6 ms·

> News management and opinion manipulation by itself is not necessary “evil”. Corporate communications and public relations departments often use certain propag

> News management and opinion manipulation by itself is not necessary “evil”. Corporate communications and public relations departments often use certain propaganda techniques as a crisis management measure to prevent panic, additional financial and reputation damage, etc. Ehhh.... I'll refer you to George Carlin's [edit: it's Bill Hick's] "If you're in marketing or advertising" bit. > Fake news is the promotion and propagation of news articles via social media. These articles are promoted in such a way that they appear to be spread by other users, as opposed to being paid-for advertising. The news stories distributed are designed to influence or manipulate users’ opinions on a certain topic towards certain objectives. Good definition. But by that method... NYTimes is fake news when it comes to GMOs and their consistent bias against it. I see journalists trying to push an ideology all the time. We've lost trust in news institutions. Capital-F Fake news is especially egregious, but this definition of fake news, which is just about manipulating opinion, is _everywhere_.

jacquesm 9y ago
> Ehhh.... I'll refer you to George Carlin's "If you're in marketing or advertising" Wrong comedian.
- metaphorm 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFCMhSzeGuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFCMhSzeGuA this is the bit, I think.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    No, he clearly meant Bill Hicks. Easy to confuse the two because they both have a segment that could apply but context indicates it isn't Carlin.
    - metaphorm 9y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M that's the Hicks' bit. similar in tone and content.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Not really. Bill Hicks implores people in marketing and advertising to go kill themselves because they're satan's little helpers, Carlin tries to string together a very long list of oversold words to get people to recognize when they're fed bullshit. There's a little bit of a difference :) Big fan of both by the way. If you have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImG1z1vHh9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImG1z1vHh9M Carlin's "Last Words". Quite a few of them, actually.
        HutchSaxony 9y ago
        Bill Hicks sucked, it's time to admit it http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-bill-hicks http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-... http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.453119369/ http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.45...
- ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
  Bill Hicks, was an excellent humanist. >By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. (Kill yourself.) >Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.
metaphorm 9y ago
I've had people get into hair spitting arguments with me over whether or not the clearly manipulative and distorted news reporting style in mainstream publications (NYTimes is a good example) ought to count as fake news. Personally I don't care for the term. I think the traditional term propaganda is on target and suitably broad that it applies to both social media manipulation (fabricated blog posts on your Facebook newsfeed) and traditional media manipulation (overwhelming biases at most news publications).
- Theodores 9y ago
  Propaganda is different to Fake News. The term itself is propaganda. If you say something is propaganda then you are saying it is like classic obvious propaganda, e.g. North Korean, Soviet or anything else 'communist'. With the term Fake News there is a dismissal of the story without aligning it to the imagery that the word 'propaganda' brings to mind. Consequently it is easier to use the words Fake News and not have the baggage of the more accurate 'propaganda' word.
- hsod 9y ago
  Can you explain (or link to an explanation for) your conclusion that there exists "overwhelming biases at most news publications", or even at the NYT in particular? I'm particularly interested in anything quasi-rigorous (i.e. not based on an individuals subjective feelings), but a well-reasoned personal perspective would be illuminating as well. My perception is that the NYT (on the news side) is imperfect but is fundamentally oriented towards the truth.
  - cryoshon 9y ago
    here is the problem with the NYT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_controversies you'll find that their bias is toward whatever is convenient for the US state department at the time. generally speaking, they can't be trusted because they're on a leash. that's not to say that any individual story is factually incorrect so much as the stories they're allowed to work on and publish are kept within a certain narrow range. they sit on stories when told to. they don't write certain stories because it'd make their masters mad. they don't pick up stories which might invalidate their formerly expressed views. they are neutered in a dozen different ways. you'll also find that their op/eds are profoundly mediocre and "reasonable" reiterations of status quo thought that aren't particularly well contextualized or built to withstand critical responses. they never rock the boat. they never say anything perceptive. they never take a stand until long after there is a well established "safe" stand to take. and even then, it's a weak stand. as far as "just the facts" goes, they're not even that information dense. frequently, the lack of context (not necessarily intentional) is so severe as to be very misleading. you can do worse than the NYT by quite a bit. but it's still a rag. if you want an example of a better media outlet, check out the intercept. it's gone downhill recently, but the difference is palpable: the intercept offers contextualized fact-checked facts that people don't want published.
