9 ms·

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

82 points by grzm 10y ago

Jizzle 10y ago
I think when clicks equal money, there's a lot less room for ethics in journalism. See: https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp Still, as the article points out, efforts to sanitize reporting will fail. But I think that's OK. I'd rather see a populace interested and misinformed, than one uninterested and uninformed.
- bostik 10y ago
  > I'd rather see a populace interested and misinformed Really? Isn't that the worst possible combination for making it easier to spread propaganda? Quoting Confucious - To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
- specialist 10y ago
  I salut your egalitarianism, but media doesn't work that way. To wit, the Fox News audience is more ignorant than those who don't watch news at all.
akjainaj 10y ago
The mass media had all the power, for some time, they controlled all the information. They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths, etc. People got tired of that, and therefore, started distrusting the mass media. And now the mass media says "this hurricane of fake news, this has to be stopped!" The mass media forgets: this is all your fault. This monster, you created it. In this past election, most newspapers decided to side with Clinton. Why would you do that? Now all Trump supporters and even some Clinton supporters hate you and won't trust you again for a long time. You had the power and the responsibility to tell the truth. You decided to publish half truths because you had certain interests. Money, power. People got tired and they went for the ONLY alternative that there is: the tabloids, the liars. It's ALL your fault. You are shameless scoundrels, writing a title that says that "media literacy backfired". No, your strategy of manipulating the public backfired. Now deal with it.
- bostand 10y ago
  What do you think about InfoWars & co?
  - akjainaj 10y ago
    They are rubbish. There are no serious conservative news outlets that I know of. I usually read the news on liberal websites (such as the NYT) but I take everything with a pinch of salt... or a fistful of salt :-) Could I do the same with conservative websites? No. Breitbart for example looks like a parody website. Also, being a conservative, I think I'd be more inclined to believe their lies, which is something I'd rather not do.
    - alva 10y ago
      Is there an equivalent to The Spectator http://www.spectator.co.uk/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/ in the US? It is a conservative publication that has been running for nearly 200 years. Any ambitious conservative writers seem to have quite an opportunity at the moment.
      - luckydata 10y ago
        I don't think so, there isn't much of a market for smart, well informed conservative writing at the moment in the USA. The Republican audience is quite anti-intellectual.
    - noobermin 10y ago
      How about WSJ? Some articles in the Economist tend rightward.
    - cloakandswagger 10y ago
      Drudge Report is actually quite good, if you can parse out the obvious conservative bias. Drudge is the undisputed king of independent media, and in my experience stories get broken and fleshed out on Drudge faster than any other source.
    - 10y ago
carsongross 10y ago
As a counterpoint to this article, I recommend Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Intellectual, Yet Idiot" piece: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.96um3vb31 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e... Elites, heal thyself.
- pdpi 10y ago
  That's some top notch ranting. the ad hominem-to-factual argument ratio is through the roof, and the amount of bare assertions is splendid. It's fine if you don't agree with the post, but if that's the case you do your position a disservice by posting this inanity.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    NNT is well worth reading and taking seriously, regardless if you agree with him or not. But yes, he is a master of the rant.
  - mst 10y ago
    I regard Taleb as a useful source of "possibilities to think about", generally presented in an entertaining way. If you're reading it expecting evidence for said possibilities, then, yes, you'll be disappointed - but this tends to be true of pop sci style writing in general.
jordanb 10y ago
This obsession with fake news is predicated on the assumption that the electorate in the Midwest voted for Trump because they were misinformed or confused. I think that for very many people, enough to cost Clinton the election, the choice to support Trump or to stay home came not from confusion or misinformation or racism or xenophobia but from the realization that Clinton is going to do absolutely nothing to help them, and that while Trump will probably not help them either, there is at least a chance he might. At one point he asked "what have you got to lose?" I think that's a line that resonated very well in the Midwest. This obsession with fake news on the left is disturbing to me for two reasons. One, quite frankly, is the notion that fake news was only deployed by the right to hurt Clinton, and only being transmitted from "disreputable" news sites (with ties to Putin of course) across Facebook. I recall the fake news about Bernie supporters throwing chairs in Nevada being broadcast on NPR, then in the evening NPR broadcasting that they knew it was fake (on on-the-media I believe) then the following morning, mentioning it again as if it were true. The implication here is that if we could just keep all the news transmission in the hands of "responsible gatekeepers" in the media then fake news could be eliminated. But if NPR isn't a responsible gatekeeper, then who is? Secondly I'm disturbed to watch my party, the party I want to see win elections, go down a navel gazing rabbit hole rather than addressing the very real fundamental structural problems with its operation. How the least popular politician in America, clouded by scandal, became the Democratic nominee is a question the party should be asking. Why the party managed to disconnect so thoroughly with its base is a question that should be asking. How the party could run such lousy campaigns with such horrible management of resources not just at the presidential level but in congress at at the state level, that's something the party leadership needs to explain, and we who support the party need to demand accountability for. If the Democratic party and Democratic supporters keep going off into the weeds and obsessing about things that aren't pertinent like "fake news" or sneering at all the xenophobic voters then they're going to keep on losing elections and the Republicans will have carte blanche to push whatever agenda they want.
- nabla9 10y ago
  >realization that Clinton is going to do absolutely nothing to help them, and that while Trump will probably not help them either, there is at least a chance he might. At one point he asked "what have you got to lose?" I think that's a line that resonated very well in the Midwest. Same thing explained trough prospect theory: Does Prospect Theory explain Trump and Brexit votes? http://cognitionandculture.net/blog/christophe-heintzs-blog/does-prospect-theory-explain-trump-and-brexit-votes http://cognitionandculture.net/blog/christophe-heintzs-blog/...
michaelchisari 10y ago
