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Garbage In, Garbage Out

From Nathan Winograd
July 2024

A Gothamist article about the New York City pound relies on the same kill-enabling organizations and comes to the same wrong conclusions as a prior New York Times piece.

shelter Dogs

Garbage in, garbage out: flawed, biased, or poor quality (“garbage”) information or input produces a result or output of similar (“garbage”) quality.

When we were in our 20s and 30s, my wife and I had a Sunday morning ritual. We would go to a local bagel place and order a soy latte and a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel topped with hummus and a tomato slice. We would buy The New York Times and spend the next two hours reading it from cover to cover. I looked forward to it every week, and every week, it did not disappoint.

Now in my 50s, I still occasionally get bagels but no longer read The New York Times. Not because of the internet, because the pace of news has quickened, because of alternative sources for news, or for any other reason often given for the newspaper industry’s decline. I stopped reading it because of its content — the articles are one-sided, increasingly superficial, and frequently inaccurate. To say that its editorial standards have slipped would be an understatement. In truth, they have cratered.

Based on its writers’ political views, it republishes ideology as fact and no longer seeks to report on both or multiple sides of an issue. This is true across various topics, including those involving dogs and cats.

Every spring, for example, the Times amplifies the misguided, hypocritical, and sadistic voices of “native species” ideologues by calling cats “catastrophic,” embracing trapping, shooting, a poisoned gel that causes immense suffering and prolonged death, and even cutting their heads off while still alive.

Reading the paper, one would think there was no debate on the issue, as there is almost no mention of the growing number of biologists, ecologists, and ethicists who condemn the unscientific approach of “Invasion Biology,” the moral panic it creates, and the subsequent violent response it espouses.

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Read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE. 

Posted on All-Creatures.org: July 17, 2024
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