12 ms·

I'm a former journalist, and one of the mistakes I often see people make is to either give too much or not enough credence to whether the facts in a news story

by jawns 10y ago

I'm a former journalist, and one of the mistakes I often see people make is to either give too much or not enough credence to whether the facts in a news story (or op-ed) are true. Obviously, if you disregard objective facts because they defy your assumptions or hurt your argument, you're deluding yourself. But an argument that uses objectively true and verifiable facts may nevertheless be invalid (i.e. it's possible that the premises might be true but the conclusion false). Similarly, a news story might be entirely factual but still biased. And in software terms, your unit tests might be fine, but your integration tests still fail. So here's what I tell people: Fact checking is like spell check. You know what's great about spell check? It can tell me that I've misspeled two words in this sentance. But it will knot alert me too homophones. And even if my spell checker also checks grammar, I might construct a sentence that is entirely grammatical but lets the bathtub build my dark tonsils rapidly, and it will appear error-free. Similarly, you can write an article in which all of the factual assertions are true but irrelevant to the point at hand. Or you can write an article in which the facts are true, but they're cherry-picked to support a particular bias. And some assertions are particularly hard to fact-check because even the means of verifying them is disputed. So while fact checking can be useful, it can also be misused, and we need to keep in mind its limitations. In the end, what will serve you best is not some fact checking website, but the ability to read critically, think critically, factor in potential bias, and scrutinize the tickled wombat's postage.

