11 ms·

"all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony. I'm not trying to suggest that the industry is not without p

by untog 8y ago

"all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony. I'm not trying to suggest that the industry is not without problems, but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not "fake". There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. They also do themselves no favours (IMO) by publishing absurd opinion columns alongside actual news in a way that devalues the overall proposition. And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report - that's why it is in your benefit to maintain a varied news diet from different sources. None of this means they are all "fake news". I'm not particularly wedded to today's media outlets. If something new is going to come along and blow them out of the water, bring it on. But I'm yet to see an alternative that improves on what they offer. All I see is amateurishness (Reddit crowd sourcing the wrong identity for terrorists multiple times) and all-out propaganda efforts.

nerdbaggy 8y ago
I think most news is over exaggerated, not so much fake.
swiley 8y ago
NYT is notoriously bad and often omits and slants things.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  I was an NYT subscriber for a long time (years) and during the 2016 primaries and elections I learned how crappy they were. They tried to misinform me! I was paying them and they were lying to me. First about the Bernie campaign and then about the Trump campaign. I don't pay the news to bullshit me. For a period of six months I read both the NYT and the WSJ. The WSJ editorials are clearly written by morons but otherwise their news had higher predictive value. I agree entirely with you. It's no wonder people reading the NYT were constantly surprised. My fault entirely after Judith Miller but no longer. Purged them from my rotation.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Same here - long time, >15 years NYT subscriber, I stuck with them even while they were so obviously biased against my boy Bernie but finally it became too much. They just stopped reporting actual news one day and never looked back. They are publishing things that just aren’t true, and their silence is deafening on stories reported by their rivals. As you say, it’s not something I’m remotely interested in paying for.
  - swiley 8y ago
    I feel like WSJ and NPR actually take time and research what their writing about.
  - surge 8y ago
    Well on the WSJ side there was that whole Pewdiepie makes some Nazi jokes therefore is secretly whistle blowing to recruit 9-17 year olds into white supremacy/anti-antisemitism narrative they were running with. Ignoring the context of the jokes and doing nothing that shock comics haven't been doing for years. But the character assassination probably has more to do with the fact that person has a bigger audience than the WSJ, and more influence and that's where advertisers (their source of money) were going, so they started doing hit pieces on YT's biggest personas to scare advertisers out of spending their money there.
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Honestly, I haven’t a clue what the deal is here, but I will make a note to remember to discount their coverage on online stars. Thank you.
adnzzzzZ 8y ago
When people speak of "fake news" they're generally not talking about news with factual mistakes, but often times where the fact picking mechanism is biased. You can produce a piece that is 100% factual that still omits important facts that are relevant to the story and would paint a completely different picture. Most of the sites you mentioned do that very consistently.
- closeparen 8y ago
  It's ironic to argue the definitions of post-truth, but no. Fake news refers to stories that are fabricated, and usually calibrated to be attention-grabbing, masquerading as news. That is a separate phenomenon from bias, and much worse. Bias is a problem that can interfere with the output of people who think they are doing good-faith journalism. But anyone with a blog can write what other people will mistake for news, and if they're good, can make it go viral. No relationship with the truth, not even an attempted one, is involved. Conservative slant headline: Hero CCW Bystander Stops Mass Shooting. Liberal slant headline: Mass Shooting Underscores the Need for Gun Control Now. Fake news headline: New Proof That Lizard Men Hired Crisis Actors in Plot to Take Your Guns.
  - arduanika 8y ago
    > Fake news refers to... That might be how you use the term, but that might more correctly called "false news". In common parlance, "fake news" refers to an overall pattern of filtering and narrative-pushing such that consuming lots of these stories (possibly each of them factual) will leave the reader with gross misapprehensions about the world.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      This is not a productive argument, but it may be worth nothing that Science [0], Wikipedia [1], and NPR [2] are using it to refer to fabrication, not bias. [0] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/majority-americans-were-not-exposed-fake-news-2016-us-election-twitter-study-suggests http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/majority-americans-we... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...
nostromo 8y ago
It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell — and they are always on the lookout for facts to back up those narratives. Facts outside of the narrative are simply passed over. I wouldn’t call this fake news, but it’s also not good journalism. And yes, Fox News and MSNBC have been doing this for years. But this form of bias now seems to permeate everything, including formerly trusted titans like NPR and the NYT.
- bluejekyll 8y ago
  Why are you throwing NPR into that mix? NPR remains one of the few news sources that goes out of its way to try and get unbiased reporting in the US. People are people of course, so it’s impossible to be completely unbiased.
  - makomk 8y ago
    I'm still baffled how NPR screwed up their story on Trump Jr supposedly lying to Congress so badly, though. If you didn't see it, they took his replies to questions about whether any other negotiations to build in Russia were going on at the same time as Cohen's ones, quoted them without context, pretended he was saying Cohen wasn't negotiating in Russia then in contradiction to Cohen's court testimony, and used this to make it look like Trump Jr had lied to Congress. Any fact checker, editor or reporter who'd bothered to check the quotes the story relied on should've caught this. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from a shady conspiracy theory peddler. (The original version: http://archive.is/ozzmb http://archive.is/ozzmb )
  - Sir_Vival 8y ago
    That's used to be true but in the past two years they've gotten quite bad. For instance, during the child separation story they called it "President Trump's child separation policy," when describing it. Only weeks later did they call it "the increase of child separations due to President Trump's zero tolerance policy." It was known the day the story broke that he didn't enact the policy.
  - Sir_Vival 8y ago
matheweis 8y ago
While I think you’re mostly right, worth pointing out that CNN’s “Journalist of the Year” - who worked for Der Spiegel - was recently outed as having completely fabricated the majority of the articles that he’s written over the last several years. Unfortunately it seems that being highly respected doesn’t mean everything published is true... Feels a bit rich to link to any media as a source now, but here you go: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/german-reporter-stripped-cnn-journalist-year-awards-fabricating-stories-n950256 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/german-reporter-stripped-cn...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rainonmoon 8y ago