In many ways, this fake news* epidemic feels like the early days of spam/phishing emails. The news that has problems are like marketing emails: There's a valid question about the level of legitimacy we should afford them, but they're not the same as "sEXy MILfS SeLL1ng V1AGrA". I disagree with the article that media literacy was the problem. Quite the opposite, the lack of media literacy necessary to manage a flood of new information in the internet age is how we got here. And like spam/phishing emails, which managed to rope in even otherwise intelligent, logical people before they knew what it was, we're going to have a painful adjustment period. And some people will never quite get the memo. * When I say fake news, I'm not talking about stuff you disagree with, or poorly reported news or even sensationalist headlines. That's a different conversation. I'm talking about stuff that is made up from whole cloth. Stories like Trump personally rescuing 200 stranded marines with his private plane in Desert Storm. There is not an ounce of truth to that, and is not based on any verifiable facts. Yet it was one of the top viral stories of 2016.
- booleandilemma 10y ago
  Can someone provide some links to fake news articles? I feel like the term "fake news" became popular after the election yet I haven't actually seen any fake news. Maybe it's because I don't use Facebook?
  - vowelless 10y ago
    > I feel like the term "fake news" became popular after the election You're not wrong. It seemed like suddenly this phrase was everywhere. https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fake%20news https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fak...
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      As the Republican coalition is made up of finance people and arms dealers, the Democratic coalition is made up of PR companies and management consultants (a lot like UK Labour.) They overestimated their effectiveness over a general populace, but there's no questioning their expertise in thought-leading the cosmopolitan middle class.
fdsaaf 10y ago
The old media has been lying for years, especially about race, gender, and sexuality. People saw through these lies, because the reality asserts itself to anyone who sees and hears, but most felt trapped, unable to report the evidence of their eyes without losing friends, family, and jobs. When these people saw new media come along that told the truth about the things they saw with their on eyes, people felt a sense of relief and began believing everything these new media reported, even things about which old media has been truthful and about which new media is lying. The lesson here is that if you have a platform and social trust, don't abuse that platform to lie, even in the name of "social justice". It's tempting, but it won't work. The truth will come out, and you'll have irreversibly damaged your reputation.
- salmon30salmon 10y ago
  Are you able to point to any academic papers or even concrete examples of the old media lying about race, gender or sexuality? I am legitimately curious about this claim. Thanks!
  - fdsaaf 10y ago
    You'll have to do some research off-HN, sorry. I'm already treading very thin ground by questioning the polite consensus on these topics. It's too dangerous to bring up the real issues at a place like HN. Try scanning, say, the Unz Review once in a while. Hold your nose and look at the content. Yes, everyone respectable will denounce the place, but make up your own mind. Occasionally, you'll see an article that makes you say, "Hrm. That makes sense." You'll have been trained to reject this feeling, to attribute it to something evil within yourself. You'll want to go running back to your comfortable lies. Ignore this sensation, just for a moment, and give new ideas the benefit of the doubt. I suppose one thing that's safe to talk about is the campus rape issue. The official story is that the American college is about as dangerous as a third world country when it came to sexual assault. After Rolling Stone's piece was revealed to be a complete fabrication, this claim started to lose its currency. But until this debunking, everyone went along with the idea that campus was some sort of awful, dangerous place and that men were demons. The Jackie article was far from the first one painting an unreal image of gender relations. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything other examples I can denounce in polite company. All I can say is that the official story is that human being are blank slates upon birth, with all characteristics socially constructed, and that this idea is false. Nothing in our society makes sense if you ascribe to the blank slate idea, but the media pushes it anyway. The intellectual contortions that the mainstream media uses to preserve the blank slake hypothesis are embarrassing and credibility-destroying.
tomohawk 10y ago
This is what Ben Rhodes, chief propagandist selling Obama's Iran deal had to say: “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. . . The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
- ra1n85 10y ago
  That explains a lot. Curious what happened - did the business model break to the extent that seasoned journalists that can manage foreign assignments are no longer on payroll or sought after? Is this a consequence of cost-cutting at news outlets?
  - michaelchisari 10y ago
    In the old days, subscriptions kept the lights on, and advertising was gravy. Today, subscriptions don't exist and advertising barely keeps the lights on. That kind of economic corruption is seen on all level of news and reporting.
  - AmVess 10y ago
    Yes on both counts. Media consolidation led to lots of layoffs and belt tightening, and the internet just made things worse. Journalism in this country has become a bit of a joke, and that's all on the lack of oversight by lawmakers. These giant media conglomerates should never have been allowed to form in the first place for the very reasons we are discussing now; poor journalism and nearly worthless commodity reporting.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    As someone else said, yes and yes. In addition to the simple fact that advertising is down, it's because newspapers were/are bundles. When they had local monopolies (or at least duopolies) on information and certain advertising, this let them do things like fill a lot of cheap column inches with sports scores and wire copy while maintaining (in many cases) prestige investigative units and foreign bureaus. These never came close to paying for themselves in the sense that subscribers would pay for them as standalone writing. But they lent gravitas to the paper as a whole, helping to make the paper as a whole a moneymaking proposition.
whatshisface 10y ago
The author argues that when 'the plebs' (look, we know what you're getting at) come up with independent beliefs, serious mistakes can happen. There are some arguments about expertise, but the part that will stick out to most readers is the argument against "individuality." I'd like to point out that millions of perfectly aligned and polarized poor critical thinkers is a far more terrifying prospect.
- cloakandswagger 10y ago
  A smattering of "fake news" stories that need to be debunked is a really small price to pay if it means we gain a larger portion of the population that actually attempts to think for themselves, question sources and stories critically, etc. I think back to the MSM "glory days" of the early 2000s. Independent sources were nearly nonexistent, and it felt like the entire country happily accepted whatever narrative they were given (see: WMD in Iraq, invasion)
hugh4life 10y ago
