5 ms·

> If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. This is clearly true, but I wonder if must always be so. In academia, lying in a publicati

> If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. This is clearly true, but I wonder if must always be so. In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists?

mola 7y ago
It's easy to lie without lying. As a society we replaced any sort of value for our value proxy, money. So truth ethics etc. are all secondary values.
- chrischattin 7y ago
  This sounds good in an edgy r/im14andthisisdeep sort of way. But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    > > It's easy to lie without lying. As a society we replaced any sort of value for our value proxy, money. > But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term. Both your parent's view and your view could spring from a belief about how the world is, rather than from non-anecdotal hard data. I'd like to believe the more optimistic version, but I find it hard to do so. Do you have some data to support it?
  - wayoutthere 7y ago
    That really depends on the size of the fish and the size of the pond. If you're a whale in an ocean of minnows (hello Amazon) you can effectively dictate the terms of business, ethics be damned.
  - kick 7y ago
    The two richest people on the planet right now are both known for being almost entirely void of morals when it comes to their business dealings.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      They're known for this because both activists and entrenched business interests benefit from promoting that narrative. Gates and Bezos both regularly talk about the impact they have on the world and why that matters more than just money - there are reasonable arguments that they've done bad things, but the idea that they're completely amoral voids is just silly.
      - kick 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/4/1/21201162/amazon-delivery-delays-coronavirus-worker-strikes https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/4/1/21201162/amazon-... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-treating-human-beings-as-robots/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-trea... "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it." - Bezos Gates's philanthropy is fine, but my comment was on his business dealings. He has a long history of anti-competitive behavior, completely void of morals.
        com2kid 7y ago
        Nestle poisons entire cities and has killed thousands of babies. Name anyone who died from a single thing 90s Microsoft did. The modern tech giants take actions every day that are far more anti competitive than anything Microsoft ever did.
        kick 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_... Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to what are perceived to be more important problems. First World problems are a subset of this fallacy. Nestle is evil. Microsoft is evil. Nestle kills more than Microsoft. Microsoft is still evil.
  - dntbnmpls 7y ago
    > But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term. This seems like a fairy tale you tell young naive business majors with no experience. The real world isn't like that. You think oil companies, tech companies, defense companies, tobacco companies, banks, etc have been profitable for decades because of integrity and ethics? No you become profitable and wealthy by being amoral and cutthroat then paying PR firms to spread the news about how good you were all along. Do you think Google, Facebook, Apple, etc are so profitable because they are moral? Do you think Nike became Nike by having integrity and ethics or by exploiting cheap labor overseas?
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    That doesn't sound right. It can be a sustainable way to run a business, but some publications do fine despite a well-earned reputation for dishonesty, such as British tabloids. More generally, plenty of companies cause negative externalities, profiting by causing damage that they don't have to pay for.
  - mola 7y ago
    Thank you for thinking I'm deep an edgy.... But why is long term important? people need to see long term effects to know that it's more profitable. But right now, people see success without ethics, so why should they think long term? There might be a day of reckoning, where these short term gains result in long term catastrophe, but until then, people do what works. And today the only measure of what works is money.
JadeNB 7y ago
> In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists? The problem is that these incentives for academics aren't created out of purity of heart, but because of the system to which they belong; you will no longer be highly read and cited once it is clear that your results can't be trusted. Unfortunately, this seems not to be true in journalism—you can purvey intentionally, and explicitly, wrong information, and it will still be consumed actively by those whose biases are confirmed by it. We can discuss how to change that, but changing what kind of news people want to read is surely even harder than changing what kind of news journalists write and publishers publish.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  Well, also as a journalist you can not get away with making up stories. There was a recent case of a high class journalist, who did that and was caught. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius But he did so very brutal so to say. The problem with journalism is mostly not straight lying, but missleading and bending the truth until it fits the agenda. So a classic journalist should not have another agenda than the truth. But this type seems to be very rare today.
  - DangitBobby 7y ago
    What you're saying is probably broadly speaking true for journalists in general. But what many people actually consume news-wise can only be compared on the surface to actual journalism. Consumers of this material have no interest in determining if what they're reading is true, and there are no consequences for those spreading misinformation while pretending to be journalists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784665
  - em500 7y ago
    Best we can tell, Bloomberg's Chinese Big Hack story was completly made up, but it doesn't appear anyone involved suffered any consequences. https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-later-bloomberg-silently-stands-by-its-big-hack-icloud-spy-chip-story https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...
wayoutthere 7y ago
This doesn't really solve the Fox News problem: if an audience agrees with what you're saying, they will begin to trust you regardless of the facts. Many people have no way of knowing what the truth really is when they get their news exclusively from the a small group of propagandists coordinating a message. Who gets to decide when someone is lying? What happens when that power to determine truth from lies is obtained by a bad actor to create a new truth?
sbierwagen 7y ago
>In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, Can be. Among others, Matthew Walker still has a job. https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure/ https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure...
mikekchar 7y ago
At least these days, it's not so easy for a journalist to have a career ending mistake. My example for this is Daniel Lyons, for whom I have practically no respect at all as a journalist. His participation in the SCO debacle should legitimately have been career ending (and IMHO was not at all mitigated by his subsequent apology). His "Fake Steve Jobs" work breathtakingly poor judgement, again IMHO. I mean there is trash journalism and then there is making stuff up and hinting that maybe you know more than others do (all the while saying, "It's just a parody"). Let's not even talk about bit that's mentioned at the end of his Wikipedia article (I really hope that's not true!). But let's face it, he's a talented writer. He writes engagingly on topics that are interesting for a lot a people. The fact that he exercises absolutely no judgement whatsoever in his research is unfortunate, but even this is appealing to a lot of people who want to believe what he writes. I suspect that there are more people on HN who love him than hate him. How would you filter this kind of writing without some draconian censor forbidding him from publishing?