sebow 10y ago
>objective facts alright...
dboyd 10y ago
My favourite one that I use as a cliche from time-to-time is... > The average European lifespan has more than doubled since Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco to the continent.
- smsm42 10y ago
  This is a good one, also probably because by "lifespan" it means life expectancy at birth, as many "statistics" do, which has pretty much nothing to do with anything that happens to people after 15 or so.
gdulli 10y ago
That's all true. "Fake news" became a term recently due to a situation requiring far less nuance to understand and combat. Stories were intentionally being made up from scratch and targeted to manipulate certain people for a specific tangible effect. And it worked. We have to stop the bleeding and address this very low-hanging fruit. And that much is not a difficult problem to solve, the Googles and Facebooks are the right places to solve it to provide the greatest visibility. We're not going to make the whole population critical thinkers in the short term. The veracity of news or information in general is complex like you say and not something Google or Facebook should try to solve.
- Banthum 10y ago
  That original, pure form of "fake news" held onto the label for about 24 hours before the definition started expanding to include all this true-but-deceptive stuff we're talking about. Nobody's defending "true" fake news like that, but I think that kind of fake news is actually a very small part of the picture. The much bigger problem is the subtler dishonesties we're discussing here. Because they're more widespread, harder to catch, come from sources that are regarded as reputable, and thus ensnare smarter people in their falsehoods. Honest question - has there been any research on how much reach and effect "true" fake news actually has? How big is that particular sub-problem, in reality?
  - learc83 10y ago
    >fake news is actually a very small part of the picture I'm not sure that's true. Before the election at least a 3rd of news articles shared by family members on Facebook were completely falsified. Pictures of "Bernie Sanders" driving a sports car. Stories about Obama's mother in law collecting a lifetime pension for babysitting the kids etc...
    - smsm42 10y ago
      You are assuming everybody who shared those memes actually believes they are factually true, as opposed to just feeling good trash-talking somebody the (re-)poster hates.
aero142 10y ago
The journalistic norm for years has been, as long as you don't lie, no one can prove you were being dishonest, so you get to keep your credibility. So, what happened instead is they used other tactics to insinuate, without stating. My favorite version of this is to leave out the facts and just get quotes. This is the "'Administration is lying about facts', congressman says", kind of headline. It allows the reporter to insinuate that something is true by getting a quote from someone, without having to put their name on the lie. No where in the article will there be any attempt to answer the question of whether it's true or not.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  Yeah, citing someone is a cheap hack to put propaganda into an article. Nothing really is going to change much for an average reader, except for who is going to influence them and how much. The whole fact checking thing is a bit subtle. They are essentially excluding all anti-western organisations from fact-checkers, weakening foreign anti-western influence over readers. Manufacturing consent is also going to get easier.
  - skybrian 10y ago
    This is too cynical. Citing your source is good practice and people should do it more (see Wikipedia for example). If you learned something by reading it on the Internet and post a link, at least then I know where you got it from, and there's less chance the message got garbled due to paraphrasing. (Of course the source might not be reliable.)
  - narrator 10y ago
    The other cheap trick is to write a news article and turn it into an editorial by finding random people who agree with the story writer's position and quoting them. This happens all the time with tv news where they interview the random guy on the street.They probably interviewed 20 people and only kept the opinion of the one person they agreed with.
rayiner 10y ago
I cringe to hear "fact checking" used in reference to news articles. A "fact" is something that can be falsified with the evidence at hand. It's a fact that the temperature of this liquid is 72 degrees--you can measure it. Almost all of what news articles deal with, however, are inferences drawn from evidence, where the evidence is subject to dispute and many different inferences can be drawn from the same evidence. For example, take PolitiFact's analysis of Trump's assertion: "There is 'no system to vet' refugees from the Middle East."[1] To me that's not a "fact" that can be "checked." That's an assertion which could mean many different things. What qualifies as a "system" or "vet[ing]?" Is there an implicit assumption about who's system we're talking about? What is the definition of "refugee?" Even if we decide that under all reasonable assumptions, that statement is still false, what even is the significance of it in context? Here, PolitiFact omits most of the quote: "Altogether, under the Clinton plan, you'd be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children." Are we talking about the system that exists now, or the system Clinton proposed? Are we talking just about vetting, or a system that vets them and prevents future radicalization? Note the litany of assumptions in PolitiFact's analysis: 1) Clinton's proposal is the same as the status quo; 2) That we're just talking about vetting, not also future radicalization; 3) that "refugee" refers to the formal UN refugee status; 4) that various measures qualify as "vetting," etc. All of these assumptions may be perfectly reasonable, but when you pile them on, you've got a counter-argument, i.e. a proposal to draw a different inference, posing as a fact-check. As a lawyer, I spend much of my life taking purported "facts" and asking these questions. Because between the complexity of human interactions, the need to make inferences from incomplete evidence, and the ambiguities inherent in human language, it's rarely clear what someone even meant to say much less whether that assertion was true or false. [1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/13/donald-trump/wrong-donald-trump-says-theres-no-system-vet-refug/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/...