  It's worth considering the industry factors that contributed to this. Sub-editors and fact-checkers have been the first to go in the cataclysmic waves of layoffs journalism has been weathering for the past decade.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Der Spiegel was famed for their fact checking... with one problem. Their fact checkers evidently started with the assumption that their journalists weren't being deliberately deceptive. This combined with the journalist making up shit that flattered the preconceived cultural biases of the fact checkers (e.g. urban germans think that rural americans are backwards gun-toting hicks who believe the earth is flat) and it becomes clear that understaffing wasn't the real problem. Actually there was another problem at Der Spiegel, cultural again; anybody who questioned the rockstars had their career thrown on the rocks. When Juan Moreno questioned the integrity of the fraud Class Relotius, Der Spiegel's editors didn't believe him, and thought he was just jealous of Relotius. So again, not a problem caused by understaffing.
    - gerbilly 8y ago
      >Their fact checkers evidently started with the assumption that their journalists weren't being deliberately deceptive. People reviewing pull requests at our company also have to assume that programmers aren't being deliberately deceptive. So what? Almost all of our working relationship, heck relationships period, are based on trust.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 8y ago
> There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. That's a very charitable way of seeing things when you know a lot of these organizations are politically oriented.
barry-cotter 8y ago
The media do not issue corrections unless they are forced to do so and they publish dishonest hit pieces all the time, like the one on David Reich[1]. They run with their prejudices and then write articles about how awful it is that other people can contradict their prejudices with facts[2]. They decide they’re going to write a hit piece and solicit material for it, publicly, when their lack of good faith is obvious and wonder why trust in the media is at an all time low and dropping[3]. Good journalists exist. Whether good journalistic institutions do or not is an open question, but the idea that the NYT is one of them is a joke. [1]https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/letter-response-jan-17-article-new-york-times https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/letter-response-jan-17-article... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/how-conservative-media-transformed-the-covington-catholic-students-from-pariahs-to-heroes https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/how-conserva... [3]https://twitter.com/globaldan/status/1088570101283110915?s=21 https://twitter.com/globaldan/status/1088570101283110915?s=2...
anticodon 8y ago
> "all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony. For me it's not important, if the news is a lie or that they just build the distorted model of reality by omission of the facts. Withdrawing the fact is equivalent to lying, although it may have a different name. I think the problem is that media was always mostly a way to spread government propaganda. "We are the best, other countries are either clueless or evil." Because there was no internet, there were no big issues with it, because it was hard to check if it's true or not. Now, there's internet, so, for example, people can read media of other countries (still difficult because of different languages, but possible). In order to fight the threat to the mental model "we're great, others are evil", somebody invented the term "fake news". Now, everything that contradicts "official" point of view can be simply called "fake news".
- iagovar 8y ago
  Well, but media also lies in both ways. I've been indirecly object of media pieces and I was surpised of the little connection of what really happenned and what they told the public. I was involved in the issue and I know who they talked to and what they talked about. At least two newspapers and one TV station lied, and the left ones cherry picked the info they liked. IDK if that is fake news, propaganda or whatever. Its certainly a symptom of something bad that is happening there.
gaius 8y ago
but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not "fake". There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story Waiting for the retraction of the Covington story based on the full video? To be given the same prominence, not buried in the small print on page 16. Also waiting for the blue-ticked accounts on Twitter who called for violence or doxxing of those boys to be banned.
iagovar 8y ago
It may be false, but not that hyperbolic. I had the same experience with media pieces about my country or areas of my expertise.
2ion 8y ago
> stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc These newspapers are useless. I'm interested in increased resolution of reporting on my immediate environment, I want to know about the backstabbing and backroom deals local politicians do, the local murderers and the town rapists, the crimes refugees do or don't, exact breakdowns of economical utility of refugees, exact numbers on town expenditures and big land sales. I want statistics and news on things that matter and change my immediate environment. All this is missing from national editions. All of this is missing from local newspapers dealing with local trivia only and have the same content anyway because they are owned by the same conglomerate. I have to look up all of it myself if the information is publicly available, if not then the newspapers don't do their job in unlocking it. Daily newspapers are competing with other outlets and weekly editions and radio and TV in reporting the big, everyday occurrences. They don't have a pitch.
thatfrenchguy 8y ago
"lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don't fit the current media paradigm" is something done by every single outlet, including NYT, WSJ and the Washington Post (and obviously Fox News and friends), and it's not new. Don't you remember the Iraq war ?
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. They go far deeper than this. Anyone that follows any polarizing issue is well aware that pushing a narrative via omission of key details (or not covering a story at all because it doesn't fit their narrative) is rampant among the established media. Sure the stuff they write about usually actually happened but you have no idea which particular articles are being spun and which way they're being spun (though you can take an educated guess). It's hard to tell if they're intentionally spinning a narrative of if they're woefully ignorant of their own cognitive bias and go around confirming their bias. In any case, if the NYY, WaPo or WSJ is publishing half truths and half the story I don't see that as being categorically different from Fake News(TM) because the affect on the population at scale is similar.
weberc2 8y ago
I probably mostly agree with your post but I hear this a lot: > And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report And it’s not really addressing what people mean when they talk about media bias. The media appears to be more biased than it used to. Specifically it represents fewer viewpoints on certain (typically political) issues. It would be interesting IMHO if we talked about this when we talked about media bias. “Completely avoiding bias is impossible” misses the point and isn’t very interesting.

