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Absent any evidence of journalistic misconduct, I don't understand the point of making this connection. Reuters, in particular, is famous for having a "value-neutral" policy[1][2] that goes beyond the already rigorous firewall that other outfits enforce.
Edit: Added a second citation for Reuter's neutrality policy, highlighting a particularly controversial time when they refused to deviate from neutrality.
[1]: https://www.reutersagency.com/en/about/standards-values/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters#Policy_of_objective_la...
The leaks described in the sources below do not give me any confidence in Reuters journalistic integrity:
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of...
https://telegra.ph/OP-HMG-Trojan-Horse-Part-4-Undermining-Ru...
>Absent any evidence of journalistic misconduct, I don't understand the point of making this connection.
It's a textbook conflict of interest. Most sane places have a policy of addressing even perceived conflicts of interest.
"Disclose potential or actual conflicts of interest to a manager" is the 6th bullet on the very first link I provided.
But again: there isn't even a perceived conflict of interest here, unless your perception includes a fatally flawed understanding of how journalistic outfits isolate their executive board. Reuters is not responsible for correcting that fatally flawed understanding.
A lot of media outfits feign neutrality. Maybe most.
The test isnt whether they have a page on their website it's how they report on stories that could damage their bottom line (or, in Al jazeeras case, tolerate a saudi imposed blockade).
This isn't a falsifiable claim: what's the difference between "feigning neutrality" and "operating neutrally" if the output is neutral reporting?
Nobody is actually netural. What makes a news outfit "neutral" is their adherence to journalistic standards of neutrality, which include both a firewall against executive interests and an editing process designed to temper the biases of individual journalists.
Of course it's falsifiable: pick a bunch of topics that negatively affect them (stories about them, their key advertisers, etc.) and diff it against a source that has no interest.
If there is no difference they're neutral. If they downplay or ignore - not so neutral.
>What makes a news outfit "neutral" is their adherence to journalistic standards of neutrality, which include both a firewall against executive interests and an editing process designed to temper the biases of individual journalists.
Which involves more than just talking about neutrality. It involves executives being willing to pay the price when that neutrality would violate their interests - financial or otherwise.
That, or they don't just have a reporter working that beat. Outlets frequently choose to allocate reporters based on the likelihood that another outlet will beat them to the presses. Or more saliently: your supposedly "disinterested" source has an undisclosed positive interest.
Reuters has historically typified the kind of reporting that's labeled as "neutral." We have no particular reason to believe that their ex-CEO has had any undue influence on their newsdesk's neutrality.
Also, the source points out he retired from the role in February 2020, which doesn't exactly help the COVID vaccine vs quack cure conclusions people highlighting the connection presumably want people to draw.
> Former CEO and director of Reuters is large investor and board member of Pfizer (pfizer.com)
So?
Edit: The only reason I can think of that anyone would seen any significance in this is if they wanted to imply some kind of conspiracy where major news outlets are pushing vaccines purely out of personal greed. That falls flat for many reasons, particularly that he stopped being CEO of Reuters in Feb 2020 (as noted in a comment), before the pandemic was a pandemic. Otherwise this is humdrum business executive sitting on corporate boards and having ~2.4% of his net worth in stock in that company [1].
[1] https://wallmine.com/people/34254/james-c-smith: "The estimated Net Worth of James C Smith is at least $221 Million dollars as of 8 June 2021." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001611777/000122520...: "8. Price of Derivative Security (Instr. 5): $59.05, Number of derivative Securities Beneficially Owned Following Reported Transaction(s) (Instr. 4): 90,618.081". 90,618.081 * $59.05 = 5.35099768 million US$, $5.35 million / $221 Million = 2.4%.
When you're incentivized to manipulate the news, assuming you have the ability, you manipulate the news.
> When you're incentivized to manipulate the news, assuming you have the ability, you manipulate the news.
Nope, sorry. However, if you take that as an axiom it does free you to believe a lot of nutty self-affirming things without a shred of actual evidence.
