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It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all b

It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, but their literal job is to check things out.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. As long as it fits into a convenient, simple, marketable narrative that isn’t unacceptable to the outlet the journalist works for, its not that hard. Bonus, sure, if its one that the outlet the journalist works for is already pushing (which is probably more important in most cases than the journalist’s own priors; in fact, that this is the case is pretty visible when journalists switch outlets.)
jolux 5y ago
If you have to rely on a news source’s veracity, I would not rely on the veracity of Vice and Business Insider, to put it mildly. And “New York Times bestselling author” is a marketing blurb, not a reputation for reporting the truth.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it. Maybe because most don’t click inside to know that the titles are invariably clickbait compared to the actual bulk of the article? I don’t know.
  - notJim 5y ago
    > I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it What? Business Insider has always been known as a low-value clickbait website AFAIK. Maybe people don't talk about it much because it's assumed?
RedHobbit 5y ago
That's the frustrating thing isn't it, "fake news" became popularized in the last few years and 'professional journalists' who can't even be bothered to fact check anything are really proving it right. Which is a shame since a free unbiased press is healthy for a society.
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  I'm with you until your last line. An "unbiased" press I think was a pretty unusual and brief development in the mid 20th century. I have no problem with a partisan press that wears its heart on its sleeve and states its objectives in the masthead: I'm perfectly capable of reading critically, and noting what's omitted as much as what's covered, and I'll know which alternative periodical to seek out for the other side of the story. The pretension to neutrality, to me, seems to result in less information overall.
  - lenkite 5y ago
    It's fine if they are completely biased. That's OK. It is not fine if they run "fact-checkers" and then de-claim anything contrary to what they propagandize as "misinformation" / "raycist" / "nazi". Then they use these fact-checkers to get people banned/doxxed. Even when their fact-checkers are utterly wrong, they will just update stating "needs more context".
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    I'm 100% with your premise. When I first got exposure to the world of blogs, I had to quickly learn the skill of rejecting the parts of a piece that are ill-supported while pulling insight from the well-considered[1] parts. This doesn't just extend to rejecting inferences, but to spot-checking facts: studies are not that hard to skim, and important topics will usually have multiple analyses out there that disagree with each other. But once I started doing that, I couldn't turn it off for regular media sources. Reading articles critically was a huge shock: there are a LOT of really low-quality articles at (eg) the NYT, cases where they get the most basic of facts wrong, and are trivially fact-checked by clicking through to the study they reference. However. I don't think the vast majority of people are capable of exiting "pour facts into my brain" mode when reading an article. Your position that we should bite the bullet and stop pretending to be neutral would bolster the epistemology of the few who already think critically, but do horrible damage to that of the masses. Maybe the NYT is the best society can do for honest, mass-market journalism. If that's the case, it seems dangerous to give up what little commitment to rigor and honesty they have. I certainly don't want to live in a world where even more people get their news from Breitbart equivalents. I don't think it's a coincidence that the only successful examples of opinionated, high-quality journalism are denser and less accessible, from The Economist all the way up to specific blogs. Perhaps because simplified narratives are required to hold the attention of John Q Public, and every simplification is an opportunity for bias. [1] My favorite example of this was when I followed a chain of links and read an article that I disagreed with much about, but retrieved a very novel insight about how to better achieve social justice, a cause which is important to me. As I got deeper into the article, I started having more and more strong disagreements until at a certain pt I realized the guy was a (self-identified) Christian reactionary monarchist, ie a paleo-paleo-conservative. The second thing I learned that day was the meta-lesson that even someone whose values are incredibly alien to me can teach me something tangential to his values.
