6 ms·

When I was 15, there was a bus bombing near my school. A kid in my class was the grandson of a well known politician. A newspaper ran with a completely made up

When I was 15, there was a bus bombing near my school. A kid in my class was the grandson of a well known politician. A newspaper ran with a completely made up story about how it was his bus line, and how the grandfather had panicked. A few days later a fact checker called his mom. Not sure if they ran a retraction. It seemed incredibly disrespectful to those who were on the bus. Two died. About a year after that, some kids that I knew were arrested for cannabis use. The story made the news. Some of it was true, but some was made up. The made up parts were embellishments, they made the story better. Age gaps were exaggerated, romantic narratives inserted... I think most people who are in the vicinity of a news story irl have such experiences. Often the lies are minor, but just like with ordinary people who tell lies... the little lies make you disbelieve everything they say. We kind of expect this from book authors and documentarians. Their job is to get a good narrative going. No one thinks "Tiger King" is an honest telling. IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient. TJ should have understood this. He was a pamphleteer after all. The rights of man is pure fiction, to quote Yuval Noah Harari. If you dissect a person, you will find no rights inside. Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously.

nickthemagicman 6y ago
I don't quite follow how the narrative makes it more important than the facts. I guess we have define what ideas we expect the news to deliver.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Many people die every day. This isn't news, nor is it meaningful to us on more than an ambient level. The narratives that these deaths fit into make them meaningful. The stories of people dying of covid. People dying of political violence. If drug deaths or suicide rates are increasing, and it's been making news then associated deaths are a part of this narrative.
metalliqaz 6y ago
I was in the vicinity of a news story once and I interacted with the press. A reporter from a local news station. She asked me what I saw and took notes. There were two follow up questions: "did you notice anything else?", and that's it. The report didn't really include any of the extra details that I provided, just what you could see from the street. It included a clip from a different witness who was much more chatty and added their own... flair. I say all this because in my limited experience, the embellishments come from average Joes who are eager to say such things to reporters.
- BlueDingo 6y ago
  I agree but I think it's both. Reporters will know if a witness/interviewee is too straightforward for their purposes and will move out until they find a juicy enough narrative. That way their ass is covered.
darepublic 6y ago
Reminds me of the opening text of Fargo. > The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred. So solemn, so respectful and complete bs :D
- elliekelly 6y ago
  Is there a word for that sort of cinematic (or in some cases literary) device? Opening with "disclaimer" style text to make the movie feel more real. It seems mockumentary adjacent - fiction presented as fact. Pseudo non-fiction? I've seen it used in other films, too but the only example I can really think of is maybe the Blair Witch Project.
  - superhuzza 6y ago
    The use of disclaimers to suggest real events is discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclaimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclai... Also https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DanBrowned https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DanBrowned
busterarm 6y ago
I've been in the vicinity of news/magazine press or knew the subjects personally about a dozen times. In every single instance the facts were grossly misrepresented and in the three cases at Vice/Motherboard told the complete opposite story of the actual truth. Vice's article about "Sugar Weasel, the One and Only Clown Escort" is a complete fabrication (well, other than his own self-delusions) and any basic fact checking shows the story to be false immediately.
- 3np 6y ago
  This made me feel pretty uneasy about Wired's posthumous Holloway story.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Vice has that reputation. This is the problem. There's plenty of newsrooms doing solid work. You can't do this any more than you can talk about restaurants while describing fast food burgers and a fancy tapas bar in the same sentence. There's more interesting problems here. Outlets with actual scientists on staff do better science coverage, local institutions can cover a crisis with a better grasp on the context than a global organization that's sending reporters there for the first time. But before we can have that conversation we need to paint with a narrower brush.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Definitely. I've certainly found my own sources for the kinds of news that I'm interested in. A lot of it is independent journalists/*loggers. Often enough I can check their sources and check multiple points of view on the same topic. The problem is that's a lot of work. Other people I might want to educate about the facts haven't put in that work -- they've just watched CNN/MSNBC/FOX or read the NYT/etc. And most of those get it wrong.
    - coffeefirst 6y ago
      Sure, and I won't defend cable news at all. The 24/7 realtime nature of what they do is set up to be superficial and error-prone.
JackFr 6y ago
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
- jkaptur 6y ago
  Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." You open the newspaper to an article on some subject that you know well, because your salary depends on it. In Tourre's case, finance. In mine, tech. You read the article and see that the journalist isn't a subject matter expert and has made an error about some fact. Often, the error is so small that it doesn't affect the story at all. I call these the "well, actually, some streets are sheltered from the rain" stories. In any case, you dismiss the entire story and stop reading it, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if your technical expertise somehow gave you insight into a place you've never been and a culture you've never interacted with. You turn the page, and forget the gaps in your own knowledge.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I think this is a fantastic comment, especially given the cavalcade of robotic quotations of that "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" passage that happen whenever the press comes up. One should definitely read the newspaper with a certain degree of skepticism, but I feel that people who take the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" to heart often get into weird places (like thinking that reading raw scientific papers is somehow a replacement for reading the newspaper, as if anyone could actually keep up with them in more than a narrow area and science is the only thing that matters). While I think the self-interest from the Sinclair quote is definitely a reason to doubt "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" dismissals (i.e. maybe the story actually is right, but you think it's wrong because you have biased take), I think the problem you're getting at is ego. A lot of people want to be the guy who is smarter or sees things more clearly than others, so they latch on to ideas that let them superficially dismiss things that others trust as a way of proving their greater insight (maybe only to themselves). I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history. First rough drafts are always going to have errors, but you'll be the last to know if you wait for those to be corrected before reading. If you keep up with the rough drafts, you'll see the corrections as the stories unfold.
civilized 6y ago
> IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient. > Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously. You have a right to your opinion, of course, but frankly I find this revolting. There's a huge difference between recognizing that imperfect intellectual integrity and flawed critics are common, and dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity as boring, unimportant, and hypocritical. You don't have to deceive people to be interesting and successful. You just don't. And I think plenty of people manage to not live their lives that way.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  I agree, its despicable. I would also suggest there is an enormous opportunity to make money for an organization that pursues and documents the truth, with integrity and to the the best of their ability. Society cannot possibly work if its members inhabit vastly incoherent bullshit bubbles and deep down inside we all know it.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I think you might be misunderstanding me. ">* dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity*" is far from true. Intellectual integrity is crucial. I a deep sense, it's the main thing that matters. I mean that a newspaper is a newspaper. A pamphlet is a pamphlet. An Encyclopedia is... etc. Moralizing about it doesn't help much. As TJ says in his speech. Anyway, I mean this "for one's own sake." Our own Intellectual honesty is something most of us think we just have. In practice, it's a skill. Call outs like this aren't a good way of practicing it, IMO.
  - civilized 6y ago
    If you're just saying "this is how the world works" - yeah, maybe, but not everyone is the same. I'm sure there are some individual reporters and maybe, occasionally, even whole news orgs, that are trying to be better then this.
TT3351 6y ago
TJ: A newspaper should be divided into four sections (truths, probabilities, possibilities, and lies) https://jacklimpert.com/2017/02/newspaper-divided-four-sections-truths-probabilities-possibilities-lies-thomas-jefferson/ https://jacklimpert.com/2017/02/newspaper-divided-four-secti...
clint 6y ago
This is largely due to the wholesale destruction of the news industry by embarrassed capitalists and politicians over the last 30-40 years. Another reasons is that the same people have removed any ensemble of education which teach children to think even halfway critical about any topic. We have journalists entering the workforce who have a good chance of having never consumed or witnessed any real journalism in their entire life. So many of publications we used to know and love employed a sufficient amount of _professional_ copywriters, fact checkers, editors and so forth. Editors were happy to let journalists take their time on stories that might not pay off for several years knowing it would pay to get things right. Now-a-days, unless you work at the NYT, Guardian, or other company with mega-bucks and a robust subscription program you will probably never see a fact-checker, photographer, copywriter, and your editor will be not much more than an assembly line manager who may or may not care about the quality of the journalism you produce. If they do care, the likely have no leverage over the moneyed-interests who own the company. A lot of people these days are not willing to pay for good journalism because they've been tricked into thinking they get "just as good" for free, which they most obviously do not. And when they "discover" that their free news is run by rank amateurs who don't actually care about journalism and produce the kinds of things the OP rails against, it often seems to fester into a complete denunciation of the entire enterprise. In fact, it is my belief that this is actually the goal of many unscrupulous practitioners of crappy journalism. They know they can bankroll and support a crappy "news site" with the left hand and with the right hand use that to slowly tear down the firms putting out rigorous journalism, giving actual facts to citizens which show their ideology and politicians are nothing more than kleptocratic idiots.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Journalism has almost always been payed to a vast extent by advertisers, not subscribers. I don't think the decline in journalism is directly attributable to the pattern of free news. More likely, it is due to the progressing obsession with profit, metrics-driven businesses. Papers are for-profit companies, so any change they can do that help their bottom line will always win out. We can make more money if we run aggressive titles? Done. We can save money by getting rid of seasoned professionals and people won't stop reading and looking at our ads? Awesome! Not to mention, the extent to which journalism has declined is probably exaggerated. The style is obviously changing, and it may be more popular and crass. But journalism has always been extremely biased for the status quo, with many events that ruin the common narrative being systematically ignored. A lot of the problems caused by the US military and companies in South America was long ignored in mainstream journalism in the US in the 70s and 80s, just as one example. Watergate was huge news for years, COINTELPRO was quickly forgotten.
