOs"
4. After a few days/weeks, all opposing voices have been drowned out, and their moderation teams delete any posts that could sway their opinion/goes against the current.
- Misfolding & Conversion: A normal, functional prion protein (PrP C) changes shape into a misfolded, pathogenic form (PrP Sc), which acts as a template to convert more PrP C into PrP Sc.
- Self-Propagation: The core of prion dynamics is this autocatalytic cycle, where PrP Sc recruits and converts normal PrP C, leading to exponential growth. Aggregation: These misfolded proteins clump together, forming large aggregates (amyloid) that deposit in the brain, causing neurodegeneration.
- Fragmentation: For propagation to continue, large aggregates must break down (fragment) into smaller pieces (seeds) that can initiate new conversion cycles, a process crucial for disease progression and influenced by chaperones like Hsp104 in yeast.
The group you are describing would indeed need to remove the misfolded protein for survival.
In terms of hope:
".... For propagation to continue, large aggregates must break down (fragment) into smaller pieces (seeds) that can initiate new conversion cycles"
In other words, the Republican party could be looking at serious fracturing into many many post-mango camps, ala Margerie Taylor Green leaving the MAGA camp. These dynamics are probably exactly how the conservatives got co-opted by the MAGA strain.
Do you mean like r/tuesday? If not, please help me find the common ground with my normie brothers and sisters.
No man is that interesting. This person’s “opinion” on the world has just been utterly exhausting.
A decade of a reign like that caused damage.
(They also just got the original if you want to watch it again)
No one else has mentioned it but among all his other great performances his hair-trigger angry dad in Wolf of Wall Street is hilarious.
I think being able to be both funny in his anger but also a bit intimidating and then go to being a warm father figure is something he would not have been able to portray without genuine charisma.
People want journalists to publish quickly AND only publish what’s fully verified.
They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters; never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low. Is any other profession held to such an impossible standard?
Morale is not low amongst journalists because the job is tough, it's low because they're being fired all over the place, pay has decreased, and corporatism is making the whole thing pretty mediocre.
The counter-argument is probably that if it were truly acknowledged, then the pay itself would be higher. But I don't think it's the case that the average person in Florida thinks less of teachers than someone in New York. (I'm including cost of living adjustments in making this comparison btw.)
I don't disagree with the items you lay out, and maybe the ones you list are most important. But I do think "respect" belongs on the list, too.
What on earth are you talking about? Most major cities have had multiple papers in cutthroat competition with each other for decades. If the New York Times got a story wrong, the Wall Street Journal would happily take the opportunity to correct them and vice versa. In smaller cities with one big paper (like Baltimore with The Sun), the local tabloids (like The City Paper) would relish any opportunity to embarrass the paper of record if they got something wrong.
The era of monopolistic journalism is the new thing, not the old thing. The corporatism GP is referring to is conglomerates like Sinclair and Tribune Online Content (Tronc) buying up tons of local papers and broadcast stations and “cutting costs” by shutting down things like investigative reporting.
The local newspapers in question have terrible economics now because of the internet. The competition has come from the internet. Sinclair is dying, because they have bought a bunch of dying/dead assets. Tronc is the same. There was nothing to do here, the newspaper business as it worked previously is dead with a few exceptions.
The business is dead. The people involved aren't getting paid well, the owners are losing money, it's all bad when economics go bad.
Renting time on a printing press is not exorbitant.
Buying out local printing presses (and/or getting exclusivity in return for your business), is anticompetitive and sometimes illegal, but it's definitely not natural.
Car manufacturers have a monopoly on cars.
Smartphone manufacturers on smartphones.
Mankind has a monopoly on creating humans.
You are clueless about newspapers in their heyday. It was like 60 years ago. No need to go around correcting people on a topic you know nothing about.
I don't know why anyone would believe that.
Teachers, but point taken.
But education and journalism are deeply and essentially beneficial to society.
Referees could just as well be replaced by a coin toss or AI or participation trophies (like FIFA Peace Prizes), and society would be just fine without them.
Their salaries are much better spent on journalists and teachers, and schools should spend much less on their sports programs and scholarships, and much more on their faculty and research and writing and journalism programs, to actually benefit students who are there to learn instead of just playing games.
I'm not saying get rid of them, and I didn't mention art or music or exercise, which are far more useful and enriching than sports.
Just don't sacrifice much more important things for sports, like so many high schools and colleges and universities do.
