8 ms·

I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for newspapers. The problem seems to me that not every topic is c

I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for newspapers. The problem seems to me that not every topic is covered in the same way by journalists and that the journalists are usually also specializing in particular topics and don't just write anywhere. A science journalist has usually studied some natural science but has to cover all of them and has to simplify a lot, so a trained expert will find a lot of inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway, than describing news about theoretical physics to laymen in terms that are 100% accurate to a physicist. In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way. Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. I've never heard of any reasonable and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a good substitute. Neither are copy&paste news aggregators or bloggers. At some point you've got to trust your newspaper (or read a better one!) unless there is explicit counter-evidence from elsewhere against the story. Most botched reports get corrected very fast anyway.

coldtea 8y ago
>This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". That's only true when the coverage consists of retelling such basic facts, but that's a small part of what journalists do. Anyone with knowledge of international events and affairs can spot all kinds of errors, omissions, and plain falsehoods when articles cover such topics -- just as well as one does when it comes to say physics or computer science. >Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. Most journalists and press agencies cater to the lowest common denominator. There are press sources that go far deeper [1] but those are not what people usually read for their "news". For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT. [1] Even if they introduce a certain delay on the news (which in most cases is irrelevant, it's not like anybody will need to act immediately upon some news regarding foreign affairs for example).
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- jonathanstrange 8y ago
  > For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT. If you have the time, sure. Journalists do this work for you and are trained to do it, but of course there is nothing wrong with going closer to the source. Only few people can afford this luxury, though. I sometimes do this for topics I'm really interested in, but certainly not for every daily news. For the ones who don't have the time, resorting to reputable newspapers is by far the best choice. Edit: In your reply you were shifting the goalpost. I was talking about news, not "what journalists do". Writing an editorial or opinion piece or broad analysis is not reporting news. Just wanted to make this clear.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    I disagree that the parent comment “shifted the goal posts.” The type of news article or segment that involves retelling facts like in the original comment is also where editorial choices of what facts to tell, how to present them, how to stylize a guest commentator, etc., all take place. There is no isolated part of the news about foreign affairs, say, that is commonly just a complete summary of discrete facts. Every choice about presenting it for consumption is part of an editorial and marketing process. In this sense, I think the parent comment adequately captures a useful counterpoint to your original comment, and is not “shifting the goalposts” or anything by talking about one (journalists) of the many factors that make reporting even on fact summaries still often full of politically convenient ommissions or focused on politically convenient estimates rather than full disclosure of all estimates, etc. etc.
    - jonathanstrange 8y ago
      Fair enough. I still think he shifted the goalpost a little bit but didn't want to make the impression of not accepting the criticism. It's a fair criticism from the perspective of the OP. Maybe you and the OP have different conceptions of what news are, though, because I have definitely no problem discerning factual statements from opinions or framing and in my book only the former constitute news. That every news source is biased and in fact every person on earth is biased, that is journalism 101 and has been known and accepted since the first newspaper was published. Likewise, you can learn at every photography course that every picture also tells a story about what's not on it. I really don't get why people make such a big fuzz about these truisms nowadays and suspect that many of the critics have a hidden political agenda themselves. (Not meant as a statements towards you specifically, just as a general remark, as the description of a tendency.)
300bps 8y ago
It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right I don’t disagree with this simple statement per se but I disagree with its implications. You can still paint a false picture by choosing which facts to report and which to ignore. I see it every day in the gym with one television that plays CNN next to one that plays Fox News. Watching the TV on the left gives me the impression Trump is a hooligan constantly on the verge of being impeached. The TV on the right tells me the economy is roaring and everything is great.
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pjc50 8y ago
> "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when" Quite a lot of news reporting does this, but it's extremely hard not to accidentally let "a spokesperson said X" implant the belief "X is true" in your mind unless you're very vigilant. So reporting these kind of official statements without fact-checking the underlying statement can be surprisingly misleading. But then there's also the ability of media to just make or dig up a scandal out of whole cloth by finding people willing to make the statements they want. Today's fiasco is the Times trying to resurrect the idea that Michael Foot was a Soviet agent, a claim which they lost a libel lawsuit over decades ago. https://inews.co.uk/news/ex-sunday-times-ed-andrew-neil-leads-criticism-of-times-over-soviet-sympathiser-michael-foot/ https://inews.co.uk/news/ex-sunday-times-ed-andrew-neil-lead...