mike-cardwell 6y ago
The one time that something newsworthy happened in my life, we didn't speak to the press, because we didn't particularly want to. That's not a problem for them though, they literally just printed errors and completely made up quotes from us instead. I guess I should be thankful. It's a valuable lesson to learn at a young age.
foobiekr 6y ago
On the contrary, lots of people think "Tiger King" is an honest telling. Spend a little time on /r/conspiracy and consider that most of these people are not joking and their thinking is _entirely_ narrative driven.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pwned1 6y ago
Same experience here. I was a elected to a local board and was mentioned in several local newspaper stories. Every story that included events that I had personal knowledge of was incorrect, sometimes in very substantial ways.
BeetleB 6y ago
A friend of mine was once arrested and it made national news - multiple times (arrest, randomly later on, then trial, etc). What I observed: 1. They often got a lot of details wrong - details very relevant to how the public would perceive him. Easily verifiable details, BTW. A lot of it was just someone on the law enforcement/justice side making statements that they did not bother to verify. 1a. Some of these false facts are now part of his Wikipedia page, with several references to these news outlets. Be wary of facts on Wikipedia if the source is journalism. 2. The national news have a hive mind mentality. Between the arrest and the trial, he would suddenly become headline news, and often with no event triggering it. As if they all suddenly decided (on the same day) to just write a story about him. The reality is more likely laziness - one outlet decided to make it big news and others didn't want to be left behind. 2a. As an aside, another well known freelance journalist said this is common. He once had the scoop on a big story and was trying to sell it to the top news outlets. The most common question was "Is anyone else running this?" followed by "We don't want to be the only ones to run this." The concern was about being wrong in the end, but the facts were easily verifiable and the news outlet didn't want to go through the trouble. 2b. The random big news about my friend with no trigger? A number of times the same news outlet had reported the very same thing at the time of arrest months prior. It was basically recycled news, but presented as if it was breaking news. 3. The local newspapers were the best. They didn't report false facts - they verified them. They had the most detail (continual coverage over months rather than random sensational headlines). That was 20 years ago. Something similar happened to another friend of mine recently. Half of the latest news reports about him have ridiculously wrong facts (year of arrest, time spent in prison, etc). Stuff that is trivially verifiable. His case was not as high profile. Lesson learned: News stories that are not as big are a lot more likely to have wrong information. This experience (particularly the false facts) is why I'm adamant about suspending judgment prior to the trial. My sources (news) are unreliable. (BTW, that first person was easily acquitted - the defense called only one witness, because the prosecution's case was so flawed).
air7 6y ago
> I think most people who are in the vicinity of a news story irl have such experiences What's funny though is that although this is true, we still tend to believe all other news stories as though they are 100% true.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
I was once interviewed by a local newspaper. It was not a full-length interview. I just said something quotable as a bystander and so they asked me for some demographic information. I gave them three facts, my name, my age, and the town I lived in. Including my quote, I gave the journalist four facts. When I read the article, I was horrified that two of the four facts, including a misquote of what I said, were wrong.
philipkglass 6y ago
I have been interviewed twice for articles in Wired and once for Chemical and Engineering News. I was a first hand observer of an event reported in the Portland Oregonian when I was in high school. I was not misquoted or otherwise misrepresented in the first three cases. In all of these cases I found the reporting to be accurate. I do notice mistakes when news publications write about topics relevant to my expertise. But these mistakes often (though not always) would not change the conclusions of the article when corrected. A lot of the mistakes I notice are elementary ones like confusing units of energy and power. They indicate that the writer lacks a subject matter background but they don't invalidate the whole article. When an article says "The new wind farm will generate 180,000 megawatts per year, enough to supply 10,000 Texas households" it's clear enough that "180,000 megawatt hours per year" is what should have been written. I know that other people have different experiences, where they find that their first hand knowledge of events has been completely twisted by news reporting. Or where their subject of expertise is reported incorrectly in mainstream publications all the time, not only in details but in the major conclusions. I wonder if these howlers are prevalent in online discussions of news accuracy simply because the howlers make for more vivid memories that will spur people to share their experiences in comments.
edouard-harris 6y ago
Very true. A good author makes you suspend your disbelief. And a good journalist makes you suspend your Gell-Mann amnesia.
bobthechef 6y ago
> TJ should have understood this. He was a pamphleteer after all. The rights of man is pure fiction, to quote Yuval Noah Harari. If you dissect a person, you will find no rights inside. What a fatuous remark. If you dissect a person, will you find numbers? Concepts? Why would you ever expect to find rights in a man as if they were organs? Naturally, a materialistic view of the universe will lead you down this path, but it's such a patently incoherent metaphysics that you can only wonder about the sanity of the materialist.

