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This idea that's going around that all sources need to be cited is ridiculous. I is mostly promoted by folks who desire to shut down free media. A good journali

This idea that's going around that all sources need to be cited is ridiculous. I is mostly promoted by folks who desire to shut down free media. A good journalist works hard to ensure their source is reliable. If journalists couldn't use anonymous sources all that would be left is govt appointed propagandists. Also, knowing who a source is wouldn't help you evaluate the statement because it would be someone you don't know anyway.

Epiphany21 5y ago
>This idea that's going around that all sources need to be cited is ridiculous. No it isn't. People lie and cheat all the time for all kinds of reasons. If there's no source cited it's effectively an opinion piece. Letting someone write articles from home all day long with the option to use an anonymous source is working out about as well as anyone with half a brain would expect. Journalists are not some pure beacons of morality and honesty and they shouldn't be trusted at all. They're strangers on the internet.
waffleiron 5y ago
So how do we know the anonymous source (such as in this case) isn't a government appointed propagandist?
- nkrisc 5y ago
  You don’t. So you decide whether to believe it and always keep in your mind the possibility the other version of what you believe is true.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Even if you know the source it's pretty difficult to rule out that the information isn't ultimately coming from a propaganda dump.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    nobody does this. they should, but they don't. nobody keeps the wavefunction of their views on a topic uncollapsed. this takes incredible mental fortitude and immunity to emotional resonance, which increasingly few people have.
    - ForHackernews 5y ago
      Oh c'mon, this is really overbaked phrasing ('wavefunction...uncollapsed' lol). Every single person in the world knows how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources: The weatherman says it won't rain, but the sky looks dark and I'm going to carry an umbrella anyway.
      - adamrezich 5y ago
        did you try to see what I was getting at before dismissing my statement? when's the last time you successfully maintained something resembling internal undecided neutrality on a given topic, instead of resolving your views into a concrete position? it seems to be human nature to know that [something] is [true/false/some other quality], instead of maintaining an ambiguous perspective—even for complex issues, we seem to want to boil them down into something like a polarizing binary choice of belief—rather than allowing ourselves to remain uncertain, as soon as possible—to avoid the mental burden of not having come to a decision yet. always-online smartphones in everyone's pockets and social media have made the world increasingly polarizing. fence-sitters are not tolerated: pick a side, you're either with me, or against me, and everything I stand for! which is to say, you're emotionally compelled to choose one end of the binary spectrum over the other—when the reality of the situation might not even be a binary choice to begin with! if human beings were better at remaining "undecided until further evidence" on issues, and if it was more societally-permitted, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. (is this phrasing less "overbaked"? I still don't see what's wrong with the wavefunction collapse analogy.) > Every single person in the world knows how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources: The weatherman says it won't rain [...] I completely and wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. everyone knows that weather prediction is uncertain, and takes such predictions with a grain of salt accordingly. this is not the case for news media. historically it has been mostly trusted implicitly, and this is largely still the case, but now there's people who don't trust any news media at all (or perhaps only their preferred, alternative sources). regardless, "every single person in the world" does NOT "know how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources" in the smartphone/social media age. it is delusional to believe otherwise.
- threeseed 5y ago
  You trust the journalist. It's not a perfect system obviously but yet to see an alternative.
  - Mirioron 5y ago
    But over the last decade journalists, as a group, have taught me not to trust them.
  - babelfish 5y ago
    Okay. I do not trust this journalist.
  - mastazi 5y ago
    It is currently a broken system. I don't think there has ever been a time in which trust in news sources has been lower that it is right now, and this is having all sorts of negative impacts in society. One of the problems is that news outlets don't have the right incentives; back in the time of printed paper you would spend your dollar on what you would consider a "trusted" news source, nowadays much of "news" is clickbait. The majority of what I see in online news aggregators today, would have been considered unacceptably low quality back when I was still in the field of journalism (2005-ish)
  - Leary 5y ago
    What incentive does a journalist have? Do they have an incentive to publish a story that is sensational when the story could be either true or false?
    - hermitdev 5y ago
      > Do they have an incentive to publish a story that is sensational when the story could be either true or false? It's obvious from US political coverage, especially since the 2016 election, that the answer to this is: Yes, journalists have incentives to publish sensationalist stories fortified with "anonymous sources" that may be falsified and have little to do with reality for the sake of ratings, clicks and the ilk, as well as pushing either their own or their employers' political agenda(s). I'll say this clearly: this is true of all media, left, right & everything else. The media has repeatedly demonstrated that they are just as corrupt as the politicians that they are supposedly holding accountable. The difference is: no journalists have gone to jail for their corruption. And no, I'm not calling for an end to a free press. We, their audience, need to hold them accountable by depriving them of the funds to keep their corruption active. We should demand our journalists hold the same level of integrity we wish of our politicians.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  because it lines up with what I have already determined to be the truth, therefore it too must be the truth. who needs trust or verification when you have emotional resonance?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  You trust the vetting rep of the newspaper. NYT in this case which seems to have one of the best processes.
