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I'm confused that there are no comments here yet about the actual topic at hand: international media willfully flat out lying about what happened. Basically, fa

I'm confused that there are no comments here yet about the actual topic at hand: international media willfully flat out lying about what happened. Basically, fake news in mainstream media. Sure, the Daily Mail isn't particularly a quality newspaper, but a lie about an entire country's medical practices is quite a bit different than a lie about some aristocrat's love life. And even then, aren't eg BBC Radio or the Independent supposed to be quality news sources? The latter writes "A 17-year-old girl who was raped as a child has ended her own life through legal euthanasia in the Netherlands" [0]. What's going on here? This is the kind of stuff that we're being told only fringe media do, the rogue blogs that will do anything that heats up facebook outrage, for ad impressions - the kind whose business model is to invent lies for maximum shares. This story isn't about euthanesia or suicide. It's about how the mainstream media took a note from the invent-outrageous-lies-blogs' playbook. About how it's totally OK now for BBC Radio 4 to report flat out lies, if only it gets people talking about BBC Radio. This is a serious problem. While everybody is falling over each other to blame Facebook for undermining democracy, apparently the likes of the BBC and the Independent are slowly transforming into the real perpetrators. Sure, I know why: their journalists are paid by the click just as any other. But apparently any sort of fact checking went out the window there, and I wonder whether that's a viable business strategy in the long term. Why consume "quality" media if the quality is the same as the inflammatory rando blog post your aunt just shared on Facebook? I recognize that journalism is under a lot of financial pressure, but if lies like these get willfully spread by people who should know better, what's left? How do we know that this Politico article isn't a lie as well? I'm deeply troubled by all this. [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/euthanasia-clinic-suicide-depression-rape-anorexia-netherlands-teenager-noa-pothoven-a8944356.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/euthanasia-c... the headline I quoted is from the video. There's a little "oops we might've lied hihi" on the bottom of the article but they couldn't be bothered to fix the video because hey, clicks lol.

ahje 7y ago
This. When I first saw stuff about this popping up on various sites (including meme-sites, where it was posted with some kind of anti-immigrant agenda), I thought that it sounded to wierd to be true and decided to look it up. A few internet searches later confirmed it was, indeed, fake news being spread by mainstream media. Calling this a serious problem is an understatement. It's an outright disaster, and it only adds to the already growing public distrust of the media.

ahje 7y ago

This. When I first saw stuff about this popping up on various sites (including meme-sites, where it was posted with some kind of anti-immigrant agenda), I thought that it sounded to wierd to be true and decided to look it up. A few internet searches later confirmed it was, indeed, fake news being spread by mainstream media. Calling this a serious problem is an understatement. It's an outright disaster, and it only adds to the already growing public distrust of the media.