nickthemagicman 6y ago

I don't quite follow how the narrative makes it more important than the facts. I guess we have define what ideas we expect the news to deliver.

dalbasal 6y ago
Many people die every day. This isn't news, nor is it meaningful to us on more than an ambient level. The narratives that these deaths fit into make them meaningful. The stories of people dying of covid. People dying of political violence. If drug deaths or suicide rates are increasing, and it's been making news then associated deaths are a part of this narrative.

metalliqaz 6y ago

I was in the vicinity of a news story once and I interacted with the press. A reporter from a local news station. She asked me what I saw and took notes. There were two follow up questions: "did you notice anything else?", and that's it. The report didn't really include any of the extra details that I provided, just what you could see from the street. It included a clip from a different witness who was much more chatty and added their own... flair. I say all this because in my limited experience, the embellishments come from average Joes who are eager to say such things to reporters.

BlueDingo 6y ago
I agree but I think it's both. Reporters will know if a witness/interviewee is too straightforward for their purposes and will move out until they find a juicy enough narrative. That way their ass is covered.

darepublic 6y ago

Reminds me of the opening text of Fargo. > The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred. So solemn, so respectful and complete bs :D

elliekelly 6y ago
Is there a word for that sort of cinematic (or in some cases literary) device? Opening with "disclaimer" style text to make the movie feel more real. It seems mockumentary adjacent - fiction presented as fact. Pseudo non-fiction? I've seen it used in other films, too but the only example I can really think of is maybe the Blair Witch Project.
- superhuzza 6y ago
  The use of disclaimers to suggest real events is discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclaimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclai... Also https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DanBrowned https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DanBrowned

busterarm 6y ago

I've been in the vicinity of news/magazine press or knew the subjects personally about a dozen times. In every single instance the facts were grossly misrepresented and in the three cases at Vice/Motherboard told the complete opposite story of the actual truth. Vice's article about "Sugar Weasel, the One and Only Clown Escort" is a complete fabrication (well, other than his own self-delusions) and any basic fact checking shows the story to be false immediately.

