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>In the case of sources that we cannot verify, [general suspicion] is indeed advisable. Conversely, however, we should also consider in a positive sense who we

• chitowneats 4y ago
  Reminds me of the truly chilling statement from New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern: "We will continue to be your single source of truth...Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth." Xi Jingping must be proud that his thought is becoming so widespread.
  • vinay427 4y ago
    Your quote feels deceptively lacking in context. In particular, the second part ("Unless... truth") is in response to a direct question about a viral hoax that suggested an imminent lockdown. It seems quite reasonable to me that the government should be the one source of truth on their own intended policies, just as it seems reasonable that a news reporter's publications should remain the source of truth on that reporter's writing and perspectives. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jacinda-ardern-truth/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jacinda-ardern-truth/
    • chitowneats 4y ago
      Agree to disagree that the fluff in the middle of the statement matters. You did just link a snopes "fact-check" that agrees that, "Unless You Hear It from Us, It Is Not the Truth'?", is correctly attributed. The rest of the article is spin, as is often the case with snopes. The truth is independent of any political or journalistic entity. It's incredibly naive to think that self-appointed arbiters of truth will stop at one issue, the one that you happen to agree with them on.
      • frostburg 4y ago
        The omitted part drastically alters the meaning and you just ran with it.
        • chitowneats 4y ago
          It does not in the slightest. I don't care what question she was answering. The statement is absolutely bone chilling in any context.
          • frostburg 4y ago
            Imagine that you're talking about database transactions or crypto key exchanges, instead of executive acts.
            • chitowneats 4y ago
              Humans, and the systems they create amongst themselves, like governments, are infinitely more fallible than hardened features of computer systems like database transactions. This is an unbelievably poor analogy. This entire conversation reaffirms my belief that we need to require more humanities education for STEM majors.
              • frostburg 4y ago
                What is being said here is basically the tautological truth that official government acts are indeed the official government acts, generally with some mechanism such as signing, publishing in an official gazette or something like that. Not that government can define reality. Your Trump example in the other post is the most interesting because Trump actually created confusion on this point, by tweeting random stuff about acts that he then would never follow the proper channels for etc.
          • mopsi 4y ago
            I don't find it "chilling in all contexts" at all. Organizations very often set up a single channel for information distribution to avoid confusion arising from rumours, personal opinions and speculations. "Whatever gets posted at _____ should be treated as verified info, and everything else you hear as unverified" is very common during events such as natural disasters.
    • perihelions 4y ago
      - "It seems quite reasonable to me that the government should be the one source of truth on their own intended policies" Why shouldn't citizens have the right to speculate that their government is lying to them about its intended plans?
      • chitowneats 4y ago
        [flagged]
      • frostburg 4y ago
        They clearly do, but there is a difference between speculating and posing as the government and lying about what the real government is saying.
        • perihelions 4y ago
          Which one is the Washington Post, when the US government says X, but the Post says they interviewed two anonymous insider sources and the truth is actually Y? Are they "posing as the government"? I don't understand the perspective of the other side of this position, at all, frankly. Contradicting official narratives isn't some edge-case scenario we're just making up; it's a core function of the Fifth Estate.
          • frostburg 4y ago
            When you read that on a newspaper you know that you're reading a newspaper and they tell you that they've talked with people that allegedly told them something different than the official line. This doesn't happen with stuff like "no, no the Senate actually didn't pass that law yesterday" that are a matter of obvious public record.
            • perihelions 4y ago
              If you're acknowledging a newspaper as a potential source of truth, you're no longer acknowledging the government as the sole source.
• frostburg 4y ago
  They're comparatively a lot more trustworthy than anyone decrying the evils of the "MSM", despite serious issues and systematic bias. At the very least, you mostly know who they are.
  • mistermann 4y ago
    On average maybe, but not necessarily. When thinking critically, be mindful of sub-perceptual heuristics.
  • prepend 4y ago
    Certainly, they are more reputable. But I think that a healthy level of skepticism is good and not flat out believing anything from reputable sources is to be expected. In the US, the New York Times has perhaps the best reputation but they distributed false stories leading up to and during the Iraq war. I don’t like this idea of “good” sources and “bad” sources and don’t think people should promote trusting sources that are deemed “good.” Herman and Chomsky write about this in the 80s [0] and I think it’s still valid today. I don’t think we should promote narratives of dualistic struggles, especially if we are presented as being on the righteous side. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
    • frostburg 4y ago
      I find disturbing how a large portion of the general USA public is apparently convinced that the NYT and CNN are leftist orgs (due to a general political realignment that left not being socially reactionary and imperialism clustered, as far as I understand).
      • shkkmo 4y ago
        As someone who generally falls further to the left than the right, and sometimes much further, I would agree that those are generally left biased news outlets. Here's a site that does a pretty decent job of ranking bias per article and per outlet: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings
• PopAlongKid 4y ago
  >I don't really like how this is said as if it is 100% true I don't see it as being said that way. What was said was, "we should also consider in a positive sense". That is more nuanced than automatic trust, it's more like giving the benefit of the doubt until shown otherwise. If you are automatically and reflexively suspicious of all public broadcasters and major daily newspapers, then who are you not suspicious of?
