9 ms·

The Importance of Fact-Checking

186 points by NaOH 2y ago

gcp123 2y ago
What makes this fascinating isn't just what it says about storytelling, but what it reveals about our relationship with truth in media. I worked in public radio for 7 years, and TAL's influence was impossible to overstate - every producer wanted to craft stories with that perfect narrative arc. The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes, sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution that makes you feel something. Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful or not. The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication. But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio beat.
- jfengel 2y ago
  And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller, not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program. The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass. TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the story: >Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true. This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.
    - jfengel 2y ago
      I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between telling true stories and journalism. Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity. That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist. TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it. So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
      - IshKebab 2y ago
        What are you talking about? It was a complete fabrication. There is no true story.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        The distinction indeed needs to be drawn carefully, because as I understand you, you're not describing an "other side" compared to journalism - you're describing a thin intermediary layer between journalism and the kind of outlets like e.g. Top Gear, that let people treat them as a lighthearted but factual source, then occasionally do a hit job on something or someone, and when damage they did is pointed out, proclaim "but we are an entertainment program, not news, so we don't have any obligation to be factual and accurate!". Because of such cases, when I see someone (like you here) argue "X is not a journalist, Y is not a news program", my mind automatically pattern-matches this to ", therefore it has no obligation to tell the truth, despite the fact that they let people believe they're journalists/news". Which is not what you meant here, but common enough that I doubt this is just mine knee-jerk reaction.
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  - makomk 2y ago
    It's certainly not the only evidence of problems at NPR. For example, they managed to basically accuse Trump Jr of lying to Congress in a story that should not have survived basic fact checking: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after-falsely-accusing-trump-jr-of-being-in-legal-jeopardy-for-lying-to-senate https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after... That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.
- cratermoon 2y ago
  The funny thing is, Daisey was not the first time narrative journalism – aka documentary media – has waltzed down the path to fiction. Famously, we have the film Nanook of the North and the book Wisconsin Death Trip, case studies I covered when I was in journalism program, before TAL. Today, we might call these works docudrama, but the blurring of the line between drama and journalism remains.
  - tpmoney 2y ago
    There was also that Der Spiegel journalist that wrote effectively a completely made up fiction about an American town called "Fergus Falls. The followup investigation of which discovered a number of additional stories that ranged from highly exaggerated to completely made up. The danger of trying to tell a narrative with journalism is the tendency to decide on the narrative you want to tell, and gather facts (or I guess make them up) to fit that narrative, rather than finding a narrative in the fact that lets you tell their story.
- rayiner 2y ago
  How has the story about the Duke Lacrosse players been processed in the journalism schools?
- grandempire 2y ago
  Arranging facts into a narrative with mass appeal is the craft of journalism.
  - lazyeye 2y ago
    Or cherry-picking facts to support a narrative? This seems far more common in the mainstream media.
    - grandempire 2y ago
      I think cherry-picking is inherent to the craft. As a pejorative it probably means the chosen arrangement of facts is poorly constructed.
kjellsbells 2y ago
Another excellent example of the TAL format gone wrong: the Caliphate podcast series by the New York Times. Conpelling narrative, hot topic, built on quicksand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=... You can still find it on Spotify, with a mea culpa attached. https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5kvIvQOKBDZ_1Y-Bnyw https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5...
pards 2y ago
The title refers to the January 6, 2012 episode, beginning about halfway through the article: > “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication. On March 16, 2012, This American Life, aired the “Retraction” covering Rob Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies). “Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass.
- pstuart 2y ago
  That they were horrified by the mistake and set out to address it publicly and work to prevent future mistakes is telling. This American Life is a treasure.
  - testing22321 2y ago
    > This American Life is a treasure In the running for best podcast of all time. As Canadians though, we just can’t listen anymore, it is too depressing and dystopian. There was the episode about the nice folks who got new neighbours who started some nut job paramilitary thing with automatic weapons. The nice folks live everyday in fear. There are the episodes of regular women unable to get basic medical treatment because Roe v Wade. The list is endless, sadly. We don’t want to live in that world, and we don’t want it taking over our thoughts either.
sneak 2y ago
Humans are addicted to narrative. Deep, deep down. It’s the single best tool for making compelling propaganda.
- billfruit 2y ago
  Certainly more and more people are now suspecting of something odd, when they see a narrative, especially when the bare facts are scarce or obscured.
  - sneak 2y ago
    I don’t think this is true at all. Look at the rise of Qanon, for example, or antivax, or any other popular narrative-based fiction that is gaining traction. The news still uncritically reports what the police claim happened. The power of narrative is becoming greater in our connected world, not less. It has less requirement now to be rooted in any sort of facts.
    - billfruit 2y ago
      Atleast in places like HN. Its not uncommon to see articles being called out for indulging in "narrative" where mere reporting of facts would have sufficed
cudgy 2y ago
Reminiscent of the dramatic release of a Syrian prisoner reported on CNN that was determined to be fake. “CNN is acknowledging that a gripping story it aired last week depicting a Syrian man being let free from a Damascus prison after the fall of dictator Bashar Assad’s regime was not what it seemed.” https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake-98ee34d4e125d45bd18b57f55526c709 https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake...
otterley 2y ago
Everyone gets things wrong sometimes. As important as getting things right is, nobody is perfect. Then, how you react when you make a mistake matters. You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest and apply the lessons learned in the future. Kudos to Ira and his team for doing the right thing after realizing they did the wrong thing.
- glenstein 2y ago
  And to your point, if you are watching this, and trying to cynically use a one-off example to discredit years of reliable journalism, that too is a moment of character, and I think as important as the story itself.
  - tmoertel 2y ago
    It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of those “years of reliable journalism” by fact checking a random sample of the stories told over those years. According to the article we are discussing, TAL started using professional fact checkers only after the discovery of the Daisey incident. We’re assuming that stories aired prior to that event are reliable, but we haven’t verified that belief, have we?