Our society is NOT existentially suffering from a lack of referees, as much as a lack of good teachers and journalists.
Get your priorities straight. It really doesn't matter if your sportsball team wins or loses, but it does extremely matter if your children are educated and informed or not.
There's some cases where I rather someone put their name up or I don't want to hear it, the only exception is give me some damning proof? Give me something that qualifies your anonymous remarks or its not worth anything to me, its just he said she said.
Regarding this specifially, I don't care enough, I am more curious about the legal case and how it will play out though.
This is where journalistic reputation comes in. Do you trust the journalistic entity providing the story? Do they have a history of being correct? Has information from anonymous sources in other stories proven to be true?
Judith Miller was not a politically neutral journalist trying to preserve access, she was a deeply, actively involved long-time Iraq hawk doing propaganda for her ideological faction.
We couldn't put something into the book, unless it was corroborated by three separate sources (this was before the current situation, where you will get a dozen different sources that basically all come from the same place).
The onus was on us; not the people we interviewed. We were responsible for not publishing random nonsense.
The latter among major news orgs is incredibly rare.
Then there was a lot of shenanigans regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. There was a headline from a letter written by Intelligence Officers that made it sound like the actually forensically valid laptop itself was faked Russian disinformation, but it turned out to be valid.
When it comes to politics every major news org fails misserably. Their inability to contain personal biases is astounding to me. I want raw facts if you're going to make political assertions or its just propaganda. I don't care which side is doing what, if they're doing wrong expose them all, but use facts and evidence, not just TMZ / tabloid level shenanigans. Everyone is behaving like teenagers whenever politics is brought up these days.
We currently reward outlets that spew out junk, right off the bat, and penalize outlets that take the time to validate the data. Some outlets almost certainly make it up, on the spot. No downside.
Back in the 1990s/early 200s, Michael Ramirez (a political cartoonist) posted a comic, showing three pairs of shoes.
On the left, were a massive pair of battered brogue wingtips. Under them, was the caption "Cronkite."
In the middle, was a very small pair of oxfords; both left. Its caption was "Rather."
The right, was captioned "Couric," and featured a big pair of clown shoes.
There is a real trust problem Journalism will need to overcome and some of it is self inflicted
Source?
“non-credible” anonymous sources: that’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It is in any government’s interest to downplay the authority of any off-the-record leak source, but political parties that rail the hardest against anonymous sources generally have more to hide, and generally those stories prove substantively true in the long run.
It is still rare for any newspaper to predicate a story on a single uncorroborated anonymous source.
If you have examples it would be interesting.
Bloomberg has come out with the linked story in 2021. They have never provided any other detail; no other journalist has been able to corroborate anything advanced in the story. Through grapevines, we've been able to ascertain that Bloomberg based the whole story on a single source that they massively misunderstood.
That story is the worst case scenario, and thank god, it's extremely rare to find such a blunder. Reading the comments here, you'd think half the reporting in the world is exactly as wrong as that one single thing.
Perhaps it is my/our geek bias that we habitually do, and we are therefore excusing some of this without intending to? It is worth pondering.
This is why substack exists
And you’re never going to get all the angles from a single source. So short of paying a couple thousand dollars, and still getting ads, many people become cheap in exchange for the cheap experience pushed on them.
Or do the contradictions only exist across multiple persons?
(Tangent: anyone know if there's a term for this fallacy? I.e., claiming that an attribute exists for some/all of a group's members, when in fact that attribute only applies to the collective itself?)
Teachers: parents expects teachers to deliver personalized instruction to a classroom of 30+ while adhering to standardized testing targets. They are expected to act as surrogate parents yet threatened with lawsuits and suspensions when they attempt to enforce discipline. They are asked to spend their own money on supplies, but I think we've had enough levies to raise funds for our local district, haven't we? They are treated as lazy, agenda-driven agents by their community neighbors. They get the summers off, so I think I've heard enough about their "burnout".
Doctors: patients demand certainty from a science based on probability. They expect empathetic listening but it must come within the fifteen-minute slots insurance and healthcare network financial officers dictate. Any story of a missed diagnosis is evidence of idiocy or contempt. Patients want pharmaceutical fixes for decades of poor lifestyle choices without side effects or changes to habits. They're all just paid for by the pharmaceutical industry anyway, so better if they just give me the prescription I saw a TV ad about. And why won't they just do what ChatGPT said they should do, anyway? Besides, they're all rich, right?
