8 ms·

Good luck to them if course, but I am not sure this will work. Couple of reasons come to my mind: 1. How will I know that news have been reviewed by qualified

Good luck to them if course, but I am not sure this will work. Couple of reasons come to my mind: 1. How will I know that news have been reviewed by qualified people? Technically this should be news agency/source's job. 2. By the time the score will depict the news' quality, the damage may be already done. 3. RT is based on people's opinions, but news should be fact checked. What I think it should do, is to score the publishers instead... some kind of publishing performance history. Although the most effective would be to have some kind of liability for spreading/posting fake news, this would make publishers to do more fact checking before fast publishing. All above is just my IMHO.

sureaboutthis 8y ago
Haven't read the article yet but I would hope, instead, it would rate these based on consistent quality and not per story.
crististm 8y ago
> 3. RT is based on people's opinions, but news should be fact checked. Except when RT doesn't like to hear people's opinion when it differs from the mainstream. Unfortunately it's easy to box it as "trolling" and hide it under the rug.
- crististm 8y ago
  Apparently I'm getting myself in a SJW hive. Shame on me. s/hive/swarm
  - martythemaniak 8y ago
    Did you mistake Rotten Tomatoes for Russia Today?
    - fartcannon 8y ago
      I think he's referring to when they delete reviews that are affected by cultural phenomenon.
  - komali2 8y ago
    This is why my hackles are raised the instant somebody starts a "people should be exposed to various viewpoints discussion." I want to give the good faith interpretation, which would be, maybe, a healthy exposure to different economic system philosophies or something. But, nowadays, I find this argument, or people "just promoting the right to free speech," are really exactly the kind of people that casually toss around "sjw" as an accusation. Like, downvoted because HN is a hive of sjws? As if. Progressive, sure, but a hive of SJW as you undoubtedly mean by the word is a laughable accusation. Nowadays it seems when someone wants "multiple viewpoints" to be presented what they really want is the right to continue to bully people. This would have been an extremely presumptive thing to say but, crististm, you've gone and made this obvious for me by trotting out the old sjw accusation.
    - frogpelt 8y ago
      Interesting that you consider it bullying if an individual abrasively states different viewpoints from the crowd. Is it bullying if the crowd uses similar tactics to silence the individual? Perhaps it depends on whether you agree with the crowd's opinion or not.
      - komali2 8y ago
        I disagree that all instances of "silencing" are bullying. Take this journalist's recent flight experience: https://mobile.twitter.com/i/events/1110170398589480961 https://mobile.twitter.com/i/events/1110170398589480961 Some young woman was on her own on a flight and was getting creeped on by an older man. The journalist stepped in, flight attendants stepped in, the man was berated and eventually forced to move. Now those words - the man was berated and forced to move. If a group of schoolkids did that to some random nerdy kid on the playground, and we used those words to describe the situation, that's bullying. In the case of the flight, it obviously isn't. So, I don't think it's so much about whether I agree with the crowd's opinion, but a greater context. At an LGBT parade there's a fire and brimstone pastor shouting about how everyone's going to hell. The crowd is shouting back. Is that bullying? I don't really think so. I think it's the pastor that came to do the bullying.
    - 8y ago
- danso 8y ago
  If you want to go on a rant, is it too much to ask that you list examples and how they apply, rather than assume everyone here is as on top of Internet drama like you might be? Your examples might even make it clear why a RT for news would be even more difficult than the one that exists for movies.
  - Circuits 8y ago
    If you think that is a rant my sister would melt your eyes from your skull within about 10 minuets.
  - crististm 8y ago
    The one that exists for movies adjusted their public mirror reflection the moment the public voiced a contrarian opinion. What would make a similar site for news safe from such trust abuse?
  - SkyBelow 8y ago
    I guess it might be better to repackage this as something that isn't a rant. RT is a company that is currently owned by Warner Bros. (through a chain of ownership). This alone is enough for someone to raise the possibility they may not be completely unbiased in how they treat each movie despite having any evidence of such behavior. Conflict of interest, in my own experience, have never required evidence of any further problem outside of the conflict of interest itself. Since the end result is merely movie ratings which is a fully subjective experienced, it isn't worth time digging any further into. When it comes to a news rating site that will likely be deciding things of a more factual nature (news is true or not, or at least somewhat based on true events), I think a potential conflict of interest has larger implications. Whom ever owns the site will have a conflict of interest with regards to at least some news, and the ability of that site to be used by other groups like non-profits, NGOs, or even governments will need to be limited with respect to where the conflict of interest will occur. I don't think the difference is in the difficulty of making a RT for news, but on the downstream impacts of the conflict of interest that exists between owner and purpose.