xienze 9y ago
> Fake news is the promotion and propagation of news articles via social media. These articles are promoted in such a way that they appear to be spread by other users, as opposed to being paid-for advertising. I don't really buy that there's some massive botnet (Russian, naturally) spreading these stories. I mean we're really talking about the social media equivalent of chain emails. Someone reads something that an author knowingly or unknowingly thinks is true, they think it's true and share with their friends, and so on. This has been going on for as long as humans could share information with one another. Of course our intellectual superiors have confirmed that what's happening _now_ is actually a crisis of massive proportion for some reason or another that I can't quite put my finger on.
- kingbirdy 9y ago
  I think the Russia angle is more from a generation perspective - obviously it's not just Russians reading them, that defeats the point, but someone has to write it and get the ball rolling on sharing them
- shallot_router 9y ago
  Absolutely, but for many those stories to gain traction in the first place, often there needs to be a marketing seed of some sort. That's where the "fake news" machinery comes in. (Of course, some sizeable subset is a chain mail or story that spreads organically, or some fake news mill trying to make money.)
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Russia invaded Crimea with unmarked soldiers, because it wasn't obvious who they were /s What's invading a forum in comparison? You're right, there's some innocent stuff going on, but it's almost naive to believe that states wouldn't use very cheap and easily available methods to spread propaganda to various populations. I mean, it'd almost be stupid for them not to be strategic in that way. We're talking about Putin, a guy who comes from the KGB and has sanctioned assassinations.
  - meric 9y ago
    Not trying to defend Putin here, but Obama has sanctioned assassinations too, perhaps you can drop that tidbit next time to make a more persuasive argument.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
"If you're in marketing or advertising" The government should apply a significant "sin tax" to advertising. Advertising imposes huge external costs on society that aren't borne by the advertiser; a sin tax would help to properly align the incentives. And it really wouldn't hurt the advertisers very much -- if advertising became more expensive they'd do less of it, but so would their competitors, making the ads they do run much more effective. It would hurt Google, Facebook and other billboard-selling agencies. Not necessarily a bad thing.
- lend000 9y ago
  If there's an externality, then it isn't a sin tax. But make sure you are able to pinpoint the externality so you know how much to tax. There's nothing that irks me more than people wanting to pin taxes on anything that they may not like (even though they can't point to an external aggression).
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    Something like a billboard is pure externality. It exists solely to influence the behaviour of a third party not involved in the transaction. A TV or web ad isn't pure externality -- viewers benefit by getting the content for free or reduced cost. I suspect the billboard effect dominates, though. I'm sure some smart economist could figure out a way to measure that.
    - lend000 9y ago
      > It exists solely to influence the behaviour of a third party not involved in the transaction. And? So are speeches, and HN comments. As long as it isn't fraudulent, I don't see where the aggression/externality comes into play. Similarly, just because someone put up a building you don't like to look at on property that wasn't yours does NOT entitle you to reparations (or the building owner to taxes for the corresponding 'externality'), because in a practical society, it is ridiculous to claim that you were harmed.
      - 9y ago
jancsika 9y ago
NYTimes is not fake news in that sense because there are still editorial standards the paper must adhere to. Taking the most cynical stance possible, NYT news articles are like Cylons-- they mix lies with the truth, where in this case individual truths are situated in a context than implies a larger lie. Fake news proper are paid-for advertisements masquerading as news, with zero editorial standards. There's no way to verify whether particular statements are true or not. That difference has consequences. For example, if you read a handful of newspapers you can glean the larger truth by understanding the national/corporate/journalistic biases of each paper. For a simple example, read both Barton Gellman and Glenn Greenwald's articles based on the Snowden leaks. Comparing/contrasting various Facebook fake news posts is unlikely to reveal any more truth than what you started with.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  The reality is the NYT and all mainstream "news" outlets are beholden to their advertisers. Notice how Mylan is always in the news getting negative press but you rarely hear about the Billions in fines/settlements paid by Merck and GlaxoSmithKline arising from product liability (the result of junk science, but that's a different topic). Merck and GSK account for 70% of ad revenues for news outlets. Contrary to common beliefs, reporters are no longer journalists but spokespeople.