10 ms·

"But part of guarding against the illusion is the obligation it puts on us to stop repeating falsehoods. We live in a world where the facts matter, and should m

• tdkl 10y ago
  Sadly he's being/will be paid by the amount of clicks...
• tsunamifury 10y ago
  Journalism students don't get hired as journalists anymore.
  • tropo 10y ago
    Hiring them wouldn't be an improvement. Journalism students are notoriously biased. Then there is the matter of clear logical thinking... look, they didn't get computer science degrees and there could be a reason why.
  • XaYdEk 10y ago
    And there's the difference between journalist and reporter. ;) Journalists seem to be going extinct.
• jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Those points should be given airtime as they are destroyed in public and the responsible parties brought to justice. Censorship is never the answer.
  • inimino 10y ago
    Known falsehoods do not deserve airtime. This is not about censorship.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • jsprogrammer 10y ago
      Known falsehoods are facts that should be reported.
      • inimino 10y ago
        Every minute spent reporting that "X said Y but there is no evidence for this" repeats the lie and is a minute taken away from presenting legitimate information.
        • jsprogrammer 10y ago
          >"X said Y but there is no evidence for this" That is not a known falsehood. It is just speculation.
• mtberatwork 10y ago
  Yes, but generally it's not journalists and reporters pushing the talking points, but the talk show hosts and bloggers. Journalism and infotainment, despite being deceptively blurred, are two very different things once you look past the charade.
  • Taek 10y ago
    If telling the truth was good for profitability, we'd see more of it. Confirming what people already suspect is how you get viewers, it's an uphill battle to tell someone something that will cause cognitive dissonance.
    • kordless 10y ago
      "Truth" is a slippery thing. Keep in mind you can't create dissonance in someone. Only they can do that, given it's an internal conflict of two opposing truths. You can, however, introduce a thought process that breaks dissonance by double binding them. Making someone choose between two undesirable options is a sure way to get rid of one of the "truths", leaving the one that best suits moving forward. People in dissonance will attempt to spread the dissonance and will resist any attempts to break it. I've seen people bounce between two opposing beliefs in a matter of seconds and rationalize the whole thing as if it made perfect sense. The only way to "fix" this behavior in someone is to double bind them and then let it be - walk away from the dissonance least it spread to you. Pushing too hard on the dissonance will cause it to blame you directly for calling attention to it.
• projektir 10y ago
  It shouldn't be limited to just journalism students, but really any producer of content that makes claims.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• idid 10y ago
  related discussions on an article on the beeb[1], regarding the spread of confusion (Agnotology - wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10856554
• swanson 10y ago
  That's a very fine line to walk -- few of these talking points are strictly true or false and almost everything on either side of the issue is deliberately misleading (or "persuasive" if you prefer). Who is deciding what truths are getting air time? Humans are notoriously terrible at seeing our own biases, why are reporters/journalism students any different?
  • wpietri 10y ago
    The difference is that journalists are supposed to be professionals who discern the reality of a situation and report it to those of us who can't be there or don't have time to sift through all of the details. The reason we don't get that as much in the US is that a lot of journalism is modeled on the wire service piece, which is meant as generic copy that almost any newspaper can reprint. It's what journalism prof Jay Rosen calls "The View From Nowhere". One important distinction, also mostly lost on American journalism, is that viewpoint is different than bias. It's easier to see in the foreign press, though. The Economist, for example, has a very clear viewpoint, but they visibly work hard not to be biased.
    • zigzigzag 10y ago
      I'm not sure how you can describe The Economist as both having a clear viewpoint yet also not biased. It's more that TE is very open and honest about being biased, it doesn't try to hide that fact, so that helps it come across as a more mature publication. But nobody rational would read TE and think they're getting an unbiased view of the world on any topic that the editor feels strongly about (immigration, the EU, Russia, etc). For tech stuff, the politics of Malaysia and the myriad other topics TE covers that they don't have any strong opinion on, sure, it's great for that. For politics what you're reading are opinion pieces intended to persuade you.