by untog 8y ago

nerdbaggy 8y ago

I think most news is over exaggerated, not so much fake.

swiley 8y ago

NYT is notoriously bad and often omits and slants things.

scarejunba 8y ago
I was an NYT subscriber for a long time (years) and during the 2016 primaries and elections I learned how crappy they were. They tried to misinform me! I was paying them and they were lying to me. First about the Bernie campaign and then about the Trump campaign. I don't pay the news to bullshit me. For a period of six months I read both the NYT and the WSJ. The WSJ editorials are clearly written by morons but otherwise their news had higher predictive value. I agree entirely with you. It's no wonder people reading the NYT were constantly surprised. My fault entirely after Judith Miller but no longer. Purged them from my rotation.
- gaius 8y ago
  Same here - long time, >15 years NYT subscriber, I stuck with them even while they were so obviously biased against my boy Bernie but finally it became too much. They just stopped reporting actual news one day and never looked back. They are publishing things that just aren’t true, and their silence is deafening on stories reported by their rivals. As you say, it’s not something I’m remotely interested in paying for.
- swiley 8y ago
  I feel like WSJ and NPR actually take time and research what their writing about.
- surge 8y ago
  Well on the WSJ side there was that whole Pewdiepie makes some Nazi jokes therefore is secretly whistle blowing to recruit 9-17 year olds into white supremacy/anti-antisemitism narrative they were running with. Ignoring the context of the jokes and doing nothing that shock comics haven't been doing for years. But the character assassination probably has more to do with the fact that person has a bigger audience than the WSJ, and more influence and that's where advertisers (their source of money) were going, so they started doing hit pieces on YT's biggest personas to scare advertisers out of spending their money there.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Honestly, I haven’t a clue what the deal is here, but I will make a note to remember to discount their coverage on online stars. Thank you.