    - glenstein 2y ago
      So that's exactly the kind of over correction in the wrong direction that I'm talking about. I don't think I agree that that's the pertinent extrapolation here. We absolutely would benefit from that spot checking. But I don't think the implication should be that 100% or something near it of the previous articles are fabricated, or under the cloud of deep suspicion until proven otherwise. The same things that led to this particular story unraveling, are vulnerabilities that could have led to other stories unraveling. If we get a second and a third, I think you might be right to have that cloud of suspicion. That would be like a Shattered Glass scenario and we're not there yet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Glass_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Glass_(film)
croes 2y ago
People are attracted by stories, not facts. If the story is true, good. Facts without a story lose against stories without facts. That’s why populism is so successful. If facts would matter Trump would be president. The facts were all known beforehand and are now, but many don’t care about facts. People aren’t as rational as myths like the homo economicus try to make us believe. Just look at ads. They sell emotions not facts.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  This is only true to a point. When facts impact their lives people suddenly care more about them than stories.
  - roxolotl 2y ago
    Orwell’s Reflections on the Spanish War[0] has a good quote about this which feels particularly salient in light of the tariffs: > Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. [0]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
  - throwaway_47831 2y ago
    I once thought this, but it is dangerously incorrect. During the pandemic I observed people up-close deny reality in front of their own eyes. I sat at a dinner table and listened to a man go on about how the hospitals were just making up Covid cases for money, and it wasn't really that widespread - right after his wife related that the Covid ward at the hospital she just got back from was nearly full. Where she worked, as a doctor. Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history to see that people will care about a story they have accepted long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very feet.
spaceisballer 2y ago
Reminds me of a book I just read, The Lifespan of a Fact. Solid read going into fact checking versus telling a story and figuring out where the line should be. Definitely entertaining.
cantalopes 2y ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 2y ago
  Please edit swipes out of comments on Hacker News. We're trying for curious conversation here. If you could remind yourself of the guidelines that would be appreciated: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
glenstein 2y ago
Mike Daisey, the fabricator in question, had a completely headspinning excuse: >Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve. It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.
- hydrogen7800 2y ago
  Or the vice president saying "if I have to create stories so the American media actually pays attention, then that's what I'm going to do." https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2 https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2
  - pstuart 2y ago
    That could be given a pass if the stories were not complete lies and that the attention brought wasn't deeply damaging to the community it addressed. It's a pity that it worked. A nation of immigrants is now virulently anti-immigrant.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      Sadly, it’s nothing new. We’ve always welcomed some immigrants and hated others. The specific groups have just changed throughout the years.
    - lazyeye 2y ago
      Factcheck: conflating out of control illegal immigration with orderly legal immigration is dishonest and acting in bad faith.
      - pstuart 2y ago
        The case in point was about legal immigrants accused of eating their neighbors pets and taking their jobs. Neither was true. Your factcheck needs to be factchecked. Accusing me of being dishonest and acting in bad faith is a hoot. I may be ignorant of certain things but I'm only interested in the truth as I can best discover it. I would love to have debate with someone from "your side", but you are, at best, a troll and haven't demonstrated any good faith.
femiagbabiaka 2y ago
There’s an even more surface-level commonality between these published fabrications: they’re all narratives in service of US State Department approved talking points, it’s like one level above stenography. And mainstream media is just repeating the same pattern today with coverage of Gaza.
- glenstein 2y ago
  I think I can't really accept that framing on a number of levels, but first and foremost, because it's a very lazy and easy accusation to make. One famous criticism of George W. Bush, as he was increasingly discredited in his second term was that "some things are true, even if George Bush says them." I personally think The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens is a must-read, and I would also say that what Uncle Sam really wants by Noam Chomsky was truly eye-opening to me in recasting the history of American foreign policy, but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was an intentional part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy. Sometimes these criticisms of labor issues, of human rights issues, of democracy issues, etc are going to speak for themselves not because they conveniently coincide with a preferred state department narrative, but because they do map onto legitimate moral issues. So I don't think it's enough to just say that the State Department would agree with criticisms as though that's sufficient to dismiss them. I understand there are corners in the internet where that passes muster, but to me it feels like it skips too many necessary steps in critical thinking.
  - femiagbabiaka 2y ago
    It’s certainly the case that there is overlap with the positions of the State Department and the truth. But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth. That’s how they’re treated, however. In fact, those who approach state narratives with skepticism are not taken seriously, and those who choose to be stenographers become the editors of the New York Times or the Atlantic, etc. > but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was a part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy and sometimes these criticisms are going to speak for themselves simply because they do map onto legitimate moral issues. After WWII the United States imported many Nazi functionaries to serve as the founders of institutions such as NATO[1], scientists, etc. During the war, American businessmen profited heavily from doing business with the Nazi regime. Of course we weren’t alone in this. Ending the Holocaust (too late) was obviously moral. But very little of what was done after was in interest of global democracy or the greater good, just as our entry into the war was not really about those things either. There were many in the global Jewish community and even in FDR’s own administration who were ringing the alarm bells long before we entered the war to do something, anything to help get Jews out of Europe to safety, who were denied and obstructed. Ultimately we only entered the war when it served our own best interests. The focus on WWII is also interesting because it is one of the only times in the last century that the U.S. could have been said to fight a just war. What about all the rest? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger
Isamu 2y ago
Funny because I regard his show as “story time” and not something I would treat as journalism. In contrast Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox was a part of their “opinion” lineup and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism. When Carlson and Fox won the defamation lawsuit in 2020 it was because “Mr. Carlson’s statements were not statements of fact and that she failed adequately to allege actual malice.” The “not statements of fact” included the reassurances that Carlson always made, in this case he said “Remember the facts of the case. These are undisputed” followed by clearly disputed and false claims. The lawyers argued successfully that it should be clear to the viewer that what Carlson says “cannot reasonably be interpreted as fact” even when he says that these are the facts. Arguably the bigger factor was proving malice, and Carlson seems very careful not to put anything into an email or text that undermines what he says on air. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