3np 6y ago
This made me feel pretty uneasy about Wired's posthumous Holloway story.
coffeefirst 6y ago
Vice has that reputation. This is the problem. There's plenty of newsrooms doing solid work. You can't do this any more than you can talk about restaurants while describing fast food burgers and a fancy tapas bar in the same sentence. There's more interesting problems here. Outlets with actual scientists on staff do better science coverage, local institutions can cover a crisis with a better grasp on the context than a global organization that's sending reporters there for the first time. But before we can have that conversation we need to paint with a narrower brush.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Definitely. I've certainly found my own sources for the kinds of news that I'm interested in. A lot of it is independent journalists/*loggers. Often enough I can check their sources and check multiple points of view on the same topic. The problem is that's a lot of work. Other people I might want to educate about the facts haven't put in that work -- they've just watched CNN/MSNBC/FOX or read the NYT/etc. And most of those get it wrong.
  - coffeefirst 6y ago
    Sure, and I won't defend cable news at all. The 24/7 realtime nature of what they do is set up to be superficial and error-prone.

JackFr 6y ago

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

jkaptur 6y ago
Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." You open the newspaper to an article on some subject that you know well, because your salary depends on it. In Tourre's case, finance. In mine, tech. You read the article and see that the journalist isn't a subject matter expert and has made an error about some fact. Often, the error is so small that it doesn't affect the story at all. I call these the "well, actually, some streets are sheltered from the rain" stories. In any case, you dismiss the entire story and stop reading it, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if your technical expertise somehow gave you insight into a place you've never been and a culture you've never interacted with. You turn the page, and forget the gaps in your own knowledge.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I think this is a fantastic comment, especially given the cavalcade of robotic quotations of that "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" passage that happen whenever the press comes up. One should definitely read the newspaper with a certain degree of skepticism, but I feel that people who take the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" to heart often get into weird places (like thinking that reading raw scientific papers is somehow a replacement for reading the newspaper, as if anyone could actually keep up with them in more than a narrow area and science is the only thing that matters). While I think the self-interest from the Sinclair quote is definitely a reason to doubt "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" dismissals (i.e. maybe the story actually is right, but you think it's wrong because you have biased take), I think the problem you're getting at is ego. A lot of people want to be the guy who is smarter or sees things more clearly than others, so they latch on to ideas that let them superficially dismiss things that others trust as a way of proving their greater insight (maybe only to themselves). I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history. First rough drafts are always going to have errors, but you'll be the last to know if you wait for those to be corrected before reading. If you keep up with the rough drafts, you'll see the corrections as the stories unfold.

civilized 6y ago

> IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient. > Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously. You have a right to your opinion, of course, but frankly I find this revolting. There's a huge difference between recognizing that imperfect intellectual integrity and flawed critics are common, and dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity as boring, unimportant, and hypocritical. You don't have to deceive people to be interesting and successful. You just don't. And I think plenty of people manage to not live their lives that way.

zarkov99 6y ago
I agree, its despicable. I would also suggest there is an enormous opportunity to make money for an organization that pursues and documents the truth, with integrity and to the the best of their ability. Society cannot possibly work if its members inhabit vastly incoherent bullshit bubbles and deep down inside we all know it.
dalbasal 6y ago
I think you might be misunderstanding me. ">* dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity*" is far from true. Intellectual integrity is crucial. I a deep sense, it's the main thing that matters. I mean that a newspaper is a newspaper. A pamphlet is a pamphlet. An Encyclopedia is... etc. Moralizing about it doesn't help much. As TJ says in his speech. Anyway, I mean this "for one's own sake." Our own Intellectual honesty is something most of us think we just have. In practice, it's a skill. Call outs like this aren't a good way of practicing it, IMO.
- civilized 6y ago
  If you're just saying "this is how the world works" - yeah, maybe, but not everyone is the same. I'm sure there are some individual reporters and maybe, occasionally, even whole news orgs, that are trying to be better then this.