adnzzzzZ 8y ago

When people speak of "fake news" they're generally not talking about news with factual mistakes, but often times where the fact picking mechanism is biased. You can produce a piece that is 100% factual that still omits important facts that are relevant to the story and would paint a completely different picture. Most of the sites you mentioned do that very consistently.

closeparen 8y ago
It's ironic to argue the definitions of post-truth, but no. Fake news refers to stories that are fabricated, and usually calibrated to be attention-grabbing, masquerading as news. That is a separate phenomenon from bias, and much worse. Bias is a problem that can interfere with the output of people who think they are doing good-faith journalism. But anyone with a blog can write what other people will mistake for news, and if they're good, can make it go viral. No relationship with the truth, not even an attempted one, is involved. Conservative slant headline: Hero CCW Bystander Stops Mass Shooting. Liberal slant headline: Mass Shooting Underscores the Need for Gun Control Now. Fake news headline: New Proof That Lizard Men Hired Crisis Actors in Plot to Take Your Guns.
- arduanika 8y ago
  > Fake news refers to... That might be how you use the term, but that might more correctly called "false news". In common parlance, "fake news" refers to an overall pattern of filtering and narrative-pushing such that consuming lots of these stories (possibly each of them factual) will leave the reader with gross misapprehensions about the world.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    This is not a productive argument, but it may be worth nothing that Science [0], Wikipedia [1], and NPR [2] are using it to refer to fabrication, not bias. [0] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/majority-americans-were-not-exposed-fake-news-2016-us-election-twitter-study-suggests http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/majority-americans-we... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...

nostromo 8y ago

It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell — and they are always on the lookout for facts to back up those narratives. Facts outside of the narrative are simply passed over. I wouldn’t call this fake news, but it’s also not good journalism. And yes, Fox News and MSNBC have been doing this for years. But this form of bias now seems to permeate everything, including formerly trusted titans like NPR and the NYT.

bluejekyll 8y ago
Why are you throwing NPR into that mix? NPR remains one of the few news sources that goes out of its way to try and get unbiased reporting in the US. People are people of course, so it’s impossible to be completely unbiased.
- makomk 8y ago
  I'm still baffled how NPR screwed up their story on Trump Jr supposedly lying to Congress so badly, though. If you didn't see it, they took his replies to questions about whether any other negotiations to build in Russia were going on at the same time as Cohen's ones, quoted them without context, pretended he was saying Cohen wasn't negotiating in Russia then in contradiction to Cohen's court testimony, and used this to make it look like Trump Jr had lied to Congress. Any fact checker, editor or reporter who'd bothered to check the quotes the story relied on should've caught this. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from a shady conspiracy theory peddler. (The original version: http://archive.is/ozzmb http://archive.is/ozzmb )
- Sir_Vival 8y ago
  That's used to be true but in the past two years they've gotten quite bad. For instance, during the child separation story they called it "President Trump's child separation policy," when describing it. Only weeks later did they call it "the increase of child separations due to President Trump's zero tolerance policy." It was known the day the story broke that he didn't enact the policy.
- Sir_Vival 8y ago

matheweis 8y ago

While I think you’re mostly right, worth pointing out that CNN’s “Journalist of the Year” - who worked for Der Spiegel - was recently outed as having completely fabricated the majority of the articles that he’s written over the last several years. Unfortunately it seems that being highly respected doesn’t mean everything published is true... Feels a bit rich to link to any media as a source now, but here you go: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/german-reporter-stripped-cnn-journalist-year-awards-fabricating-stories-n950256 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/german-reporter-stripped-cn...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rainonmoon 8y ago
It's worth considering the industry factors that contributed to this. Sub-editors and fact-checkers have been the first to go in the cataclysmic waves of layoffs journalism has been weathering for the past decade.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Der Spiegel was famed for their fact checking... with one problem. Their fact checkers evidently started with the assumption that their journalists weren't being deliberately deceptive. This combined with the journalist making up shit that flattered the preconceived cultural biases of the fact checkers (e.g. urban germans think that rural americans are backwards gun-toting hicks who believe the earth is flat) and it becomes clear that understaffing wasn't the real problem. Actually there was another problem at Der Spiegel, cultural again; anybody who questioned the rockstars had their career thrown on the rocks. When Juan Moreno questioned the integrity of the fraud Class Relotius, Der Spiegel's editors didn't believe him, and thought he was just jealous of Relotius. So again, not a problem caused by understaffing.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    >Their fact checkers evidently started with the assumption that their journalists weren't being deliberately deceptive. People reviewing pull requests at our company also have to assume that programmers aren't being deliberately deceptive. So what? Almost all of our working relationship, heck relationships period, are based on trust.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ekianjo 8y ago