- stcredzero 10y ago
  I cringe to hear "fact checking" used in reference to news articles. A "fact" is something that can be falsified with the evidence at hand. It's a fact that the temperature of this liquid is 72 degrees--you can measure it. Then a different person comes along at noon, and the temperature is now 76 degrees. The 2nd person then starts a social media campaign against the 1st -- and wins because they had pictures and more followers.
zeteo 10y ago
> Fact checking is like spell check. No it's not. Spell checking relies on very precise rules. Fact checking relies on assessing context and, more often than not, the speaker's intention. For example, let's take the statement "There are 300 million people in the US". Is this false? Well, it depends where I'm going with it. If I was only relying on the figure as an approximation, I can say something like "therefore deaths from terrorism only affect 0.0x%, which is not something we should worry a lot about". This is obviously a factually valid argument, even though you might disagree with the conclusion b/c you think other facts are more relevant etc. On the other hand, my argument can also be "and there were 300 million in 2007, therefore the population has been stagnant and we need to do something about it". This is factually quite false, since the population has in fact increased by ~18M. Now should the original statement "there are 300 million people in the US" be rated true or false? A hostile fact checker may rate the first instance false, since there are actually 318+ million. A friendly fact checker will rate the second instance true b/c I obviously meant the rate of growth was low by historical standards etc.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  Spell checking is distance between a word and the closest word in a set. But it's not like the set of allowable spellings for words is well-defined. You generally choose a dictionary (or /usr/dict/words) and call that canonical-enough. Which dictionary you use, and whether your spelling is actually a better choice for your context than what the dictionary says aren't generally considered. Even though they do fuzz the idea of what's properly spelled. EDIT: I'm not trolling or trying to start a flame war on spellers. Just point out that almost every part of human life has some subjectivity to it.
  - literallycancer 10y ago
    Note that for many languages there is an institution (often governmental) that decides what the grammar should be like, and which constructions are allowed. That English has many different language authorities, each with their own opinion is more of an anomaly.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
vilhelm_s 10y ago
It reminds me Adam Gopnik's idea of a "theory checker" > [You would] get exactly the same incomprehension and suspicion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, post-interview, that a theory checker would be calling them. "It's been a pleasure speaking to you," you'd say to Al Gore or Mayor Giuliani. "And I'm going to write this up; probably in a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you." > Alarmed, suspicious: "A what?" > "You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren't any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream -- that kind of thing." (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001482.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001482.h...)
devoply 10y ago
I used to be one of those critical types. I have learned the errors of my ways and learned to ignore the news and the facts. The facts are that we don't control much in our lives, and the manufactured news is used to manufactured consent. Give your consent freely and you won't have to worry about a thing. It's already all decided for you anyway. They just want you to believe that you have made a choice. Instead of that game, which is emotionally exhausting, it's acceptable to me to instead simply give consent for whatever, it's all good. Nice writing style by the way, you get your point across very well.
- civilian 10y ago
  Can't tell if /s ?
  - devoply 10y ago
    I am not entirely sure myself. But really it's where I am actually at. Exhausted of being critical of things we can't change.
    - theseatoms 10y ago
      It seems that a lot of people feel this way. Maybe the answer is getting involved in local politics, as quaint as that sounds?
      - Banthum 10y ago
        The problem is that local politics don't really make the differences that people care most deeply about. Maybe that should be different. This is why I'd like to see a more federalist approach. Where really passionate issues could be decided as locally as possible without everything having to be handled by the feds. That's how America was supposed to work, at least. A federation of states, not a country with administrative divisions.
      - mod 10y ago