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    Failure to cover certain news topics and journalistic conflicts of interest are orthogonal to my point. Even if you assume all news outlets are literally employing spokespeople for advertisers-- NYT, WaPo, Der Spiegel, etc.-- those spokespeople still have to do actual hard, daily work of producing actual news content within professional constraints. That work includes an adherence to journalistic standards of evidence (i.e., multiple sources), building and maintaining source contacts, being subject to an ombudsman, gaining notoriety through a track record, etc. They can't just spout gross inaccuracies all day or they'd be fired. Thus you can check multiple independent news articles against each other and use context clues to get some better sense of the truth. Having a weak and mostly commercial press makes that more of a burden than it ought to be, but it's possible. Facebook-style "fake news" is literally stuff like "the word covfefe is an Antidiluvian term for 'in the end we win'". You can peruse 1,000s of such gems like that on Facebook all day, from different fake news publishers. And you would have learned absolutely nothing of substance after you are done. If a critical mass of Americans believe mainstream news outlets are as substance-free as that, then we've got a very expense national civics lesson in store for us. edit: typo and clarification
specialist 9y ago
The distinction is sourcing, or lack of. We now insist researchers show their data, work, code, etc. (Re)Apply the same standards to journalism, reporting, etc. Unsourced? Then it's fiction, gossip, entertainment, whatever. Problem solved.
- bmelton 9y ago
  If that were the standard, we'd never have gotten the news of NSA surveillance, Watergate, and who knows what else, as the sources were understandably shrouded in secrecy.
  - specialist 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(journalism)#Anonymous_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(journalism)#Anonymous_...
geezerjay 9y ago
> I see journalists trying to push an ideology all the time. Nowadays propaganda is being pushed so hard to the public, and manipulation tactics are being so in demand, that there are even MOOCs teaching how to push propaganda tactics into journalism to blatantly manipulate the audience. Take, for example, the edx course euphemistically called "journalism for social change" https://www.edx.org/course/journalism-social-change-uc-berkeleyx-j4sc101x-1 https://www.edx.org/course/journalism-social-change-uc-berke... This shit is a clear sign that the entire free world is being enthusiastically carted away from democracy and right into the middle of authoritarian dictatorships, and everyone in charge seems eager to either play along with this change or even use it to their advantage.
- sintaxi 9y ago
  Holy shit this is nuts. This is clearly a course on how to create propaganda. The saddest part of this are the many out there who will emerge from a course like this thinking they are some sort of moral crusader doing good not realizing they are everything they claim to despise.
  - sverige 9y ago
    I think you just described graduates of journalism school. (Before you downvote, check the curriculum of your favorite J-school.)
    - Spivak 9y ago
      Is there an ethical line between learning how to make a persuasive argument and manipulation/propaganda?
      - geezerjay 9y ago
        If you're reporting on something and you feel the need "to make a persuasive argument", you've already crossed the line between journalism and manipulation/propaganda. A writer either report the facts and lets the audience arrive at their conclusions, or pushes his agenda in an attempt to stop the audience to arrive at their own conclusions.
cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
>Capital-F Fake news is especially egregious, but this definition of fake news, which is just about manipulating opinion, is _everywhere_. This could be fixed by teaching and focusing on critical thinking. The fact that critical thinking is the least important skill taught in schools should be a hint to how important the ability to manipulate large sectors of the population is to those in a position to do so.
- Spivak 9y ago
  Teaching people to identify fake news is a fools errand. Not because people are stupid but because the heuristics and signals we teach to identify quality journalism can be easily emulated. At some level there has to be trust, and capital-N news organizations have managed to convince people that they're undeserving of it. It's not all bad, but building a reputation takes time and discipline.
HutchSaxony 9y ago
You're quoting the misogynist Bill Hicks? Remember when he "joked" that pop singer Debbie Gibson deserved to be raped (by the ghost of Jimmi Hendrix, no less) for the sin of singing pop songs? Har, dee, har, har. http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-bill-hicks http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-... http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.453119369/ http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.45... And your assumptions about how advertising works are as ill informed as climate change denial. Sorry, but there's no data to support that belief. Read Frank Trentman's Empire of Things: How humans became consumers and you'll begin to understand

