Talk:Raw Story

Palmer Report (off topic request)

Hi Timesshifter. I posted on another of your pages but in case I screwed up (not a member of Wiki) I thought I'd post the same thing here for you and Grorp. PLEASE let Wikipedia readers make up their own mind about Palmer Report too. There is no source that I could find for labeling them a partisan fake news site in the header.

Here is what I wrote to you on the other page. Timeshifter hi. Question. I am hoping I am doing this correctly. I saw your comments on Raw Story and agree with them.I am sorry but I do not have an account and hope this is the correct place to respond. I will also answer you on the other page.

Can you PLEASE --- whenever you have time take a look at Palmer Report? There has been a Wikipedia attack from some republican editors. They are a political site -- a good one and I am a fan.

For months (years) scores of people have been pleading with the editors there to take the "hyper partisan, fake news website" out of the header. It is not accurate. It was put there by the same person who muddied up Raw story -- a republican. I along with dozens -- literally dozens of people protested. We felt it was an attack, a vicious one. The response was always send some reliable sources to counter it.

Only nobody ever used the term "hyper-partisan, fake news website" in the first place. I spent four hours trying to find a source and asked several times. There are some obscure republican sources. They never used, to the best of my knowledge any of those terms.

They also locked the page when people tried to change it and called it vandalism. But everyone I saw came in good faith. The Palmer Report is not fake news and is very much like Raw Story. I had a source -- Brian Williams from MSNBC did a segment several tears ago and used information from their site. I was told that was not interesting enough to put on the site and then they ignored me and all the others. You an easily see this through old Talk pages because there are over a dozen complaints.

I hope you are not upset that I posted such a long post but I think what is happening makes Wiki look very bad and I liked what you said on the raw story site. I do not want to name the person less it be thought of as a verbal attack but you can see all this quite easily. Please if you can do anything, please research this and please look seriously at the "hyperpartisan, fake news" entry. Because that is not neutral.

Thank you,

Norah 2600:6C65:7E7F:B93E:AD3C:1976:2DA8:EAB2 (talk) 00:33, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

This page was last edited on 5 February 2023, at 00:11 (UTC). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:6C65:7E7F:B93E:AD3C:1976:2DA8:EAB2 (talk)

I replied on my talk page. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:04, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Raw Story hires new editors

• Specific text to be added or removed: In 2023, Raw Story named Dave Levinthal, formerly deputy editor at Insider, as Editor-in-Chief, with the goal of expanding investigative and enterprise reporting. Prior to Insider, Levinthal served at OpenSecrets, Politico and The Dallas Morning News. The site also named Adam Nichols as Executive Editor, formerly Managing Editor at Patch.
• Reason for the change: The new editors replace editors listed in the infobox. They also reflect a change in focus for the site and indicate the site is hiring senior editors from competing news sites. I suggest this change for the history section and the infobox.
• References supporting change: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook-pm/2023/01/09/what-the-three-amigos-are-looking-for-00077044 https://talkingbiznews.com/media-moves/raw-story-makes-two-top-editorial-hires/ https://www.rawstory.com/about-us/masthead/

Thanks in advance for your consideration! JByrne404 (talk) 17:33, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

 Done. Grorp (talk) 07:53, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Report on $690,000 theft from Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS)

• Specific text to be added or removed: In January 2023, Raw Story's Dave Levinthal was the first to report that cyberthieves stole $690,000 from the Senate campaign of Jerry Moran (R-KS). He also revealed that $150,000 was stolen from Trump ally Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX).
• Reason for the change: The reports are scoops that demonstrate Raw Story's investigative reporting, cited in the hiring of new Editor-in-Chief Dave Levinthal, referenced in the History section.
• Suggestion for cleanup: Because the end of the content section includes another "first to report" sentence, perhaps the Rise Above Movement sentence can be shortened and blended into the prior paragraph, also about domestic extremism. [Perhaps revising to read: ‘Raw Story was the first to report on the re-indictments of the founders of the Rise Above Movement, a California white nationalist group known for actively seeking out and engaging in street brawls.’]
• References supporting change (first sentence): https://apnews.com/article/politics-kansas-city-jerry-moran-77b20f856652279c4756f24f6bb29beb https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/01/20/politics/jerry-moran-campaign-cybercriminals-fbi/index.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/23/latest-cyberattack-health-care-shows-how-vulnerable-sector-is/ https://www.axios.com/2023/01/21/republican-jerry-moran-campaign-cybercriminals-theft https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kansas-republican-sen-moran-says-cyber-criminal-stole-nearly-700k-campaign
• References supporting change (second sentence): https://www.thedailybeast.com/cybercriminals-steal-dollar150k-from-trump-ally-troy-nehls-campaign-fund https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/troy-nehls-campaign-wire-theft-17767384.php https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook-pm/2023/02/06/the-sotu-stakes-for-biden-00081339?nname=playbook-pm&nid=0000015a-dd3e-d536-a37b-dd7fd8af0000&nrid=0d413eb3-7eb8-46a8-ab5b-39bb574340bc&nlid=964328