cerebrum 8y ago
Iraq has WMDs.
- angstrom 8y ago
  That’s closer to manufactured consent. No evidence, vague justification and mainstream parroting to reinforce the narrative.
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dooglius 8y ago
> Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. I've never heard of any reasonable and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a good substitute. Neither are copy&paste news aggregators or bloggers. This is true, but why does this mean we should assign trust to newspapers? I think the reality is that a reliable source of information is not possible due to the Principal-Agent problem [0]: any information-providing body is going to have incentives to distort the information provided. Misleading headlines or "clickbait" to draw in more readers are one such incentive, and the inherent difficulty of verifying one's facts is another. The notion that there has to be something we can trust is a foolish one, and we should be skeptical of everything we read. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
rayiner 8y ago
> I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for newspapers. I notice the effect all the time reading any coverage of legal or regulatory issues in mainstream newspapers. I pretty much just flip past any such article these days--it's too painful. As to the alternatives, they're domain specific. For legal stuff, there are specialized legal journals. Blogs are top notch too--anything you read on PopeHat is 10x better than the NYT.
billfruit 8y ago
I doubt even in the case of international affairs things are any better in the manner traditional media is covering it. Eg: See the coverage of Syria, there seems to be hardly any first hand reporting appearing, most reports read like analysis written from afar.
quirkot 8y ago
> This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". I disagree very strongly with this statement. The "facts" may be simpler in that it doesn't take research to uncover them, but the "reporting" is far more complex because there are so many and contradicting facts. Take any international conflict and you have multiple truths about which gov't decided what. Additionally the actors are motivated to create confusion.
stcredzero 8y ago
It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way. In the case of "worldly facts" news, the really significant part is often the emotional impression of the text. The way this plays out in physics/science, world news, and politics are all going to be somewhat different. It results in factual errors more often in science news, which often amounts to making people feel like they're informed, but the emotional games played in more political news are different. (The exceptions are climate science and evolution, where the topics are more politicized and the emotional games are more political.)
BeetleB 8y ago
>This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". People often divide news content into two spheres: Facts and opinion (e.g. editorial). News articles are believed to be facts, and then they separately have opinions and editorials. The common advice is to be wary of the latter. In my experience, though, the news is really divided into three spheres: Facts, opinions, and context. You'll find that almost every news article contains both facts and context. The context portion of the article is there to tell you why all this matters. Contextual statements are also facts, but they do not involve the immediate events. It is in the choice of which contextual facts are included in the article that bias creeps in. As a simple exam, in 2003 Michael Jackson was charged with child molesting. I recall almost all the articles I read mentioned in the end that he had been similarly accused in 1991. Yet none of those articles mentioned the details and outcome of that investigation. With international affairs, once you've studied a topic for long enough, you'll quickly become aware of the contextual biases, and you'll want to scream at the authors for omitting what you think are very relevant contextual facts.
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Strilanc 8y ago
> a trained expert will find a lot of inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs Are you an expert of international events and affairs? Have you spoken to one about whether this is true? I'm not and haven't, but I would bet they have plenty of examples of terrible coverage. (I imagine many examples would be of the form "they focused on irrelevant detail X when what matters is Y" or "they said X implies Y but it's actually unknown what the consequences of X will be" or "they only quoted people with opinion X" or "they oversimplified X to the point of caricature" or of course "that's just factually wrong, I was there and X never happened".)
- 13415 8y ago
  I think he was talking about the news content, not about analysis.
pwned1 8y ago
I was once elected to public office. Nearly every article that involved me was wrong. Several times the article even insinuated that the situation was the opposite of reality. This wan't a partisan elected position either.
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
> It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, Even a cursory skimming of Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky will dispel you forever of such a notion. The motivations for inaccuracies of political journalist are different from that of a science journalist but the result is the same.
philwelch 8y ago
Political reporting is 10% facts and 90% narrative. In fact, the facts themselves are reported very selectively, largely based on what fits into the desired narrative. You can round up 100 protestors anywhere, for any issue. Why does the media cover some protests but not others? Why does the media never report on public suicides and bank robberies (to avoid encouraging copycats) but they report every mass shooting, complete with a gory scoreboard? Why was the bloodiest war since World War II virtually unreported on in the US? Why were Donald Trump’s bizarre antics more comprehensively reported than the policy proposals of any of the Presidential candidates?