"Wherever I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one everywhere. What a caricature—and what a base, empty caricature—of England or France or Italy you get in the "Times," or the "Manchester Guardian," the "Matin," or the "Tribune"! No one of them is in any sense general—or really national. The Free Press gives you the truth; but only in disjointed sections, for it is disparate and it is particularist: it is marked with isolation—and it is so marked because its origin lay in various and most diverse propaganda: because it came later than the official Press of Capitalism, and was, in its origins, but a reaction against it." http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18018/18018-h/18018-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18018/18018-h/18018-h.htm "Partly it [the Teflon-like ability of some to resist the charge of “irrationality” or “extremism”] is a matter of a general cynicism in our culture about the power or even the relevance of rational argument to matters sufficiently fundamental. Fideism has a large, not always articulate, body of adherents, and not only among the members of those Protestant churches and movements which openly proclaim it; there are plenty of secular fideists. And partly it is because of a strong and sometimes justified suspicion by those against whom the charge is leveled that those who level it do so, not so much because they themselves are genuinely moved by rational argument, as by appealing to argument they are able to exercise a kind of power which favors their own interests and privileges, the interests and privileges of a class which has arrogated the rhetorically effective use of argument to itself for its own purposes. Arguments, that is to say, have come to be understood in some circles not as expressions of rationality, but as weapons, the techniques for deploying which furnish a key part of the professional skills of lawyers, academics, economists, and journalists who thereby dominate the dialectically unfluent and inarticulate. There is thus a remarkable concordance in the way in which apparently very different types of social and cultural groups envisage each other’s commitments. To the readership of the New York Times, or at least that part of it which shares the presuppositions of those who write that parish magazine of affluent and self-congratulatory liberal enlightenment, the congregations of evangelical fundamentalism appear unfashionably unenlightened. But to the members of those congregations that readership appears to be just as much a community of pre-rational faith as they themselves are but one whose members, unlike themselves, fail to recognize themselves for what they are, and hence are in no position to level charges of irrationality at them or anyone else." http://askonasi.com/2015/12/alasdair-macintyre-on-the-trump-phenomenon/ http://askonasi.com/2015/12/alasdair-macintyre-on-the-trump-...
devoply 10y ago
Maybe fake news is a blessing in disguise in that it makes you distrust everything. Which is a good thing. Because despite what some people want to believe, media as it is today is a healthy dose of garbage shoveled down your throat by people with various interests. All focused on self-interest without considering the broader implications of their actions. Fake news is the lowest form of this, but we have many higher forms that pass without ridicule.
milesf 10y ago
Bit of scaremongering in that piece: Think about how this might play out in communities where the “liberal media” is viewed with disdain as an untrustworthy source of information… or in those where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of religious people. I'm a 'religious person', and my children attend a Christian High School. Being Canadian we tend to look upon all American media with skepticism because it is so much more sensational than our media outlets. We are always talking about how to discern truth from error. For example, I recently picked up this book on logical reasoning: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1502713764 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1502713764 Yes, there are other religious people out there who are terrified of everything, but don't lump all of us together. Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Oxford... these are all universities that were founded as theological seminaries (and still have those departments). Sound reasoning is not only the backbone of Science and Technology, but also Christian Theology.
- JacobJans 10y ago
  > Yes, there are other religious people out there who are terrified of everything, but don't lump all of us together. The article didn't lump all Christian together. Ironically, the quote you pulled proves that point. The article was specifically talking about "communities ... where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of people." Such communities do exist, in the U.S., and they have real political influence.
more_original 10y ago
This all reminds me of the situation in Eastern Germany just before the German unification. In the elections campaigns in Eastern Germany just after the fall of the Iron Curtain, politicians were lobbying for reunification with rather overblown promises for the future of Eastern Germany after the reunification. It should have been clear that these promises weren't realistic, and this was in fact pointed out at the time. But people dismissed these warnings, as they came from the (now free) Eastern German media. It seems that many people now thought that everything the old media said was a lie and dismissed as false everything they were saying. This feels quite similar to the attitudes about the "lying press" that are currently circulating.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  But people dismissed these warnings, as they came from the (now free) Eastern German media As an East German who participated in the demonstrations (17 at the time), your version is completely and utterly wrong in the main part. Yes, the reuniuon was painted in a way too nice light. No, we East Germans did NOT vote for it because we were mislead - the vast majority of East Germans would have voted for it in any case! There was no alternative. The vision of being stuck with a useless currency without any value, in the middle of crumbling infrastructure (and whatever problems US infrastructure may have - and I lived in the US for a decade - it's not even close to East Germany, and yes, we had plenty of lead pipes too, in my own house for example), incapable of traveling anywhere (no money), a dead-end society. Our environment was a huge disaster!! Without reunification everybody who could would have moved West. You may argue that has happened anyway, but I would say not nearly as much as what would have happened if the GDR had remained. As far as "cost" - this is a somewhat silly argument on the level of an economy. For me, yes, I have to look at my costs, same as for a business. But in an economy somebody's cost is somebody else's income! The US does a lot of "socialism" and planned economy via military spending. Germany did the reunification. I think the German money was well-spend in comparison. Okay sorry, that wasn't supposed to be an argument about US military spending, I have no idea about its overall effects, but I know about the effects of the German reunification. The environmental cleanup alone was HUGE, you have no idea (it seems to me). I lived next to a very large chemical fiber factory (where I learned too), such filth, huge mountains(!) of ash nearby form the (horribly dirty) power plant, the river that ran by without much life and you didn't want to touch the