TT3351 6y ago

TJ: A newspaper should be divided into four sections (truths, probabilities, possibilities, and lies) https://jacklimpert.com/2017/02/newspaper-divided-four-sections-truths-probabilities-possibilities-lies-thomas-jefferson/ https://jacklimpert.com/2017/02/newspaper-divided-four-secti...

clint 6y ago

This is largely due to the wholesale destruction of the news industry by embarrassed capitalists and politicians over the last 30-40 years. Another reasons is that the same people have removed any ensemble of education which teach children to think even halfway critical about any topic. We have journalists entering the workforce who have a good chance of having never consumed or witnessed any real journalism in their entire life. So many of publications we used to know and love employed a sufficient amount of _professional_ copywriters, fact checkers, editors and so forth. Editors were happy to let journalists take their time on stories that might not pay off for several years knowing it would pay to get things right. Now-a-days, unless you work at the NYT, Guardian, or other company with mega-bucks and a robust subscription program you will probably never see a fact-checker, photographer, copywriter, and your editor will be not much more than an assembly line manager who may or may not care about the quality of the journalism you produce. If they do care, the likely have no leverage over the moneyed-interests who own the company. A lot of people these days are not willing to pay for good journalism because they've been tricked into thinking they get "just as good" for free, which they most obviously do not. And when they "discover" that their free news is run by rank amateurs who don't actually care about journalism and produce the kinds of things the OP rails against, it often seems to fester into a complete denunciation of the entire enterprise. In fact, it is my belief that this is actually the goal of many unscrupulous practitioners of crappy journalism. They know they can bankroll and support a crappy "news site" with the left hand and with the right hand use that to slowly tear down the firms putting out rigorous journalism, giving actual facts to citizens which show their ideology and politicians are nothing more than kleptocratic idiots.

tsimionescu 6y ago
Journalism has almost always been payed to a vast extent by advertisers, not subscribers. I don't think the decline in journalism is directly attributable to the pattern of free news. More likely, it is due to the progressing obsession with profit, metrics-driven businesses. Papers are for-profit companies, so any change they can do that help their bottom line will always win out. We can make more money if we run aggressive titles? Done. We can save money by getting rid of seasoned professionals and people won't stop reading and looking at our ads? Awesome! Not to mention, the extent to which journalism has declined is probably exaggerated. The style is obviously changing, and it may be more popular and crass. But journalism has always been extremely biased for the status quo, with many events that ruin the common narrative being systematically ignored. A lot of the problems caused by the US military and companies in South America was long ignored in mainstream journalism in the US in the 70s and 80s, just as one example. Watergate was huge news for years, COINTELPRO was quickly forgotten.

mike-cardwell 6y ago

The one time that something newsworthy happened in my life, we didn't speak to the press, because we didn't particularly want to. That's not a problem for them though, they literally just printed errors and completely made up quotes from us instead. I guess I should be thankful. It's a valuable lesson to learn at a young age.

foobiekr 6y ago

On the contrary, lots of people think "Tiger King" is an honest telling. Spend a little time on /r/conspiracy and consider that most of these people are not joking and their thinking is _entirely_ narrative driven.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pwned1 6y ago

Same experience here. I was a elected to a local board and was mentioned in several local newspaper stories. Every story that included events that I had personal knowledge of was incorrect, sometimes in very substantial ways.