coldtea 8y ago

>This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". That's only true when the coverage consists of retelling such basic facts, but that's a small part of what journalists do. Anyone with knowledge of international events and affairs can spot all kinds of errors, omissions, and plain falsehoods when articles cover such topics -- just as well as one does when it comes to say physics or computer science. >Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. Most journalists and press agencies cater to the lowest common denominator. There are press sources that go far deeper [1] but those are not what people usually read for their "news". For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT. [1] Even if they introduce a certain delay on the news (which in most cases is irrelevant, it's not like anybody will need to act immediately upon some news regarding foreign affairs for example).

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jonathanstrange 8y ago
> For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT. If you have the time, sure. Journalists do this work for you and are trained to do it, but of course there is nothing wrong with going closer to the source. Only few people can afford this luxury, though. I sometimes do this for topics I'm really interested in, but certainly not for every daily news. For the ones who don't have the time, resorting to reputable newspapers is by far the best choice. Edit: In your reply you were shifting the goalpost. I was talking about news, not "what journalists do". Writing an editorial or opinion piece or broad analysis is not reporting news. Just wanted to make this clear.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I disagree that the parent comment “shifted the goal posts.” The type of news article or segment that involves retelling facts like in the original comment is also where editorial choices of what facts to tell, how to present them, how to stylize a guest commentator, etc., all take place. There is no isolated part of the news about foreign affairs, say, that is commonly just a complete summary of discrete facts. Every choice about presenting it for consumption is part of an editorial and marketing process. In this sense, I think the parent comment adequately captures a useful counterpoint to your original comment, and is not “shifting the goalposts” or anything by talking about one (journalists) of the many factors that make reporting even on fact summaries still often full of politically convenient ommissions or focused on politically convenient estimates rather than full disclosure of all estimates, etc. etc.
  - jonathanstrange 8y ago
    Fair enough. I still think he shifted the goalpost a little bit but didn't want to make the impression of not accepting the criticism. It's a fair criticism from the perspective of the OP. Maybe you and the OP have different conceptions of what news are, though, because I have definitely no problem discerning factual statements from opinions or framing and in my book only the former constitute news. That every news source is biased and in fact every person on earth is biased, that is journalism 101 and has been known and accepted since the first newspaper was published. Likewise, you can learn at every photography course that every picture also tells a story about what's not on it. I really don't get why people make such a big fuzz about these truisms nowadays and suspect that many of the critics have a hidden political agenda themselves. (Not meant as a statements towards you specifically, just as a general remark, as the description of a tendency.)

300bps 8y ago

It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right I don’t disagree with this simple statement per se but I disagree with its implications. You can still paint a false picture by choosing which facts to report and which to ignore. I see it every day in the gym with one television that plays CNN next to one that plays Fox News. Watching the TV on the left gives me the impression Trump is a hooligan constantly on the verge of being impeached. The TV on the right tells me the economy is roaring and everything is great.

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pjc50 8y ago

> "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when" Quite a lot of news reporting does this, but it's extremely hard not to accidentally let "a spokesperson said X" implant the belief "X is true" in your mind unless you're very vigilant. So reporting these kind of official statements without fact-checking the underlying statement can be surprisingly misleading. But then there's also the ability of media to just make or dig up a scandal out of whole cloth by finding people willing to make the statements they want. Today's fiasco is the Times trying to resurrect the idea that Michael Foot was a Soviet agent, a claim which they lost a libel lawsuit over decades ago. https://inews.co.uk/news/ex-sunday-times-ed-andrew-neil-leads-criticism-of-times-over-soviet-sympathiser-michael-foot/ https://inews.co.uk/news/ex-sunday-times-ed-andrew-neil-lead...

cerebrum 8y ago

Iraq has WMDs.

angstrom 8y ago
That’s closer to manufactured consent. No evidence, vague justification and mainstream parroting to reinforce the narrative.
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dooglius 8y ago

> Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. I've never heard of any reasonable and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a good substitute. Neither are copy&paste news aggregators or bloggers. This is true, but why does this mean we should assign trust to newspapers? I think the reality is that a reliable source of information is not possible due to the Principal-Agent problem [0]: any information-providing body is going to have incentives to distort the information provided. Misleading headlines or "clickbait" to draw in more readers are one such incentive, and the inherent difficulty of verifying one's facts is another. The notion that there has to be something we can trust is a foolish one, and we should be skeptical of everything we read. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

rayiner 8y ago

> I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for newspapers. I notice the effect all the time reading any coverage of legal or regulatory issues in mainstream newspapers. I pretty much just flip past any such article these days--it's too painful. As to the alternatives, they're domain specific. For legal stuff, there are specialized legal journals. Blogs are top notch too--anything you read on PopeHat is 10x better than the NYT.

billfruit 8y ago

I doubt even in the case of international affairs things are any better in the manner traditional media is covering it. Eg: See the coverage of Syria, there seems to be hardly any first hand reporting appearing, most reports read like analysis written from afar.

quirkot 8y ago

> This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". I disagree very strongly with this statement. The "facts" may be simpler in that it doesn't take research to uncover them, but the "reporting" is far more complex because there are so many and contradicting facts. Take any international conflict and you have multiple truths about which gov't decided what. Additionally the actors are motivated to create confusion.

stcredzero 8y ago

It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way. In the case of "worldly facts" news, the really significant part is often the emotional impression of the text. The way this plays out in physics/science, world news, and politics are all going to be somewhat different. It results in factual errors more often in science news, which often amounts to making people feel like they're informed, but the emotional games played in more political news are different. (The exceptions are climate science and evolution, where the topics are more politicized and the emotional games are more political.)

BeetleB 8y ago

>This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". People often divide news content into two spheres: Facts and opinion (e.g. editorial). News articles are believed to be facts, and then they separately have opinions and editorials. The common advice is to be wary of the latter. In my experience, though, the news is really divided into three spheres: Facts, opinions, and context. You'll find that almost every news article contains both facts and context. The context portion of the article is there to tell you why all this matters. Contextual statements are also facts, but they do not involve the immediate events. It is in the choice of which contextual facts are included in the article that bias creeps in. As a simple exam, in 2003 Michael Jackson was charged with child molesting. I recall almost all the articles I read mentioned in the end that he had been similarly accused in 1991. Yet none of those articles mentioned the details and outcome of that investigation. With international affairs, once you've studied a topic for long enough, you'll quickly become aware of the contextual biases, and you'll want to scream at the authors for omitting what you think are very relevant contextual facts.

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Strilanc 8y ago

> a trained expert will find a lot of inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs Are you an expert of international events and affairs? Have you spoken to one about whether this is true? I'm not and haven't, but I would bet they have plenty of examples of terrible coverage. (I imagine many examples would be of the form "they focused on irrelevant detail X when what matters is Y" or "they said X implies Y but it's actually unknown what the consequences of X will be" or "they only quoted people with opinion X" or "they oversimplified X to the point of caricature" or of course "that's just factually wrong, I was there and X never happened".)

13415 8y ago
I think he was talking about the news content, not about analysis.

pwned1 8y ago

I was once elected to public office. Nearly every article that involved me was wrong. Several times the article even insinuated that the situation was the opposite of reality. This wan't a partisan elected position either.

abdullahkhalids 8y ago

> It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, Even a cursory skimming of Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky will dispel you forever of such a notion. The motivations for inaccuracies of political journalist are different from that of a science journalist but the result is the same.

philwelch 8y ago

Political reporting is 10% facts and 90% narrative. In fact, the facts themselves are reported very selectively, largely based on what fits into the desired narrative. You can round up 100 protestors anywhere, for any issue. Why does the media cover some protests but not others? Why does the media never report on public suicides and bank robberies (to avoid encouraging copycats) but they report every mass shooting, complete with a gory scoreboard? Why was the bloodiest war since World War II virtually unreported on in the US? Why were Donald Trump’s bizarre antics more comprehensively reported than the policy proposals of any of the Presidential candidates?