water. Today: The water is near perfect, the ash-mountains gone (there is a big new modern factory), the power plant modernized, everything is clean. Yes there are a lot less people in the area, but overall I consider it a huge plus. The depopulation problem is not actually alone that people moved out of East Germany: Quite a few larger cities there are gaining. A big part of it is people moving to cities. Same reason why some areas in the US (Bay Area, where I lived) are gaining, or Munich or Berlin in Germany, or Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, while villages suffer. East Germany had been the less populated and more rural part of Germany before too! So no, overall what they promised about the reunification was not all that oversold. Some individuals may disagree, the majority though most definitely does not regret voting the way they did. However, your misrepresentation of what happened does remind me of what is going on now. Trump is the work of Russian hackers! People are mislead! As someone who feels actually pretty left (at least socially very much so, and when it comes to risks and rewards distribution in society), I am disgusted by what I have to read from "my" camp. Zero reflection, zero analysis. Trump brought out the worst, that is true! I see a lot of it in many of those arguing against him though.
tmuir 10y ago
I see it as Trump, the master negotiator, knowing the one thing the media can't afford to point out, and then Trump the politician doing just that: Manufacturing Consent.
failrate 10y ago
What every news consumer should consider is that every source has a bias. Only by considering multiple sources can you have something approaching "truth".
mandelbulb 10y ago
Overall the cause of the issue can be, in my opinion, summarized as cognitive isolation. People either never learn to or stop challenging their own views and knowledge. This ranges from rather simple cases where people live in less advanced areas, living hard but repetitive lives, to the well-educated and experienced who stopped debating with people of the same level of mastery of some subject, thus, constantly amplifying their perception of a subject and eventually also ceasing to pick up nuanced disagreements from those who at least challenge a small part of the respective topic. The intent being, at best, to win an argument and validate one's perspective rather than letting others to convince oneself In simpler terms, many people--whether educated by well-grounded or misleading sources--do not understand or neglect that even if you have trained, studied, researched in-depth for years, you are quite rarely capable of considering and addressing enough of the relevant approaches to a certain matter and that you have to continue to "peer-review" your own points of view your whole life. Misconception of that often leading to the misinterpretation of the importance and the nuanced workings of trust in our societies which a whole new world of dangerous paths one can take.
milesf 10y ago
Have a look at this segment of an interview with John Pilger on the state of journalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Ho8OrBzig&feature=youtu.be&t=408 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Ho8OrBzig&feature=youtu.be... We do not have many journalists anymore. We have too many anti-journalists.
niftich 10y ago
This is a good read. It's from danah boyd, whom I've disagreed with on some points before, but this article looks at why certain people distrust mainstream media or the opinions of experts, and traces it back to America's individualist message taught to children early on coupled with an ever more acute class conflict, as opposed to a more condescending conclusion typically implied by previous analyses.
saycheese 10y ago
"For the past three years, my assignment has been to try to help this newspaper live up to its own high journalistic standards as it covered a historic presidential election, two wars, the Great Recession, violence in the Middle East and more. I have deplored the overuse of anonymous sources, warned against the creep of opinion into news analysis and worried about the preservation of Times quality on the Internet. But, in truth, I have sometimes felt less like a keeper of the flame and more like an internal affairs cop," said Clark Hoyt, who was departing as the public editor of The New York Times in 2010; Hoyt had been serving as the NYT internal representative for the readers. Source: http://nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html http://nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html
deleted 10y ago
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olivermarks 10y ago
Free speech is a central tenet of western democracies, and democratic republics like the USA. Suppressing 'Fake News' argues against this differentiator from authoritarian control of information by non democratic government. Just as music radio lost its credibility and audience when Clearchannel dumbed it down to automated playlists in the intersts of maximizing corporate profits, 'main stream news' (MSN) has lost most of its credibility this decade. There is no 'news', there is only information to be parsed and compared. The media is owned by a few large global conglomerates and there are no investigative reporters under their employ.
- specialist 10y ago
  "Suppressing 'Fake News' argues against this..." Anyone fluffed up about 'fake news' is ignorant of the history of journalism. It's always been yellow journalism, propaganda, pamphleteering, grinding of axes. William Randolph Hearst? We had brief respite from 1945 to maybe 1990. And sadly we thought the pretense of objectivity and efforts at fact checking was the norm. "The media is owned by a few large global conglomerates and there are no investigative reporters under their employ." There are four styles. Ad-based, subscription/endowment supported (Economist, CSM), reader/viewer supported (eg public radio), and whacko bloggers [0]. It's all about the incentives. "MSM" is corporate media infotainment, nothing more. A comment down-thread suggests that any media that is ad-supported is now suspect. I agree. [0] Like me. I was an activist who blogged. FOIAs, public hearings, fact checking.
  - olivermarks 10y ago
    Your 4th media style 'whacko bloggers' disrespects the many people writing very coherent, logical and well thought out commentaries and ideas. Yes there are plenty of crazy people - always has been - but these days the MSM reproduces tweets and steals from bloggers. I would argue free speech on the internet is very important to counter all the yellow journalism, paid promo pieces and straight up propoganda...
    - specialist 10y ago
chatmasta 10y ago
I don't understand the obsession with finding the perfect news source, the one source of truth, devoid of any bias. It will never happen. During the election, I would go back and forth between super left wing and super right wing news sources. I found that was the best way to filter out the bullshit. This is the only way to read the news. By reading many different sources of news, each with their own wild biases, you can triangulate the actual facts. We should just be grateful that in the modern world we have access to so many different sources, instead of just a few.
adolph 10y ago
People believe in information that confirms their priors. This is one way to look at the problem and one that fits in with the contemporary interest in cognitive bias. An alternative explanation is that people more easily intake information that activates their schema.

