3 ms·

What's really interesting about this story is just how many sites published it without verifying. They just heard it from another news site and copied it. It's

What's really interesting about this story is just how many sites published it without verifying. They just heard it from another news site and copied it. It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere?

andsoitis 4y ago
Extending that thought, I think a lot of readers here also assumed truth to the story, as evidenced by the the discussion the other day.
- esperent 4y ago
  Yeah but we are not journalists. Of course everyone should make an effort to verify the things they read, but journalists are held to a higher standard because verifying information like this and then making it available to us in an easily consumed format is literally their job. The journalists who published this failed at their jobs. We non-journalists who read and believed them just made a trivial and unimportant mistake.
ksec 4y ago
This has been the case for quite some time, and most people are still not aware of it, Not even on HN. And if the folks on HN dont know, that you could guess 99% of the mainstream reader doesn't know. The whole news publishing itself is now an echo chamber. Regardless of Social Media or not. They all wanted clicks and first headline stories. Once you understand how that industry works, how being correct has little to no business incentive, and how the PR industry works with submarine articles, which all together forms a positive ( or negative ) feedback loop. And if you are an expert or actual industry professionals in the field, You will then realise everything you read in newspaper are nothing more than gossip.
- ewzimm 4y ago
  Although obvious, I think it’s worth mentioning plenty of great examples of this even beyond the modern media. For example, “less than 1% of people become addicted to OxyContin” (Purdue Pharma) or “AIDS was created by the CIA” (Da Baby, also the KGB), or “Thomas Jefferson had a child with Sally Hemmings” (James Callender). You can likely find similar stories carved into Sumerian tablets somewhere. I do think it’s gotten worse in some areas, but the identification of the issue as a modern product of the Internet echo chamber also seems a bit misleading, as it might cause someone to misidentify the problem as a uniquely modern one that we could fix with changes to rules of publishing platforms alone. I’m not sure that the echo chambers in the modern media are worse than they were in Europe during the Hundred Years’ War, for example.
rchaud 4y ago
> It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere? Was there a list in the 2000s when these sites were just called 'blogs'? You don't need a list. You can simply look at the stories they post on their sidebar, judge the cadence of the writing and decide if it's for you or not.

andsoitis 4y ago

Extending that thought, I think a lot of readers here also assumed truth to the story, as evidenced by the the discussion the other day.

esperent 4y ago
Yeah but we are not journalists. Of course everyone should make an effort to verify the things they read, but journalists are held to a higher standard because verifying information like this and then making it available to us in an easily consumed format is literally their job. The journalists who published this failed at their jobs. We non-journalists who read and believed them just made a trivial and unimportant mistake.

ksec 4y ago

This has been the case for quite some time, and most people are still not aware of it, Not even on HN. And if the folks on HN dont know, that you could guess 99% of the mainstream reader doesn't know. The whole news publishing itself is now an echo chamber. Regardless of Social Media or not. They all wanted clicks and first headline stories. Once you understand how that industry works, how being correct has little to no business incentive, and how the PR industry works with submarine articles, which all together forms a positive ( or negative ) feedback loop. And if you are an expert or actual industry professionals in the field, You will then realise everything you read in newspaper are nothing more than gossip.

ewzimm 4y ago
Although obvious, I think it’s worth mentioning plenty of great examples of this even beyond the modern media. For example, “less than 1% of people become addicted to OxyContin” (Purdue Pharma) or “AIDS was created by the CIA” (Da Baby, also the KGB), or “Thomas Jefferson had a child with Sally Hemmings” (James Callender). You can likely find similar stories carved into Sumerian tablets somewhere. I do think it’s gotten worse in some areas, but the identification of the issue as a modern product of the Internet echo chamber also seems a bit misleading, as it might cause someone to misidentify the problem as a uniquely modern one that we could fix with changes to rules of publishing platforms alone. I’m not sure that the echo chambers in the modern media are worse than they were in Europe during the Hundred Years’ War, for example.

rchaud 4y ago

> It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere? Was there a list in the 2000s when these sites were just called 'blogs'? You don't need a list. You can simply look at the stories they post on their sidebar, judge the cadence of the writing and decide if it's for you or not.