Almost all, to varying degrees, with the expectation increasing the more you deal with people that are outside that field. People seriously underestimate the challenges and difficulties of things they have little experience with while overestimating their ability to do it.
'How hard can it be to ask someone who knows what's going on and write that anyway?'
What we call "objective" is usually just invisible judgment that aligns with our priors. An observer's choices about what to include, exclude, measure, or frame shape reality long before conclusions appear.
Scientific facts are just theories that haven't been proven wrong yet.
Not contradictory. People want information to be verified quickly. That's the job. The person who can do it the fastest gets the scoop. Publishing unverified stuff isn't doing the job faster, it's not doing the job. You can get away with cheating for a bit, as you can probably guess what's going to wind up getting verified most of the time, but that's all the more reason to punish cheaters when they eventually are caught.
And even then, publishing rumors and speculation are fine so long as they are clearly noted as such. It is only when unverified statements are treated as facts that there is a problem.
> They want anonymous sources named "in the spirit of truth," without grappling with the reality that doing so would instantly dry up anyone risking their job, or worse, to provide information.
You're not supposed to cite an anonymous source saying there are bodies buried; you're supposed to learn where the bodies are buried from the anonymous sources and then show the bodies as evidence. There is no need for an appeal to authority when you have proof. If a story relies on cited sources they should be named, and if no one is willing to go on the record then you shouldn't be relying on cited sources.
Also we should be pushing for strong whistleblower protections, especially reporting when whistleblowers are retaliated against.
> They expect journalists to release raw information as soon as they have it, while simultaneously acting as perfect filters
Who is asking for either raw data streams or that the news act as filters? People expect evidence (ie things that can be verified) and analysis (ie context for the evidence presented). Omitting unreliable evidence is fine, but people complain when the standard for reliable evidence changes without good reason.
> never amplifying rumors, or being wrong, even as new facts emerge.
If you publish actual facts, they will remain facts no matter what new facts emerge. Truth never contradicts truth, it only expands the story. It is perfectly fine to have incomplete facts, you better have a damn good reason if you have false facts.
> They want neutrality, except when neutrality conflicts with their priors.
No one wants neutrality, they want integrity. You can enthusiastically report that your side is right any day of the week so long as you're also willing to report when they're wrong. It's when evidence is chosen to fit the narrative rather than the narrative developed around the evidence that there's a problem.
> It's no wonder that morale among journalists is at an all-time low.
Morale should be low in an industry driven to compromise it's standards and race to the bottom, and the worst offenders are the most highly rewarded. This should be an impetus for change.
Few profession I have more respect for than journalists and police.
Most of them are trying to fight evil and make society better and are hated for it.
If a journalist has an entire day to gather facts and write the story before it's published in the newspaper the next day, it's going to be a lot more accurate than the realtime demands of "we are hearing reports of a bomb threat in the vicinity of..."
Many more people paid for journalism a few decades ago. People who only consume free media are obviously going to see more junk.
RIP Rob and Michelle.
May Reiner, as they say, Tap into the afterlife!
The primary reason it shined in IMAX was the concert footage; It's giving "I'm on stage at a Tap concert".
Death can not stop true love. It can only delay it for a while.
RIP.
Trump's a piece of work, all right.
I’ve not seen it spelled like that that before.
That tracks for me, so Trump has personal reasons for behaving the way he does, though arguably self-preservation would induce him to not carry on the way he has done. But then he cannot be quiet about things he's guilty of, so I can't see his behavior as anything other than having a motive for just what's happened. I can't imagine he would take Rob's proposed series with equinamity: I'd love to know what Rob knew.
Wake up and first thing I do is read this...
Rob Reiner? Really? What a terrible shame. What a loss. His films and even his time on All in the Family really helped shape the cultural landscape.
Nothing had as large an impact on my sense of humor growing up as This is Spinal Tap. Just thinking about the movie now I chuckle to myself. Most of his other films are certified classics.
He will be greatly missed.
Amusingly, neither did Liam Gallagher until he was 30:
> https://www.loudersound.com/features/oasis-liam-gallagher-sp...
> "It's fair enough," he responded. "I was under the impression for some time that Oasis was a real band."
I'm dying!
RIP
Jimmy Fallon, manager, and band Stillwater in the film "Almost Famous".
Ari Gold in Entourage
And Wayne's World, I would have to say.