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Certainly the authors of that story put in a lot of spin and opinion that did the article a disservice- Should have stuck to the facts.
by drcode 10y ago
Certainly the authors of that story put in a lot of spin and opinion that did the article a disservice- Should have stuck to the facts.
- 542458 10y agoPure "fact-based" reporting is in no way a solution. For example, take the following paragraph; "The Fukushima Daiichi reactors suffered a disaster in 2011, causing dangerous radiation leakage. Even six years later, radiation levels are high enough to be instantly fatal. Even brief exposure can cause genetic damage leading to cancer. The radioactive dust from the disaster has been carried eastward, and has been detected throughout the United States. This radioactive dust has likely been deposited in millions of houses across the country. However, the United States has no plans to initiate a domestic cleanup." There are only facts in that paragraph, but it paints a very misleading picture of a domestic emergency that simply doesn't exist (the domestic radiation levels are so low as to be harmless to humans). Pure "fact" reporting doesn't solve this problem.
- parsnips 10y agoIf you included additional fact that the domestic radiation is not fatal, it does solve the problem.
- simonh 10y agoYou're missing the point that journalists can stick to facts, but still thoroughly pervade a piece with their own biases and agenda.
- diego 10y agoThat is the point. Simply by choosing which facts to mention and which to omit you can create an extremely biased news piece.
- parsnips 10y agoOmission of facts is not reporting the facts. That's the point.
- NikolaeVarius 10y agoYes it is. How the hell do you report ALL the facts in any scenario? Any publication in existance will have to pick and choose what to report in order to keep a article to a manageable level. Do you think Scientific Abstracts are all factually correct? Hell no. There is actually a very well known issue with scientific experiments and articles where scientists will simply repeat experiments until they get a result that is within acceptable p-values and simply submit an article on that one experiment, ignoring every single time it was wrong.
- enraged_camel 10y agoYou don't need to report ALL the facts. You just need to report the pertinent ones. And the fact that domestic radiation is not fatal is pretty fucking pertinent to the passage in the OP.
- JetSpiegel 10y agoThen any news piece must asymptotically approach infinite words. Remember to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
- andy_ppp 10y agoNo, that's the exact point he's making; excluding certain information and "sticking to the facts" does not guarantee articles are not misleading.
- Ultramax 10y agoExactly. But the issue here is that you are dealing with two different mindsets. On one hand, you have the paragraph above that 'stands alone'. But that has no bearing on the truth. It's omitting key facts to be true, and creating a social situation like 'reacting to a non-existent threat'. So to me and you, ridiculous paragraphs like those above are In Error, because they are Unfinished and Missing Info. But to others, they point to the paragraph above as some kind of 'sole entity' that exists on it's own. No one cares about a paragraph that omits critical facts to portray the reality of the situation. But apparently, on the Internet, some do. Chuck that incomplete paragraph in the trash and try again, that's my response to their nonsensical verbal antics.
- aaron695 10y agoWhat wasn't fact? True the headline not, but the rest seemed factual. Spin perhaps was high, but it wasn't opinion. They seem to have been careful and specifically only stated facts. "He looked", "it's believed" etc
- GrinningFool 10y agoWhat is spin if not opinion expressed through facts?
- fridsun 10y agoWhat's a fact if not an opinion so firmly believed that one has to suffer a cognitive dissonance when it's countered?
- Retra 10y agoTruth is not measured by the production of cognitive dissonance. "Cognitive dissonance" is not even a validated phenomena, it's just barely more than psychobabble. Your comparison here is dangerously wrong.