    - Spellman 8y ago
StreamBright 8y ago
There even further problems with this. https://annofgg.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/img_8561.png https://annofgg.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/img_8561.png News quite often show one viewpoint.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ZhuanXia 8y ago
Subsidized prediction markets. Unfortunately, they are illegal
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  How would a prediction market help determine whether a news article about current events is accurate?
  - jerkstate 8y ago
    I believe that the theory is that having "skin in the game" in the form of money would help optimize the news for something other than clickworthiness.
    - jonathankoren 8y ago
      You’re assuming that a publisher would be willing to put enough money into a prediction market to make a profit from the market machinations rather than advertising or subscriptions. This is also assuming that prediction markets are actually useful in general, and useful in this specific case. Both of which are open to discussion, but even for this specific case, it’s not even clear what the the prediction market would even be predicting. The Politifact meter? What about all the stuff Poltifact doesn’t bother reporting on? Poltifxt (or any other org) aren’t perfect, and can be played as well.
      - wutbrodo 8y ago
        > You’re assuming that a publisher would be willing to put enough money into a prediction market to make a profit from the market machinations rather than advertising or subscriptions. The publisher doesn't (need to) interact with the prediction market at all. The idea isn't that the publisher isn't directly financially punished for inaccurate reporting. That doesn't happen in the RT analogue, isn't what's proposed by the OP service, and can't really happen in any constitutional system (plus, subscribers may be looking for content that isn't factual but feeds their biases). The conversation is about a third party for those who want to know about the factual accuracy of a publication. That being said, I agree with you that prediction markets aren't quite a good fit. When the NYT publishes some clearly inaccurate nonsense and leans on its reputation as "the paper of record", the issue generally isn't predictive analysis which is later uncontroversially falsified. The issue is usually lying about statistics in ways that are clear with close attention but that escape the attention of the casual reader and thus shape the conversation. Prediction markets wouldn't really help much here: if the outcome the market was predicting was uncontroversial, then you wouldn't need a system for checking the article in the first place.
skybrian 8y ago
These are important limitations, but in the end, if their scoring system helps readers find good, in-depth news articles to read (even if they're not the freshest) then they'll be worth visiting.
devy 8y ago
Yep. Rating news is a terrible idea. The news should ideally be as objective as possible (or otherwise it's called "Fake News"), they don't always come out as a popular / most highly rated one. Movies, on the other hand, are highly subjective. Elon Must has a similar idea where he wanted to rate journalists but later he gave up.[1] https://www.inc.com/brian-hart/elon-musk-wants-to-let-public-rate-journalists-heres-why-its-a-truly-terrible-idea.html https://www.inc.com/brian-hart/elon-musk-wants-to-let-public... Ultimately, you as an individual have to decide, do you trust a startup / news rating site to tell you what it is to believe ? My answer to that is absolutely not! I want to do my own research before believing anyone. (Yes I understand some people will be different than that.)
- munk-a 8y ago
  I would like to see journalists be more transparent about what in their statement is fact vs. opinion, since lately I've seen pretty clear examples of the opinion as fact on both sides of the aisle. But this sort of a solution sounds terrible - what would prevent the overseas bot farms from downvoting articles that hurt their agenda and upvoting divisive articles?, and why do you, as a company, want to adopt responsibility for trying to police this knowing full well that it'll be on your heads if your efforts fail (or work too well and prevent outspoken parties from being able to boost their favorable news). This just seems like the absolute worst place to position yourself in the modern world. PS: Also, aside from all the politics... think about the swarms of bots ad companies would hire to upvote their sponsored content...
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  > Rating news is a terrible idea. Yes, it's like "Stackoverflow for news". Certainly, Stackoverflow-type systems do have their benefits, but those benefits are for a very narrow use-case and there's an awful flip-side that the rhetoric and rules in stackoverflow have ever-increasing perverse incentives to reward strange, persnickety behavior. It's great if you're missing some pieces of information here-and-there, but it's awful to use as a tutorial or as a way to understand subject-matter in a holistic fashion. The idea that you can have any kind of self-policing or crowd-sourced mediation of journalistic "facts" vs "baloney" is a pipe-dream. IMHO, the problem is not whether or not a piece of information is "a fact" but rather what other facts are missing, and context of these facts as a whole, and the intention behind the entities brokering facts on your behalf. It's all very easy to point out horrendous bias, and outright lying (just watch "Fox and Friends" for a few minutes), but what about a set of facts which is incomplete? That's just as bad as no facts and it has a name: "disinformation". What we need as consumers of journalism is not necessarily "just the facts" but intelligent and rational analysis that can function even with incomplete information, that draws on not just "available facts" but also a historical basis, that is brave enough to adjust itself as reality warrants. This is necessarily and intrinsically subjective and it will often NOT be recognized as true and be, at times, incredibly unpopular.
