6 ms·

Another part of the problem is that you cannot unring a bell. For example, the WaPo issued a retraction yesterday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tru

by Natsu 6y ago

Another part of the problem is that you cannot unring a bell. For example, the WaPo issued a retraction yesterday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-call-georgia-investigator/2021/01/09/7a55c7fa-51cf-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-call-georgia-i... The headline quotes from their original story were proven wrong when deleted audio of the call was recovered: https://www.wsj.com/articles/recording-of-trump-phone-call-to-georgia-lead-investigator-reveals-new-details-11615411561 https://www.wsj.com/articles/recording-of-trump-phone-call-t... But the harm was already done, the misinformation was already used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of this: https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_final.pdf https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/house_trial_brief_... This is a well-respected publication commenting on a matter of great importance that injected false information into it. Information that was somehow 'confirmed' by several other publications relying on their own anonymous sources.

tomComb 6y ago
There is no perfect solution here, but at least they had to publicly acknowledge their error. This is much better than with the sources most people use. I often see people say 'hey look at this terrible thing WaPo or NYT did' as an excuse for reading whatever garbage source is saying exactly what they want to hear. It's not all of nothing.
- p1necone 6y ago
  Indeed, you can cherry pick individual examples of inaccurate reporting from literally any media outlet. It seems suspicious to me that this commenter picked out a story criticising the right that had some innacuracies when it's largely media outlets on the right that have a history of actually repeatedly reporting outright lies in recent history (see Fox, OAN, Newsmax etc).
joshuamorton 6y ago
They did not issue a retraction. They issued a correction. The precise language of the call is different, but the core of the reporting is unchanged. The precise differences are that, what was quoted as "find the fraud" was actually find "dishonesty", and you'll "a national hero" was actually that you have "the most important job in the country right now". This doesn't change the overall story: Trump attempted to reach out to GA election officials and push them to overturn election results. > But the harm was already done, the misinformation was already used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of this: None of the citations on page 10 reference this reporting or any of the quotes attributed to Trump on this call.
- p1necone 6y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, the differences from the reporting and the actual call are exactly the sorts of differences you'd expect if their anonymous source was someone who had heard the call once and was conveying the wording based off of memory. There's no significant difference in meaning as far as I can tell - Trump was still instructing them to find him votes.
- Natsu 6y ago
  Page 10 says this: "December 23, for instance, President Trump reportedly called one of Georgia’s lead election investigators, urging him to “find the fraud”" and references, among others: 28 Amy Gardner, ‘Find the Fraud’: Trump Pressured a Georgia Elections Investigator in a Separate Call Legal Experts Say Could Amount to Obstruction, Wash. Post (Jan. 9, 2021). This specific fake quote was used in the WaPo headline, in a charge of obstruction, and in a criminal referral. The call was secretly recorded, then deleted, so the source knew or should have known this was false. The wording changes the call from implying some vague kind of quid-pro-quo arrangement to overturn an election to making a complaint because he (wrongly) believed he was a victim of fraud. The faked quotes are relevant to the legal charges brought against Trump. Their source had a recording, so there was no excuse for being inaccurate on something this important.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > Page 10 says this: Ah, my mistake, was looking at the 10th page of the document, not page 10 of the document (no blame on your part here, I just hate that this is an ambiguity). > The call was secretly recorded, then deleted, so the source knew or should have known this was false. This doesn't follow. We don't know how many people were on the call, nor do we know that they all knew the call was recorded. We don't know who WaPo's source was. There are all kinds of possibilities where the person either was a second hand source (e.g. they weren't on the call, but were in the room when someone on the call, aghast, described it), or was recalling from memory having been on the call, but unaware someone recorded it. > The wording changes the call from implying some vague kind of quid-pro-quo arrangement to overturn an election to making a complaint because he (wrongly) believed he was a victim of fraud. It does not. Nothing was directly offered in either case. If you believed it was a quid-pro-quo before, you should still believe it. If you didn't before, than the headline doesn't matter. Just to clarify, here are some things Trump said on the recording. - “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised.” - “whatever you can do, Frances, it would be — it’s a great thing. It’s an important thing for the country. So important. You’ve no idea. So important. And I very much appreciate it.” If you thought there was a quid pro quo originally, Trump's words, as spoken, still support it. If you're looking for a way to excuse his actions, yes, this gives you a scapegoat. You can blame the WaPo for bad reporting, instead of Trump for committing a crime. Notably however, WaPo didn't contend that Trump tried to negotiate a quid-pro-quo. They simply reported the facts, as best they could. > Their source had a recording This is, again, untrue. There's nothing to suggest that Frances Watson was WaPo's source. There's nothing to suggest that anyone who is not Frances Watson knew there was a recording. > and in a criminal referral And in the course of that criminal referral, the actual recording, which, to reiterate, isn't exculpatory, was found. What's your point.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tryonenow 6y ago