82 points by grzm 10y ago

I think when clicks equal money, there's a lot less room for ethics in journalism. See: https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp Still, as the article points out, efforts to sanitize reporting will fail. But I think that's OK. I'd rather see a populace interested and misinformed, than one uninterested and uninformed.

bostik 10y ago
> I'd rather see a populace interested and misinformed Really? Isn't that the worst possible combination for making it easier to spread propaganda? Quoting Confucious - To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
specialist 10y ago
I salut your egalitarianism, but media doesn't work that way. To wit, the Fox News audience is more ignorant than those who don't watch news at all.

akjainaj 10y ago

The mass media had all the power, for some time, they controlled all the information. They used that power to publish biased articles, half truths, etc. People got tired of that, and therefore, started distrusting the mass media. And now the mass media says "this hurricane of fake news, this has to be stopped!" The mass media forgets: this is all your fault. This monster, you created it. In this past election, most newspapers decided to side with Clinton. Why would you do that? Now all Trump supporters and even some Clinton supporters hate you and won't trust you again for a long time. You had the power and the responsibility to tell the truth. You decided to publish half truths because you had certain interests. Money, power. People got tired and they went for the ONLY alternative that there is: the tabloids, the liars. It's ALL your fault. You are shameless scoundrels, writing a title that says that "media literacy backfired". No, your strategy of manipulating the public backfired. Now deal with it.

bostand 10y ago
What do you think about InfoWars & co?
- akjainaj 10y ago
  They are rubbish. There are no serious conservative news outlets that I know of. I usually read the news on liberal websites (such as the NYT) but I take everything with a pinch of salt... or a fistful of salt :-) Could I do the same with conservative websites? No. Breitbart for example looks like a parody website. Also, being a conservative, I think I'd be more inclined to believe their lies, which is something I'd rather not do.
  - alva 10y ago
    Is there an equivalent to The Spectator http://www.spectator.co.uk/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/ in the US? It is a conservative publication that has been running for nearly 200 years. Any ambitious conservative writers seem to have quite an opportunity at the moment.
    - luckydata 10y ago
      I don't think so, there isn't much of a market for smart, well informed conservative writing at the moment in the USA. The Republican audience is quite anti-intellectual.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    How about WSJ? Some articles in the Economist tend rightward.
  - cloakandswagger 10y ago
    Drudge Report is actually quite good, if you can parse out the obvious conservative bias. Drudge is the undisputed king of independent media, and in my experience stories get broken and fleshed out on Drudge faster than any other source.
  - 10y ago

carsongross 10y ago

As a counterpoint to this article, I recommend Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Intellectual, Yet Idiot" piece: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.96um3vb31 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e... Elites, heal thyself.

pdpi 10y ago
That's some top notch ranting. the ad hominem-to-factual argument ratio is through the roof, and the amount of bare assertions is splendid. It's fine if you don't agree with the post, but if that's the case you do your position a disservice by posting this inanity.
- carsongross 10y ago
  NNT is well worth reading and taking seriously, regardless if you agree with him or not. But yes, he is a master of the rant.
- mst 10y ago
  I regard Taleb as a useful source of "possibilities to think about", generally presented in an entertaining way. If you're reading it expecting evidence for said possibilities, then, yes, you'll be disappointed - but this tends to be true of pop sci style writing in general.

jordanb 10y ago

This obsession with fake news is predicated on the assumption that the electorate in the Midwest voted for Trump because they were misinformed or confused. I think that for very many people, enough to cost Clinton the election, the choice to support Trump or to stay home came not from confusion or misinformation or racism or xenophobia but from the realization that Clinton is going to do absolutely nothing to help them, and that while Trump will probably not help them either, there is at least a chance he might. At one point he asked "what have you got to lose?" I think that's a line that resonated very well in the Midwest. This obsession with fake news on the left is disturbing to me for two reasons. One, quite frankly, is the notion that fake news was only deployed by the right to hurt Clinton, and only being transmitted from "disreputable" news sites (with ties to Putin of course) across Facebook. I recall the fake news about Bernie supporters throwing chairs in Nevada being broadcast on NPR, then in the evening NPR broadcasting that they knew it was fake (on on-the-media I believe) then the following morning, mentioning it again as if it were true. The implication here is that if we could just keep all the news transmission in the hands of "responsible gatekeepers" in the media then fake news could be eliminated. But if NPR isn't a responsible gatekeeper, then who is? Secondly I'm disturbed to watch my party, the party I want to see win elections, go down a navel gazing rabbit hole rather than addressing the very real fundamental structural problems with its operation. How the least popular politician in America, clouded by scandal, became the Democratic nominee is a question the party should be asking. Why the party managed to disconnect so thoroughly with its base is a question that should be asking. How the party could run such lousy campaigns with such horrible management of resources not just at the presidential level but in congress at at the state level, that's something the party leadership needs to explain, and we who support the party need to demand accountability for. If the Democratic party and Democratic supporters keep going off into the weeds and obsessing about things that aren't pertinent like "fake news" or sneering at all the xenophobic voters then they're going to keep on losing elections and the Republicans will have carte blanche to push whatever agenda they want.

nabla9 10y ago
>realization that Clinton is going to do absolutely nothing to help them, and that while Trump will probably not help them either, there is at least a chance he might. At one point he asked "what have you got to lose?" I think that's a line that resonated very well in the Midwest. Same thing explained trough prospect theory: Does Prospect Theory explain Trump and Brexit votes? http://cognitionandculture.net/blog/christophe-heintzs-blog/does-prospect-theory-explain-trump-and-brexit-votes http://cognitionandculture.net/blog/christophe-heintzs-blog/...