        I sort-of feel this way. Not enough to give up my voice (vote), but to a degree I think it doesn't matter if I'm worried about politics/news/Tomahawk missiles, or who I vote for, or whatever. I "fixed" it by moving to a remote location where, at least, things affect me less. Our county is poor, not much money to mishandle. Our road isn't paved, no potholes to fix and no expectation to have a perfect gravel road. No building permits. Cheap property tax. Neighbors don't visit, no traffic driving by. I go out and vote and then try to avoid political debate, news, etc. I'm not exactly burying my head in the sand, but it's sort-of close. And then I'm building up my property (a homestead of sorts) and self-reliance. I don't have any romantic ideas that I'm going to shut myself off from the world and do it all myself, but I do have the idea that I can limit my exposure to a large degree. So far, it's been really nice.
jsharf 10y ago
You're right, and it's possible that fighting incorrect facts might be a losing fight. A news article can have many correct facts, it only needs one lie that fell through the cracks in order to bias the readers. Talk to anyone from a country with a corrupt government. They often know at a very deep level exactly what's going on, since they were born in an environment where things only make sense if you are skeptical and look at the motivations behind a politicians actions.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  It doesn't need any lies. The narrative is influenced by what people to choose to publicize as much as how they choose to do it.
brightball 10y ago
> Or you can write an article in which the facts are true, but they're cherry-picked to support a particular bias. IMO that is the single biggest issue with most of the stuff that I see out there. It's not about what you include but what you leave out. A reader can scrutinize what you put in but only somebody with existing knowledge of the subject will know what you're leaving out.
Pica_soO 10y ago
>In the end, what will serve you best is not some fact checking website, but the ability to read critically, think critically, factor in potential bias, and scrutinize the tickled wombat's postage. ToMuchWork,DidNotThink; I think, having a chain of trusted people, who i know too thin, vouching for a articles truth, would be nearly as good?
ergothus 10y ago
> one of the mistakes I often see people make is to either give too much or not enough credence to whether the facts in a news story (or op-ed) are true. Sure, (subject to the limitations of "true/false" in context as many others have posted). (Warning: All of the below is US-based, because I know squat about politics elsewhere) But I feel like the major problem is a total lack of critical thinking from readers. Confirmation bias is real, but very few are doing anything to try and compensate for it. So while I'd love to teach people the nuances of fact-checking, I'd first start by having them question what they read at ALL. Gun Debate: Liberals think more guns = more gun deaths because there are too many trigger happy macho gun nuts. Conservatives think Sweden is a hellhole full of grenade throwing terrorists and rapists because guns don't keep them in check. Almost no one even TRIES to validate facts. If they did, context would become (very!) important...but they haven't gotten that far. Terrorism: Liberals think Conservative policies spread fear and hate that increases terrorism. Conservatives think Liberals turn a blind eye to the problems "outsiders" are bringing in. Immigration: Liberals think immigrants are good for the economy, and regardless people deserve a chance. Conservatives think immigrants are bad for the economy and that people deserve a chance _if_ they follow the rules. You can even get to more basic, easy questions: Build a wall: Liberals think it's an ineffective waste of money. Conservatives think it will reduce economy-draining illegal immigration and drug traffic. Cut Taxes: Liberals think the rich have benefited more from the society and should pay back more. Conservatives think that the rich have earned their money, and that cutting taxes on the rich will increase growth which will actually raise govt income. Climate Change: Liberals think it's human-caused and likely devastating to humans. Conservatives think it's highly disputed by scientists, and potentially good even if true. Filibuster: Liberals think the Republicans have been so obstructionist and extreme, staring with Clinton and accelerating in the Obama years, that we've gotten where we are. Conservatives think Democrats have been obstructionist starting in the Bush years and were the first to go nuclear. Voter Fraud: Liberals think it's rare, tiny, and efforts to combat it are just window dressing over minority voter-suppression. Conservatives think it's real, with large groups being bussed in to commit fraud in multiple places. Benghazi: Many investigations. No charges. Yet most people on both sides don't actually KNOW that notable investigation has happened, so their opinions on what has/hasn't been investigated aren't based on reality. It is completely true that with the above issues there is a lot of nuance, and fact-checkers like Politifact should but can't completely handle the nuance of context. But the average person doesn't consider that their "facts" can be biased, don't even bother to check fact-checkers, and usually don't even understand the position of the other side. When people consider that a statement from either side may be wholely made up, or just misleading, then I'll worry about how we as a society hone their skills to determine that. But first we need to get them to even consider it.
pcvarmint 10y ago
Correct. Labeling stories "real" or "fake" news does nothing to advance human knowledge and understanding.

