<Replying to rayiner's comment as sibling because of comment depth limit.>
I don't know anything about what legal writing requires. Journalism requires editing and making calls about how to fairly and coherently convey quotes because of space and attention constraints because every story can't be a deposition.
We can debate the WIDS article but the most important things to me are 1. that there is actually a concrete objection that can discussed 2. how this case contributes, along with other cases, to produce the alleged pattern of behavior, namely the systematic (and willful?) negative erroneous reporting on tech leaders.
The cases you gave are not tech-elite related and the domains they cover are subject to different influences (e.g. liberal bias), though they may deserve their own scrutiny. I am also not familiar with the reporting on many of these issues and most of your examples don't cite actual articles. But I already agree that video news media (which seems to be mostly neutral or positive on tech anyway) is a joke and I exercise more skepticism when I read about polarized left/right issues, especially coming from a lower status or more uneven publications like Business Insider.
But with respect to tech I have not seen much evidence of these supposed routine fabrications from marquee print media.
Legal documents have different standards, I explained why I thought the meaning was the same. When there are concrete refutations we can actually discuss them and each come to our own conclusion.
But even if we take this case as journalistic bad behavior (obviously there is going to be some), I wouldn't conclude, based on this evidence, that there is systemic journalistic malpractice against tech or elites, nor would I default to taking a critical story on tech as false.
There are other areas like foreign policy where you can default to extreme skepticism because people have done concrete analysis and demonstrated a pattern. In tech on the other hand, cases seem to be hard to come by (everyone just "knows" it's true) and people instead resort to name calling and vague accusations. But even in foreign policy where I know the reporting to be untrustworthy I don't discard an article out of hand, I'm just extremely skeptical and search out disconfirming evidence and articles. I can't do that with tech stories because nobody concretely describes why a story is false. The "What I Didn't Say" article is an exception rather than the rule.
The most likely reason why nobody explains why something is false is because it isn't. When the facts are on your side people pound the facts otherwise they pound the table.
To demonstrate an obvious pattern you need to give a set of important examples. Of course you can find selective misquoting and distortions, but that doesn't establish a pattern, much less a pattern for important cases. (But even if that pattern was established each individual story would be true or false on its own merits).
That said even the example you linked isn't that strong. The omission of the word "these" in "these women" doesn't change the meaning of the paragraph because it's qualified by "they haven't been hacking for 10 years". Obviously the modified paragraph doesn't apply to women who have been hacking for 10 years. The alteration only matters if many women have been hacking for 10 years relative to men. Therefore, the altered paragraph accurately conveys the author's meaning.
The same for the ambiguity as to whether "we" refers to society or YC. Either interpretation has very similar meaning ("Women aren't starting Facebook because they don't have 10 years programming experience and neither YC nor society can undo that without a time machine).
Then the author talks about how they misspoke. You can't blame that on a journalist when they quote you.
Even if you don't agree the excerpts are clearly not obvious examples of journalistic malpractice. And most claims of misquoting and distortion are much weaker than even this, often completely baseless.
> God I would love to see what you'd come up with as an example of this.
@jason on Twitter said so explicitly in the last 24 hours, pg said so on Twitter some time ago.
The rest of your comment just illustrates my initial point: abstract statements, ad-hominems and proof-by-assertions.
That isn't to say that the media doesn't have biases or get stories wrong. The problem is that the elites try to use those facts to discredit all accurate reporting that is harmful to their interests. The honest and convincing way to discredit an inaccurate story is to point out concretely how it is wrong, doing anything else suggests that the story is accurate.
The rich and powerful attack those who attack their interests, but now they are more unified.
Notice that there is actually very little concrete criticism of the media, instead you get abstract assertions ("hit piece", "fake news"), ad hominems and so on. When pressed the elites say that the reporting isn't wrong but that they should still be portrayed in a positive light. Obviously journalism can't work if they got their way.
I don't know anything about what legal writing requires. Journalism requires editing and making calls about how to fairly and coherently convey quotes because of space and attention constraints because every story can't be a deposition.
We can debate the WIDS article but the most important things to me are 1. that there is actually a concrete objection that can discussed 2. how this case contributes, along with other cases, to produce the alleged pattern of behavior, namely the systematic (and willful?) negative erroneous reporting on tech leaders.
The cases you gave are not tech-elite related and the domains they cover are subject to different influences (e.g. liberal bias), though they may deserve their own scrutiny. I am also not familiar with the reporting on many of these issues and most of your examples don't cite actual articles. But I already agree that video news media (which seems to be mostly neutral or positive on tech anyway) is a joke and I exercise more skepticism when I read about polarized left/right issues, especially coming from a lower status or more uneven publications like Business Insider.
But with respect to tech I have not seen much evidence of these supposed routine fabrications from marquee print media.