michaelchisari 10y ago

In many ways, this fake news* epidemic feels like the early days of spam/phishing emails. The news that has problems are like marketing emails: There's a valid question about the level of legitimacy we should afford them, but they're not the same as "sEXy MILfS SeLL1ng V1AGrA". I disagree with the article that media literacy was the problem. Quite the opposite, the lack of media literacy necessary to manage a flood of new information in the internet age is how we got here. And like spam/phishing emails, which managed to rope in even otherwise intelligent, logical people before they knew what it was, we're going to have a painful adjustment period. And some people will never quite get the memo. * When I say fake news, I'm not talking about stuff you disagree with, or poorly reported news or even sensationalist headlines. That's a different conversation. I'm talking about stuff that is made up from whole cloth. Stories like Trump personally rescuing 200 stranded marines with his private plane in Desert Storm. There is not an ounce of truth to that, and is not based on any verifiable facts. Yet it was one of the top viral stories of 2016.

booleandilemma 10y ago
Can someone provide some links to fake news articles? I feel like the term "fake news" became popular after the election yet I haven't actually seen any fake news. Maybe it's because I don't use Facebook?
- vowelless 10y ago
  > I feel like the term "fake news" became popular after the election You're not wrong. It seemed like suddenly this phrase was everywhere. https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fake%20news https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&q=fak...
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    As the Republican coalition is made up of finance people and arms dealers, the Democratic coalition is made up of PR companies and management consultants (a lot like UK Labour.) They overestimated their effectiveness over a general populace, but there's no questioning their expertise in thought-leading the cosmopolitan middle class.

fdsaaf 10y ago

The old media has been lying for years, especially about race, gender, and sexuality. People saw through these lies, because the reality asserts itself to anyone who sees and hears, but most felt trapped, unable to report the evidence of their eyes without losing friends, family, and jobs. When these people saw new media come along that told the truth about the things they saw with their on eyes, people felt a sense of relief and began believing everything these new media reported, even things about which old media has been truthful and about which new media is lying. The lesson here is that if you have a platform and social trust, don't abuse that platform to lie, even in the name of "social justice". It's tempting, but it won't work. The truth will come out, and you'll have irreversibly damaged your reputation.

salmon30salmon 10y ago
Are you able to point to any academic papers or even concrete examples of the old media lying about race, gender or sexuality? I am legitimately curious about this claim. Thanks!
- fdsaaf 10y ago
  You'll have to do some research off-HN, sorry. I'm already treading very thin ground by questioning the polite consensus on these topics. It's too dangerous to bring up the real issues at a place like HN. Try scanning, say, the Unz Review once in a while. Hold your nose and look at the content. Yes, everyone respectable will denounce the place, but make up your own mind. Occasionally, you'll see an article that makes you say, "Hrm. That makes sense." You'll have been trained to reject this feeling, to attribute it to something evil within yourself. You'll want to go running back to your comfortable lies. Ignore this sensation, just for a moment, and give new ideas the benefit of the doubt. I suppose one thing that's safe to talk about is the campus rape issue. The official story is that the American college is about as dangerous as a third world country when it came to sexual assault. After Rolling Stone's piece was revealed to be a complete fabrication, this claim started to lose its currency. But until this debunking, everyone went along with the idea that campus was some sort of awful, dangerous place and that men were demons. The Jackie article was far from the first one painting an unreal image of gender relations. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything other examples I can denounce in polite company. All I can say is that the official story is that human being are blank slates upon birth, with all characteristics socially constructed, and that this idea is false. Nothing in our society makes sense if you ascribe to the blank slate idea, but the media pushes it anyway. The intellectual contortions that the mainstream media uses to preserve the blank slake hypothesis are embarrassing and credibility-destroying.

tomohawk 10y ago

This is what Ben Rhodes, chief propagandist selling Obama's Iran deal had to say: “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. . . The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

ra1n85 10y ago
That explains a lot. Curious what happened - did the business model break to the extent that seasoned journalists that can manage foreign assignments are no longer on payroll or sought after? Is this a consequence of cost-cutting at news outlets?
- michaelchisari 10y ago
  In the old days, subscriptions kept the lights on, and advertising was gravy. Today, subscriptions don't exist and advertising barely keeps the lights on. That kind of economic corruption is seen on all level of news and reporting.
- AmVess 10y ago
  Yes on both counts. Media consolidation led to lots of layoffs and belt tightening, and the internet just made things worse. Journalism in this country has become a bit of a joke, and that's all on the lack of oversight by lawmakers. These giant media conglomerates should never have been allowed to form in the first place for the very reasons we are discussing now; poor journalism and nearly worthless commodity reporting.
- ghaff 10y ago
  As someone else said, yes and yes. In addition to the simple fact that advertising is down, it's because newspapers were/are bundles. When they had local monopolies (or at least duopolies) on information and certain advertising, this let them do things like fill a lot of cheap column inches with sports scores and wire copy while maintaining (in many cases) prestige investigative units and foreign bureaus. These never came close to paying for themselves in the sense that subscribers would pay for them as standalone writing. But they lent gravitas to the paper as a whole, helping to make the paper as a whole a moneymaking proposition.

whatshisface 10y ago

The author argues that when 'the plebs' (look, we know what you're getting at) come up with independent beliefs, serious mistakes can happen. There are some arguments about expertise, but the part that will stick out to most readers is the argument against "individuality." I'd like to point out that millions of perfectly aligned and polarized poor critical thinkers is a far more terrifying prospect.