What does this have to do with anything? That you'd even quote that screenshot like it means something indicates a significant lack of understanding of many things, including basic chronology: that tweet from "Reuters Fact Check" is from 1/7/2022, Jim Smith stepped down as Reuters CEO nearly two years prior.
> Edit: https://www.bitchute.com/video/sixF3E328RBF/
So? Pfizer buys ads, big whup. Your implication is (probably) Pfizer is dictating content or the sponsored shows making stuff up or hiding things to make their sponsor happy, but you've done nothing to actually show that, and there are good reasons to believe it's not true.
My friend, you need to entertain the possibility that pharma companies would do be bad things - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical...
> My friend, you need to entertain the possibility that pharma companies would do be bad things...
Do you mean "be bad" or "do bad"? I'm quite aware pharma companies can do bad things, but that doesn't mean everything they do is bad, and in any case it's of limited relevance to the kind of conspiracy-theory implications about media coverage that are the topic here.
> Do you mean "be bad" or "do bad"?
Both.
> and in any case it's of limited relevance to the kind of conspiracy-theory implications about media coverage that are the topic here.
There is no "conspiracy" in the "tin foil hat" sense. When a corporation brings in a former media exec on their board, its bc they want insight on how to run an effective PR campaign, and pharma cares about that, given how much more money they spend on marketing over r&d. The same should be said for defense contractors - ~80% high ranking military officers went to work for defense companies in 2004-2008, versus 50% in the previous decade [1].
There's no smoky back room in a pizzeria basement where the illumanati get together to sacrifice babies. They join boards and network at conferences.
[1] http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2010/12/26/de...
>>> My friend, you need to entertain the possibility that pharma companies would do be bad things...
>> Do you mean "be bad" or "do bad"?
> Both.
On the "be bad things" front, I think you need to entertain the possibility that things aren't so black and white.
> When a corporation brings in a former media exec on their board, its bc they want insight on how to run an effective PR campaign, and pharma cares about that, given how much more money they spend on marketing over r&d.
That kinda sounds plausible, but it's too much of a stretch. IIRC, Thompson Reuters' bread and butter is actually accounting software, and that's the part Jim Smith had been focused on for the last 20+ years, per his Wikipedia bio. If "insight on how to run an effective PR campaign" is what they wanted, they'd probably do a lot better by bringing on an actual PR person. Also, is it even plausible for a member of the board to be involved in planning a PR campaign?
You should watch some old episodes of Columbo. It's fiction, but also a fun exploration about how plausible narratives can fall apart if you actually pay attention to the details.
> there are good reasons to believe it's not true
And those would be?
> And those would be?
For instance: ethical codes that reporters in many cases actually care about, the well-established organizational structures news organizations use to manage advertiser-created conflicts of interest, etc.
I'm not saying any of that is foolproof, but it's definitely effective enough to render a lazy compilations of "this program is sponsored by Pfizer" moot as media criticism.
Now update your equation to include sex, money, and blackmail (e.g., a major child sex trafficker was just convicted for shuffling children for the "elite"—which, go figure, was swept under the rug rather quickly).
I'd say your POV is incredibly naive and should be more considerate of a lack of morality near the top (which has precedence: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...).
Corrected title to reflect that in February 2020, Steve Hasker succeeded Smith as President and CEO of Thomson Reuters
Board of directors at Pfizer should know better - if they were smart, they would have realized the optics of having a former media executive on the board. Unfortunately, they feed into the narrative that there is conspiracy between media and pharma, whether its true or not.
Of course, they gain "insight" into building a media narrative by having Mr Smith on their board. Marketing is very important to pharma companies. [1, 2, 3]
Perhaps having perceived conflicts of interest will be a long term problem for pharma. If the conspiracy keeps gaining momentum, congress might get involved. But on the other hand, pharma has lobbyists. Time will tell.
EDIT - I am very surprised that there is so much resistance to the idea that pharma companies would do anything unethical. Even more surprised that someone flagged this post. The audience here seems to have a great deal of resistance to the idea that pharma companies would do anything criminal - in fact, they have, on many occasions [4] - 2 of the vaccine manufacturers, pfizer and J&J, have paid $4.5 Billion combined in settlements to the DoJ. And to be clear, those settlements to avoid public criminal trials and those are on the violations that they have been caught on - imagine the criminal actions that have not yet come to light.