Thanks for your consideration! JByrne404 (talk) 20:13, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

 Done. Grorp (talk) 00:36, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Additional campaign theft exclusive

• Specific text to be added or removed: Levinthal also revealed that a thief stole more than $10,000 from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) campaign account.
• Reason for the change: As noted by The Daily Beast, the incident is "the latest and probably highest profile incident in a growing trend of thefts targeting political organizations on both sides of the aisle." The suggested text might be added to the paragraph outlining reports of prior thefts.
• References supporting change: https://www.thedailybeast.com/check-thief-pilfers-chuck-schumers-campaign-committee-report-says, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook/2023/04/04/trump-v-new-york-tbd-00090292, https://morningconsult.com/briefs/morning-consult-washington-trumps-gop-primary-lead-widens-ahead-of-arraignment/?from_subscribe=true

Thanks for your consideration! JByrne404 (talk) 16:43, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

 Not done These are just three précis' that contain routine aggregation credit to TRS. One of them is just 14 words long. I'm at a loss to find many, or any, articles we have on other media outlets that try to contain an exhaustive list of every story they've filed, which is the direction we're headed here. I think our essay on WP:EXCESSDETAIL provides a cogent argument for declining this edit request. That said, if TRS' story on the Schumer campaign committee becomes, itself, the subject of reporting (e.g. the CJR does a feature on the process of newsgathering that went into the development of the story, the story wins the Pulitzer, etc.) I think that would be a different matter. Chetsford (talk) 17:36, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Chetsford, this is fair and I follow your logic. I appreciate your taking a look. We'll try to reserve our requests for more material items. Best, JByrne404 (talk) 18:03, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Removed hyperpartisan sentence

I removed the sentence "Some consider Raw Story a hyperpartisan media outlet" and its three citations, which 5 months ago I had tagged as "verification needed". No one else took it up, so today I've taken a stab at it.

Pennycook doesn't mention Raw Story at all. The document includes one figure/chart with 60 domain names (one of which is rawstory.com). That's it. No context. No content.

Xu is not available online through Wikipedia Library Taylor & Francis; it's just not there. I cannot tell if the not-logged-in version is ONLY an abstract, or if the whole thing was yanked from Taylor and Francis. A search by author does not find any similar content under another title or DOI although there remain 3 other articles by Xu.

Benkler mentions Raw Story and 'hyper' in passing; no context or explanation, like it's a foregone conclusion. This is all you find in the article that mentions Raw Story:

• "Moreover, younger, more net-native, more frankly partisan sites gain significantly in prominence. On the left, Daily Kos, Politicus USA, Raw Story, and Salon gain visibility relative to their place in the link economy."
• "Media sources most frequently shared on Twitter. 16 Raw Story"
• "Media sources most frequently shared on Facebook. 13 Raw Story"
• "Palmer Report and Raw Story, other left-wing sites, saw more attention on Twitter in 2017"
• "This did not prevent a hyperpartisan site like the Palmer Report or Raw Story from joining the Huffington Post as the three most tweeted sources in the left media set."

I'm just not seeing any WP:WEIGHT to warrant using the term "hyperpartisan" in Wikivoice or including it in the article. Grorp (talk) 01:36, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't think, but am open to correction, that "Some consider Raw Story a hyperpartisan media outlet" is Wikivoice with the qualifier "some consider" preceding it.
Pennycoock and Xu include TRS in graphs charting "hyperpartisan" outlets. WEIGHT is not a black/white determinant on whether something is or is not included in an entry, but how much emphasis should be placed on it. I think it's a challenging position to stake that a seven word sentence sourced to three RS in an sprawling, 1600-word article, is wildly out of proportion and violative of WEIGHT. Chetsford (talk) 06:22, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm referring to weight in the source articles (how much), and weight of reliable sources (how many), not the percentage of characters in an entire Wikipedia article. None of the sources explain their "label" directly tied to Raw Story. (Let's make that 2 sources since Xu is missing online. If you have a copy of Xu, please email it to me so I can read it.)

When writing something that is potentially controversial in Wikipedia, we want to get it right. Here's an example of why it's important to get it right. Let's take bing.com's AI/Chat tool. If you ask "Is raw story hyperpartisan?" you will get the answer yes, with citations to Wikipedia. (Clearly those 7 words have a weightier effect than expected.) If, on the other hand, you then click the proffered question "What are some examples of hyperpartisan media outlets?", you do NOT get Raw Story. You do, however get "Fox News, MSNBC, Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, and The Huffington Post". Not one of their Wikipedia articles use the word "hyperpartisan". I also notice that 3 of those 5 are on Pennycook's "mainstream media" (oops!) and only 2 on "hyperpartisan". Pennycook doesn't appear to have a "partisan" category; just main, hyperp, and false. So how useful or precise is Pennycook's chart, then?