cloakandswagger 10y ago
A smattering of "fake news" stories that need to be debunked is a really small price to pay if it means we gain a larger portion of the population that actually attempts to think for themselves, question sources and stories critically, etc. I think back to the MSM "glory days" of the early 2000s. Independent sources were nearly nonexistent, and it felt like the entire country happily accepted whatever narrative they were given (see: WMD in Iraq, invasion)

hugh4life 10y ago

"Wherever I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one everywhere. What a caricature—and what a base, empty caricature—of England or France or Italy you get in the "Times," or the "Manchester Guardian," the "Matin," or the "Tribune"! No one of them is in any sense general—or really national. The Free Press gives you the truth; but only in disjointed sections, for it is disparate and it is particularist: it is marked with isolation—and it is so marked because its origin lay in various and most diverse propaganda: because it came later than the official Press of Capitalism, and was, in its origins, but a reaction against it." http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18018/18018-h/18018-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18018/18018-h/18018-h.htm "Partly it [the Teflon-like ability of some to resist the charge of “irrationality” or “extremism”] is a matter of a general cynicism in our culture about the power or even the relevance of rational argument to matters sufficiently fundamental. Fideism has a large, not always articulate, body of adherents, and not only among the members of those Protestant churches and movements which openly proclaim it; there are plenty of secular fideists. And partly it is because of a strong and sometimes justified suspicion by those against whom the charge is leveled that those who level it do so, not so much because they themselves are genuinely moved by rational argument, as by appealing to argument they are able to exercise a kind of power which favors their own interests and privileges, the interests and privileges of a class which has arrogated the rhetorically effective use of argument to itself for its own purposes. Arguments, that is to say, have come to be understood in some circles not as expressions of rationality, but as weapons, the techniques for deploying which furnish a key part of the professional skills of lawyers, academics, economists, and journalists who thereby dominate the dialectically unfluent and inarticulate. There is thus a remarkable concordance in the way in which apparently very different types of social and cultural groups envisage each other’s commitments. To the readership of the New York Times, or at least that part of it which shares the presuppositions of those who write that parish magazine of affluent and self-congratulatory liberal enlightenment, the congregations of evangelical fundamentalism appear unfashionably unenlightened. But to the members of those congregations that readership appears to be just as much a community of pre-rational faith as they themselves are but one whose members, unlike themselves, fail to recognize themselves for what they are, and hence are in no position to level charges of irrationality at them or anyone else." http://askonasi.com/2015/12/alasdair-macintyre-on-the-trump-phenomenon/ http://askonasi.com/2015/12/alasdair-macintyre-on-the-trump-...

devoply 10y ago

Maybe fake news is a blessing in disguise in that it makes you distrust everything. Which is a good thing. Because despite what some people want to believe, media as it is today is a healthy dose of garbage shoveled down your throat by people with various interests. All focused on self-interest without considering the broader implications of their actions. Fake news is the lowest form of this, but we have many higher forms that pass without ridicule.

milesf 10y ago

Bit of scaremongering in that piece: Think about how this might play out in communities where the “liberal media” is viewed with disdain as an untrustworthy source of information… or in those where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of religious people. I'm a 'religious person', and my children attend a Christian High School. Being Canadian we tend to look upon all American media with skepticism because it is so much more sensational than our media outlets. We are always talking about how to discern truth from error. For example, I recently picked up this book on logical reasoning: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1502713764 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1502713764 Yes, there are other religious people out there who are terrified of everything, but don't lump all of us together. Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Oxford... these are all universities that were founded as theological seminaries (and still have those departments). Sound reasoning is not only the backbone of Science and Technology, but also Christian Theology.

JacobJans 10y ago
> Yes, there are other religious people out there who are terrified of everything, but don't lump all of us together. The article didn't lump all Christian together. Ironically, the quote you pulled proves that point. The article was specifically talking about "communities ... where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of people." Such communities do exist, in the U.S., and they have real political influence.

more_original 10y ago

This all reminds me of the situation in Eastern Germany just before the German unification. In the elections campaigns in Eastern Germany just after the fall of the Iron Curtain, politicians were lobbying for reunification with rather overblown promises for the future of Eastern Germany after the reunification. It should have been clear that these promises weren't realistic, and this was in fact pointed out at the time. But people dismissed these warnings, as they came from the (now free) Eastern German media. It seems that many people now thought that everything the old media said was a lie and dismissed as false everything they were saying. This feels quite similar to the attitudes about the "lying press" that are currently circulating.

Noseshine 10y ago
But people dismissed these warnings, as they came from the (now free) Eastern German media As an East German who participated in the demonstrations (17 at the time), your version is completely and utterly wrong in the main part. Yes, the reuniuon was painted in a way too nice light. No, we East Germans did NOT vote for it because we were mislead - the vast majority of East Germans would have voted for it in any case! There was no alternative. The vision of being stuck with a useless currency without any value, in the middle of crumbling infrastructure (and whatever problems US infrastructure may have - and I lived in the US for a decade - it's not even close to East Germany, and yes, we had plenty of lead pipes too, in my own house for example), incapable of traveling anywhere (no money), a dead-end society. Our environment was a huge disaster!! Without reunification everybody who could would have moved West. You may argue that has happened anyway, but I would say not nearly as much as what would have happened if the GDR had remained. As far as "cost" - this is a somewhat silly argument on the level of an economy. For me, yes, I have to look at my costs, same as for a business. But in an economy somebody's cost is somebody else's income! The US does a lot of "socialism" and planned economy via military spending. Germany did the reunification. I think the German money was well-spend in comparison. Okay sorry, that wasn't supposed to be an argument about US military spending, I have no idea about its overall effects, but I know about the effects of the German reunification. The environmental cleanup alone was HUGE, you have no idea (it seems to me). I lived next to a very large chemical fiber factory (where I learned too), such filth, huge mountains(!) of ash nearby form the (horribly dirty) power plant, the river that ran by without much life and you didn't want to touch the water. Today: The water is near perfect, the ash-mountains gone (there is a big new modern factory), the power plant modernized, everything is clean. Yes there are a lot less people in the area, but overall I consider it a huge plus. The depopulation problem is not actually alone that people moved out of East Germany: Quite a few larger cities there are gaining. A big part of it is people moving to cities. Same reason why some areas in the US (Bay Area, where I lived) are gaining, or Munich or Berlin in Germany, or Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, while villages suffer. East Germany had been the less populated and more rural part of Germany before too! So no, overall what they promised about the reunification was not all that oversold. Some individuals may disagree, the majority though most definitely does not regret voting the way they did. However, your misrepresentation of what happened does remind me of what is going on now. Trump is the work of Russian hackers! People are mislead! As someone who feels actually pretty left (at least socially very much so, and when it comes to risks and rewards distribution in society), I am disgusted by what I have to read from "my" camp. Zero reflection, zero analysis. Trump brought out the worst, that is true! I see a lot of it in many of those arguing against him though.

