4 ms·

It's not a good thing. You risk committing a false equivalence. Saying there is no 100% reliable journalism is technically accurate, as all news organizations m

It's not a good thing. You risk committing a false equivalence. Saying there is no 100% reliable journalism is technically accurate, as all news organizations make mistakes and are subject to biases. But some news is more reliable than others: Reuters is not Breitbart.

fixermark 9y ago
Exactly. There are news outlets that will hold themselves to a standard and issue corrections and there are news outlets that care more about clicks than truth. These are not equivalent.
unknown_apostle 9y ago
True, a news agency like Reuters aims to be a neutral observer whereas a polemical site like Breitbart wants to influence politics. Reuters succeeds to the extent that it sticks to transmitting basic facts to newsrooms around the world. Which is already very hard to get right. But a lot of what also passes for quality journalism involves not news agencies but newspapers and magazines. I consider a lot of these to be just more sneaky versions of Breitbart. They are more subtle, use more sophisticated language, have specific formatting and typesetting, have a longer history and they mix up their activism with a broad spectrum of neutral news. (I'm mostly familiar with the press in my own country so it's hard to give widely recognizable examples.) And of course, then there's publications like The Economist. In my very personal opinion, even though they may be "honest" in their intentions, they still end up giving their readers an illusion of understanding. You don't really know what happens in Iraq or Syria or China from reading the Economist. But it's so well written that you might end up believing you do. Anyhow, I see enough reasons not to trust anyone who wants to use this fake news scare to punish their competition or to herd the population to the "proper" sources of information. The untamed internet, when used properly as a source of information, will just give a snapshot of bewilderingly diverse points of view. Which is still not much, but so much better than the best polished story written by the best journalists.

fixermark 9y ago

Exactly. There are news outlets that will hold themselves to a standard and issue corrections and there are news outlets that care more about clicks than truth. These are not equivalent.

unknown_apostle 9y ago

True, a news agency like Reuters aims to be a neutral observer whereas a polemical site like Breitbart wants to influence politics. Reuters succeeds to the extent that it sticks to transmitting basic facts to newsrooms around the world. Which is already very hard to get right. But a lot of what also passes for quality journalism involves not news agencies but newspapers and magazines. I consider a lot of these to be just more sneaky versions of Breitbart. They are more subtle, use more sophisticated language, have specific formatting and typesetting, have a longer history and they mix up their activism with a broad spectrum of neutral news. (I'm mostly familiar with the press in my own country so it's hard to give widely recognizable examples.) And of course, then there's publications like The Economist. In my very personal opinion, even though they may be "honest" in their intentions, they still end up giving their readers an illusion of understanding. You don't really know what happens in Iraq or Syria or China from reading the Economist. But it's so well written that you might end up believing you do. Anyhow, I see enough reasons not to trust anyone who wants to use this fake news scare to punish their competition or to herd the population to the "proper" sources of information. The untamed internet, when used properly as a source of information, will just give a snapshot of bewilderingly diverse points of view. Which is still not much, but so much better than the best polished story written by the best journalists.