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This is why I'm convinced independent journalists are the future. Fact finding itself is a shrinking part of the job. Fact checking the monunental amount of dat
by throwawayinfo 6y ago
This is why I'm convinced independent journalists are the future. Fact finding itself is a shrinking part of the job. Fact checking the monunental amount of data out there is increasingly important. As such, the need for these megacorp publishers is going away.
Edit: Just look at the BLM movement. Lots of people believe these are peaceful civil disobedience and lots of people believe they're communist race riots. Right now, the question is basically "who do you want to believe?" I don't claim to have an answer but I just hope that the right ideas will win in an open space with small creators.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoWhen there's enough conflicting information out there, fact checking just turns back into fact finding, doesn't it?
- throwawayinfo 6y agoI mean people don't need to go gather primary sources as much if every important event has thousands of smartphone cameras at the scene.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoMost of what gets uploaded anywhere or even worse, the stuff that goes viral, has a pretty heavy selection bias. To know whether the stuff that got shared publicly tells the whole story or a misleading story, you have to know more than just what got shared publicly. Maybe the event that everyone pulled out their phones for had some important context beforehand, but at that point it didn't look noteworthy enough to pull out anyone's phone for. Now you'll have tons of recordings of the same event, but that doesn't mean any more context than one video. I prefer a story written by someone who was there to a story written by someone who looked through all the thousands of posts to social media, but wasn't there.