  - rectang 5y ago
    You're probably right that the Times has "one of the best processes". However, the Times also employed Judith Miller, which goes to show how little such processes are worth.
    - thetallstick 5y ago
      For those who don't get the Judith Miller reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Prelude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr... "In the buildup to the 2003 war, the New York Times published a number of stories claiming to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. One story in particular, written by Judith Miller, helped persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD: in September 2002 she wrote about an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes which the NYT said were to be used to develop nuclear material."
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
There has been a lot of that on this site. Implicitly sowing distrust in free press (such as in this instance) or flat out shitting on the free press with insults.
mastazi 5y ago
The problem is that due to the gigantic shift that happened in news/journalism in the last 20 years, due to the introduction of new technology, the consequent disruption of traditional markets and all the changes that came from that, it is now hard for an average person to determine whether what they are reading is coming from a trusted source. Even within well known news outlets, blunders and retractions are relatively common, while 20/30 years ago they would have been the exception. I share your sentiment that anonymous sources are vital but it seems we don't have a very good way to convince people to trust what they say, unfortunately. Before going into tech about 12 years ago, I used to be a young journalist, I could see the start of that implosion from the inside. Nowadays I practice extreme "news minimalism" because I consider 95% of what's out there either unreliable or "noise". It's sad.
- eternalban 5y ago
  > due to the introduction of new technology I disagree that this is merely a technological issue. What passes for journalism in this country took a nosedive in 90s, after a handful of corporate conglomerates took over all broadcast news. I am not sure how old you are, but I remember news in 80s. CNN owned by Ted Turner, and the current manifestation are night and day. p.s. And it wasn't just CNN. ABC's Nightline, for example, was also solid and that only happened because of Turner's CNN. And of course, MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour was outstanding.
  - mastazi 5y ago
    In the 90's I was probably reading mostly Italian newspapers since I was living there (even though I had an internet connection, I didn't really use it for getting the latest news, I was mostly active in forums related to my hobbies etc.). It wasn't until the early aughts that I started reading a lot of news in English. And I went English-only even later than that, around 2009 when I left Italy. So I haven't had a chance to experience what you are describing.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  > Even within well known news outlets, blunders and retractions are relatively common Are they really though? NYT for example must write thousands of articles a year and they're human. What's the alternative?
stefan_ 5y ago
Oh my sweet summer child. The anonymous intelligence officials are the govt appointed propagandists! NYT is full of them parroting the government line. None of these people on a cushy job are risking their freedom leaking anything that they weren't literally tasked with leaking to their media contacts; the ones that did are in prison.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Exactly! We only need sources cited for things we don't like.
ekianjo 5y ago
Intelligence officials is just a different word for propaganda
TeeMassive 5y ago
Nothing in what you said backs the claim that anonymous sources from the government can be reasonably trusted in the click-bait post Iraq War era. You simply made accusations and statements about "good journalists".
erklik 5y ago
I think the problem is that people don't "know" the journalists largely anymore. I don't know how people trusted these journalists in the past, perhaps it was by following their work throughout years and seeing repeated truths. However, largely no-one is following a journalist today. How can I trust some random person? There are news sources, with seemingly qualified journalists that genuinely just "make up" news. If journalists are able to do that, who knows this wasn't the same? If it's a valid, public source, well, even if you don't know the source, if someone is willing to put their name to the news, maybe it's more valid.
- bakuninsbart 5y ago
  No, the large difference is the incredible amount of information we have available today. People back in the 90s or before had to rely on journalists to get any information. You simply did not get any information outside of your country bubble unless you actively travelled the world. Today this deception of journalists being generally competent is just not viable anymore, since people have way too many sources to fact check, and way too many bubbled to blop in.
pphysch 5y ago
There are plenty of good, honest journalists out there. However, journalists don't decide what their assignments are, much less what gets published. Managing/selecting a few dozen foreign editors at mainstream outlets, conveniently co-located around DC/NYC, is absolutely within the capabilities of a powerful NatSec apparatus.
afiori 5y ago
The idea is not really that sources must be public, it is rather a response to the very common retractions of the form "turns out our sources lied to us and the whole story was based on one source, also in the future you won't have a way to know whether we will use this source again."