- Aunche 2y ago
  This was a different case, but Fox News did have to pay almost 800 million to Dominion to settle the lawsuit about rigged voting machines. There Tucker did admit in text that the allegations were ridiculous, but reported them as if they were true anyways.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb. For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
    - andelink 2y ago
cle 2y ago
Every time I read about fact-checking in journalism, I feel like there's a huge gap that nobody really talks about. It's very easy to present a story that is 100% factually accurate, but that implies causal links or other claims that are not. Our brains love hasty generalizations, and media outlets rely on that to present near-100% truthful facts to their viewers, such that they jump to completely opposite generalizations. We're further primed for this with thought-terminating cliches like "trust the data" and "look at the facts". Media profits enormously from the subsequent outrage. The more folks talk about "fact checking" without acknowledging the danger of cherry-picking and Texas sharpshooters and confounding variables, like in this article, the less I trust "fact checking" as a useful mechanism for forming opinions from their reported facts. Fact-checking is definitely a requirement, but still insufficient. This is also exacerbated by narratives like those presented by TAL that introduce enormous complexity to the task, due to the emotional context.
- YZF 2y ago
  You can have 100% fact based propaganda by cherry picking. This is not dissimilar to coming with a theory just based on your selected subset of preferred observations. This is the fuel of conspiracy theories. I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.
- praestigiare 2y ago
  You are of course correct that fact checking is not sufficient to protect us from all the ways that a journalistic work could mislead. But it does help when they are based on lies. As in the article this discussion is happening under. It helps address that problem, specifically. It seems like a strange reaction to say that this example of a lie being uncovered makes you less trustful of fact checking. In addition to that, I am not sure if you have ever worked with an independent fact checker, but they very much do make an effort to point out misleading, cherry-picked, and out of context information.
MrMcCall 2y ago
I understand the importance of fact-checking, but the problem is that it loses its value when much of the readership dont care about facts. We live in a world where many, many people are not only too stupid to know how stupid they are, but don't give a shit that they're stupid AND think they're the smart ones. Dunning-Kruger is incredibly instructive.
- mantas 2y ago
  On top of that, quite a few fact checkers seem to be cherry pickers too. I’ve seen too many fact-checks where with some knowledge of the topic it was obvious that fact checkers either didn’t do due diligence or pushed a narrative on purpose.
- huhkerrf 2y ago
  Ironically, your comment would be illustrative of Dunning Kruger, if it really showed what you're claiming. The Dunning Kruger study never said that stupid people believed they were smarter than smart people, or that they outperformed the high performers. All it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance, but they still believed they did worse than the high performers. You don't have to believe me. It's clearly shown on the Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    > it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance True. > but they still believed they did worse than the high performers. Fair point, but if they can't understand their own unexcellent performance, how can they understand excellence? They never did. They thought they were expert enough, which was simply not true. And they had ZERO understanding of what it takes to be an excellent performer, which was precisely why they thought they were excellent. I read the study itself. It shows "the overconfidence of fools". Does DJT think he's a dipshit? Of course not. He believes the exact opposite, because he's a lying fool, just like the underperformers of DK. Whether a person knows they're lying or is just mistaken is not as important as the fact that they're just not capable nor do they even know what it takes to be capable. They are trapped in the fiction of their own capability. The key takeaway is that honest, humble hard work is the way to achieve expertise, and that many people have chosen to lie to themself and the world instead. I do concede that they didn't believe they were better than the true experts. Thanks for the correction, but the overconfident fools of the world still think they're smart, and often they think they ARE smarter than intelligent people, even though that's not in DK.
incomingpain 2y ago
about a week ago I had a weird experience. I had purchased concert tickets for a date night with wifey in april, which got postponed to october. like wtf long. I brought it up in conversation as i was annoyed. Everyone at the table picks up their phone to fact check me and they brought up the hall's website and said I was wrong. I had the email sent to me about the postponement on my phone, it was real. I didnt care to prove myself right. Checking the website now it's now showing october. Why even fact check it? Just to prove me wrong? What if your fact check went wrong?
- switch007 2y ago
  This is so common in my experience, especially when they're 30 or younger, and I'd love to know what it is. Is it just an excuse to pickup their phone due to addiction?
  - whoopdedo 2y ago
    https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ Social media has bred a generation who believe that value comes from being the loudest voice in the room. One-upmanship is one of the sure ways to make your voice stand out.
    - switch007 2y ago
      Ah yes that drives me crazy too. Everything is a micro battle to win. I had this issue with some junior colleagues. I had to point out that it's disrupting and actually quite tiring being interrupted all the time with minor corrections, often wrong or so unbelievably minor. One thought he could demand sources for everything I said no matter the stakes. They ignored context, nuance, caveats etc and just listened to the part they could attempt to easily refute. God I'm exhausted just recounting it Am I an old fart ..
throwaway81523 2y ago
You have to read past 40% of the article (1167 words of fluff) to get to what happened. Thanks for the narrative but better to just say the facts. Here's what should have been the actual lede: > Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet another example of Glass’s artistry. A reworking of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China. Tldr: a bunch of the allegations in the episode were false and got past TAL's production approach at the time, but they are more careful now.
- ripe 2y ago
  Thank you for summarizing. Many of the comments here seem to be focusing on obscure portions of the article, so it's easy for a lurker on HN to be misled.
didgetmaster 2y ago
Almost every contentious issue has a set of facts that support one side of the argument, while also having a set of facts that support the other side. More often than not, a biased story is one that focuses exclusively on one set of facts while completely ignoring the other set. Fact checkers may catch falsehoods that are reported as facts, but they rarely point out obvious ommissions.
- deleted 2y ago
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- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  In many ways, a half-truth is worse than a simple lie, and there is no guarantee all parties are wrong in their own way: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Saxe/The_Blind_Men_and_the_Elephant https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax... Media tends to interview the most outrageous looking imbecile they can find at any event... regardless of political affiliation. The Sinclair Broadcast Group helps local news maintain consistent messaging, and thus any mistakes intentional or not are less noticeable. Fact-checking is only as good as the data sources people find. There are groups that ran entire fake scientific journals to sell the public outright nonsense. Verifiable facts are difficult to validate. "AI"/LLM slop content just made it worse =3