mola 7y ago

It's easy to lie without lying. As a society we replaced any sort of value for our value proxy, money. So truth ethics etc. are all secondary values.

chrischattin 7y ago
This sounds good in an edgy r/im14andthisisdeep sort of way. But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  > > It's easy to lie without lying. As a society we replaced any sort of value for our value proxy, money. > But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term. Both your parent's view and your view could spring from a belief about how the world is, rather than from non-anecdotal hard data. I'd like to believe the more optimistic version, but I find it hard to do so. Do you have some data to support it?
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  That really depends on the size of the fish and the size of the pond. If you're a whale in an ocean of minnows (hello Amazon) you can effectively dictate the terms of business, ethics be damned.
- kick 7y ago
  The two richest people on the planet right now are both known for being almost entirely void of morals when it comes to their business dealings.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    They're known for this because both activists and entrenched business interests benefit from promoting that narrative. Gates and Bezos both regularly talk about the impact they have on the world and why that matters more than just money - there are reasonable arguments that they've done bad things, but the idea that they're completely amoral voids is just silly.
    - kick 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/4/1/21201162/amazon-delivery-delays-coronavirus-worker-strikes https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/4/1/21201162/amazon-... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-treating-human-beings-as-robots/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-trea... "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it." - Bezos Gates's philanthropy is fine, but my comment was on his business dealings. He has a long history of anti-competitive behavior, completely void of morals.
      - com2kid 7y ago
        Nestle poisons entire cities and has killed thousands of babies. Name anyone who died from a single thing 90s Microsoft did. The modern tech giants take actions every day that are far more anti competitive than anything Microsoft ever did.
        kick 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_... Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to what are perceived to be more important problems. First World problems are a subset of this fallacy. Nestle is evil. Microsoft is evil. Nestle kills more than Microsoft. Microsoft is still evil.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago
  > But in reality, having integrity and ethics in business is actually more profitable over the long term. This seems like a fairy tale you tell young naive business majors with no experience. The real world isn't like that. You think oil companies, tech companies, defense companies, tobacco companies, banks, etc have been profitable for decades because of integrity and ethics? No you become profitable and wealthy by being amoral and cutthroat then paying PR firms to spread the news about how good you were all along. Do you think Google, Facebook, Apple, etc are so profitable because they are moral? Do you think Nike became Nike by having integrity and ethics or by exploiting cheap labor overseas?
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  That doesn't sound right. It can be a sustainable way to run a business, but some publications do fine despite a well-earned reputation for dishonesty, such as British tabloids. More generally, plenty of companies cause negative externalities, profiting by causing damage that they don't have to pay for.
- mola 7y ago
  Thank you for thinking I'm deep an edgy.... But why is long term important? people need to see long term effects to know that it's more profitable. But right now, people see success without ethics, so why should they think long term? There might be a day of reckoning, where these short term gains result in long term catastrophe, but until then, people do what works. And today the only measure of what works is money.

