7 ms·

They both corrected the articles after 3 hours. Gotta give credit where credit is due. But it shouldn't scare you that peoples lies are taken at face value. We

They both corrected the articles after 3 hours. Gotta give credit where credit is due. But it shouldn't scare you that peoples lies are taken at face value. We see it everyday. Hell some politicians are lying right your face.

Alupis 4y ago
Journalists are supposed to have more credibility than your friend's gossip though... While retracting and/or correcting the articles is a step towards journalistic integrity, it should be very troubling these articles were published in the first place. After all, how many people bother to go back and review past articles just on the off chance some piece of information was corrected? None...
- yeuxardents 4y ago
  Honestly it troubles me that anyone believes 'journalists' from any of the major corporations have _any_ credibility, even going back to the 1990s with censorship of stories have been rife within the corporate 'journalism' industry. There are very few journalists that deserve real credibility.
  - Alupis 4y ago
    Journalists should not be afforded legal protections for publishing un-verified, demonstrably false information. We need a system where it's dangerous to not thoroughly vet your story before throwing it over the fence. Currently, they just say "oops" and move on like it never happened... but the damages caused to the public and it's discourse are permanent. The past decade has shown us that much at a minimum. Years from now folks will still howl about Musk marching loyal twitter employees out the front door with boxes full of their belongings... despite it being completely untrue. Heck, there are still folks that feverishly assert the "OK" sign is racist...
    - nradov 4y ago
      Journalists don't have any special protection under US federal law for publishing false information. Anyone can sue them for libel. Although it's difficult for plaintiffs to win such cases, regardless of whether the defendant is a journalist or anyone else.
      - Alupis 4y ago
        It does not need to be libel to be permanently damaging to the public. The "OK" sign as a symbol of "white power" is a great example - nobody's reputation was tarnished directly by the reporting... but the entire story was made up and never true. Yet, there's folks today that insist it truly is a symbol of "white power". Libel is also notoriously difficult to establish grounds for, and be successful with a lawsuit. Intent is difficult to prove - yet I would assert a journalist that does not thoroughly vet their story before publishing has a malicious intent, even if it was indirect.
        nemothekid 4y ago
        >The "OK" sign as a symbol of "white power" is a great example - nobody's reputation was tarnished directly by the reporting... but the entire story was made up and never true. Yet, there's folks today that insist it truly is a symbol of "white power". This is strange - the OK symbol was definitely co-opted by white nationalists; it started as a "media troll", then people started to do it non-ironically. It served it's purpose and to say it was "never true" is at the very least controversial. I had personally seen it spread on /pol/ months before it got any mainstream coverage. While I believe the story may have been overblown, I think it stands it would be very difficult to sue a journalist that this was libel or even untrue. At the very least the memes had to have started from somewhere and that posing with the ok symbol wasn't a particularly popular thing to do until after the memes were created.
        Alupis 4y ago
        It started on 4Chan as a deliberate "watch us make the media go nuts" joke... and it worked. Today, here you are asserting it actually has an alternate, nefarious meaning. It doesn't, and never did. It became a meme because of how ridiculous of an idea it was. I think you're proving my point. Retractions and corrections do not work. Published stories have enormous weight, yet modern journalists don't seem to be aware of, or do not care about, the potential harm they can do. It's just a race to publish first - truth be damned.