  - didgetmaster 2y ago
    Those who do not understand how AI works might think that it might correct all the falsehoods that come along. But if an LLM is trained on data full of errors and falsehoods, then the resulting model will only reenforce them rather than correct them.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I guess. I'm not convinced by the facts on the other side of LGBTQ discourse. Is it really true I could be arrested in Florida because my driver's license says I'm female? It doesn't protect anyone. It doesn't make anyone's life better.
g42gregory 2y ago
I believe it is very important to do fact-checking yourself. For me, this means reading original documents, court reports, etc… Certainly not checking the current NYT/WSJ/FT takes, as they themselves have to be fact-checked.
- submeta 2y ago
  NYT/WSJ/FT are more propagandistic then we are aware of. Just observe the developments in the Middle East, watch the language used, the euphemisms, compare that to their language when it comes to Russian aggression. It is very clear that our western media is manufacturing more consent then writing in an objective neutral language.
- pstuart 2y ago
  True, but confirmation bias is a bitch. Without the willingness to change one's mind when presented with compelling evidence, such fact-checking borders on harmful.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    In some religious circles they literally teach confirmation bias as a virtue, by another name of course. To paraphrase, if your prayer was answered or you were unexpectedly spared/saved/rewarded then it was god; and if not then he works in mysterious ways/you lacked faith/were unworthy/etc.
blindriver 2y ago
No one cares about facts anymore. They care about vibes and whether what is saying matches their vibes. That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Google news headline. I don't know how we get past this, but I'm teaching my kids to believe NOTHING they read online or on youtube. NOTHING. I'm teaching them to get information from first hand sources, not even "reliable" sources like newspapers because they have their own agendas too. There's a hierarchy of believability, and the higher you go, the less you put your faith into that information. It's a sad way to grow up but when almost everything is faked for engagement, it's a reality that you can't trust anything.
- theoreticalmal 2y ago
  How do you intend on handling situations where the first hand information is too complex or too technical or in a not-understood language? Such that your kids can’t directly interact with the primary source? I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can’t trust anything in reality anymore
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers Professor Legasov would be disappointed
- iambateman 2y ago
  You seem to care about the truth and I do. That makes two… I’m optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about that a lot.
  - rhdunn 2y ago
    Part of the problem is that it is difficult/impossible to go through the original sources and verify the claims. Another part of the problem is knowing what biases an outlet/reporter has and what parts of a story/the thing they are reporting on is missing out. It's known that a few research papers (e.g. [1], [2]) have been fabricated on various topics. So when you read the news about those, do you read the papers? If you do, can you verify the claims in those papers? It's not possible to do at scale, so you have to trust the reporting on those stories. A lot of reporting on things like that, or releases from major companies, tend to be based on press releases. You also have papers and websites that use others as their source of the information, so any inaccuracies or biases in that initial reporting gets magnified. It also depends on the knowledge of the person reporting -- if they are not an expert in the field they can easily get some of the details wrong. It took a long time, combined effort, and a lot of resources for the Leela Zero team to replicate the results of Alpha Zero [3]. And that's with papers that don't have the source code, or exact details on the training methodology. I've seen quite a lot of papers on things like arXiv that amount to a summary of "we did a thing, here's a table of results" -- this makes it hard to replicate the results. And a lot of papers build on work of others, so quite often you'll need to read and understand hundreds of papers. Then you have reporting from trials. They will not cover everything in the trial, but provide summaries of the results. See both the Lucy Letby case and the Johnny Depp vs Amber Herd trails for how those are reflected in the relevant media, both during and after the trials. You can't go to all the trials and even when there are recodings of them there will be multiple weeks of video to go through, which is impossible for all trials. So you have to rely on reporting or reports from the people who have done that, and are reliant on the witnesses and evidence given during the trial to be accurate and in support of the outcome of that trial. Then there's reporting of things like campaign events and rallies during elections. Media will only show soundbites that can remove the context from the original -- see also the countless "out of context" videos on YouTube. You can't always get the original sources, an you can't always go through the entire context. So you have to rely on the media reporting. That gives wildly different perspectives from the different groups on a given topic -- see e.g. the left and right reporting/coverage on things like Donald Trump doing the stint at a McDonalds. I don't have any answers on how best to solve this other than: 1. listing (and preserving) sources reported on that are not anonymous and can be verified -- including linking back to any press releases, research papers, trail transcripts, videos, or other relevant sources; 2. having a mechanism for replicating results from research papers, and having a way to find if/how that was done for a given research paper; 3. consuming reports from different sources, ideally ones that have different perspectives. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-retract-landmark-alzheimers-paper-containing-doctored-images https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret... [2] https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amyloid-research-study-controversy https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amy... [3] https://lczero.org/blog/ https://lczero.org/blog/
amriksohata 2y ago
Fact checking can have bias too
acidmath 2y ago
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ctrlp 2y ago
So, basically, regarding journalism: they had learned nothing and forgot nothing. Something died in me when I realized TAL and NPR were largely just bullshit factories. Glass isn't even coy about his motives being to tell/sell stories. He admits that truth is secondary to theater, and he's pretty unapologetic about dressing up performance as journalism. So unconcerned about it, in fact, that he's proudly teaching such ethics to students at prestigious journalism programs when he should be teaching at the performing arts school.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Is it fair to lump all of NPR in with TAL? They have quite a few different shows run by different people.
- ripe 2y ago
  It's quite a leap from "TAL discovered their mistaken story and added fact checking" to "TAL and NPR are largely bullshit factories". You need to present evidence for your extreme claim.
  - ctrlp 2y ago
    The producer of the show is admitting he is going to subvert facts to fiction if it helps tell a good story and you're demanding evidence?
neonate 2y ago
https://archive.ph/gIjim https://archive.ph/gIjim
carschno 2y ago
There are remarkable parallels to the Relotius scandal that took place at the German magazine Der Spiegel a few years ago (although in a bigger and more systematic way): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_of_stories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_o...