JadeNB 7y ago

> In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists? The problem is that these incentives for academics aren't created out of purity of heart, but because of the system to which they belong; you will no longer be highly read and cited once it is clear that your results can't be trusted. Unfortunately, this seems not to be true in journalism—you can purvey intentionally, and explicitly, wrong information, and it will still be consumed actively by those whose biases are confirmed by it. We can discuss how to change that, but changing what kind of news people want to read is surely even harder than changing what kind of news journalists write and publishers publish.

hutzlibu 7y ago
Well, also as a journalist you can not get away with making up stories. There was a recent case of a high class journalist, who did that and was caught. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius But he did so very brutal so to say. The problem with journalism is mostly not straight lying, but missleading and bending the truth until it fits the agenda. So a classic journalist should not have another agenda than the truth. But this type seems to be very rare today.
- DangitBobby 7y ago
  What you're saying is probably broadly speaking true for journalists in general. But what many people actually consume news-wise can only be compared on the surface to actual journalism. Consumers of this material have no interest in determining if what they're reading is true, and there are no consequences for those spreading misinformation while pretending to be journalists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784665
- em500 7y ago
  Best we can tell, Bloomberg's Chinese Big Hack story was completly made up, but it doesn't appear anyone involved suffered any consequences. https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-later-bloomberg-silently-stands-by-its-big-hack-icloud-spy-chip-story https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...

wayoutthere 7y ago

This doesn't really solve the Fox News problem: if an audience agrees with what you're saying, they will begin to trust you regardless of the facts. Many people have no way of knowing what the truth really is when they get their news exclusively from the a small group of propagandists coordinating a message. Who gets to decide when someone is lying? What happens when that power to determine truth from lies is obtained by a bad actor to create a new truth?

sbierwagen 7y ago

>In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, Can be. Among others, Matthew Walker still has a job. https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure/ https://yngve.hoiseth.net/why-we-sleep-institutional-failure...

mikekchar 7y ago

At least these days, it's not so easy for a journalist to have a career ending mistake. My example for this is Daniel Lyons, for whom I have practically no respect at all as a journalist. His participation in the SCO debacle should legitimately have been career ending (and IMHO was not at all mitigated by his subsequent apology). His "Fake Steve Jobs" work breathtakingly poor judgement, again IMHO. I mean there is trash journalism and then there is making stuff up and hinting that maybe you know more than others do (all the while saying, "It's just a parody"). Let's not even talk about bit that's mentioned at the end of his Wikipedia article (I really hope that's not true!). But let's face it, he's a talented writer. He writes engagingly on topics that are interesting for a lot a people. The fact that he exercises absolutely no judgement whatsoever in his research is unfortunate, but even this is appealing to a lot of people who want to believe what he writes. I suspect that there are more people on HN who love him than hate him. How would you filter this kind of writing without some draconian censor forbidding him from publishing?