  - aeternum 4y ago
    It has been an issue since the invention of the printing press. Benjamin Franklin himself published fake news about Indian tribes scalping the settlers in order to convince the colonists to take action against them. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-37-02-0132 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-37-02-01...
    - User23 4y ago
      He wrote in his Autobiography that propaganda was the primary reason to own a newspaper.
- drekipus 4y ago
  I think half the population has already long-ago lost trust in media and journalists, and now the other half is catching up.
  - trendroid 4y ago
    For some reason many of these people that lose trust in traditional media immediately start trusting "independent media" on YouTube that happens to agrees with their views or ways of seeing the world.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Yes, because the education system failed them and taught them to blindly trust in the media and so when they lose that they go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Some of them will come around and find some middle ground, and others will be be content in spewing misinformation as long as it makes them feel better.
  - kdkdjdsj 4y ago
    Idk, show of hands: who thinks Brian Sicknick was killed with a fire extinguisher? Who thinks there is a tape of Donald Trump pissing on a prostitute, or that he was caught communicating with Alfa Bank, or
  - User23 4y ago
    I trust broadly corroborated video evidence. For example I know that the “mostly peaceful protests” were anything but from watching videos filmed by diverse sources. The Internet and ubiquitous cameras really have revolutionized our ability to see what’s actually going on.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Journalists are supposed to have more credibility than your friend's gossip though For what is essentially a pop culture scoop, three hours seems like a fine trade-off between accuracy and timeliness.
- taylodl 4y ago
  Are people paying for credibility? Hate to break the news to you (ha!) but the news you’re going to see the most is the news that sells the best. It’s all about those Benjamins. You can’t expect good things from a society that has compromised all its ideals and prostrates itself for money. Certainly not journalistic integrity - unless it sells. Which it doesn’t.
thrown_22 4y ago
People still think that police were murdered by the protesters on Jan 6 two years after being told that every police officer who died on that day died from causes that had nothing to do with the protestors and everything to do with going up a flight of stairs under the influence of donuts. It's not good enough to print a retraction which no one sees and pretend it's solved the problem of spreading lies.
bhaney 4y ago
> They both corrected the articles after 3 hours Because they got caught. How long would those articles have remained up if nobody else had done the journalists' investigation jobs for them and then reported the incorrect story? Would the journalists who "broke" the story ever have bothered to verify it themselves? Would they have issued a correction at all if it didn't quickly become public knowledge that the story was fake?
jwond 4y ago
I don’t think they are really due any credit for correcting misinformation that they shouldn’t have published in the first place. I understand news outlets are all in a rush to be among the first to cover these trending stories, but in my opinion that is not a valid excuse for failing to verify basic facts prior to publication.
cocoricamo 4y ago
Yeah, it's scary. It was obvious the guys were trolling. Last names "Ligma" and "Johnson" very over the top statement holding a Michelle Obama book. The journalists were either too focused on getting the scoop and fooled themselves into believing what is clearly a ruse or they knew and went along with it because it generated views/clicks.