diminoten 8y ago
None if these are unsolveable. For example, RT gives a critics score in addition to a popular score, so this could do that to solve 1 and 3, and 2 is a non starter because there's always more damage to be done/prevented. Scoring publishers just puts an extra layer of abstraction on the problem without actually handling any of the issues you brought up. The fact is, this is a good idea. So good that it already exists in a number of places with carrying degrees of success.
stcredzero 8y ago
Although the most effective would be to have some kind of liability for spreading/posting fake news The market cannot do this, at least as currently constituted. Right now, fake news which pleases the sensibility of whatever group gets rewarded by that group. The same group also fails to punish the fake news. The surprising fact, which shouldn't be surprising, since Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman have been calling this out since the 80's, is that the mainstream does this too. The differences in 2019, are that pushing narratives and differences in emotional language play a much larger role, and factual accuracy is much less important to the public now than it was then.
Bartweiss 8y ago
I think your doubts are all extremely well-founded, but I don't think scoring publishers is a viable alternative. There are already a bunch of attempts to list 'trustworthy' news sources, sometimes paired with attempts to offer a "balanced media diet" while avoiding inaccuracy. Unfortunately, publisher-level judgements are fundamentally too broad for story-level relevance. Accuracy varies wildly, and there's a significant difference between publisher-level quality (e.g. biased topic choice) and story-level quality (i.e. if I read it, is it factually correct?) Worse, publishers benefit from keeping it that way, by extending the aegis of a reputable name to content that's fast and cheap instead of diligent, or to inflammatory clickbait that monetizes better online. Fox is infamous, but their online site actually has a lot of good investigative reporting. Unfortunately, we can't just split Fox.com from television Fox News, because Fox.com also hosts old Glenn Beck videos and other comparable rubbish. The Huffington Post has hired some good reporters over the years, but their model of saving money with repackaged (or stolen) content effectively launders inaccurate stories from a host of other sites. The difference between their pedigreed staff writers and their news-roundup commentary is immense. Buzzfeed News moved to its own domain last summer, but before that it was a subdomain of Buzzfeed that produced a whole bunch of award-winning investigative stories from top reporters. Unfortunately, Buzzfeed also does news, and has a history of things like blackholing stories at advertiser request or committing serial plagiarism. The Washington Post website, like many other news sites, has a section for blog posts by non-regular contributors. A story in their PostEverything section doesn't warrant anything like the same faith their main content would, but its under their 'news' heading and isn't demarcated any differently than staff blogs. The list of similar practices is painfully long, to the point that I'm struggling to think of sources which don't have major quality discrepancies within their brand. The WSJ, NYT, and ProPublica come to mind; it's no accident that they all trade extremely heavily on their reputations. Television sources, with their numerous distinct shows, are of course disastrous for this - PBS is the only channel I can think of now that History and National Geographic have surrendered. I don't have a good answer here, but it looks to me like there are strong incentives for publishers not to offer a stable level of quality in their work.
bliblah 8y ago
Rottentomatoes is extremely biased and subject to the so called "Hype Train" effect where popular movies have massively inflated scores regardless of content (Don't mean to sound like a hater but The last star wars films have been critically acclaimed despite most of the fans disliking them for various reasons). I can imagine this happening with news but along party line with critics upvoting sites that fit their world view regardless of actual content. IMO this obsession with "Fact-checking" and "Journalistic Integrity" is just people still trying to deal with the fact that conservatist populism has been surging lately and the opposing sides just cant get their brain around it so they are just trying to say "No you are wrong and full of liars; See this fact-check proves it!". But neither side really cares since they are just trying to push their agendas.
tracker1 8y ago
Kind of the problem with ever increasing editorializing of news, and the monetizing of news in general. It's gotten so far from anything based on fact for a long while now.
hopler 8y ago
Facts are outside the realm of humans, unreachable. Humans can only have observations, hearsay, and opinions about what the facts are. That's why we have scientific opinions and judicial opinions. A statistical analysis with a confidence interval or a p-value is a measurement of how strongly someone holds an opinion based on their observations.