jacquesm 9y ago

> Ehhh.... I'll refer you to George Carlin's "If you're in marketing or advertising" Wrong comedian.

metaphorm 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFCMhSzeGuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFCMhSzeGuA this is the bit, I think.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  No, he clearly meant Bill Hicks. Easy to confuse the two because they both have a segment that could apply but context indicates it isn't Carlin.
  - metaphorm 9y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M that's the Hicks' bit. similar in tone and content.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Not really. Bill Hicks implores people in marketing and advertising to go kill themselves because they're satan's little helpers, Carlin tries to string together a very long list of oversold words to get people to recognize when they're fed bullshit. There's a little bit of a difference :) Big fan of both by the way. If you have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImG1z1vHh9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImG1z1vHh9M Carlin's "Last Words". Quite a few of them, actually.
      - HutchSaxony 9y ago
        Bill Hicks sucked, it's time to admit it http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-bill-hicks http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-... http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.453119369/ http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.45...
ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
Bill Hicks, was an excellent humanist. >By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. (Kill yourself.) >Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.

metaphorm 9y ago

I've had people get into hair spitting arguments with me over whether or not the clearly manipulative and distorted news reporting style in mainstream publications (NYTimes is a good example) ought to count as fake news. Personally I don't care for the term. I think the traditional term propaganda is on target and suitably broad that it applies to both social media manipulation (fabricated blog posts on your Facebook newsfeed) and traditional media manipulation (overwhelming biases at most news publications).

Theodores 9y ago
Propaganda is different to Fake News. The term itself is propaganda. If you say something is propaganda then you are saying it is like classic obvious propaganda, e.g. North Korean, Soviet or anything else 'communist'. With the term Fake News there is a dismissal of the story without aligning it to the imagery that the word 'propaganda' brings to mind. Consequently it is easier to use the words Fake News and not have the baggage of the more accurate 'propaganda' word.
hsod 9y ago
Can you explain (or link to an explanation for) your conclusion that there exists "overwhelming biases at most news publications", or even at the NYT in particular? I'm particularly interested in anything quasi-rigorous (i.e. not based on an individuals subjective feelings), but a well-reasoned personal perspective would be illuminating as well. My perception is that the NYT (on the news side) is imperfect but is fundamentally oriented towards the truth.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  here is the problem with the NYT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_controversies you'll find that their bias is toward whatever is convenient for the US state department at the time. generally speaking, they can't be trusted because they're on a leash. that's not to say that any individual story is factually incorrect so much as the stories they're allowed to work on and publish are kept within a certain narrow range. they sit on stories when told to. they don't write certain stories because it'd make their masters mad. they don't pick up stories which might invalidate their formerly expressed views. they are neutered in a dozen different ways. you'll also find that their op/eds are profoundly mediocre and "reasonable" reiterations of status quo thought that aren't particularly well contextualized or built to withstand critical responses. they never rock the boat. they never say anything perceptive. they never take a stand until long after there is a well established "safe" stand to take. and even then, it's a weak stand. as far as "just the facts" goes, they're not even that information dense. frequently, the lack of context (not necessarily intentional) is so severe as to be very misleading. you can do worse than the NYT by quite a bit. but it's still a rag. if you want an example of a better media outlet, check out the intercept. it's gone downhill recently, but the difference is palpable: the intercept offers contextualized fact-checked facts that people don't want published.