BeetleB 6y ago

A friend of mine was once arrested and it made national news - multiple times (arrest, randomly later on, then trial, etc). What I observed: 1. They often got a lot of details wrong - details very relevant to how the public would perceive him. Easily verifiable details, BTW. A lot of it was just someone on the law enforcement/justice side making statements that they did not bother to verify. 1a. Some of these false facts are now part of his Wikipedia page, with several references to these news outlets. Be wary of facts on Wikipedia if the source is journalism. 2. The national news have a hive mind mentality. Between the arrest and the trial, he would suddenly become headline news, and often with no event triggering it. As if they all suddenly decided (on the same day) to just write a story about him. The reality is more likely laziness - one outlet decided to make it big news and others didn't want to be left behind. 2a. As an aside, another well known freelance journalist said this is common. He once had the scoop on a big story and was trying to sell it to the top news outlets. The most common question was "Is anyone else running this?" followed by "We don't want to be the only ones to run this." The concern was about being wrong in the end, but the facts were easily verifiable and the news outlet didn't want to go through the trouble. 2b. The random big news about my friend with no trigger? A number of times the same news outlet had reported the very same thing at the time of arrest months prior. It was basically recycled news, but presented as if it was breaking news. 3. The local newspapers were the best. They didn't report false facts - they verified them. They had the most detail (continual coverage over months rather than random sensational headlines). That was 20 years ago. Something similar happened to another friend of mine recently. Half of the latest news reports about him have ridiculously wrong facts (year of arrest, time spent in prison, etc). Stuff that is trivially verifiable. His case was not as high profile. Lesson learned: News stories that are not as big are a lot more likely to have wrong information. This experience (particularly the false facts) is why I'm adamant about suspending judgment prior to the trial. My sources (news) are unreliable. (BTW, that first person was easily acquitted - the defense called only one witness, because the prosecution's case was so flawed).

air7 6y ago

> I think most people who are in the vicinity of a news story irl have such experiences What's funny though is that although this is true, we still tend to believe all other news stories as though they are 100% true.

jackcosgrove 6y ago

I was once interviewed by a local newspaper. It was not a full-length interview. I just said something quotable as a bystander and so they asked me for some demographic information. I gave them three facts, my name, my age, and the town I lived in. Including my quote, I gave the journalist four facts. When I read the article, I was horrified that two of the four facts, including a misquote of what I said, were wrong.

philipkglass 6y ago

I have been interviewed twice for articles in Wired and once for Chemical and Engineering News. I was a first hand observer of an event reported in the Portland Oregonian when I was in high school. I was not misquoted or otherwise misrepresented in the first three cases. In all of these cases I found the reporting to be accurate. I do notice mistakes when news publications write about topics relevant to my expertise. But these mistakes often (though not always) would not change the conclusions of the article when corrected. A lot of the mistakes I notice are elementary ones like confusing units of energy and power. They indicate that the writer lacks a subject matter background but they don't invalidate the whole article. When an article says "The new wind farm will generate 180,000 megawatts per year, enough to supply 10,000 Texas households" it's clear enough that "180,000 megawatt hours per year" is what should have been written. I know that other people have different experiences, where they find that their first hand knowledge of events has been completely twisted by news reporting. Or where their subject of expertise is reported incorrectly in mainstream publications all the time, not only in details but in the major conclusions. I wonder if these howlers are prevalent in online discussions of news accuracy simply because the howlers make for more vivid memories that will spur people to share their experiences in comments.

edouard-harris 6y ago

Very true. A good author makes you suspend your disbelief. And a good journalist makes you suspend your Gell-Mann amnesia.

bobthechef 6y ago

> TJ should have understood this. He was a pamphleteer after all. The rights of man is pure fiction, to quote Yuval Noah Harari. If you dissect a person, you will find no rights inside. What a fatuous remark. If you dissect a person, will you find numbers? Concepts? Why would you ever expect to find rights in a man as if they were organs? Naturally, a materialistic view of the universe will lead you down this path, but it's such a patently incoherent metaphysics that you can only wonder about the sanity of the materialist.