by jawns 10y ago

sebow 10y ago

>objective facts alright...

dboyd 10y ago

My favourite one that I use as a cliche from time-to-time is... > The average European lifespan has more than doubled since Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco to the continent.

smsm42 10y ago
This is a good one, also probably because by "lifespan" it means life expectancy at birth, as many "statistics" do, which has pretty much nothing to do with anything that happens to people after 15 or so.

gdulli 10y ago

That's all true. "Fake news" became a term recently due to a situation requiring far less nuance to understand and combat. Stories were intentionally being made up from scratch and targeted to manipulate certain people for a specific tangible effect. And it worked. We have to stop the bleeding and address this very low-hanging fruit. And that much is not a difficult problem to solve, the Googles and Facebooks are the right places to solve it to provide the greatest visibility. We're not going to make the whole population critical thinkers in the short term. The veracity of news or information in general is complex like you say and not something Google or Facebook should try to solve.

Banthum 10y ago
That original, pure form of "fake news" held onto the label for about 24 hours before the definition started expanding to include all this true-but-deceptive stuff we're talking about. Nobody's defending "true" fake news like that, but I think that kind of fake news is actually a very small part of the picture. The much bigger problem is the subtler dishonesties we're discussing here. Because they're more widespread, harder to catch, come from sources that are regarded as reputable, and thus ensnare smarter people in their falsehoods. Honest question - has there been any research on how much reach and effect "true" fake news actually has? How big is that particular sub-problem, in reality?
- learc83 10y ago
  >fake news is actually a very small part of the picture I'm not sure that's true. Before the election at least a 3rd of news articles shared by family members on Facebook were completely falsified. Pictures of "Bernie Sanders" driving a sports car. Stories about Obama's mother in law collecting a lifetime pension for babysitting the kids etc...
  - smsm42 10y ago
    You are assuming everybody who shared those memes actually believes they are factually true, as opposed to just feeling good trash-talking somebody the (re-)poster hates.

aero142 10y ago

The journalistic norm for years has been, as long as you don't lie, no one can prove you were being dishonest, so you get to keep your credibility. So, what happened instead is they used other tactics to insinuate, without stating. My favorite version of this is to leave out the facts and just get quotes. This is the "'Administration is lying about facts', congressman says", kind of headline. It allows the reporter to insinuate that something is true by getting a quote from someone, without having to put their name on the lie. No where in the article will there be any attempt to answer the question of whether it's true or not.

zzzcpan 10y ago
Yeah, citing someone is a cheap hack to put propaganda into an article. Nothing really is going to change much for an average reader, except for who is going to influence them and how much. The whole fact checking thing is a bit subtle. They are essentially excluding all anti-western organisations from fact-checkers, weakening foreign anti-western influence over readers. Manufacturing consent is also going to get easier.
- skybrian 10y ago
  This is too cynical. Citing your source is good practice and people should do it more (see Wikipedia for example). If you learned something by reading it on the Internet and post a link, at least then I know where you got it from, and there's less chance the message got garbled due to paraphrasing. (Of course the source might not be reliable.)
- narrator 10y ago
  The other cheap trick is to write a news article and turn it into an editorial by finding random people who agree with the story writer's position and quoting them. This happens all the time with tv news where they interview the random guy on the street.They probably interviewed 20 people and only kept the opinion of the one person they agreed with.

rayiner 10y ago

I cringe to hear "fact checking" used in reference to news articles. A "fact" is something that can be falsified with the evidence at hand. It's a fact that the temperature of this liquid is 72 degrees--you can measure it. Almost all of what news articles deal with, however, are inferences drawn from evidence, where the evidence is subject to dispute and many different inferences can be drawn from the same evidence. For example, take PolitiFact's analysis of Trump's assertion: "There is 'no system to vet' refugees from the Middle East."[1] To me that's not a "fact" that can be "checked." That's an assertion which could mean many different things. What qualifies as a "system" or "vet[ing]?" Is there an implicit assumption about who's system we're talking about? What is the definition of "refugee?" Even if we decide that under all reasonable assumptions, that statement is still false, what even is the significance of it in context? Here, PolitiFact omits most of the quote: "Altogether, under the Clinton plan, you'd be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children." Are we talking about the system that exists now, or the system Clinton proposed? Are we talking just about vetting, or a system that vets them and prevents future radicalization? Note the litany of assumptions in PolitiFact's analysis: 1) Clinton's proposal is the same as the status quo; 2) That we're just talking about vetting, not also future radicalization; 3) that "refugee" refers to the formal UN refugee status; 4) that various measures qualify as "vetting," etc. All of these assumptions may be perfectly reasonable, but when you pile them on, you've got a counter-argument, i.e. a proposal to draw a different inference, posing as a fact-check. As a lawyer, I spend much of my life taking purported "facts" and asking these questions. Because between the complexity of human interactions, the need to make inferences from incomplete evidence, and the ambiguities inherent in human language, it's rarely clear what someone even meant to say much less whether that assertion was true or false. [1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/13/donald-trump/wrong-donald-trump-says-theres-no-system-vet-refug/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/...

stcredzero 10y ago
I cringe to hear "fact checking" used in reference to news articles. A "fact" is something that can be falsified with the evidence at hand. It's a fact that the temperature of this liquid is 72 degrees--you can measure it. Then a different person comes along at noon, and the temperature is now 76 degrees. The 2nd person then starts a social media campaign against the 1st -- and wins because they had pictures and more followers.