Epiphany21 5y ago

>This idea that's going around that all sources need to be cited is ridiculous. No it isn't. People lie and cheat all the time for all kinds of reasons. If there's no source cited it's effectively an opinion piece. Letting someone write articles from home all day long with the option to use an anonymous source is working out about as well as anyone with half a brain would expect. Journalists are not some pure beacons of morality and honesty and they shouldn't be trusted at all. They're strangers on the internet.

waffleiron 5y ago

So how do we know the anonymous source (such as in this case) isn't a government appointed propagandist?

nkrisc 5y ago
You don’t. So you decide whether to believe it and always keep in your mind the possibility the other version of what you believe is true.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Even if you know the source it's pretty difficult to rule out that the information isn't ultimately coming from a propaganda dump.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  nobody does this. they should, but they don't. nobody keeps the wavefunction of their views on a topic uncollapsed. this takes incredible mental fortitude and immunity to emotional resonance, which increasingly few people have.
  - ForHackernews 5y ago
    Oh c'mon, this is really overbaked phrasing ('wavefunction...uncollapsed' lol). Every single person in the world knows how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources: The weatherman says it won't rain, but the sky looks dark and I'm going to carry an umbrella anyway.
    - adamrezich 5y ago
      did you try to see what I was getting at before dismissing my statement? when's the last time you successfully maintained something resembling internal undecided neutrality on a given topic, instead of resolving your views into a concrete position? it seems to be human nature to know that [something] is [true/false/some other quality], instead of maintaining an ambiguous perspective—even for complex issues, we seem to want to boil them down into something like a polarizing binary choice of belief—rather than allowing ourselves to remain uncertain, as soon as possible—to avoid the mental burden of not having come to a decision yet. always-online smartphones in everyone's pockets and social media have made the world increasingly polarizing. fence-sitters are not tolerated: pick a side, you're either with me, or against me, and everything I stand for! which is to say, you're emotionally compelled to choose one end of the binary spectrum over the other—when the reality of the situation might not even be a binary choice to begin with! if human beings were better at remaining "undecided until further evidence" on issues, and if it was more societally-permitted, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. (is this phrasing less "overbaked"? I still don't see what's wrong with the wavefunction collapse analogy.) > Every single person in the world knows how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources: The weatherman says it won't rain [...] I completely and wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. everyone knows that weather prediction is uncertain, and takes such predictions with a grain of salt accordingly. this is not the case for news media. historically it has been mostly trusted implicitly, and this is largely still the case, but now there's people who don't trust any news media at all (or perhaps only their preferred, alternative sources). regardless, "every single person in the world" does NOT "know how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources" in the smartphone/social media age. it is delusional to believe otherwise.
threeseed 5y ago
You trust the journalist. It's not a perfect system obviously but yet to see an alternative.
- Mirioron 5y ago
  But over the last decade journalists, as a group, have taught me not to trust them.
- babelfish 5y ago
  Okay. I do not trust this journalist.
- mastazi 5y ago
  It is currently a broken system. I don't think there has ever been a time in which trust in news sources has been lower that it is right now, and this is having all sorts of negative impacts in society. One of the problems is that news outlets don't have the right incentives; back in the time of printed paper you would spend your dollar on what you would consider a "trusted" news source, nowadays much of "news" is clickbait. The majority of what I see in online news aggregators today, would have been considered unacceptably low quality back when I was still in the field of journalism (2005-ish)
- Leary 5y ago
  What incentive does a journalist have? Do they have an incentive to publish a story that is sensational when the story could be either true or false?
  - hermitdev 5y ago
    > Do they have an incentive to publish a story that is sensational when the story could be either true or false? It's obvious from US political coverage, especially since the 2016 election, that the answer to this is: Yes, journalists have incentives to publish sensationalist stories fortified with "anonymous sources" that may be falsified and have little to do with reality for the sake of ratings, clicks and the ilk, as well as pushing either their own or their employers' political agenda(s). I'll say this clearly: this is true of all media, left, right & everything else. The media has repeatedly demonstrated that they are just as corrupt as the politicians that they are supposedly holding accountable. The difference is: no journalists have gone to jail for their corruption. And no, I'm not calling for an end to a free press. We, their audience, need to hold them accountable by depriving them of the funds to keep their corruption active. We should demand our journalists hold the same level of integrity we wish of our politicians.
adamrezich 5y ago
because it lines up with what I have already determined to be the truth, therefore it too must be the truth. who needs trust or verification when you have emotional resonance?
ipaddr 5y ago
You trust the vetting rep of the newspaper. NYT in this case which seems to have one of the best processes.
- rectang 5y ago
  You're probably right that the Times has "one of the best processes". However, the Times also employed Judith Miller, which goes to show how little such processes are worth.
  - thetallstick 5y ago
    For those who don't get the Judith Miller reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Prelude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr... "In the buildup to the 2003 war, the New York Times published a number of stories claiming to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. One story in particular, written by Judith Miller, helped persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD: in September 2002 she wrote about an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes which the NYT said were to be used to develop nuclear material."