xienze 9y ago

> Fake news is the promotion and propagation of news articles via social media. These articles are promoted in such a way that they appear to be spread by other users, as opposed to being paid-for advertising. I don't really buy that there's some massive botnet (Russian, naturally) spreading these stories. I mean we're really talking about the social media equivalent of chain emails. Someone reads something that an author knowingly or unknowingly thinks is true, they think it's true and share with their friends, and so on. This has been going on for as long as humans could share information with one another. Of course our intellectual superiors have confirmed that what's happening _now_ is actually a crisis of massive proportion for some reason or another that I can't quite put my finger on.

kingbirdy 9y ago
I think the Russia angle is more from a generation perspective - obviously it's not just Russians reading them, that defeats the point, but someone has to write it and get the ball rolling on sharing them
shallot_router 9y ago
Absolutely, but for many those stories to gain traction in the first place, often there needs to be a marketing seed of some sort. That's where the "fake news" machinery comes in. (Of course, some sizeable subset is a chain mail or story that spreads organically, or some fake news mill trying to make money.)
aaron-lebo 9y ago
Russia invaded Crimea with unmarked soldiers, because it wasn't obvious who they were /s What's invading a forum in comparison? You're right, there's some innocent stuff going on, but it's almost naive to believe that states wouldn't use very cheap and easily available methods to spread propaganda to various populations. I mean, it'd almost be stupid for them not to be strategic in that way. We're talking about Putin, a guy who comes from the KGB and has sanctioned assassinations.
- meric 9y ago
  Not trying to defend Putin here, but Obama has sanctioned assassinations too, perhaps you can drop that tidbit next time to make a more persuasive argument.

bryanlarsen 9y ago

"If you're in marketing or advertising" The government should apply a significant "sin tax" to advertising. Advertising imposes huge external costs on society that aren't borne by the advertiser; a sin tax would help to properly align the incentives. And it really wouldn't hurt the advertisers very much -- if advertising became more expensive they'd do less of it, but so would their competitors, making the ads they do run much more effective. It would hurt Google, Facebook and other billboard-selling agencies. Not necessarily a bad thing.

lend000 9y ago
If there's an externality, then it isn't a sin tax. But make sure you are able to pinpoint the externality so you know how much to tax. There's nothing that irks me more than people wanting to pin taxes on anything that they may not like (even though they can't point to an external aggression).
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Something like a billboard is pure externality. It exists solely to influence the behaviour of a third party not involved in the transaction. A TV or web ad isn't pure externality -- viewers benefit by getting the content for free or reduced cost. I suspect the billboard effect dominates, though. I'm sure some smart economist could figure out a way to measure that.
  - lend000 9y ago
    > It exists solely to influence the behaviour of a third party not involved in the transaction. And? So are speeches, and HN comments. As long as it isn't fraudulent, I don't see where the aggression/externality comes into play. Similarly, just because someone put up a building you don't like to look at on property that wasn't yours does NOT entitle you to reparations (or the building owner to taxes for the corresponding 'externality'), because in a practical society, it is ridiculous to claim that you were harmed.
    - 9y ago

jancsika 9y ago

NYTimes is not fake news in that sense because there are still editorial standards the paper must adhere to. Taking the most cynical stance possible, NYT news articles are like Cylons-- they mix lies with the truth, where in this case individual truths are situated in a context than implies a larger lie. Fake news proper are paid-for advertisements masquerading as news, with zero editorial standards. There's no way to verify whether particular statements are true or not. That difference has consequences. For example, if you read a handful of newspapers you can glean the larger truth by understanding the national/corporate/journalistic biases of each paper. For a simple example, read both Barton Gellman and Glenn Greenwald's articles based on the Snowden leaks. Comparing/contrasting various Facebook fake news posts is unlikely to reveal any more truth than what you started with.