Pharma's PR must be working - the portion Hacker News audience comes to pharma's defense consistently.
[1] https://www.csrxp.org/icymi-new-study-finds-big-pharma-spent...
[2] The current and last CEO of GlaxoSmithKline have marketing background, not science / medical backgrounds. Most of the time, pharma CEOs do not have scientific / medical backgrounds - https://nbhorwitz.medium.com/the-path-to-power-in-pharma-339...
[3] Just think about all those late night prozac / cialis / etc commercials you see on late night tv.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical...
Nevermind that. When pharma is buying up 50% or more of the ad time during your news programs how can you be expected to accurately cover stories involving them?
You can't. It's literally a conflict of interest.
I guess the concept of advertising in media in general is literally a conflict of interest, right? Unless your content is very narrowly targeted at X, and your ads are narrowly targeted at Y, and there is no overlap between the audience for X and Y?
>>> Nevermind that. When pharma is buying up 50% or more of the ad time during your news programs how can you be expected to accurately cover stories involving them?
>> You can't. It's literally a conflict of interest.
> I guess the concept of advertising in media in general is literally a conflict of interest, right?
If you follow the logic of the GP and GGP to its conclusion, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that none of us common citizens can know anything about the world, because it's a contradiction for a adequately-funded media organization to exist that's also funded by no-one.
In the real world, there are methods for managing conflicts of interest like those caused by advertisers and other funding sources (things like firewalls within an organization, etc). They don't work absolutely perfectly, but do they work pretty well.
Often it appears that the stories on HN that I am most interested in reading are the ones that get flagged and quickly taken offline. I don't mean that as any sort of accusation, it just seems that automated moderation system tends to derail topics of importance due to a flood of up and down votes.
This is correct. There is a "flame war" detection mechanism that will penalize topics that get too much activity.
I run with show dead myself. You'll be surprised what ends up in the refuse bin.
It probably means ‘topics of importance’ is very subjective.
Indeed.
I have yet to see any disclaimer from any Reuters articles about potential conflicts of interest in their Covid coverage. I am saying this as someone who has had three shots of Pfizer.
Or that it was secretly funded by the British government:
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-media-idUKKBN1ZC2...
Malone pointed this out 01Jan: https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/i-dont-always-lose-half-a-...
It is important to recognize that Twitter is now relying on big media such as Thompson-Reuters to provide “factchecking” regarding “misleading” information concerning vaccines. Reuters is horizontally integrated with Pfizer at the Board of Directors level, and their “factcheckers” have been harassing me this week because I spoke about the risks associated with SARS-CoV-2 genetic vaccination in children with Neil Oliver on UK-based GB News.
Troll Factory hard at work here..... 3 day old account, nice.
I'm not sure who you are referring to, but I posted this and I created my account April 9, 2019.
And Reuters is a founding member of the contemporary Ministry of Truth: https://www.bbc.com/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/
From the link:
The BBC's Trusted News Initiative is a partnership that includes organisations such as Facebook, Twitter, Reuters and The Washington Post. It is the only forum in the world of its kind designed to take on disinformation in real time. Now we and our partners are going to share what we’ve all learned about how to tackle disinformation, and you are invited.So how do we as a society address this potential conflict of interest? Reuters is a huge news org that is now used to fact check and be a "trusted" news source.
We don't do this "as a society." Reputable news outfits (like Reuters) enforce a firewall between the news desk and management/executives, and bet their entire reputation on the public visibility of that policy.
Except that firewall is bridged by editorial discretion. The myth of the heroic employed journalist punching up and biting the hand that feeds is just that. A myth.
Even questioning it gets articles flagged, case in point on this submission. I don't for a second believe that everyone is impartial, especially journalists. Behind the scenes, they do everything they can to tilt things in favor of their side and their ideology, even at the smallest degree.