sureaboutthis 8y ago

Haven't read the article yet but I would hope, instead, it would rate these based on consistent quality and not per story.

crististm 8y ago

> 3. RT is based on people's opinions, but news should be fact checked. Except when RT doesn't like to hear people's opinion when it differs from the mainstream. Unfortunately it's easy to box it as "trolling" and hide it under the rug.

crististm 8y ago
Apparently I'm getting myself in a SJW hive. Shame on me. s/hive/swarm
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  Did you mistake Rotten Tomatoes for Russia Today?
  - fartcannon 8y ago
    I think he's referring to when they delete reviews that are affected by cultural phenomenon.
- komali2 8y ago
  This is why my hackles are raised the instant somebody starts a "people should be exposed to various viewpoints discussion." I want to give the good faith interpretation, which would be, maybe, a healthy exposure to different economic system philosophies or something. But, nowadays, I find this argument, or people "just promoting the right to free speech," are really exactly the kind of people that casually toss around "sjw" as an accusation. Like, downvoted because HN is a hive of sjws? As if. Progressive, sure, but a hive of SJW as you undoubtedly mean by the word is a laughable accusation. Nowadays it seems when someone wants "multiple viewpoints" to be presented what they really want is the right to continue to bully people. This would have been an extremely presumptive thing to say but, crististm, you've gone and made this obvious for me by trotting out the old sjw accusation.
  - frogpelt 8y ago
    Interesting that you consider it bullying if an individual abrasively states different viewpoints from the crowd. Is it bullying if the crowd uses similar tactics to silence the individual? Perhaps it depends on whether you agree with the crowd's opinion or not.
    - komali2 8y ago
      I disagree that all instances of "silencing" are bullying. Take this journalist's recent flight experience: https://mobile.twitter.com/i/events/1110170398589480961 https://mobile.twitter.com/i/events/1110170398589480961 Some young woman was on her own on a flight and was getting creeped on by an older man. The journalist stepped in, flight attendants stepped in, the man was berated and eventually forced to move. Now those words - the man was berated and forced to move. If a group of schoolkids did that to some random nerdy kid on the playground, and we used those words to describe the situation, that's bullying. In the case of the flight, it obviously isn't. So, I don't think it's so much about whether I agree with the crowd's opinion, but a greater context. At an LGBT parade there's a fire and brimstone pastor shouting about how everyone's going to hell. The crowd is shouting back. Is that bullying? I don't really think so. I think it's the pastor that came to do the bullying.
  - 8y ago
danso 8y ago
If you want to go on a rant, is it too much to ask that you list examples and how they apply, rather than assume everyone here is as on top of Internet drama like you might be? Your examples might even make it clear why a RT for news would be even more difficult than the one that exists for movies.
- Circuits 8y ago
  If you think that is a rant my sister would melt your eyes from your skull within about 10 minuets.
- crististm 8y ago
  The one that exists for movies adjusted their public mirror reflection the moment the public voiced a contrarian opinion. What would make a similar site for news safe from such trust abuse?
- SkyBelow 8y ago
  I guess it might be better to repackage this as something that isn't a rant. RT is a company that is currently owned by Warner Bros. (through a chain of ownership). This alone is enough for someone to raise the possibility they may not be completely unbiased in how they treat each movie despite having any evidence of such behavior. Conflict of interest, in my own experience, have never required evidence of any further problem outside of the conflict of interest itself. Since the end result is merely movie ratings which is a fully subjective experienced, it isn't worth time digging any further into. When it comes to a news rating site that will likely be deciding things of a more factual nature (news is true or not, or at least somewhat based on true events), I think a potential conflict of interest has larger implications. Whom ever owns the site will have a conflict of interest with regards to at least some news, and the ability of that site to be used by other groups like non-profits, NGOs, or even governments will need to be limited with respect to where the conflict of interest will occur. I don't think the difference is in the difficulty of making a RT for news, but on the downstream impacts of the conflict of interest that exists between owner and purpose.
  - Spellman 8y ago