CodeWriter23 9y ago
The reality is the NYT and all mainstream "news" outlets are beholden to their advertisers. Notice how Mylan is always in the news getting negative press but you rarely hear about the Billions in fines/settlements paid by Merck and GlaxoSmithKline arising from product liability (the result of junk science, but that's a different topic). Merck and GSK account for 70% of ad revenues for news outlets. Contrary to common beliefs, reporters are no longer journalists but spokespeople.
- jancsika 9y ago
  Failure to cover certain news topics and journalistic conflicts of interest are orthogonal to my point. Even if you assume all news outlets are literally employing spokespeople for advertisers-- NYT, WaPo, Der Spiegel, etc.-- those spokespeople still have to do actual hard, daily work of producing actual news content within professional constraints. That work includes an adherence to journalistic standards of evidence (i.e., multiple sources), building and maintaining source contacts, being subject to an ombudsman, gaining notoriety through a track record, etc. They can't just spout gross inaccuracies all day or they'd be fired. Thus you can check multiple independent news articles against each other and use context clues to get some better sense of the truth. Having a weak and mostly commercial press makes that more of a burden than it ought to be, but it's possible. Facebook-style "fake news" is literally stuff like "the word covfefe is an Antidiluvian term for 'in the end we win'". You can peruse 1,000s of such gems like that on Facebook all day, from different fake news publishers. And you would have learned absolutely nothing of substance after you are done. If a critical mass of Americans believe mainstream news outlets are as substance-free as that, then we've got a very expense national civics lesson in store for us. edit: typo and clarification

specialist 9y ago

The distinction is sourcing, or lack of. We now insist researchers show their data, work, code, etc. (Re)Apply the same standards to journalism, reporting, etc. Unsourced? Then it's fiction, gossip, entertainment, whatever. Problem solved.

bmelton 9y ago
If that were the standard, we'd never have gotten the news of NSA surveillance, Watergate, and who knows what else, as the sources were understandably shrouded in secrecy.
- specialist 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(journalism)#Anonymous_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(journalism)#Anonymous_...

geezerjay 9y ago

> I see journalists trying to push an ideology all the time. Nowadays propaganda is being pushed so hard to the public, and manipulation tactics are being so in demand, that there are even MOOCs teaching how to push propaganda tactics into journalism to blatantly manipulate the audience. Take, for example, the edx course euphemistically called "journalism for social change" https://www.edx.org/course/journalism-social-change-uc-berkeleyx-j4sc101x-1 https://www.edx.org/course/journalism-social-change-uc-berke... This shit is a clear sign that the entire free world is being enthusiastically carted away from democracy and right into the middle of authoritarian dictatorships, and everyone in charge seems eager to either play along with this change or even use it to their advantage.

sintaxi 9y ago
Holy shit this is nuts. This is clearly a course on how to create propaganda. The saddest part of this are the many out there who will emerge from a course like this thinking they are some sort of moral crusader doing good not realizing they are everything they claim to despise.
- sverige 9y ago
  I think you just described graduates of journalism school. (Before you downvote, check the curriculum of your favorite J-school.)
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Is there an ethical line between learning how to make a persuasive argument and manipulation/propaganda?
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      If you're reporting on something and you feel the need "to make a persuasive argument", you've already crossed the line between journalism and manipulation/propaganda. A writer either report the facts and lets the audience arrive at their conclusions, or pushes his agenda in an attempt to stop the audience to arrive at their own conclusions.

cuckcuckspruce 9y ago

>Capital-F Fake news is especially egregious, but this definition of fake news, which is just about manipulating opinion, is _everywhere_. This could be fixed by teaching and focusing on critical thinking. The fact that critical thinking is the least important skill taught in schools should be a hint to how important the ability to manipulate large sectors of the population is to those in a position to do so.

Spivak 9y ago
Teaching people to identify fake news is a fools errand. Not because people are stupid but because the heuristics and signals we teach to identify quality journalism can be easily emulated. At some level there has to be trust, and capital-N news organizations have managed to convince people that they're undeserving of it. It's not all bad, but building a reputation takes time and discipline.

HutchSaxony 9y ago

You're quoting the misogynist Bill Hicks? Remember when he "joked" that pop singer Debbie Gibson deserved to be raped (by the ghost of Jimmi Hendrix, no less) for the sin of singing pop songs? Har, dee, har, har. http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-bill-hicks http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-... http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.453119369/ http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.45... And your assumptions about how advertising works are as ill informed as climate change denial. Sorry, but there's no data to support that belief. Read Frank Trentman's Empire of Things: How humans became consumers and you'll begin to understand