>This is a well-respected publication commenting on a matter of great importance that injected false information into it. And the [likely politically deliberate] regularity with which this has been happening for years makes me very uneasy to read articles by the same outlets crusading against "misinformation". This movement isn't about combating misinformation, it's about combatting their misinformation, and ensuring that people only see our "true" information
- bgorman 6y ago
  Yes, effectively all US media are propaganda for the elites at this point. After the way the mainstream media threw the election for Joe Biden this past election, I think many people will turn to less traditional sources. It is simply too much of a coincidence that all these false stories about Donald Trump got published, yet any negative story about Joe Biden, e.g. the Hunter Biden scandal was thrown down the memory hole.
  - macintux 6y ago
    Which false stories about Trump? This one was wrong in some details; what else do you have?
    - waheoo 6y ago
      It's not our job to educate you. What do you think "fake news" is? It's just the culmination of all the out of context, agenda riddled and biased spinning that the media does. Go look at how the both sides controversy gets portrayed, then go listen to the full speech. Not just the soundbite you heard on the Daily show. I saw the Charlottesville videos, I was horrified, the president's statements were hurtful and stupid. But wow, the media really took it for a ride. Aside from that, not everything is about trump, look at project Veritas retracto YouTube vids [1] if you want to see how the game is played. Need more? Tim pool[2], zuby[3], or aba and preach [4] are all great too. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw1mdj6kavM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw1mdj6kavM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fHvjM_4F6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fHvjM_4F6w [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndb6pboUf7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndb6pboUf7U [4] https://www.youtube.com/user/iProjectAtlas/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/iProjectAtlas/videos
offby37years 6y ago
Bombholing. > The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed. > As George Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history. > The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers. > Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombhole-era-0cb https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombhole-era-0cb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAWggqZQmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAWggqZQmE
- mistermann 6y ago
  Here's a video where an ex-lawyer goes through a NYT article on election fraud and absolutely tears apart the misleading language they use to build the case that there was "no" election fraud: https://youtu.be/TmgMu5sefzA https://youtu.be/TmgMu5sefzA The beauty of this style of reporting is that the writer's skill with words allows them to plant specific ideas into reader's minds, but if anyone was to call them out on the carpet, they can completely truthfully say that nothing in the article is untrue, or explicitly asserts conclusions that any typical reader would naturally draw. The NYT is arguably one of the best news outlets going, so I'm not sure how one could hope that this situation will ever improve.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    Oh, it's an ex-lawyer? Not just some random guy sitting in his car? Thanks for including that tidbit, so I know this arbitrary YouTube video is credible. Or maybe, just maybe, you're doing the same thing you complain about, and cherry-picking your sources and relying on stories that support your existing biases. The answer is not to reason every sentence from first principles, like the HHG2G character who is pleasantly surprised every morning to discover that a pencil makes marks on paper. At every point, new information builds on previous information, and that usually works out reasonably well. There are exceptions, perhaps most notably in the case of the NYT, the post-9/11 Iraq war, but most of the time it works better than any other solution, and more importantly, any alternative would work less well.
hef19898 6y ago
To be honest, that's exactly the retraction that makes WaPo stand above the pack. They had a source, based the article on it (after verification). Then the primary source got available, certain details were different and WaPo changed the article. The core message, so, still stands. As a matter of fact, didn't the Georgia AG start an investigation into this affaire?
- kodah 6y ago
  The damage is done though, so I don't know that I see this as a thing to be happy about. I am curious if the source is known or unmasked at a later date what does accountability look like? If WaPo is the only one who can be held accountable and their only accountability is issuing a retraction, that seems like a gameable system.
  - didibus 6y ago
    What's the alternative? Stop reporting news altogether? I feel as a news org, the best you can do is just report the data as it becomes available. Obviously later data could contradict prior data or clarify its interpretation. What matters though is the accuracy of the data reported, not in the data being a perfect predictor of the outcome, but that this is accurately the current known data, even if it later comes to be shown incomplete or misleading.
    - mhuffman 6y ago
      >What's the alternative? Stop reporting news altogether? Maybe don't report something that one person told you and that you can't otherwise confirm? That used to be the way that news was done, right?
      - shadowfox 6y ago
        > That used to be the way that news was done, right? That seems like a bit of a rose colored view of news in the past.
    - 6y ago
p1necone 6y ago
You can cherry pick single examples of inaccurate reporting from literally any media outlet. It would be far more useful to analyze which ones have a pattern of repeatedly publishing misinformation.
rediguanayum 6y ago
Readers should reward new publisher that take the time to do research from primary sources and properly vet them, rather than be the first to publish a scoop. There ought to be a system that tracks and rates a publishers by their accuracy and retraction rate (and lack there of when proven wrong).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by Natsu 6y ago