StreamBright 8y ago

There even further problems with this. https://annofgg.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/img_8561.png https://annofgg.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/img_8561.png News quite often show one viewpoint.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ZhuanXia 8y ago

Subsidized prediction markets. Unfortunately, they are illegal

daveFNbuck 8y ago
How would a prediction market help determine whether a news article about current events is accurate?
- jerkstate 8y ago
  I believe that the theory is that having "skin in the game" in the form of money would help optimize the news for something other than clickworthiness.
  - jonathankoren 8y ago
    You’re assuming that a publisher would be willing to put enough money into a prediction market to make a profit from the market machinations rather than advertising or subscriptions. This is also assuming that prediction markets are actually useful in general, and useful in this specific case. Both of which are open to discussion, but even for this specific case, it’s not even clear what the the prediction market would even be predicting. The Politifact meter? What about all the stuff Poltifact doesn’t bother reporting on? Poltifxt (or any other org) aren’t perfect, and can be played as well.
    - wutbrodo 8y ago
      > You’re assuming that a publisher would be willing to put enough money into a prediction market to make a profit from the market machinations rather than advertising or subscriptions. The publisher doesn't (need to) interact with the prediction market at all. The idea isn't that the publisher isn't directly financially punished for inaccurate reporting. That doesn't happen in the RT analogue, isn't what's proposed by the OP service, and can't really happen in any constitutional system (plus, subscribers may be looking for content that isn't factual but feeds their biases). The conversation is about a third party for those who want to know about the factual accuracy of a publication. That being said, I agree with you that prediction markets aren't quite a good fit. When the NYT publishes some clearly inaccurate nonsense and leans on its reputation as "the paper of record", the issue generally isn't predictive analysis which is later uncontroversially falsified. The issue is usually lying about statistics in ways that are clear with close attention but that escape the attention of the casual reader and thus shape the conversation. Prediction markets wouldn't really help much here: if the outcome the market was predicting was uncontroversial, then you wouldn't need a system for checking the article in the first place.

skybrian 8y ago

These are important limitations, but in the end, if their scoring system helps readers find good, in-depth news articles to read (even if they're not the freshest) then they'll be worth visiting.

devy 8y ago

Yep. Rating news is a terrible idea. The news should ideally be as objective as possible (or otherwise it's called "Fake News"), they don't always come out as a popular / most highly rated one. Movies, on the other hand, are highly subjective. Elon Must has a similar idea where he wanted to rate journalists but later he gave up.[1] https://www.inc.com/brian-hart/elon-musk-wants-to-let-public-rate-journalists-heres-why-its-a-truly-terrible-idea.html https://www.inc.com/brian-hart/elon-musk-wants-to-let-public... Ultimately, you as an individual have to decide, do you trust a startup / news rating site to tell you what it is to believe ? My answer to that is absolutely not! I want to do my own research before believing anyone. (Yes I understand some people will be different than that.)

munk-a 8y ago
I would like to see journalists be more transparent about what in their statement is fact vs. opinion, since lately I've seen pretty clear examples of the opinion as fact on both sides of the aisle. But this sort of a solution sounds terrible - what would prevent the overseas bot farms from downvoting articles that hurt their agenda and upvoting divisive articles?, and why do you, as a company, want to adopt responsibility for trying to police this knowing full well that it'll be on your heads if your efforts fail (or work too well and prevent outspoken parties from being able to boost their favorable news). This just seems like the absolute worst place to position yourself in the modern world. PS: Also, aside from all the politics... think about the swarms of bots ad companies would hire to upvote their sponsored content...
crispyambulance 8y ago
> Rating news is a terrible idea. Yes, it's like "Stackoverflow for news". Certainly, Stackoverflow-type systems do have their benefits, but those benefits are for a very narrow use-case and there's an awful flip-side that the rhetoric and rules in stackoverflow have ever-increasing perverse incentives to reward strange, persnickety behavior. It's great if you're missing some pieces of information here-and-there, but it's awful to use as a tutorial or as a way to understand subject-matter in a holistic fashion. The idea that you can have any kind of self-policing or crowd-sourced mediation of journalistic "facts" vs "baloney" is a pipe-dream. IMHO, the problem is not whether or not a piece of information is "a fact" but rather what other facts are missing, and context of these facts as a whole, and the intention behind the entities brokering facts on your behalf. It's all very easy to point out horrendous bias, and outright lying (just watch "Fox and Friends" for a few minutes), but what about a set of facts which is incomplete? That's just as bad as no facts and it has a name: "disinformation". What we need as consumers of journalism is not necessarily "just the facts" but intelligent and rational analysis that can function even with incomplete information, that draws on not just "available facts" but also a historical basis, that is brave enough to adjust itself as reality warrants. This is necessarily and intrinsically subjective and it will often NOT be recognized as true and be, at times, incredibly unpopular.