Alupis 4y ago

Journalists are supposed to have more credibility than your friend's gossip though... While retracting and/or correcting the articles is a step towards journalistic integrity, it should be very troubling these articles were published in the first place. After all, how many people bother to go back and review past articles just on the off chance some piece of information was corrected? None...

yeuxardents 4y ago
Honestly it troubles me that anyone believes 'journalists' from any of the major corporations have _any_ credibility, even going back to the 1990s with censorship of stories have been rife within the corporate 'journalism' industry. There are very few journalists that deserve real credibility.
- Alupis 4y ago
  Journalists should not be afforded legal protections for publishing un-verified, demonstrably false information. We need a system where it's dangerous to not thoroughly vet your story before throwing it over the fence. Currently, they just say "oops" and move on like it never happened... but the damages caused to the public and it's discourse are permanent. The past decade has shown us that much at a minimum. Years from now folks will still howl about Musk marching loyal twitter employees out the front door with boxes full of their belongings... despite it being completely untrue. Heck, there are still folks that feverishly assert the "OK" sign is racist...
  - nradov 4y ago
    Journalists don't have any special protection under US federal law for publishing false information. Anyone can sue them for libel. Although it's difficult for plaintiffs to win such cases, regardless of whether the defendant is a journalist or anyone else.
    - Alupis 4y ago
      It does not need to be libel to be permanently damaging to the public. The "OK" sign as a symbol of "white power" is a great example - nobody's reputation was tarnished directly by the reporting... but the entire story was made up and never true. Yet, there's folks today that insist it truly is a symbol of "white power". Libel is also notoriously difficult to establish grounds for, and be successful with a lawsuit. Intent is difficult to prove - yet I would assert a journalist that does not thoroughly vet their story before publishing has a malicious intent, even if it was indirect.
      - nemothekid 4y ago
        >The "OK" sign as a symbol of "white power" is a great example - nobody's reputation was tarnished directly by the reporting... but the entire story was made up and never true. Yet, there's folks today that insist it truly is a symbol of "white power". This is strange - the OK symbol was definitely co-opted by white nationalists; it started as a "media troll", then people started to do it non-ironically. It served it's purpose and to say it was "never true" is at the very least controversial. I had personally seen it spread on /pol/ months before it got any mainstream coverage. While I believe the story may have been overblown, I think it stands it would be very difficult to sue a journalist that this was libel or even untrue. At the very least the memes had to have started from somewhere and that posing with the ok symbol wasn't a particularly popular thing to do until after the memes were created.
        Alupis 4y ago
        It started on 4Chan as a deliberate "watch us make the media go nuts" joke... and it worked. Today, here you are asserting it actually has an alternate, nefarious meaning. It doesn't, and never did. It became a meme because of how ridiculous of an idea it was. I think you're proving my point. Retractions and corrections do not work. Published stories have enormous weight, yet modern journalists don't seem to be aware of, or do not care about, the potential harm they can do. It's just a race to publish first - truth be damned.
- aeternum 4y ago
  It has been an issue since the invention of the printing press. Benjamin Franklin himself published fake news about Indian tribes scalping the settlers in order to convince the colonists to take action against them. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-37-02-0132 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-37-02-01...
  - User23 4y ago
    He wrote in his Autobiography that propaganda was the primary reason to own a newspaper.
drekipus 4y ago
I think half the population has already long-ago lost trust in media and journalists, and now the other half is catching up.
- trendroid 4y ago
  For some reason many of these people that lose trust in traditional media immediately start trusting "independent media" on YouTube that happens to agrees with their views or ways of seeing the world.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Yes, because the education system failed them and taught them to blindly trust in the media and so when they lose that they go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Some of them will come around and find some middle ground, and others will be be content in spewing misinformation as long as it makes them feel better.
- kdkdjdsj 4y ago
  Idk, show of hands: who thinks Brian Sicknick was killed with a fire extinguisher? Who thinks there is a tape of Donald Trump pissing on a prostitute, or that he was caught communicating with Alfa Bank, or
- User23 4y ago
  I trust broadly corroborated video evidence. For example I know that the “mostly peaceful protests” were anything but from watching videos filmed by diverse sources. The Internet and ubiquitous cameras really have revolutionized our ability to see what’s actually going on.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Journalists are supposed to have more credibility than your friend's gossip though For what is essentially a pop culture scoop, three hours seems like a fine trade-off between accuracy and timeliness.
taylodl 4y ago
Are people paying for credibility? Hate to break the news to you (ha!) but the news you’re going to see the most is the news that sells the best. It’s all about those Benjamins. You can’t expect good things from a society that has compromised all its ideals and prostrates itself for money. Certainly not journalistic integrity - unless it sells. Which it doesn’t.

thrown_22 4y ago

People still think that police were murdered by the protesters on Jan 6 two years after being told that every police officer who died on that day died from causes that had nothing to do with the protestors and everything to do with going up a flight of stairs under the influence of donuts. It's not good enough to print a retraction which no one sees and pretend it's solved the problem of spreading lies.

bhaney 4y ago

> They both corrected the articles after 3 hours Because they got caught. How long would those articles have remained up if nobody else had done the journalists' investigation jobs for them and then reported the incorrect story? Would the journalists who "broke" the story ever have bothered to verify it themselves? Would they have issued a correction at all if it didn't quickly become public knowledge that the story was fake?

jwond 4y ago

I don’t think they are really due any credit for correcting misinformation that they shouldn’t have published in the first place. I understand news outlets are all in a rush to be among the first to cover these trending stories, but in my opinion that is not a valid excuse for failing to verify basic facts prior to publication.

cocoricamo 4y ago

Yeah, it's scary. It was obvious the guys were trolling. Last names "Ligma" and "Johnson" very over the top statement holding a Michelle Obama book. The journalists were either too focused on getting the scoop and fooled themselves into believing what is clearly a ruse or they knew and went along with it because it generated views/clicks.