tomComb 6y ago

There is no perfect solution here, but at least they had to publicly acknowledge their error. This is much better than with the sources most people use. I often see people say 'hey look at this terrible thing WaPo or NYT did' as an excuse for reading whatever garbage source is saying exactly what they want to hear. It's not all of nothing.

p1necone 6y ago
Indeed, you can cherry pick individual examples of inaccurate reporting from literally any media outlet. It seems suspicious to me that this commenter picked out a story criticising the right that had some innacuracies when it's largely media outlets on the right that have a history of actually repeatedly reporting outright lies in recent history (see Fox, OAN, Newsmax etc).

joshuamorton 6y ago

They did not issue a retraction. They issued a correction. The precise language of the call is different, but the core of the reporting is unchanged. The precise differences are that, what was quoted as "find the fraud" was actually find "dishonesty", and you'll "a national hero" was actually that you have "the most important job in the country right now". This doesn't change the overall story: Trump attempted to reach out to GA election officials and push them to overturn election results. > But the harm was already done, the misinformation was already used, and the false quote can be seen on page 10 of this: None of the citations on page 10 reference this reporting or any of the quotes attributed to Trump on this call.

p1necone 6y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted, the differences from the reporting and the actual call are exactly the sorts of differences you'd expect if their anonymous source was someone who had heard the call once and was conveying the wording based off of memory. There's no significant difference in meaning as far as I can tell - Trump was still instructing them to find him votes.
Natsu 6y ago
Page 10 says this: "December 23, for instance, President Trump reportedly called one of Georgia’s lead election investigators, urging him to “find the fraud”" and references, among others: 28 Amy Gardner, ‘Find the Fraud’: Trump Pressured a Georgia Elections Investigator in a Separate Call Legal Experts Say Could Amount to Obstruction, Wash. Post (Jan. 9, 2021). This specific fake quote was used in the WaPo headline, in a charge of obstruction, and in a criminal referral. The call was secretly recorded, then deleted, so the source knew or should have known this was false. The wording changes the call from implying some vague kind of quid-pro-quo arrangement to overturn an election to making a complaint because he (wrongly) believed he was a victim of fraud. The faked quotes are relevant to the legal charges brought against Trump. Their source had a recording, so there was no excuse for being inaccurate on something this important.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > Page 10 says this: Ah, my mistake, was looking at the 10th page of the document, not page 10 of the document (no blame on your part here, I just hate that this is an ambiguity). > The call was secretly recorded, then deleted, so the source knew or should have known this was false. This doesn't follow. We don't know how many people were on the call, nor do we know that they all knew the call was recorded. We don't know who WaPo's source was. There are all kinds of possibilities where the person either was a second hand source (e.g. they weren't on the call, but were in the room when someone on the call, aghast, described it), or was recalling from memory having been on the call, but unaware someone recorded it. > The wording changes the call from implying some vague kind of quid-pro-quo arrangement to overturn an election to making a complaint because he (wrongly) believed he was a victim of fraud. It does not. Nothing was directly offered in either case. If you believed it was a quid-pro-quo before, you should still believe it. If you didn't before, than the headline doesn't matter. Just to clarify, here are some things Trump said on the recording. - “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised.” - “whatever you can do, Frances, it would be — it’s a great thing. It’s an important thing for the country. So important. You’ve no idea. So important. And I very much appreciate it.” If you thought there was a quid pro quo originally, Trump's words, as spoken, still support it. If you're looking for a way to excuse his actions, yes, this gives you a scapegoat. You can blame the WaPo for bad reporting, instead of Trump for committing a crime. Notably however, WaPo didn't contend that Trump tried to negotiate a quid-pro-quo. They simply reported the facts, as best they could. > Their source had a recording This is, again, untrue. There's nothing to suggest that Frances Watson was WaPo's source. There's nothing to suggest that anyone who is not Frances Watson knew there was a recording. > and in a criminal referral And in the course of that criminal referral, the actual recording, which, to reiterate, isn't exculpatory, was found. What's your point.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tryonenow 6y ago