      • wpietri 10y ago
        Can you not think of a topic where you have a clear point of view but can write in an unbiased way? For example, I can give novice programmers a reasonably unbiased overview of the strengths and weaknesses of various programming languages, even ones I don't favor myself. I can also talk happily about the flaws in the languages I personally prefer. I see people do this pretty often with things like cities they've lived in, restaurants, books, and movies. Anybody who works at it a bit can do it. You just have to be able to distance yourself a bit from your preferences, to learn how to make an intellectual case that cuts against your biases. So yeah, I've read The Economist for something like 30 years, and I think they do a good job of having a strong viewpoint without skewing their coverage much because of it. In particular, I think they keep their opinion-y activities well contained in the leaders and regular columns. The news still has a fair bit of viewpoint (e.g., numerical, humanistic, skeptical, and, well, economics-focused), but rarely do I find them shading the facts or juggling the numbers to force an outcome, which is what I mean by bias.
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  That has always been a core tenet of journalism, as taught, but the ability to get information from the Internet has put massive pressure on that. The simplest explanation is that "scoops" (being the first with a story) is more valuable than being second, so there is tremendous pressure to publish first. As your competitors (who are often lay journalists on the Internet) may have a lower standard of proof than you do, you risk being scooped if you are to stingy with your fact checking. But the Internet is perhaps a much bigger problem in this regard. It is perceived as journalism while it may be either opinion, commercial speech, or simply hate speech. My Dad will tell me something is true and refer to a half dozen blogs that he reads which all say something is true (my favorite was that half the population of LA was illegal aliens). That is a statement which can be generally challenged on its face but it can also be challenged analytically by looking at the tax base for LA county, not to mention Census records vs available housing. The challenge though was that "every source he checked" said it was true, and they all got their bogus information from probably the same original source what ever that was. As a result, while I think it is drilled into the heads of journalism students and reporters, it is not the standard operating mode of many more bloggers and vloggers, and as a result we get pounded by falsehoods if we aren't critical in our information sources.
  • TillE 10y ago
    > but the ability to get information from the Internet No, the "both sides" thing and lack of fact checking is absolutely nothing new. It's a fear of being accused of bias, plus some sheer laziness. On balance, I think the internet has been a hugely positive force for getting real information and marginalized views out there. Of course it can be misused, but some people are just going to choose to believe insane things and nothing can really be done to stop that.
  • zigzigzag 10y ago
    I think there was never some mythical golden age of pre-internet quality journalism, to be honest. I frequently read newspaper articles in supposedly respectable outlets that are not about breaking news yet are still riddled with serious flaws or biases, sometimes outright falsehoods. This problem becomes a hundred times worse when exploring their opinion columns or editorials. If "journalism school" (whatever that is) tries to teach journalists to be unbiased fact checkers then it's not done a good job. I think the internet has been a massively positive thing for news in general, as it so quickly allows people to do rapid fact checking, get access to contrary opinions, see comments on the articles and so on. If your dad doesn't do those things he probably wouldn't have been more informed before the internet, he'd have just quoted you other one-sided sources too. Fact checking things you want to believe in takes discipline and commitment, it isn't something that was broken by the internet.
• crdb 10y ago
  This assumes journalists decide what gets into press. However, an editorial line is decided by the owners or other stakeholders (at the national level, it might be governments), a compliant editor is hired and made aware of the line, and the editor then selects which pieces get to go in. My guess is either this process selects for journalists with the "right" views, or journalists themselves adapt their writing to keep their job (probably the latter).
• crdoconnor 10y ago
  >Someone really should drill this into the head of every reporter and journalism student. Talking points put forward by political campaigns and special interest groups, if they are untrue or deliberately misleading, should not be given air time. Simply parroting such false statements does a grave disservice to society. It's more the fault of the lead editors than the reporters. They're the ones who put the time pressure on (which means fact checking is often impractical) and they're the ones who deliberately introduce editorial slants.