diminoten 8y ago

None if these are unsolveable. For example, RT gives a critics score in addition to a popular score, so this could do that to solve 1 and 3, and 2 is a non starter because there's always more damage to be done/prevented. Scoring publishers just puts an extra layer of abstraction on the problem without actually handling any of the issues you brought up. The fact is, this is a good idea. So good that it already exists in a number of places with carrying degrees of success.

stcredzero 8y ago

Although the most effective would be to have some kind of liability for spreading/posting fake news The market cannot do this, at least as currently constituted. Right now, fake news which pleases the sensibility of whatever group gets rewarded by that group. The same group also fails to punish the fake news. The surprising fact, which shouldn't be surprising, since Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman have been calling this out since the 80's, is that the mainstream does this too. The differences in 2019, are that pushing narratives and differences in emotional language play a much larger role, and factual accuracy is much less important to the public now than it was then.

Bartweiss 8y ago

I think your doubts are all extremely well-founded, but I don't think scoring publishers is a viable alternative. There are already a bunch of attempts to list 'trustworthy' news sources, sometimes paired with attempts to offer a "balanced media diet" while avoiding inaccuracy. Unfortunately, publisher-level judgements are fundamentally too broad for story-level relevance. Accuracy varies wildly, and there's a significant difference between publisher-level quality (e.g. biased topic choice) and story-level quality (i.e. if I read it, is it factually correct?) Worse, publishers benefit from keeping it that way, by extending the aegis of a reputable name to content that's fast and cheap instead of diligent, or to inflammatory clickbait that monetizes better online. Fox is infamous, but their online site actually has a lot of good investigative reporting. Unfortunately, we can't just split Fox.com from television Fox News, because Fox.com also hosts old Glenn Beck videos and other comparable rubbish. The Huffington Post has hired some good reporters over the years, but their model of saving money with repackaged (or stolen) content effectively launders inaccurate stories from a host of other sites. The difference between their pedigreed staff writers and their news-roundup commentary is immense. Buzzfeed News moved to its own domain last summer, but before that it was a subdomain of Buzzfeed that produced a whole bunch of award-winning investigative stories from top reporters. Unfortunately, Buzzfeed also does news, and has a history of things like blackholing stories at advertiser request or committing serial plagiarism. The Washington Post website, like many other news sites, has a section for blog posts by non-regular contributors. A story in their PostEverything section doesn't warrant anything like the same faith their main content would, but its under their 'news' heading and isn't demarcated any differently than staff blogs. The list of similar practices is painfully long, to the point that I'm struggling to think of sources which don't have major quality discrepancies within their brand. The WSJ, NYT, and ProPublica come to mind; it's no accident that they all trade extremely heavily on their reputations. Television sources, with their numerous distinct shows, are of course disastrous for this - PBS is the only channel I can think of now that History and National Geographic have surrendered. I don't have a good answer here, but it looks to me like there are strong incentives for publishers not to offer a stable level of quality in their work.

bliblah 8y ago

Rottentomatoes is extremely biased and subject to the so called "Hype Train" effect where popular movies have massively inflated scores regardless of content (Don't mean to sound like a hater but The last star wars films have been critically acclaimed despite most of the fans disliking them for various reasons). I can imagine this happening with news but along party line with critics upvoting sites that fit their world view regardless of actual content. IMO this obsession with "Fact-checking" and "Journalistic Integrity" is just people still trying to deal with the fact that conservatist populism has been surging lately and the opposing sides just cant get their brain around it so they are just trying to say "No you are wrong and full of liars; See this fact-check proves it!". But neither side really cares since they are just trying to push their agendas.

tracker1 8y ago

Kind of the problem with ever increasing editorializing of news, and the monetizing of news in general. It's gotten so far from anything based on fact for a long while now.

hopler 8y ago

Facts are outside the realm of humans, unreachable. Humans can only have observations, hearsay, and opinions about what the facts are. That's why we have scientific opinions and judicial opinions. A statistical analysis with a confidence interval or a p-value is a measurement of how strongly someone holds an opinion based on their observations.