tmuir 10y ago

I see it as Trump, the master negotiator, knowing the one thing the media can't afford to point out, and then Trump the politician doing just that: Manufacturing Consent.

failrate 10y ago

What every news consumer should consider is that every source has a bias. Only by considering multiple sources can you have something approaching "truth".

mandelbulb 10y ago

Overall the cause of the issue can be, in my opinion, summarized as cognitive isolation. People either never learn to or stop challenging their own views and knowledge. This ranges from rather simple cases where people live in less advanced areas, living hard but repetitive lives, to the well-educated and experienced who stopped debating with people of the same level of mastery of some subject, thus, constantly amplifying their perception of a subject and eventually also ceasing to pick up nuanced disagreements from those who at least challenge a small part of the respective topic. The intent being, at best, to win an argument and validate one's perspective rather than letting others to convince oneself In simpler terms, many people--whether educated by well-grounded or misleading sources--do not understand or neglect that even if you have trained, studied, researched in-depth for years, you are quite rarely capable of considering and addressing enough of the relevant approaches to a certain matter and that you have to continue to "peer-review" your own points of view your whole life. Misconception of that often leading to the misinterpretation of the importance and the nuanced workings of trust in our societies which a whole new world of dangerous paths one can take.

milesf 10y ago

Have a look at this segment of an interview with John Pilger on the state of journalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Ho8OrBzig&feature=youtu.be&t=408 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Ho8OrBzig&feature=youtu.be... We do not have many journalists anymore. We have too many anti-journalists.

niftich 10y ago

This is a good read. It's from danah boyd, whom I've disagreed with on some points before, but this article looks at why certain people distrust mainstream media or the opinions of experts, and traces it back to America's individualist message taught to children early on coupled with an ever more acute class conflict, as opposed to a more condescending conclusion typically implied by previous analyses.

saycheese 10y ago

"For the past three years, my assignment has been to try to help this newspaper live up to its own high journalistic standards as it covered a historic presidential election, two wars, the Great Recession, violence in the Middle East and more. I have deplored the overuse of anonymous sources, warned against the creep of opinion into news analysis and worried about the preservation of Times quality on the Internet. But, in truth, I have sometimes felt less like a keeper of the flame and more like an internal affairs cop," said Clark Hoyt, who was departing as the public editor of The New York Times in 2010; Hoyt had been serving as the NYT internal representative for the readers. Source: http://nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html http://nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13pubed.html

deleted 10y ago

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olivermarks 10y ago

Free speech is a central tenet of western democracies, and democratic republics like the USA. Suppressing 'Fake News' argues against this differentiator from authoritarian control of information by non democratic government. Just as music radio lost its credibility and audience when Clearchannel dumbed it down to automated playlists in the intersts of maximizing corporate profits, 'main stream news' (MSN) has lost most of its credibility this decade. There is no 'news', there is only information to be parsed and compared. The media is owned by a few large global conglomerates and there are no investigative reporters under their employ.

specialist 10y ago
"Suppressing 'Fake News' argues against this..." Anyone fluffed up about 'fake news' is ignorant of the history of journalism. It's always been yellow journalism, propaganda, pamphleteering, grinding of axes. William Randolph Hearst? We had brief respite from 1945 to maybe 1990. And sadly we thought the pretense of objectivity and efforts at fact checking was the norm. "The media is owned by a few large global conglomerates and there are no investigative reporters under their employ." There are four styles. Ad-based, subscription/endowment supported (Economist, CSM), reader/viewer supported (eg public radio), and whacko bloggers [0]. It's all about the incentives. "MSM" is corporate media infotainment, nothing more. A comment down-thread suggests that any media that is ad-supported is now suspect. I agree. [0] Like me. I was an activist who blogged. FOIAs, public hearings, fact checking.
- olivermarks 10y ago
  Your 4th media style 'whacko bloggers' disrespects the many people writing very coherent, logical and well thought out commentaries and ideas. Yes there are plenty of crazy people - always has been - but these days the MSM reproduces tweets and steals from bloggers. I would argue free speech on the internet is very important to counter all the yellow journalism, paid promo pieces and straight up propoganda...
  - specialist 10y ago

chatmasta 10y ago

I don't understand the obsession with finding the perfect news source, the one source of truth, devoid of any bias. It will never happen. During the election, I would go back and forth between super left wing and super right wing news sources. I found that was the best way to filter out the bullshit. This is the only way to read the news. By reading many different sources of news, each with their own wild biases, you can triangulate the actual facts. We should just be grateful that in the modern world we have access to so many different sources, instead of just a few.

adolph 10y ago

People believe in information that confirms their priors. This is one way to look at the problem and one that fits in with the contemporary interest in cognitive bias. An alternative explanation is that people more easily intake information that activates their schema.