  • test1235 10y ago
    if we're going down that line, then it's ultimately down to the nature of people who actively pay for hyperbole and sensationalism.
    • crdoconnor 10y ago
      Not necessarily. Editorial stances are as often driven by the desires of the proprietor as they are the readership. E.g. there were newspapers recently in the UK that took strong editorial stances against a particular political leader in spite of the fact that the majority of their readers preferred him. The proprietors had an agenda and they risked (and ultimately lost) subscribers to push it. Hyperbole and sensationalism isn't driven solely by demand either, it's also driven by risk aversion. There's a high demand for thoughtful, well researched journalism, but the market demand often isn't fulfilled because that kind of journalism involves high up front investment and is risky whereas human interest stories and cats are cheap to churn out and their effect is consistent.
• wruza 10y ago
  The problem lies in those who listen, not in those who speak.
  • ionised 10y ago
    It lies in both.
• alasdair_ 10y ago
  I recently read Trust Me, I'm Lying (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13542853-trust-me-i-m-lying http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13542853-trust-me-i-m-lyi...) and one of the central points of the book is that journalists HAVE to act this way, especially at the moment. If everything is page view driven, the bloggers MUST come up more more and more anger/fear/happiness in their headlines to survive. They also must chase the breaking news, even if it's false. If they don't they will perish. The same applies all the way up the chain, from infowars to huffpo to the NYT. The same thing happened before (the yellow press era) and, hopefully, it will run its course but right now, only the maximally sharable posts survive.
  • grzm 10y ago
    IIRC, Holiday posits that the turn away from yellow journalism was the advent of the subscription model, where papers didn't need to sell each issue. Subscribers then could look at the overall quality of the product rather reacting to the sensational headline du jour. As an aside, I subscribe to a couple of online news outlets, one of which is mixed subscriber/ad supported. I wish that I, as a subscriber, could see more informational/less sensational headlines as a benefit of being a subscriber.
  • fennecfoxen 10y ago
    > If everything is page view driven, the bloggers MUST come up more more and more anger/fear/happiness in their headlines to survive. Papers like the Wall Street Journal want your subscription dollars, not your page views. They can access those by maintaining a reputation for quality. It's a nice stable revenue stream, too. (I suppose it also helps that they cover things other outlets often don't, like international business news.)
• tropo 10y ago
  Who will fact-check the fact-checkers? Supposed "fact checking" has become a major new weapon in the 2016 presidential fight. It has been horrifically bad. The favored team gets away with sarcasm, hyperbole, fuzzy matters of opinion, "oops I misspoke", jokes, and anything that can't be definitively proven beyond a doubt to be intentionally false. The disfavored team gets none of that leeway. When the favored team wrongly says "X, Y, and Z are so" it's counted as 1 lie, but it's 3 lies if the disfavored team says it.
  • jsight 10y ago
    Yeah, the worst part is that people aggregate these into statistics to try to "prove" which one is the biggest liar. The articles themselves are often good, but in aggregate they reflect a lot of bias.
  • fennecfoxen 10y ago
    Fact-checking in a nutshell: Stupid literalism: https://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/cover32.jpg https://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/cover32.j... Inconsistent standards: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvNnfq2XgAQqE4T.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvNnfq2XgAQqE4T.jpg (Real fact-checks, random Internet image storage.) And Politifact once vouched for the statement "if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan", before recanting and calling it the Lie of the Year. Fact checking for your stories at a paper is the essence of responsibility, but as a publishing genre in its own right it's mostly opinion journalism trying to give itself an imprimatur of impeccability.
• elcapitan 10y ago
  I think the problem there (coming from the internet) is that journalists switched from reporting about "official discourse" (which could have been a good thing) to reporting about "what people talk about". It doesn't really matter if the original story is really true, the fact they are reporting about is that people elsewhere are discussing it. Meta-journalism maybe.
• inimino 10y ago
  > every reporter and journalism student. How about every citizen? If you want to know what an echo chamber looks like, it's us. We get the journalism we deserve.