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

There has been a lot of that on this site. Implicitly sowing distrust in free press (such as in this instance) or flat out shitting on the free press with insults.

mastazi 5y ago

The problem is that due to the gigantic shift that happened in news/journalism in the last 20 years, due to the introduction of new technology, the consequent disruption of traditional markets and all the changes that came from that, it is now hard for an average person to determine whether what they are reading is coming from a trusted source. Even within well known news outlets, blunders and retractions are relatively common, while 20/30 years ago they would have been the exception. I share your sentiment that anonymous sources are vital but it seems we don't have a very good way to convince people to trust what they say, unfortunately. Before going into tech about 12 years ago, I used to be a young journalist, I could see the start of that implosion from the inside. Nowadays I practice extreme "news minimalism" because I consider 95% of what's out there either unreliable or "noise". It's sad.

eternalban 5y ago
> due to the introduction of new technology I disagree that this is merely a technological issue. What passes for journalism in this country took a nosedive in 90s, after a handful of corporate conglomerates took over all broadcast news. I am not sure how old you are, but I remember news in 80s. CNN owned by Ted Turner, and the current manifestation are night and day. p.s. And it wasn't just CNN. ABC's Nightline, for example, was also solid and that only happened because of Turner's CNN. And of course, MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour was outstanding.
- mastazi 5y ago
  In the 90's I was probably reading mostly Italian newspapers since I was living there (even though I had an internet connection, I didn't really use it for getting the latest news, I was mostly active in forums related to my hobbies etc.). It wasn't until the early aughts that I started reading a lot of news in English. And I went English-only even later than that, around 2009 when I left Italy. So I haven't had a chance to experience what you are describing.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
> Even within well known news outlets, blunders and retractions are relatively common Are they really though? NYT for example must write thousands of articles a year and they're human. What's the alternative?

stefan_ 5y ago

Oh my sweet summer child. The anonymous intelligence officials are the govt appointed propagandists! NYT is full of them parroting the government line. None of these people on a cushy job are risking their freedom leaking anything that they weren't literally tasked with leaking to their media contacts; the ones that did are in prison.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Exactly! We only need sources cited for things we don't like.

ekianjo 5y ago

Intelligence officials is just a different word for propaganda

TeeMassive 5y ago

Nothing in what you said backs the claim that anonymous sources from the government can be reasonably trusted in the click-bait post Iraq War era. You simply made accusations and statements about "good journalists".

erklik 5y ago

I think the problem is that people don't "know" the journalists largely anymore. I don't know how people trusted these journalists in the past, perhaps it was by following their work throughout years and seeing repeated truths. However, largely no-one is following a journalist today. How can I trust some random person? There are news sources, with seemingly qualified journalists that genuinely just "make up" news. If journalists are able to do that, who knows this wasn't the same? If it's a valid, public source, well, even if you don't know the source, if someone is willing to put their name to the news, maybe it's more valid.

bakuninsbart 5y ago
No, the large difference is the incredible amount of information we have available today. People back in the 90s or before had to rely on journalists to get any information. You simply did not get any information outside of your country bubble unless you actively travelled the world. Today this deception of journalists being generally competent is just not viable anymore, since people have way too many sources to fact check, and way too many bubbled to blop in.

pphysch 5y ago

There are plenty of good, honest journalists out there. However, journalists don't decide what their assignments are, much less what gets published. Managing/selecting a few dozen foreign editors at mainstream outlets, conveniently co-located around DC/NYC, is absolutely within the capabilities of a powerful NatSec apparatus.

afiori 5y ago

The idea is not really that sources must be public, it is rather a response to the very common retractions of the form "turns out our sources lied to us and the whole story was based on one source, also in the future you won't have a way to know whether we will use this source again."