  • peteradio 4y ago
    > then who are you not suspicious of? Nobody! I worked for a guy who etched below his monitor "TRUST NOONE", he was a difficult guy to be around.
• Mezzie 4y ago
  I'm not a fan of this either. In addition to what you've said, it ignores that one reason these 'alternative' sites have been so successful is that they often are good at pointing out the mistakes and misleading nature of mainstream institutions. That's often how they grow an initial trusting audience to begin with, and why they can so successfully bang the drum of 'don't trust the mainstream media': Often that media isn't trustworthy. My go to is how the mainstream media treated the war in Iraq when it was started. Of course Iraq has WMDs; the President says so. The only counter examples I found at the time were from online orgs and discussions back before those were as prominent. "Just trust us" isn't a good reaction to the current problem. If some institution wants to be trusted, they have to actually be trustworthy, but that takes $$ and effort. Which is not supported in the current landscape.
  • darkerside 4y ago
    Reminiscent of the war on drugs. When kids hear that marijuana will ruin your life and find that it doesn't, you end up with an opioid crisis.
    • memen 4y ago
      Isn't the opioid crisis a crisis because it ruins lives?
      • voxic11 4y ago
        Yes but who is going to believe that after hearing so many other drugs will ruin their lives then finding out they don't?
        • PuppyTailWags 4y ago
          The opioid crisis isn't related to the war on drugs. It was caused by doctors being misinformed about how prescription opioids worked by the drug manufacturers + widely disseminated (funded) research about pain treatment. This caused people to be prescribed opioids without a risk assessment for addiction or similar, and thereby lots of people got addicted after being prescribed for broken bones, surgeries, and general discomforts.
• loudmax 4y ago
  I saw nothing in the interview to indicate that you should accept 100% of statements mainstream media institutions. Quite the opposite. You do need to be able to evaluate relative trustworthiness. Mainstream journalism isn't going to be right 100% of the time, but they have a much better track record than rumors spread over social media. In fact, because so many contradictory stories spread on the internet, it's easy to pick ones we want to believe and reject ones that challenge our assumptions. It becomes easy to reject an uncomfortable reality and substitute one that make us feel better about ourselves. So while you should be generally suspicious of "trustworthy media and institutions" you should be very suspicious of your own biases. A healthy dose of skepticism doesn't mean disbelieving all sources equally.
• cirgue 4y ago
  Major news organizations lie by omission and innuendo. Random people on the internet lie by making stuff up. You shouldn’t trust major news outlets to give you a clear picture of the world, but they can be generally trusted as a source of verifiable fact, even if an incomplete one.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    In particular, a major news organisation saying "person X said Y" nearly always will be entirely accurate that person X did indeed say Y. That doesn't in and of itself convey anything about whether Y is true. And you should be quite wary of "unnamed sources". (exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari managed to get sacked for entirely fabricating quotes)
    • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      > That doesn't in and of itself convey anything about whether Y is true. Especially if X is a celebrity, and not a celebrity for their knowledge about Y. That just says "some random celebrity shot their mouth off about something they likely know next to zero about." That conveys zero bits of useful information.
• Pxtl 4y ago
  When you're in a market sharing space with Infowars and the Buffalo Chronicle, yes the mainstream media and democratically-funded government institutions are generally a hell of a lot more trustworthy. On "skepticism", people who are inherently distrustful of mainstream institutions tend to be shockingly credulous of fringe people with even less credibility, which is generally far worse.
• snowpid 4y ago
  While private media in Germany is diverse, German public broadcast has a strong left bias. Besides surveys of people working there, there will be a lot German lefties who claim otherwise. (maybe here too?) Shortly I dont trust German public broadcast.
  • throwaway_3850 4y ago
    Calling the german media left is like calling the democratic party left. It is such a propagandistic master piece of rebranding core left values of wealth distribution, which greatly threatens the true powerful ones, as beeing about gender, migration, environment and whatever virtue fashion signal is current. The right side falls for a simple enemy image and the left is as unimaginative as you can be, whe you have no clue about the underlying problem, certain aspects of capitalism. It works so daunting well.
    • snowpid 4y ago
      I didnt call the German media left, as I called the private media diverse in opinion, I call the German public broadcast left which is rather the perception of the German public in majority. It is very sad that you misquote me.
      • throwaway_3850 4y ago
        I didn't quote you. I was speaking about the distorted 'left' label. This distortion is mirrored in this conversation too. It is sad, that you didnt pick up my main point. Besides, yes you were speaking about Rundfunkanstalten where i was speaking about the media in general. Minor misconception in the broader scheme of the mighty and their useful idiots. >I call the German public broadcast left which is rather the perception of the German public in majority. The public perception of any group got capsized by the internet ... speaking of labels.
• mc32 4y ago
  One of the problems is that the media are not principled. Instead they have agendas and those agendas change over time. This time they are pro-war, the next time they are anti-war, not because of underlying principle (we're against bad guys --however that's defined) but because they advance some second or third order thing they agree or disagree with.