jimt1234 5y ago
> It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as they know it will get clicks. FTFY ;)
esyir 5y ago
I'm left here wondering which is true: has journalism as a field regressed, with loss of its original principles, or has it never been good to begin with. The professional journalists feel much less like the sources of information that they should be, and more like definers of "truth".
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  A lot of ills are laid at social media's door, but I think this is a warranted one. Journalists were/are the beating heart of Twitter's userbase, giving it outsize influence through years of a minuscule userbase (eg there was a non-trivial period where there were more active in-stream users of Google+ than Twitter). There have always been media personalities, but Twitter has made that the default mode of the industry, and removed editorial safeguards from a dramatic amount of the journalistic conversation. Less interestingly but probably more saliently, the economics destruction that the internet wrought on journalism has just destroyed the economic buffer that allowed them to build a culture of standards and principles (such as it was). People have always liked being affirmed over being informed, and the journalism market now forces journalists to deliver that.
wutbrodo 5y ago
> I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, It's really not that difficult a skill to build though. The trick is not to get perfect at detecting sarcasm or trolls but to realize that if you're talking about an individual or a minuscule group of people online (like the 57 members of the "bounty hunter ring"), it's almost never worth paying attention to regardless of its trolling status. Best-case they're trolling, worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit. Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world. I'm serious, it's really, really easy not to get taken in by bias-confirming dumb things. In fact, there's a force running counter to your framing, in which the average person has _less_ excuse to be taken in by trolls. Journalists have an economic incentive to jump on a story, while an individual is free to avoid having an opinion until there's enough usable information to shift your priors.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  > Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world. Careful though, QAnon was once an infinitesimally small amount of nutty people, and now they have at least two[1], likely more, sitting US Congressional representatives, with 36 running next year[2]. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/11/04/congress-will-get-its-second-qanon-supporter-as-boebert-wins-colorado-house-seat/?sh=62b11c96568f https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/11/04/congres... 2: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-36-qanon-supporters-running-congress-in-the-2022-midterms-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-36-qanon-supporters-runn...
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    Sure, I'm not suggesting there's 0% signal. I'm suggesting that the SNR of "someone said something crazy" is so close to zero as to be useless. Hell, crying wolf about it isnt just useless, it's counterproductive.
- shephardjhon 5y ago
  "worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit" That is NOT the worst case. If they were serious in the bounty case it could result in punishment for multiple people and reward of $10000 for the "trolls". In the trans case, it could result in child abuse or animal abuse. And this would be true if even ONE of those posts were serious. Not to mention it could give actual crazy people some horrible ideas. In light of today's date,remember that Sudan offered up Osama Bin Ladin to the US in the 90s before shipping him off to Afghanistan. Imagine if the US didn't dismiss the offer as "well you are just offering us one crazy guy and we don't care". 3000+ people in NYC and millions in the Middle East and South East Asia would be safer.
mzs 5y ago
FWIW I didn't see any of the journalists I follow amplify this, nor did I see any articles in credible outlets fall for this.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. As long as it fits into a convenient, simple, marketable narrative that isn’t unacceptable to the outlet the journalist works for, its not that hard. Bonus, sure, if its one that the outlet the journalist works for is already pushing (which is probably more important in most cases than the journalist’s own priors; in fact, that this is the case is pretty visible when journalists switch outlets.)