zeteo 10y ago

> Fact checking is like spell check. No it's not. Spell checking relies on very precise rules. Fact checking relies on assessing context and, more often than not, the speaker's intention. For example, let's take the statement "There are 300 million people in the US". Is this false? Well, it depends where I'm going with it. If I was only relying on the figure as an approximation, I can say something like "therefore deaths from terrorism only affect 0.0x%, which is not something we should worry a lot about". This is obviously a factually valid argument, even though you might disagree with the conclusion b/c you think other facts are more relevant etc. On the other hand, my argument can also be "and there were 300 million in 2007, therefore the population has been stagnant and we need to do something about it". This is factually quite false, since the population has in fact increased by ~18M. Now should the original statement "there are 300 million people in the US" be rated true or false? A hostile fact checker may rate the first instance false, since there are actually 318+ million. A friendly fact checker will rate the second instance true b/c I obviously meant the rate of growth was low by historical standards etc.

lallysingh 10y ago
Spell checking is distance between a word and the closest word in a set. But it's not like the set of allowable spellings for words is well-defined. You generally choose a dictionary (or /usr/dict/words) and call that canonical-enough. Which dictionary you use, and whether your spelling is actually a better choice for your context than what the dictionary says aren't generally considered. Even though they do fuzz the idea of what's properly spelled. EDIT: I'm not trolling or trying to start a flame war on spellers. Just point out that almost every part of human life has some subjectivity to it.
- literallycancer 10y ago
  Note that for many languages there is an institution (often governmental) that decides what the grammar should be like, and which constructions are allowed. That English has many different language authorities, each with their own opinion is more of an anomaly.
- dragonwriter 10y ago

vilhelm_s 10y ago

It reminds me Adam Gopnik's idea of a "theory checker" > [You would] get exactly the same incomprehension and suspicion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, post-interview, that a theory checker would be calling them. "It's been a pleasure speaking to you," you'd say to Al Gore or Mayor Giuliani. "And I'm going to write this up; probably in a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you." > Alarmed, suspicious: "A what?" > "You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren't any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream -- that kind of thing." (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001482.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001482.h...)

devoply 10y ago

I used to be one of those critical types. I have learned the errors of my ways and learned to ignore the news and the facts. The facts are that we don't control much in our lives, and the manufactured news is used to manufactured consent. Give your consent freely and you won't have to worry about a thing. It's already all decided for you anyway. They just want you to believe that you have made a choice. Instead of that game, which is emotionally exhausting, it's acceptable to me to instead simply give consent for whatever, it's all good. Nice writing style by the way, you get your point across very well.

civilian 10y ago
Can't tell if /s ?
- devoply 10y ago
  I am not entirely sure myself. But really it's where I am actually at. Exhausted of being critical of things we can't change.
  - theseatoms 10y ago
    It seems that a lot of people feel this way. Maybe the answer is getting involved in local politics, as quaint as that sounds?
    - Banthum 10y ago
      The problem is that local politics don't really make the differences that people care most deeply about. Maybe that should be different. This is why I'd like to see a more federalist approach. Where really passionate issues could be decided as locally as possible without everything having to be handled by the feds. That's how America was supposed to work, at least. A federation of states, not a country with administrative divisions.
    - mod 10y ago
      I sort-of feel this way. Not enough to give up my voice (vote), but to a degree I think it doesn't matter if I'm worried about politics/news/Tomahawk missiles, or who I vote for, or whatever. I "fixed" it by moving to a remote location where, at least, things affect me less. Our county is poor, not much money to mishandle. Our road isn't paved, no potholes to fix and no expectation to have a perfect gravel road. No building permits. Cheap property tax. Neighbors don't visit, no traffic driving by. I go out and vote and then try to avoid political debate, news, etc. I'm not exactly burying my head in the sand, but it's sort-of close. And then I'm building up my property (a homestead of sorts) and self-reliance. I don't have any romantic ideas that I'm going to shut myself off from the world and do it all myself, but I do have the idea that I can limit my exposure to a large degree. So far, it's been really nice.