So you ask yourself: Is the usage in sources merely in passing? Is it explained or expounded upon in the source? Do other sources regularly use the label when writing about Raw Story? Is it a controversial label? These are questions you might ask when deciding to include or not include content (even 7 words) in a Wiki article. Per WP:ONUS, While information must be verifiable for inclusion in an article, not all verifiable information must be included. Consensus may determine that certain information does not improve an article. Such information should be omitted or presented instead in a different article. The responsibility for achieving consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. Grorp (talk) 07:31, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm not even sure where to begin with this. We don't typically rewrite WP articles to make them more compatible with a private company's data response products. Your complaint about bing.com's chatbot output for TRS is an issue that is more properly addressed to Microsoft customer service, which this is not.

"When writing something that is potentially controversial in Wikipedia, we want to get it right." You haven't enunciated that this is somehow incorrect. It's triple sourced to three RS.

"Let's make that 2 sources since Xu is missing online." Let's not. We don't remove sources because they're paywalled; see WP:OFFLINE. I am able to read the Xu article and can confirm its presence. The editor who added it was, presumably, able to confirm its presence. You have the option of requesting a courtesy copy from Xu, Sang, and Kim via ResearchGate [1]. At this point, it feels like you're stretching to get this sentence excised, for what reasons I can only imagine. Chetsford (talk) 19:55, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I have made a request through ResearchGate. Thanks for the suggestion. I hope they send me the text. My example using Bing was a quick illustratation of the consequences of getting it wrong in the Wikipedia article. I'm sure Wikimedia Foundation wouldn't enjoy lawsuits from any organization who was slandered or libeled. There are more important reasons why we have certain policies we must follow as Wikipedia editors; and it's not just to keep the peace between wikieditors with differing viewpoints. Grorp (talk) 03:47, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Trim content section?

Due to frequent requests by TRS' editorial staff, the content section is running afoul of WP:EXCESSDETAIL and is turning into an exhaustive index of TRS' past articles. Most of these are sourced to a single outlet aggregating a TRS story and providing a link credit to TRS. Using this as a standard, the Content section will quickly spin wildly out of control; this is a level of detail we provide to no other media outlet. Should we remove mention of articles in which the article itself (versus the content of the article) is not the subject of a story? By my count, using a very generous interpretation, that would preclude inclusion of these:

• "In 2011, Raw Story was among the first outlets..."
• "In 2014, Jennifer Mascia published a column ..."
• "The same year, the outlet broke news of the connection..."
• "On February 15, 2021, Raw Story reported ..."
• "In 2023, Raw Story was the first outlet to report ..."

Chetsford (talk) 20:05, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I'm too tired to go into any great lengths or depths today, so I'm responding off the cuff, here. And I'm not interested in arguing for each and every entry under "Content" (though I could be goaded). I referred to WP:EXCESSDETAIL in my edit summary because you had used it before, so I figured you had some familiarity with it. I have no great plans for the article, nor the section, but your recent addition [2] was out of line.

The state of the article when I first encountered it (around 6 months ago?) was atrocious. It seems an activist had deliberately googled "raw story" and added an enormous list of anything that was ever said bad about Raw Story that filled 2/3rds of the page. The content was a "list of incidents"; no source covered any such trends. That's not how we write articles in Wikipedia. I'd found a wiki policy on it at the time; can't think of it this minute, but I likely mentioned it in an earlier talk page discussion. I spent an enormous amount of effort trying to put the article at least in some sort of neutral POV. I researched and removed all the ridiculous paragraphs made by that one editor (Brandolini's law in play). The remaining 3 under "false claims" are from a different editor; I just never dug into those because of the tedium involved in such work.

Your new addition to the section was way off and fits the pattern of the earlier activist-added content in the article. Your rendition of the source was a misinterpretation, skewed to infer things about Raw Story that the source didn't even suggest. That is WP:SYNTH.

There's a large difference between mentioning content that a news outlet publishes especially if it was lauded or mentioned favorably by a third party, compared to mentioning individual digs or criticisms about individual incidents. Note: In most of the cases, the 'false claims' were content from syndicated sources and were corrected or removed from servers after discovery of falseness; a standard industry action. The only reason Raw Story was called out was because it was one of the outlets with far-reach, like most clicks or shares or similar, and the studies were analyzing reach and trends so of course they used examples drawn from Raw Story instead of one of the lesser-reach outlets who had published the same exact articles. But that editor tried to make it seem like Raw Story was making false claims deliberately and negligently, neither of which was true, and none of the sources cited had alleged that, either.

Your recent addition was in the same vein. You took some content where the authors used an example of a Raw Story article to illustrate how something could potentially be misleading, and wrote it like Raw Story deliberately did something bad. That's not what the source said.

I will leave you with this. No one is going to subscribe to or read Raw Story because of a Wikipedia article. However, people could be convinced not to subscribe or read Raw Story because of Wikipedia's article blowing all out of proportion individual incidents to give the impression of such 'false claims' happening all the time. Wikipedia requires us to source what we write and mandates it is verifiable and reliable. Unless one has a source (several, actually) indicating the negative reputation like that activist tried to paint, it's just not going to fly. Controversies and criticism need more reliable sources than praise or neutral content does. Grorp (talk) 03:47, 11 April 2023 (UTC)