186 points by NaOH 2y ago

What makes this fascinating isn't just what it says about storytelling, but what it reveals about our relationship with truth in media. I worked in public radio for 7 years, and TAL's influence was impossible to overstate - every producer wanted to craft stories with that perfect narrative arc. The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes, sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution that makes you feel something. Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful or not. The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication. But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio beat.

jfengel 2y ago
And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller, not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program. The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass. TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.
- glenstein 2y ago
  The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the story: >Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true. This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between telling true stories and journalism. Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity. That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist. TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it. So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      What are you talking about? It was a complete fabrication. There is no true story.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      The distinction indeed needs to be drawn carefully, because as I understand you, you're not describing an "other side" compared to journalism - you're describing a thin intermediary layer between journalism and the kind of outlets like e.g. Top Gear, that let people treat them as a lighthearted but factual source, then occasionally do a hit job on something or someone, and when damage they did is pointed out, proclaim "but we are an entertainment program, not news, so we don't have any obligation to be factual and accurate!". Because of such cases, when I see someone (like you here) argue "X is not a journalist, Y is not a news program", my mind automatically pattern-matches this to ", therefore it has no obligation to tell the truth, despite the fact that they let people believe they're journalists/news". Which is not what you meant here, but common enough that I doubt this is just mine knee-jerk reaction.
- deleted 2y ago
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- makomk 2y ago
  It's certainly not the only evidence of problems at NPR. For example, they managed to basically accuse Trump Jr of lying to Congress in a story that should not have survived basic fact checking: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after-falsely-accusing-trump-jr-of-being-in-legal-jeopardy-for-lying-to-senate https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after... That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.
cratermoon 2y ago
The funny thing is, Daisey was not the first time narrative journalism – aka documentary media – has waltzed down the path to fiction. Famously, we have the film Nanook of the North and the book Wisconsin Death Trip, case studies I covered when I was in journalism program, before TAL. Today, we might call these works docudrama, but the blurring of the line between drama and journalism remains.
- tpmoney 2y ago
  There was also that Der Spiegel journalist that wrote effectively a completely made up fiction about an American town called "Fergus Falls. The followup investigation of which discovered a number of additional stories that ranged from highly exaggerated to completely made up. The danger of trying to tell a narrative with journalism is the tendency to decide on the narrative you want to tell, and gather facts (or I guess make them up) to fit that narrative, rather than finding a narrative in the fact that lets you tell their story.
rayiner 2y ago
How has the story about the Duke Lacrosse players been processed in the journalism schools?
grandempire 2y ago
Arranging facts into a narrative with mass appeal is the craft of journalism.
- lazyeye 2y ago
  Or cherry-picking facts to support a narrative? This seems far more common in the mainstream media.
  - grandempire 2y ago
    I think cherry-picking is inherent to the craft. As a pejorative it probably means the chosen arrangement of facts is poorly constructed.

kjellsbells 2y ago

Another excellent example of the TAL format gone wrong: the Caliphate podcast series by the New York Times. Conpelling narrative, hot topic, built on quicksand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=... You can still find it on Spotify, with a mea culpa attached. https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5kvIvQOKBDZ_1Y-Bnyw https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5...

pards 2y ago

The title refers to the January 6, 2012 episode, beginning about halfway through the article: > “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication. On March 16, 2012, This American Life, aired the “Retraction” covering Rob Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies). “Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass.

pstuart 2y ago
That they were horrified by the mistake and set out to address it publicly and work to prevent future mistakes is telling. This American Life is a treasure.
- testing22321 2y ago
  > This American Life is a treasure In the running for best podcast of all time. As Canadians though, we just can’t listen anymore, it is too depressing and dystopian. There was the episode about the nice folks who got new neighbours who started some nut job paramilitary thing with automatic weapons. The nice folks live everyday in fear. There are the episodes of regular women unable to get basic medical treatment because Roe v Wade. The list is endless, sadly. We don’t want to live in that world, and we don’t want it taking over our thoughts either.

sneak 2y ago

Humans are addicted to narrative. Deep, deep down. It’s the single best tool for making compelling propaganda.

billfruit 2y ago
Certainly more and more people are now suspecting of something odd, when they see a narrative, especially when the bare facts are scarce or obscured.
- sneak 2y ago
  I don’t think this is true at all. Look at the rise of Qanon, for example, or antivax, or any other popular narrative-based fiction that is gaining traction. The news still uncritically reports what the police claim happened. The power of narrative is becoming greater in our connected world, not less. It has less requirement now to be rooted in any sort of facts.
  - billfruit 2y ago
    Atleast in places like HN. Its not uncommon to see articles being called out for indulging in "narrative" where mere reporting of facts would have sufficed

cudgy 2y ago

Reminiscent of the dramatic release of a Syrian prisoner reported on CNN that was determined to be fake. “CNN is acknowledging that a gripping story it aired last week depicting a Syrian man being let free from a Damascus prison after the fall of dictator Bashar Assad’s regime was not what it seemed.” https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake-98ee34d4e125d45bd18b57f55526c709 https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake...

otterley 2y ago

Everyone gets things wrong sometimes. As important as getting things right is, nobody is perfect. Then, how you react when you make a mistake matters. You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest and apply the lessons learned in the future. Kudos to Ira and his team for doing the right thing after realizing they did the wrong thing.