> There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. That's a very charitable way of seeing things when you know a lot of these organizations are politically oriented.

barry-cotter 8y ago

The media do not issue corrections unless they are forced to do so and they publish dishonest hit pieces all the time, like the one on David Reich[1]. They run with their prejudices and then write articles about how awful it is that other people can contradict their prejudices with facts[2]. They decide they’re going to write a hit piece and solicit material for it, publicly, when their lack of good faith is obvious and wonder why trust in the media is at an all time low and dropping[3]. Good journalists exist. Whether good journalistic institutions do or not is an open question, but the idea that the NYT is one of them is a joke. [1]https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/letter-response-jan-17-article-new-york-times https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/letter-response-jan-17-article... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/how-conservative-media-transformed-the-covington-catholic-students-from-pariahs-to-heroes https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/how-conserva... [3]https://twitter.com/globaldan/status/1088570101283110915?s=21 https://twitter.com/globaldan/status/1088570101283110915?s=2...

anticodon 8y ago

> "all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony. For me it's not important, if the news is a lie or that they just build the distorted model of reality by omission of the facts. Withdrawing the fact is equivalent to lying, although it may have a different name. I think the problem is that media was always mostly a way to spread government propaganda. "We are the best, other countries are either clueless or evil." Because there was no internet, there were no big issues with it, because it was hard to check if it's true or not. Now, there's internet, so, for example, people can read media of other countries (still difficult because of different languages, but possible). In order to fight the threat to the mental model "we're great, others are evil", somebody invented the term "fake news". Now, everything that contradicts "official" point of view can be simply called "fake news".

iagovar 8y ago
Well, but media also lies in both ways. I've been indirecly object of media pieces and I was surpised of the little connection of what really happenned and what they told the public. I was involved in the issue and I know who they talked to and what they talked about. At least two newspapers and one TV station lied, and the left ones cherry picked the info they liked. IDK if that is fake news, propaganda or whatever. Its certainly a symptom of something bad that is happening there.

gaius 8y ago

but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not "fake". There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story Waiting for the retraction of the Covington story based on the full video? To be given the same prominence, not buried in the small print on page 16. Also waiting for the blue-ticked accounts on Twitter who called for violence or doxxing of those boys to be banned.

iagovar 8y ago

It may be false, but not that hyperbolic. I had the same experience with media pieces about my country or areas of my expertise.

2ion 8y ago

> stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc These newspapers are useless. I'm interested in increased resolution of reporting on my immediate environment, I want to know about the backstabbing and backroom deals local politicians do, the local murderers and the town rapists, the crimes refugees do or don't, exact breakdowns of economical utility of refugees, exact numbers on town expenditures and big land sales. I want statistics and news on things that matter and change my immediate environment. All this is missing from national editions. All of this is missing from local newspapers dealing with local trivia only and have the same content anyway because they are owned by the same conglomerate. I have to look up all of it myself if the information is publicly available, if not then the newspapers don't do their job in unlocking it. Daily newspapers are competing with other outlets and weekly editions and radio and TV in reporting the big, everyday occurrences. They don't have a pitch.

thatfrenchguy 8y ago

"lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don't fit the current media paradigm" is something done by every single outlet, including NYT, WSJ and the Washington Post (and obviously Fox News and friends), and it's not new. Don't you remember the Iraq war ?

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

>There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. They go far deeper than this. Anyone that follows any polarizing issue is well aware that pushing a narrative via omission of key details (or not covering a story at all because it doesn't fit their narrative) is rampant among the established media. Sure the stuff they write about usually actually happened but you have no idea which particular articles are being spun and which way they're being spun (though you can take an educated guess). It's hard to tell if they're intentionally spinning a narrative of if they're woefully ignorant of their own cognitive bias and go around confirming their bias. In any case, if the NYY, WaPo or WSJ is publishing half truths and half the story I don't see that as being categorically different from Fake News(TM) because the affect on the population at scale is similar.

weberc2 8y ago

I probably mostly agree with your post but I hear this a lot: > And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report And it’s not really addressing what people mean when they talk about media bias. The media appears to be more biased than it used to. Specifically it represents fewer viewpoints on certain (typically political) issues. It would be interesting IMHO if we talked about this when we talked about media bias. “Completely avoiding bias is impossible” misses the point and isn’t very interesting.