>This is a well-respected publication commenting on a matter of great importance that injected false information into it. And the [likely politically deliberate] regularity with which this has been happening for years makes me very uneasy to read articles by the same outlets crusading against "misinformation". This movement isn't about combating misinformation, it's about combatting their misinformation, and ensuring that people only see our "true" information

bgorman 6y ago
Yes, effectively all US media are propaganda for the elites at this point. After the way the mainstream media threw the election for Joe Biden this past election, I think many people will turn to less traditional sources. It is simply too much of a coincidence that all these false stories about Donald Trump got published, yet any negative story about Joe Biden, e.g. the Hunter Biden scandal was thrown down the memory hole.
- macintux 6y ago
  Which false stories about Trump? This one was wrong in some details; what else do you have?
  - waheoo 6y ago
    It's not our job to educate you. What do you think "fake news" is? It's just the culmination of all the out of context, agenda riddled and biased spinning that the media does. Go look at how the both sides controversy gets portrayed, then go listen to the full speech. Not just the soundbite you heard on the Daily show. I saw the Charlottesville videos, I was horrified, the president's statements were hurtful and stupid. But wow, the media really took it for a ride. Aside from that, not everything is about trump, look at project Veritas retracto YouTube vids [1] if you want to see how the game is played. Need more? Tim pool[2], zuby[3], or aba and preach [4] are all great too. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw1mdj6kavM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw1mdj6kavM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fHvjM_4F6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fHvjM_4F6w [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndb6pboUf7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndb6pboUf7U [4] https://www.youtube.com/user/iProjectAtlas/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/iProjectAtlas/videos

offby37years 6y ago

Bombholing. > The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed. > As George Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history. > The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers. > Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombhole-era-0cb https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombhole-era-0cb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAWggqZQmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAWggqZQmE

mistermann 6y ago
Here's a video where an ex-lawyer goes through a NYT article on election fraud and absolutely tears apart the misleading language they use to build the case that there was "no" election fraud: https://youtu.be/TmgMu5sefzA https://youtu.be/TmgMu5sefzA The beauty of this style of reporting is that the writer's skill with words allows them to plant specific ideas into reader's minds, but if anyone was to call them out on the carpet, they can completely truthfully say that nothing in the article is untrue, or explicitly asserts conclusions that any typical reader would naturally draw. The NYT is arguably one of the best news outlets going, so I'm not sure how one could hope that this situation will ever improve.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  Oh, it's an ex-lawyer? Not just some random guy sitting in his car? Thanks for including that tidbit, so I know this arbitrary YouTube video is credible. Or maybe, just maybe, you're doing the same thing you complain about, and cherry-picking your sources and relying on stories that support your existing biases. The answer is not to reason every sentence from first principles, like the HHG2G character who is pleasantly surprised every morning to discover that a pencil makes marks on paper. At every point, new information builds on previous information, and that usually works out reasonably well. There are exceptions, perhaps most notably in the case of the NYT, the post-9/11 Iraq war, but most of the time it works better than any other solution, and more importantly, any alternative would work less well.

hef19898 6y ago

To be honest, that's exactly the retraction that makes WaPo stand above the pack. They had a source, based the article on it (after verification). Then the primary source got available, certain details were different and WaPo changed the article. The core message, so, still stands. As a matter of fact, didn't the Georgia AG start an investigation into this affaire?

kodah 6y ago
The damage is done though, so I don't know that I see this as a thing to be happy about. I am curious if the source is known or unmasked at a later date what does accountability look like? If WaPo is the only one who can be held accountable and their only accountability is issuing a retraction, that seems like a gameable system.
- didibus 6y ago
  What's the alternative? Stop reporting news altogether? I feel as a news org, the best you can do is just report the data as it becomes available. Obviously later data could contradict prior data or clarify its interpretation. What matters though is the accuracy of the data reported, not in the data being a perfect predictor of the outcome, but that this is accurately the current known data, even if it later comes to be shown incomplete or misleading.
  - mhuffman 6y ago
    >What's the alternative? Stop reporting news altogether? Maybe don't report something that one person told you and that you can't otherwise confirm? That used to be the way that news was done, right?
    - shadowfox 6y ago
      > That used to be the way that news was done, right? That seems like a bit of a rose colored view of news in the past.
  - 6y ago

p1necone 6y ago

You can cherry pick single examples of inaccurate reporting from literally any media outlet. It would be far more useful to analyze which ones have a pattern of repeatedly publishing misinformation.

rediguanayum 6y ago

Readers should reward new publisher that take the time to do research from primary sources and properly vet them, rather than be the first to publish a scoop. There ought to be a system that tracks and rates a publishers by their accuracy and retraction rate (and lack there of when proven wrong).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]