glenstein 2y ago
And to your point, if you are watching this, and trying to cynically use a one-off example to discredit years of reliable journalism, that too is a moment of character, and I think as important as the story itself.
- tmoertel 2y ago
  It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of those “years of reliable journalism” by fact checking a random sample of the stories told over those years. According to the article we are discussing, TAL started using professional fact checkers only after the discovery of the Daisey incident. We’re assuming that stories aired prior to that event are reliable, but we haven’t verified that belief, have we?
  - glenstein 2y ago
    So that's exactly the kind of over correction in the wrong direction that I'm talking about. I don't think I agree that that's the pertinent extrapolation here. We absolutely would benefit from that spot checking. But I don't think the implication should be that 100% or something near it of the previous articles are fabricated, or under the cloud of deep suspicion until proven otherwise. The same things that led to this particular story unraveling, are vulnerabilities that could have led to other stories unraveling. If we get a second and a third, I think you might be right to have that cloud of suspicion. That would be like a Shattered Glass scenario and we're not there yet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Glass_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Glass_(film)

croes 2y ago

People are attracted by stories, not facts. If the story is true, good. Facts without a story lose against stories without facts. That’s why populism is so successful. If facts would matter Trump would be president. The facts were all known beforehand and are now, but many don’t care about facts. People aren’t as rational as myths like the homo economicus try to make us believe. Just look at ads. They sell emotions not facts.

paulryanrogers 2y ago
This is only true to a point. When facts impact their lives people suddenly care more about them than stories.
- roxolotl 2y ago
  Orwell’s Reflections on the Spanish War[0] has a good quote about this which feels particularly salient in light of the tariffs: > Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. [0]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- throwaway_47831 2y ago
  I once thought this, but it is dangerously incorrect. During the pandemic I observed people up-close deny reality in front of their own eyes. I sat at a dinner table and listened to a man go on about how the hospitals were just making up Covid cases for money, and it wasn't really that widespread - right after his wife related that the Covid ward at the hospital she just got back from was nearly full. Where she worked, as a doctor. Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history to see that people will care about a story they have accepted long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very feet.

spaceisballer 2y ago

Reminds me of a book I just read, The Lifespan of a Fact. Solid read going into fact checking versus telling a story and figuring out where the line should be. Definitely entertaining.

cantalopes 2y ago

[flagged]

tomhow 2y ago
Please edit swipes out of comments on Hacker News. We're trying for curious conversation here. If you could remind yourself of the guidelines that would be appreciated: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

glenstein 2y ago

Mike Daisey, the fabricator in question, had a completely headspinning excuse: >Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve. It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.

hydrogen7800 2y ago
Or the vice president saying "if I have to create stories so the American media actually pays attention, then that's what I'm going to do." https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2 https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2
- pstuart 2y ago
  That could be given a pass if the stories were not complete lies and that the attention brought wasn't deeply damaging to the community it addressed. It's a pity that it worked. A nation of immigrants is now virulently anti-immigrant.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    Sadly, it’s nothing new. We’ve always welcomed some immigrants and hated others. The specific groups have just changed throughout the years.
  - lazyeye 2y ago
    Factcheck: conflating out of control illegal immigration with orderly legal immigration is dishonest and acting in bad faith.
    - pstuart 2y ago
      The case in point was about legal immigrants accused of eating their neighbors pets and taking their jobs. Neither was true. Your factcheck needs to be factchecked. Accusing me of being dishonest and acting in bad faith is a hoot. I may be ignorant of certain things but I'm only interested in the truth as I can best discover it. I would love to have debate with someone from "your side", but you are, at best, a troll and haven't demonstrated any good faith.

femiagbabiaka 2y ago

There’s an even more surface-level commonality between these published fabrications: they’re all narratives in service of US State Department approved talking points, it’s like one level above stenography. And mainstream media is just repeating the same pattern today with coverage of Gaza.

glenstein 2y ago
I think I can't really accept that framing on a number of levels, but first and foremost, because it's a very lazy and easy accusation to make. One famous criticism of George W. Bush, as he was increasingly discredited in his second term was that "some things are true, even if George Bush says them." I personally think The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens is a must-read, and I would also say that what Uncle Sam really wants by Noam Chomsky was truly eye-opening to me in recasting the history of American foreign policy, but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was an intentional part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy. Sometimes these criticisms of labor issues, of human rights issues, of democracy issues, etc are going to speak for themselves not because they conveniently coincide with a preferred state department narrative, but because they do map onto legitimate moral issues. So I don't think it's enough to just say that the State Department would agree with criticisms as though that's sufficient to dismiss them. I understand there are corners in the internet where that passes muster, but to me it feels like it skips too many necessary steps in critical thinking.
- femiagbabiaka 2y ago
  It’s certainly the case that there is overlap with the positions of the State Department and the truth. But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth. That’s how they’re treated, however. In fact, those who approach state narratives with skepticism are not taken seriously, and those who choose to be stenographers become the editors of the New York Times or the Atlantic, etc. > but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was a part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy and sometimes these criticisms are going to speak for themselves simply because they do map onto legitimate moral issues. After WWII the United States imported many Nazi functionaries to serve as the founders of institutions such as NATO[1], scientists, etc. During the war, American businessmen profited heavily from doing business with the Nazi regime. Of course we weren’t alone in this. Ending the Holocaust (too late) was obviously moral. But very little of what was done after was in interest of global democracy or the greater good, just as our entry into the war was not really about those things either. There were many in the global Jewish community and even in FDR’s own administration who were ringing the alarm bells long before we entered the war to do something, anything to help get Jews out of Europe to safety, who were denied and obstructed. Ultimately we only entered the war when it served our own best interests. The focus on WWII is also interesting because it is one of the only times in the last century that the U.S. could have been said to fight a just war. What about all the rest? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger

Isamu 2y ago

Funny because I regard his show as “story time” and not something I would treat as journalism. In contrast Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox was a part of their “opinion” lineup and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism. When Carlson and Fox won the defamation lawsuit in 2020 it was because “Mr. Carlson’s statements were not statements of fact and that she failed adequately to allege actual malice.” The “not statements of fact” included the reassurances that Carlson always made, in this case he said “Remember the facts of the case. These are undisputed” followed by clearly disputed and false claims. The lawyers argued successfully that it should be clear to the viewer that what Carlson says “cannot reasonably be interpreted as fact” even when he says that these are the facts. Arguably the bigger factor was proving malice, and Carlson seems very careful not to put anything into an email or text that undermines what he says on air. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2019cv11161/527808/39/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...