jolux 5y ago

If you have to rely on a news source’s veracity, I would not rely on the veracity of Vice and Business Insider, to put it mildly. And “New York Times bestselling author” is a marketing blurb, not a reputation for reporting the truth.

jimbob45 5y ago
I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it. Maybe because most don’t click inside to know that the titles are invariably clickbait compared to the actual bulk of the article? I don’t know.
- notJim 5y ago
  > I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it What? Business Insider has always been known as a low-value clickbait website AFAIK. Maybe people don't talk about it much because it's assumed?

RedHobbit 5y ago

That's the frustrating thing isn't it, "fake news" became popularized in the last few years and 'professional journalists' who can't even be bothered to fact check anything are really proving it right. Which is a shame since a free unbiased press is healthy for a society.

lr4444lr 5y ago
I'm with you until your last line. An "unbiased" press I think was a pretty unusual and brief development in the mid 20th century. I have no problem with a partisan press that wears its heart on its sleeve and states its objectives in the masthead: I'm perfectly capable of reading critically, and noting what's omitted as much as what's covered, and I'll know which alternative periodical to seek out for the other side of the story. The pretension to neutrality, to me, seems to result in less information overall.
- lenkite 5y ago
  It's fine if they are completely biased. That's OK. It is not fine if they run "fact-checkers" and then de-claim anything contrary to what they propagandize as "misinformation" / "raycist" / "nazi". Then they use these fact-checkers to get people banned/doxxed. Even when their fact-checkers are utterly wrong, they will just update stating "needs more context".
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  I'm 100% with your premise. When I first got exposure to the world of blogs, I had to quickly learn the skill of rejecting the parts of a piece that are ill-supported while pulling insight from the well-considered[1] parts. This doesn't just extend to rejecting inferences, but to spot-checking facts: studies are not that hard to skim, and important topics will usually have multiple analyses out there that disagree with each other. But once I started doing that, I couldn't turn it off for regular media sources. Reading articles critically was a huge shock: there are a LOT of really low-quality articles at (eg) the NYT, cases where they get the most basic of facts wrong, and are trivially fact-checked by clicking through to the study they reference. However. I don't think the vast majority of people are capable of exiting "pour facts into my brain" mode when reading an article. Your position that we should bite the bullet and stop pretending to be neutral would bolster the epistemology of the few who already think critically, but do horrible damage to that of the masses. Maybe the NYT is the best society can do for honest, mass-market journalism. If that's the case, it seems dangerous to give up what little commitment to rigor and honesty they have. I certainly don't want to live in a world where even more people get their news from Breitbart equivalents. I don't think it's a coincidence that the only successful examples of opinionated, high-quality journalism are denser and less accessible, from The Economist all the way up to specific blogs. Perhaps because simplified narratives are required to hold the attention of John Q Public, and every simplification is an opportunity for bias. [1] My favorite example of this was when I followed a chain of links and read an article that I disagreed with much about, but retrieved a very novel insight about how to better achieve social justice, a cause which is important to me. As I got deeper into the article, I started having more and more strong disagreements until at a certain pt I realized the guy was a (self-identified) Christian reactionary monarchist, ie a paleo-paleo-conservative. The second thing I learned that day was the meta-lesson that even someone whose values are incredibly alien to me can teach me something tangential to his values.

jimt1234 5y ago

> It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors. It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as they know it will get clicks. FTFY ;)

esyir 5y ago

I'm left here wondering which is true: has journalism as a field regressed, with loss of its original principles, or has it never been good to begin with. The professional journalists feel much less like the sources of information that they should be, and more like definers of "truth".

wutbrodo 5y ago
A lot of ills are laid at social media's door, but I think this is a warranted one. Journalists were/are the beating heart of Twitter's userbase, giving it outsize influence through years of a minuscule userbase (eg there was a non-trivial period where there were more active in-stream users of Google+ than Twitter). There have always been media personalities, but Twitter has made that the default mode of the industry, and removed editorial safeguards from a dramatic amount of the journalistic conversation. Less interestingly but probably more saliently, the economics destruction that the internet wrought on journalism has just destroyed the economic buffer that allowed them to build a culture of standards and principles (such as it was). People have always liked being affirmed over being informed, and the journalism market now forces journalists to deliver that.

wutbrodo 5y ago

> I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, It's really not that difficult a skill to build though. The trick is not to get perfect at detecting sarcasm or trolls but to realize that if you're talking about an individual or a minuscule group of people online (like the 57 members of the "bounty hunter ring"), it's almost never worth paying attention to regardless of its trolling status. Best-case they're trolling, worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit. Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world. I'm serious, it's really, really easy not to get taken in by bias-confirming dumb things. In fact, there's a force running counter to your framing, in which the average person has _less_ excuse to be taken in by trolls. Journalists have an economic incentive to jump on a story, while an individual is free to avoid having an opinion until there's enough usable information to shift your priors.

ryandrake 5y ago
> Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world. Careful though, QAnon was once an infinitesimally small amount of nutty people, and now they have at least two[1], likely more, sitting US Congressional representatives, with 36 running next year[2]. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/11/04/congress-will-get-its-second-qanon-supporter-as-boebert-wins-colorado-house-seat/?sh=62b11c96568f https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/11/04/congres... 2: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-36-qanon-supporters-running-congress-in-the-2022-midterms-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-36-qanon-supporters-runn...
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  Sure, I'm not suggesting there's 0% signal. I'm suggesting that the SNR of "someone said something crazy" is so close to zero as to be useless. Hell, crying wolf about it isnt just useless, it's counterproductive.
shephardjhon 5y ago
"worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit" That is NOT the worst case. If they were serious in the bounty case it could result in punishment for multiple people and reward of $10000 for the "trolls". In the trans case, it could result in child abuse or animal abuse. And this would be true if even ONE of those posts were serious. Not to mention it could give actual crazy people some horrible ideas. In light of today's date,remember that Sudan offered up Osama Bin Ladin to the US in the 90s before shipping him off to Afghanistan. Imagine if the US didn't dismiss the offer as "well you are just offering us one crazy guy and we don't care". 3000+ people in NYC and millions in the Middle East and South East Asia would be safer.

mzs 5y ago

FWIW I didn't see any of the journalists I follow amplify this, nor did I see any articles in credible outlets fall for this.