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It's a really depressing state of affairs when a filter for "is this piece of journalism false" could just `return True` and be accurate enough to be useful. It

by Spivak 2y ago

It's a really depressing state of affairs when a filter for "is this piece of journalism false" could just `return True` and be accurate enough to be useful. It feels bad when you are genuinely less informed for having read the news, and it's pervasive -- across news all outlets and across the political spectrum. Everyone would have been better off had nothing about this ever been published, and that includes NYT's contribution that spawned the tabloid-spam. They put this tiny little community on blast in front of the whole world and now the misinformation is all they'll be remembered for. There is nary an article that exists that couldn't inspire academic level discourse on how wrong it is, and the factors that contributed to its wrongness. Thank the lord I'm not in high school anymore because writing a paper on current events has got to be painful.

squigz 2y ago
The NYT posted an article with a comment that was taken grossly out of context. Then the NYT posted another article addressing that. I'm not trying to say the NYT is perfect, or defend the news outlets that take things out of context, but it is difficult to arrive at the conclusion that all news outlets are doing that.
- Spivak 2y ago
  I see how you took that from my comment, I do not want to imply that all news outlets are the same level of bad. That would be an impossible position to defend even if I believed it, the Daily Mail exists. It's that even the cream of the crop isn't helping you be meaningfully informed and this article is a perfect case-study of it. Having read neither of these articles, the original or the retraction, would be the ideal state.
  - squigz 2y ago
    > Having read neither of these articles, the original or the retraction, would be the ideal state. I disagree. The ideal state would be news organization would be held accountable for the nonsense they get up to. The original article was an interesting insight into the benefits of the Internet and how it can be beneficial to tribes like that. This latest article (not really a retraction) is also beneficial in that it calls out the nonsense other news outlets got up to, and points a light at the issue itself, as you yourself are doing.
Natsu 2y ago
When I read the news, I filter out the verifiable bits and simply discard all weak or low quality evidence, not unlike the reasoning used by the investigators in this story on HN the other day when they were looking for missing persons: https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-01/ https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-01/ Legal reporting is some of the worst, so I am frequently hunting for actual court documents, transcripts, etc. which are often significantly different from what you see reported. One favorite trick is that media will report things selectively in a way that is misleading. You get a more complete picture when you see, e.g., how a witness holds up under cross-examination and what details could or could not be corroborated.
- Spivak 2y ago
  This is my approach as well just usually without the news part. For local politics and court cases I get emails from the legislative bill tracker and my state supreme court has an RSS feed every time they make a ruling. If it weren't for the fact that I read the opinion or the bill itself I would think I was going mad with how news outlets report on it. I swear we're reading two different documents. I've pretty much given up on anything of the form "journalist reporting on primary source material" which is what the OP is about. They should have just linked to the guy's YouTube so everyone could see first hand what's happening. The average news article tells me more about how people are reacting to a thing than the thing itself.
  - Natsu 2y ago
    This is a good approach, I get a lot more information by going directly to the source in cases like that. Unfortunately, it makes some things like Wikipedia less useful because they explicitly want to use secondary sources rather than primary source material. I know they have their own reasons for that due to dealing with pseudoscientific cranks and whatnot, but it does make anything politically charged less useful as reference material.

by Spivak 2y ago

squigz 2y ago

The NYT posted an article with a comment that was taken grossly out of context. Then the NYT posted another article addressing that. I'm not trying to say the NYT is perfect, or defend the news outlets that take things out of context, but it is difficult to arrive at the conclusion that all news outlets are doing that.

Spivak 2y ago
I see how you took that from my comment, I do not want to imply that all news outlets are the same level of bad. That would be an impossible position to defend even if I believed it, the Daily Mail exists. It's that even the cream of the crop isn't helping you be meaningfully informed and this article is a perfect case-study of it. Having read neither of these articles, the original or the retraction, would be the ideal state.
- squigz 2y ago
  > Having read neither of these articles, the original or the retraction, would be the ideal state. I disagree. The ideal state would be news organization would be held accountable for the nonsense they get up to. The original article was an interesting insight into the benefits of the Internet and how it can be beneficial to tribes like that. This latest article (not really a retraction) is also beneficial in that it calls out the nonsense other news outlets got up to, and points a light at the issue itself, as you yourself are doing.

Natsu 2y ago

When I read the news, I filter out the verifiable bits and simply discard all weak or low quality evidence, not unlike the reasoning used by the investigators in this story on HN the other day when they were looking for missing persons: https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-01/ https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-01/ Legal reporting is some of the worst, so I am frequently hunting for actual court documents, transcripts, etc. which are often significantly different from what you see reported. One favorite trick is that media will report things selectively in a way that is misleading. You get a more complete picture when you see, e.g., how a witness holds up under cross-examination and what details could or could not be corroborated.

Spivak 2y ago
This is my approach as well just usually without the news part. For local politics and court cases I get emails from the legislative bill tracker and my state supreme court has an RSS feed every time they make a ruling. If it weren't for the fact that I read the opinion or the bill itself I would think I was going mad with how news outlets report on it. I swear we're reading two different documents. I've pretty much given up on anything of the form "journalist reporting on primary source material" which is what the OP is about. They should have just linked to the guy's YouTube so everyone could see first hand what's happening. The average news article tells me more about how people are reacting to a thing than the thing itself.
- Natsu 2y ago
  This is a good approach, I get a lot more information by going directly to the source in cases like that. Unfortunately, it makes some things like Wikipedia less useful because they explicitly want to use secondary sources rather than primary source material. I know they have their own reasons for that due to dealing with pseudoscientific cranks and whatnot, but it does make anything politically charged less useful as reference material.