Aunche 2y ago
This was a different case, but Fox News did have to pay almost 800 million to Dominion to settle the lawsuit about rigged voting machines. There Tucker did admit in text that the allegations were ridiculous, but reported them as if they were true anyways.
- roenxi 2y ago
  That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb. For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
  - andelink 2y ago

cle 2y ago

Every time I read about fact-checking in journalism, I feel like there's a huge gap that nobody really talks about. It's very easy to present a story that is 100% factually accurate, but that implies causal links or other claims that are not. Our brains love hasty generalizations, and media outlets rely on that to present near-100% truthful facts to their viewers, such that they jump to completely opposite generalizations. We're further primed for this with thought-terminating cliches like "trust the data" and "look at the facts". Media profits enormously from the subsequent outrage. The more folks talk about "fact checking" without acknowledging the danger of cherry-picking and Texas sharpshooters and confounding variables, like in this article, the less I trust "fact checking" as a useful mechanism for forming opinions from their reported facts. Fact-checking is definitely a requirement, but still insufficient. This is also exacerbated by narratives like those presented by TAL that introduce enormous complexity to the task, due to the emotional context.

YZF 2y ago
You can have 100% fact based propaganda by cherry picking. This is not dissimilar to coming with a theory just based on your selected subset of preferred observations. This is the fuel of conspiracy theories. I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.
praestigiare 2y ago
You are of course correct that fact checking is not sufficient to protect us from all the ways that a journalistic work could mislead. But it does help when they are based on lies. As in the article this discussion is happening under. It helps address that problem, specifically. It seems like a strange reaction to say that this example of a lie being uncovered makes you less trustful of fact checking. In addition to that, I am not sure if you have ever worked with an independent fact checker, but they very much do make an effort to point out misleading, cherry-picked, and out of context information.

MrMcCall 2y ago

I understand the importance of fact-checking, but the problem is that it loses its value when much of the readership dont care about facts. We live in a world where many, many people are not only too stupid to know how stupid they are, but don't give a shit that they're stupid AND think they're the smart ones. Dunning-Kruger is incredibly instructive.

mantas 2y ago
On top of that, quite a few fact checkers seem to be cherry pickers too. I’ve seen too many fact-checks where with some knowledge of the topic it was obvious that fact checkers either didn’t do due diligence or pushed a narrative on purpose.
huhkerrf 2y ago
Ironically, your comment would be illustrative of Dunning Kruger, if it really showed what you're claiming. The Dunning Kruger study never said that stupid people believed they were smarter than smart people, or that they outperformed the high performers. All it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance, but they still believed they did worse than the high performers. You don't have to believe me. It's clearly shown on the Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  > it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance True. > but they still believed they did worse than the high performers. Fair point, but if they can't understand their own unexcellent performance, how can they understand excellence? They never did. They thought they were expert enough, which was simply not true. And they had ZERO understanding of what it takes to be an excellent performer, which was precisely why they thought they were excellent. I read the study itself. It shows "the overconfidence of fools". Does DJT think he's a dipshit? Of course not. He believes the exact opposite, because he's a lying fool, just like the underperformers of DK. Whether a person knows they're lying or is just mistaken is not as important as the fact that they're just not capable nor do they even know what it takes to be capable. They are trapped in the fiction of their own capability. The key takeaway is that honest, humble hard work is the way to achieve expertise, and that many people have chosen to lie to themself and the world instead. I do concede that they didn't believe they were better than the true experts. Thanks for the correction, but the overconfident fools of the world still think they're smart, and often they think they ARE smarter than intelligent people, even though that's not in DK.

incomingpain 2y ago

about a week ago I had a weird experience. I had purchased concert tickets for a date night with wifey in april, which got postponed to october. like wtf long. I brought it up in conversation as i was annoyed. Everyone at the table picks up their phone to fact check me and they brought up the hall's website and said I was wrong. I had the email sent to me about the postponement on my phone, it was real. I didnt care to prove myself right. Checking the website now it's now showing october. Why even fact check it? Just to prove me wrong? What if your fact check went wrong?

switch007 2y ago
This is so common in my experience, especially when they're 30 or younger, and I'd love to know what it is. Is it just an excuse to pickup their phone due to addiction?
- whoopdedo 2y ago
  https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ Social media has bred a generation who believe that value comes from being the loudest voice in the room. One-upmanship is one of the sure ways to make your voice stand out.
  - switch007 2y ago
    Ah yes that drives me crazy too. Everything is a micro battle to win. I had this issue with some junior colleagues. I had to point out that it's disrupting and actually quite tiring being interrupted all the time with minor corrections, often wrong or so unbelievably minor. One thought he could demand sources for everything I said no matter the stakes. They ignored context, nuance, caveats etc and just listened to the part they could attempt to easily refute. God I'm exhausted just recounting it Am I an old fart ..

throwaway81523 2y ago

You have to read past 40% of the article (1167 words of fluff) to get to what happened. Thanks for the narrative but better to just say the facts. Here's what should have been the actual lede: > Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet another example of Glass’s artistry. A reworking of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China. Tldr: a bunch of the allegations in the episode were false and got past TAL's production approach at the time, but they are more careful now.

ripe 2y ago
Thank you for summarizing. Many of the comments here seem to be focusing on obscure portions of the article, so it's easy for a lurker on HN to be misled.

didgetmaster 2y ago

Almost every contentious issue has a set of facts that support one side of the argument, while also having a set of facts that support the other side. More often than not, a biased story is one that focuses exclusively on one set of facts while completely ignoring the other set. Fact checkers may catch falsehoods that are reported as facts, but they rarely point out obvious ommissions.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
In many ways, a half-truth is worse than a simple lie, and there is no guarantee all parties are wrong in their own way: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Saxe/The_Blind_Men_and_the_Elephant https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax... Media tends to interview the most outrageous looking imbecile they can find at any event... regardless of political affiliation. The Sinclair Broadcast Group helps local news maintain consistent messaging, and thus any mistakes intentional or not are less noticeable. Fact-checking is only as good as the data sources people find. There are groups that ran entire fake scientific journals to sell the public outright nonsense. Verifiable facts are difficult to validate. "AI"/LLM slop content just made it worse =3
- didgetmaster 2y ago
  Those who do not understand how AI works might think that it might correct all the falsehoods that come along. But if an LLM is trained on data full of errors and falsehoods, then the resulting model will only reenforce them rather than correct them.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
I guess. I'm not convinced by the facts on the other side of LGBTQ discourse. Is it really true I could be arrested in Florida because my driver's license says I'm female? It doesn't protect anyone. It doesn't make anyone's life better.