jsharf 10y ago

You're right, and it's possible that fighting incorrect facts might be a losing fight. A news article can have many correct facts, it only needs one lie that fell through the cracks in order to bias the readers. Talk to anyone from a country with a corrupt government. They often know at a very deep level exactly what's going on, since they were born in an environment where things only make sense if you are skeptical and look at the motivations behind a politicians actions.

cookiecaper 10y ago
It doesn't need any lies. The narrative is influenced by what people to choose to publicize as much as how they choose to do it.

brightball 10y ago

> Or you can write an article in which the facts are true, but they're cherry-picked to support a particular bias. IMO that is the single biggest issue with most of the stuff that I see out there. It's not about what you include but what you leave out. A reader can scrutinize what you put in but only somebody with existing knowledge of the subject will know what you're leaving out.

Pica_soO 10y ago

>In the end, what will serve you best is not some fact checking website, but the ability to read critically, think critically, factor in potential bias, and scrutinize the tickled wombat's postage. ToMuchWork,DidNotThink; I think, having a chain of trusted people, who i know too thin, vouching for a articles truth, would be nearly as good?

ergothus 10y ago

> one of the mistakes I often see people make is to either give too much or not enough credence to whether the facts in a news story (or op-ed) are true. Sure, (subject to the limitations of "true/false" in context as many others have posted). (Warning: All of the below is US-based, because I know squat about politics elsewhere) But I feel like the major problem is a total lack of critical thinking from readers. Confirmation bias is real, but very few are doing anything to try and compensate for it. So while I'd love to teach people the nuances of fact-checking, I'd first start by having them question what they read at ALL. Gun Debate: Liberals think more guns = more gun deaths because there are too many trigger happy macho gun nuts. Conservatives think Sweden is a hellhole full of grenade throwing terrorists and rapists because guns don't keep them in check. Almost no one even TRIES to validate facts. If they did, context would become (very!) important...but they haven't gotten that far. Terrorism: Liberals think Conservative policies spread fear and hate that increases terrorism. Conservatives think Liberals turn a blind eye to the problems "outsiders" are bringing in. Immigration: Liberals think immigrants are good for the economy, and regardless people deserve a chance. Conservatives think immigrants are bad for the economy and that people deserve a chance _if_ they follow the rules. You can even get to more basic, easy questions: Build a wall: Liberals think it's an ineffective waste of money. Conservatives think it will reduce economy-draining illegal immigration and drug traffic. Cut Taxes: Liberals think the rich have benefited more from the society and should pay back more. Conservatives think that the rich have earned their money, and that cutting taxes on the rich will increase growth which will actually raise govt income. Climate Change: Liberals think it's human-caused and likely devastating to humans. Conservatives think it's highly disputed by scientists, and potentially good even if true. Filibuster: Liberals think the Republicans have been so obstructionist and extreme, staring with Clinton and accelerating in the Obama years, that we've gotten where we are. Conservatives think Democrats have been obstructionist starting in the Bush years and were the first to go nuclear. Voter Fraud: Liberals think it's rare, tiny, and efforts to combat it are just window dressing over minority voter-suppression. Conservatives think it's real, with large groups being bussed in to commit fraud in multiple places. Benghazi: Many investigations. No charges. Yet most people on both sides don't actually KNOW that notable investigation has happened, so their opinions on what has/hasn't been investigated aren't based on reality. It is completely true that with the above issues there is a lot of nuance, and fact-checkers like Politifact should but can't completely handle the nuance of context. But the average person doesn't consider that their "facts" can be biased, don't even bother to check fact-checkers, and usually don't even understand the position of the other side. When people consider that a statement from either side may be wholely made up, or just misleading, then I'll worry about how we as a society hone their skills to determine that. But first we need to get them to even consider it.

pcvarmint 10y ago

Correct. Labeling stories "real" or "fake" news does nothing to advance human knowledge and understanding.