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How sad... I just realized my initial gut reaction to seeing any news headline with the word "Fact" in it has become to assume it has a political angle. More o
by Alupis 7y ago
How sad... I just realized my initial gut reaction to seeing any news headline with the word "Fact" in it has become to assume it has a political angle.
More often than not, "Fact" is just a synonym for some political opinion.
How far have we fallen? Our news outlets are more often than not just Panic Porn and Political Hit Jobs... anything except actual unvarnished, unspun, unpoliticized raw news.
- macintux 7y agoIn fairness to the news media, it’s effectively mandatory to process the data, the facts, for presentation, so everything is “spun” to some degree.
- Retric 7y agoA lot of news is just factual information such as weather events, earthquakes, sports scores, or who won an election. Spin is more about filling time and attracting eyeballs. Consider, if you’re summarizing what news events where actually relevant to you over the last month, how long would it take?
- Alupis 7y agoProcess and make more easily consumable? Sure, I don't have all day to catch up on happenings and events. But to selectively edit videos, leave out details deliberately, loaded word choices ("blasts", "destroys", "slaps back"), deliberate misuse of words to instill a sense of credibility ("fact", "expert", "scientist"), and so much more? That's more than just processing the data... that's deliberate manipulation. In entertainment news media, Fact now means opinion, Expert now means political shill, and Scientist means random person with an opinion.
- wtvanhest 7y agoI often wonder how much entertainment news impacts politician’s decision making. I have to assume that they consider what the major news entertainment companies will say about bills they author and support or don’t. in some ways, they are not just reporting, but likely influencing.
- knzhou 7y ago> my initial gut reaction to seeing any news headline with the word "Fact" in it has become to assume it has a political angle. That's not a problem with the headline, it's a problem with your state of mind. There are actual facts at play here, and real experts with good intentions. If you think the whole world is partisan politics and facts don't matter, good for you, but please don't pollute the information pool for the rest of us.
- justforyou 7y agoYou're being unfair to OP. It's perfectly reasonable to respect facts, and question the motives of profit driven information outlets when they claim to broadcast them. There's a lot of misinformation being spread.
- knzhou 7y agoSure, but that’s not what he did. He literally saw the word “fact” and decided he didn’t like what was going to come next. That’s downright medieval.
- dwaltrip 7y agoI'm reading between the lines just a tad, but I think a more generous interpretation is that they noticed they have an unfortunately strong mental association between the following 2 things: 1. Online headline containing prominent usage of the word "fact" while also hinting at some sort of controversy 2. Misleading article, deceptive spin, bullshit, etc. I don't think I have quite as strong an association, but I can definitely sympathize with this.
- holler 7y agofact check, correct your thinking!
- guardiangod 7y agoYou can apply evolution and meme models to it. Every piece of info on Twitter is an idea fighting for survival. You'd think having 'fact' as a property of a tweet would be beneficial. But it's the opposite- the truth is often unpleasant and people don't want to hear it. This gives 'factual' tweets a survival disadvantage on Twitter. If a fake tweet makes people 'happy' (by way of confirming their innate belief), by evolution they'd out-compete other tweets.
- brenden2 7y agoIt's not just Twitter, it also includes HN and any other system that encourages crowd-sourced curation.