g42gregory 2y ago

I believe it is very important to do fact-checking yourself. For me, this means reading original documents, court reports, etc… Certainly not checking the current NYT/WSJ/FT takes, as they themselves have to be fact-checked.

submeta 2y ago
NYT/WSJ/FT are more propagandistic then we are aware of. Just observe the developments in the Middle East, watch the language used, the euphemisms, compare that to their language when it comes to Russian aggression. It is very clear that our western media is manufacturing more consent then writing in an objective neutral language.
pstuart 2y ago
True, but confirmation bias is a bitch. Without the willingness to change one's mind when presented with compelling evidence, such fact-checking borders on harmful.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  In some religious circles they literally teach confirmation bias as a virtue, by another name of course. To paraphrase, if your prayer was answered or you were unexpectedly spared/saved/rewarded then it was god; and if not then he works in mysterious ways/you lacked faith/were unworthy/etc.

blindriver 2y ago

No one cares about facts anymore. They care about vibes and whether what is saying matches their vibes. That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Google news headline. I don't know how we get past this, but I'm teaching my kids to believe NOTHING they read online or on youtube. NOTHING. I'm teaching them to get information from first hand sources, not even "reliable" sources like newspapers because they have their own agendas too. There's a hierarchy of believability, and the higher you go, the less you put your faith into that information. It's a sad way to grow up but when almost everything is faked for engagement, it's a reality that you can't trust anything.

theoreticalmal 2y ago
How do you intend on handling situations where the first hand information is too complex or too technical or in a not-understood language? Such that your kids can’t directly interact with the primary source? I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can’t trust anything in reality anymore
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers Professor Legasov would be disappointed
iambateman 2y ago
You seem to care about the truth and I do. That makes two… I’m optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about that a lot.
- rhdunn 2y ago
  Part of the problem is that it is difficult/impossible to go through the original sources and verify the claims. Another part of the problem is knowing what biases an outlet/reporter has and what parts of a story/the thing they are reporting on is missing out. It's known that a few research papers (e.g. [1], [2]) have been fabricated on various topics. So when you read the news about those, do you read the papers? If you do, can you verify the claims in those papers? It's not possible to do at scale, so you have to trust the reporting on those stories. A lot of reporting on things like that, or releases from major companies, tend to be based on press releases. You also have papers and websites that use others as their source of the information, so any inaccuracies or biases in that initial reporting gets magnified. It also depends on the knowledge of the person reporting -- if they are not an expert in the field they can easily get some of the details wrong. It took a long time, combined effort, and a lot of resources for the Leela Zero team to replicate the results of Alpha Zero [3]. And that's with papers that don't have the source code, or exact details on the training methodology. I've seen quite a lot of papers on things like arXiv that amount to a summary of "we did a thing, here's a table of results" -- this makes it hard to replicate the results. And a lot of papers build on work of others, so quite often you'll need to read and understand hundreds of papers. Then you have reporting from trials. They will not cover everything in the trial, but provide summaries of the results. See both the Lucy Letby case and the Johnny Depp vs Amber Herd trails for how those are reflected in the relevant media, both during and after the trials. You can't go to all the trials and even when there are recodings of them there will be multiple weeks of video to go through, which is impossible for all trials. So you have to rely on reporting or reports from the people who have done that, and are reliant on the witnesses and evidence given during the trial to be accurate and in support of the outcome of that trial. Then there's reporting of things like campaign events and rallies during elections. Media will only show soundbites that can remove the context from the original -- see also the countless "out of context" videos on YouTube. You can't always get the original sources, an you can't always go through the entire context. So you have to rely on the media reporting. That gives wildly different perspectives from the different groups on a given topic -- see e.g. the left and right reporting/coverage on things like Donald Trump doing the stint at a McDonalds. I don't have any answers on how best to solve this other than: 1. listing (and preserving) sources reported on that are not anonymous and can be verified -- including linking back to any press releases, research papers, trail transcripts, videos, or other relevant sources; 2. having a mechanism for replicating results from research papers, and having a way to find if/how that was done for a given research paper; 3. consuming reports from different sources, ideally ones that have different perspectives. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-retract-landmark-alzheimers-paper-containing-doctored-images https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret... [2] https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amyloid-research-study-controversy https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amy... [3] https://lczero.org/blog/ https://lczero.org/blog/

amriksohata 2y ago

Fact checking can have bias too

acidmath 2y ago

[dead]

ctrlp 2y ago

So, basically, regarding journalism: they had learned nothing and forgot nothing. Something died in me when I realized TAL and NPR were largely just bullshit factories. Glass isn't even coy about his motives being to tell/sell stories. He admits that truth is secondary to theater, and he's pretty unapologetic about dressing up performance as journalism. So unconcerned about it, in fact, that he's proudly teaching such ethics to students at prestigious journalism programs when he should be teaching at the performing arts school.

paulryanrogers 2y ago
Is it fair to lump all of NPR in with TAL? They have quite a few different shows run by different people.
ripe 2y ago
It's quite a leap from "TAL discovered their mistaken story and added fact checking" to "TAL and NPR are largely bullshit factories". You need to present evidence for your extreme claim.
- ctrlp 2y ago
  The producer of the show is admitting he is going to subvert facts to fiction if it helps tell a good story and you're demanding evidence?

neonate 2y ago

https://archive.ph/gIjim https://archive.ph/gIjim

carschno 2y ago

There are remarkable parallels to the Relotius scandal that took place at the German magazine Der Spiegel a few years ago (although in a bigger and more systematic way): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_of_stories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_o...