4 ms·

Although this is in the grand scheme of things hard to verify. Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation?

jjulius 3y ago
>Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation? Stranger things have been admitted to news organizations.
Cheer2171 3y ago
> Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation? People who don't agree with what their coworkers are doing and want to be whistleblowers. Getting those people to reach out to you is a huge part of investigative journalism.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  >Getting those people to reach out to you is a huge part of investigative journalism. Does that still exist? If you do investigative journalism maybe you win the admiration of the public. If you align with the powers that be, no nasty things happen to you and maybe you earn some money.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - DarkByte 3y ago
    The world has already learned from doing this mistake. Despotism is bad and listening to the above is how you get there.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    Yes, people with a strong sense of morality, interestingly (to the HN crowd), still do exist.
- gettodachoppa 3y ago
  The people with power over the journalists' career and reputation are in this case the party they'd piss off by doing proper journalism. They're not gonna do it. It's indirectly the main reason why no one trusts journalists in general anymore. Nearly everything is consolidated under the same people and whatever isn't gets smeared and blacklisted.
bawolff 3y ago
At the same time, people do make stuff up on the internet. I don't think its fair to treat unverified rumour as fact.
- JeffSnazz 3y ago
  > I don't think its fair to treat unverified rumour as fact. Virtually all information about the current conflict in the near east between Israel and Palestine might be considered "unverified rumor", whether the entity relaying the information is a state or a person with a camera. For better or worse, this is a standard of information we need to deal with. Perhaps the idea of a "fact" is something that needs revisiting as a concept....
  - nyokodo 3y ago
    > Perhaps the idea of a "fact" is something that needs revisiting as a concept The field of epistemology is ancient. The problem of what can be known and how we can know is even older. I don't think this conflict raises any fundamentally new questions on an epistemic level.
    - guerrilla 3y ago
      This is a terrible point because what philosophers know have nothing to do with what the general public needs to learn right now. The idea of a "fact" absolutely needs revising for almost all people.
      - grolimpio 3y ago
        I don't think that fact is an 'idea'; if something can't be proven to be true, it isn't a fact. We should consider calling it something else. The concept that needs revising is our understanding of social media posts as being automatically considered 'facts'. If it can't be proven, if we can't trust any vehicle to independently verify its veracity, then we simply have to check as many sources as we can and consider it as a possibility, not a fact.
    - 3y ago

>Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation? Stranger things have been admitted to news organizations.

> Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation? People who don't agree with what their coworkers are doing and want to be whistleblowers. Getting those people to reach out to you is a huge part of investigative journalism.

DeathArrow 3y ago
>Getting those people to reach out to you is a huge part of investigative journalism. Does that still exist? If you do investigative journalism maybe you win the admiration of the public. If you align with the powers that be, no nasty things happen to you and maybe you earn some money.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DarkByte 3y ago
  The world has already learned from doing this mistake. Despotism is bad and listening to the above is how you get there.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  Yes, people with a strong sense of morality, interestingly (to the HN crowd), still do exist.
gettodachoppa 3y ago
The people with power over the journalists' career and reputation are in this case the party they'd piss off by doing proper journalism. They're not gonna do it. It's indirectly the main reason why no one trusts journalists in general anymore. Nearly everything is consolidated under the same people and whatever isn't gets smeared and blacklisted.

bawolff 3y ago

At the same time, people do make stuff up on the internet. I don't think its fair to treat unverified rumour as fact.

JeffSnazz 3y ago
> I don't think its fair to treat unverified rumour as fact. Virtually all information about the current conflict in the near east between Israel and Palestine might be considered "unverified rumor", whether the entity relaying the information is a state or a person with a camera. For better or worse, this is a standard of information we need to deal with. Perhaps the idea of a "fact" is something that needs revisiting as a concept....
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > Perhaps the idea of a "fact" is something that needs revisiting as a concept The field of epistemology is ancient. The problem of what can be known and how we can know is even older. I don't think this conflict raises any fundamentally new questions on an epistemic level.
  - guerrilla 3y ago
    This is a terrible point because what philosophers know have nothing to do with what the general public needs to learn right now. The idea of a "fact" absolutely needs revising for almost all people.
    - grolimpio 3y ago
      I don't think that fact is an 'idea'; if something can't be proven to be true, it isn't a fact. We should consider calling it something else. The concept that needs revising is our understanding of social media posts as being automatically considered 'facts'. If it can't be proven, if we can't trust any vehicle to independently verify its veracity, then we simply have to check as many sources as we can and consider it as a possibility, not a fact.
  - 3y ago