4 ms·

I'm increasingly convinced that any organization without a specific 'beat' is hopeless. Not only are they bad at the topic, it's hard to spot because they're go

I'm increasingly convinced that any organization without a specific 'beat' is hopeless. Not only are they bad at the topic, it's hard to spot because they're good at newswriting - often you'd have to already know the story to catch the errors. I've got half a dozen tech news sources I kind of trust (as in, trust that I can usually spot their errors) - Ars, Techdirt, and their ilk are all at least useful. WaPo/NYT/etc are largely subject-specific to US politics, but in denial about it, so that's workable. Physics and biology news I'm largely reduced to reading blogs and asking friends. I've found ways of making this work for lots of things, but medicine and foreign affairs are the two that give me fits. Medicine, like social psychology, is full of headlines reading "X causes Y!" over studies finding "X correlates with Y at p=0.30". I end up just reading the damn studies myself, which is obviously not efficient or trustworthy. And foreign affairs is basically hopeless. I'm easily 5 removes away from facts at when reading an English-language story about, say, Saudi domestic politics. There's effectively no 'ground truth' to access, because every source I can compare to has its own issues. It's honestly sort of baffling when I hear people talk about those topics like they're fully-informed; I'm not sure how anyone who isn't an actual expert in the specific foreign affair in question works up that kind of confidence.

ikeboy 9y ago
Some people at least read through many sources on the same issue, maybe they're all in English but some will dig deep into sources and from multiple points of view. I think it's possible to do, just takes time.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  It's certainly a better approach than trying to find one trustworthy source in isolation; there's a lot to be said for an adversarial system of newsreading. With non-Western affairs, I try this but feel like I still struggle with obscured facts and deep-seated agendas. The errors and biases in multiple accounts of a domestic issue can often be subtracted out, but English coverage of complex foreign issues has bigger complications. Distinct authors work from the same erroneous primary source, or all make the same cultural misunderstanding on the same point, or all lack key context that wasn't international news. Coverage of topics like the war in Syria is often mind-bendingly bad, and I end up running down primary sources even when I can trust them, just for context. (A concrete example: many stories about refugees in Raqqa listed populations and areas that would have left the surviving city more densely populated than Kowloon, but no one seemed to bother doing that division.) It's vastly better than it used to be, though. Total inaccuracy is much less of a threat in a world pervaded by English-speaking internet users. I feel surrounded by sloppy, unhelpful media, but I at least have enough information to get that feeling. Stories like the Western media's misunderstanding of the USSR in the 1930s give some perspective on what it looks like to be so comprehensively wrong that you can't even tell there's a problem.
- gpm 9y ago
  This article is a perfect example of why that doesn't work. All the journalists are working from the same source, and copying from eachother, so they all make the same fundamental mistakes. It helps filtering for intentional spin, but not much with reporters just being flat out wrong.

ikeboy 9y ago

Some people at least read through many sources on the same issue, maybe they're all in English but some will dig deep into sources and from multiple points of view. I think it's possible to do, just takes time.

Bartweiss 9y ago
It's certainly a better approach than trying to find one trustworthy source in isolation; there's a lot to be said for an adversarial system of newsreading. With non-Western affairs, I try this but feel like I still struggle with obscured facts and deep-seated agendas. The errors and biases in multiple accounts of a domestic issue can often be subtracted out, but English coverage of complex foreign issues has bigger complications. Distinct authors work from the same erroneous primary source, or all make the same cultural misunderstanding on the same point, or all lack key context that wasn't international news. Coverage of topics like the war in Syria is often mind-bendingly bad, and I end up running down primary sources even when I can trust them, just for context. (A concrete example: many stories about refugees in Raqqa listed populations and areas that would have left the surviving city more densely populated than Kowloon, but no one seemed to bother doing that division.) It's vastly better than it used to be, though. Total inaccuracy is much less of a threat in a world pervaded by English-speaking internet users. I feel surrounded by sloppy, unhelpful media, but I at least have enough information to get that feeling. Stories like the Western media's misunderstanding of the USSR in the 1930s give some perspective on what it looks like to be so comprehensively wrong that you can't even tell there's a problem.
gpm 9y ago
This article is a perfect example of why that doesn't work. All the journalists are working from the same source, and copying from eachother, so they all make the same fundamental mistakes. It helps filtering for intentional spin, but not much with reporters just being flat out wrong.