4 ms·

As much as I resist futile internet arguments, I find that I can't help myself when I read someone being blatantly wrong about something I know. I feel some nea

As much as I resist futile internet arguments, I find that I can't help myself when I read someone being blatantly wrong about something I know. I feel some nearly irresistible urge to "correct" them, knowing fully well that my arguments will have no impact. Here's the thing: before the internet and social media, you simply didn't encounter that many patently false arguments in your day to day life. Everything you read or saw was produced by journalists and writers (not bloggers) who had access to their parent organization's resources. Political bias aside, if a TIME or NYT editor let something go to print, it meant that it had gone through at least some basic fact check. But that's not true online. Anyone can write anything, facts be damned. And worse, in your social media feed, a carefully researched article occupies the same space as some random guy's harebrained conspiracy theories. We can't limit the amount of "wrongness" online. Best we can do is learn to live with it

vxNsr 6y ago
It’s no longer true at those media organizations either, if it ever was.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I can't speak for Time, which has gone through a lot of ownership travails recently (albeit not as dire as Newsweek), but there are certainly still magazines and newspapers that do fact-checking. Some have full-time fact checking departments; the New Yorker in specific and Condé Nast publications in general are historically known for that. Newspapers may not employ people with the title of "fact checker" (although the New York Times has at least one staff reporter who does, in fact, have that title, Linda Qiu), but it's something that's generally the job of the editorial staff to do fact-checking. Sure, newspapers fail at this occasionally, especially with articles that get rushed due to timeliness -- and unless it's a big long-form investigative journalism piece, it's quite likely only what editors consider the major elements have been vetted. (The old saw "if the paper got this small detail wrong, how can I trust them on the big claims they're making" largely has it backward: the big claims are the ones they want receipts for, whereas the small details are more likely to get passed through without due checking. This is, at the least, what I was told by a newspaper editor many years ago!)

vxNsr 6y ago

It’s no longer true at those media organizations either, if it ever was.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I can't speak for Time, which has gone through a lot of ownership travails recently (albeit not as dire as Newsweek), but there are certainly still magazines and newspapers that do fact-checking. Some have full-time fact checking departments; the New Yorker in specific and Condé Nast publications in general are historically known for that. Newspapers may not employ people with the title of "fact checker" (although the New York Times has at least one staff reporter who does, in fact, have that title, Linda Qiu), but it's something that's generally the job of the editorial staff to do fact-checking. Sure, newspapers fail at this occasionally, especially with articles that get rushed due to timeliness -- and unless it's a big long-form investigative journalism piece, it's quite likely only what editors consider the major elements have been vetted. (The old saw "if the paper got this small detail wrong, how can I trust them on the big claims they're making" largely has it backward: the big claims are the ones they want receipts for, whereas the small details are more likely to get passed through without due checking. This is, at the least, what I was told by a newspaper editor many years ago!)