4 ms·

I think you're wrong. That quote assumes that when people think about "calling bullshit" in relation to the news that they would immediately think of Fox News

I think you're wrong. That quote assumes that when people think about "calling bullshit" in relation to the news that they would immediately think of Fox News or The National Enquirer. Is that wrong? Won't most Guardian readers immediately think of Fox News when they read this headline? When I clicked on this article, I started from a perspective of "Oh look, it's The Guardian, a lefty publication, talking about how Fox News is bad. How shocking". I was wrong. So yeah, I don't think the bit you quoted is an attempt to manipulate readers. By referencing Fox News, it's just trying to account for what it assumes its readers already think. And I think it's basically correct in those assumptions.

Bartweiss 8y ago
To the article's credit, that section makes a real effort to differentiate "bullshit" from "fake news" and "fallacious". I know an awful lot of people who are too educated and internet-savvy to accept most nakedly-false claims, but happily bite on stats that lack per-capita corrections, or compare rates like change and accuracy without accounting for base values, or even make subtle but concrete errors like confusing 'ppm' with 'ppb'. They may not accept anything farcically false, but "less wrong" is not always "more right", and it's still easy to end up believe an entire-untrue claim off respectable looking sources. I think the focus on Snopes-style truth ratings has sometimes hindered our ability to literally call 'bullshit', asserting that a piece undermines knowledge regardless of its technical correctness. I'm not sure if this article succeeds at that - I think conflating Fox with The National Enquirer and other sources that regularly invent things outright is a mistake that obscures the discussion. (Fox has run content sourced from RealTrueNews, but the distinction still matters; fake news sites and the media titans legitimizing their stories are different parts of the ecosystem.) But it's a worthwhile attempt regardless.

Bartweiss 8y ago

To the article's credit, that section makes a real effort to differentiate "bullshit" from "fake news" and "fallacious". I know an awful lot of people who are too educated and internet-savvy to accept most nakedly-false claims, but happily bite on stats that lack per-capita corrections, or compare rates like change and accuracy without accounting for base values, or even make subtle but concrete errors like confusing 'ppm' with 'ppb'. They may not accept anything farcically false, but "less wrong" is not always "more right", and it's still easy to end up believe an entire-untrue claim off respectable looking sources. I think the focus on Snopes-style truth ratings has sometimes hindered our ability to literally call 'bullshit', asserting that a piece undermines knowledge regardless of its technical correctness. I'm not sure if this article succeeds at that - I think conflating Fox with The National Enquirer and other sources that regularly invent things outright is a mistake that obscures the discussion. (Fox has run content sourced from RealTrueNews, but the distinction still matters; fake news sites and the media titans legitimizing their stories are different parts of the ecosystem.) But it's a worthwhile attempt regardless.