> The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day
Well ain't this the cold, hard truth, eh HN? How many times have we seen science and technology just completely butchered, twisted, manipulated, or sometimes, all three, by the "truth-seeking journalists" over there at the establishment media companies? Yet we [willfully] ignorantly turn the page to the next section, say on sports or local affairs, and assume we are being fed facts.
More dangerous are the people who would implore you to ignore all sources from what they perceive are enemies and pay attention only to their (or your own) bubble and prejudices.
Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag.
This submissions feels more like launching point for arguing, little value to community.
Lot's of assumptions in this here reply that I would be happy to report back to you are incorrect (such as the one that I or others who feel this way subscribe to a certain particular "bubble", or that I am suggesting in any way shape or form you ignore anything)
And since you brought up feelings, this reply to my post feels like I may have struck a nerve with one of the aforementioned "establishment media companies" that you may hold near and dear to your heart. Is this how constructive conversation works?
How about this: let's talk about the situation I alluded to in my original comment, something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Something that has countless documented occurrences in (sorry to use this word again) establishment media companies. Does this meet your criteria for providing value to the community?
Claiming someone is responding to you is "triggered" is tiresome. Another red flag, and yes, you're fitting a particular profile. A constructive conversation can still be had, but I'm not particularly interested in Gell-Mann Amnesia which you alluded to in your last post because I [don't] think a focus on "newspapers" is very accurate or interesting.
Newspapers are no different than anything else. Errors are found in all writing.
My only points are: Evaluating truth based on the identity of the source instead of the content in question is not a good approach. Journals, thesis can and are all written with errors and misleading information.
I stand by original comment that this thread and the content was put here to cause injury to the a persons confidence that they can know what is happening in the world from reading the news. Which is a very particular viewpoint.
By 'wrongthink' I'm refering to the insinuation that people who use such a phrase might be suspected of being 'dangerous'. Dangerous as in "More dangerous are the people who would [...]"
Use of the phrase "establishment media companies" seems like poor evidence for accusing somebody of being dangerous. But perhaps I misread your comment and the remark about red flags had nothing to do with your previous remark about dangerous people?
Tell me honestly please. Would you rather trust a media company that is funded by the government or one that is not? The whole "establishment media companies" thing is not just a joke but rather actual companies that try to portray narratives that work out for them.
> More dangerous are the people who would implore you to ignore all sources from what they perceive are enemies and pay attention only to their (or your own) bubble and prejudices.
Okay.
> Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag.
Wait. Aren't you doing what you say is the "more dangerous"?
> This submissions feels more like launching point for arguing, little value to community.
So lets nip it in the bud and prevent discussion? Your comment feels like an attempt to curtail an interesting discussion before it happens because it threatens your own bubble and prejudices.
There's a name for this cognitive bias but I always forget what it's called. Something to do with the reader's expertise in one field being able to pick out flaws but not in other fields from the same source.
I think this sort of holds true for any modern news org in the west (and possibly world-wide). Look at the profit incentives and it makes sense which way reporting trends will go. The more outrageous/unbelievable the story, the more eyeballs; the more eyeballs, the more ad revenue. Some news orgs definitely take more liberty than others in bending the facts of a story just enough to carve out a demographic niche that they can depend on to keep coming back.
Personally, I've actually gravitated more towards long-form stories that aren't exactly news as-it-happens and more about events unfolding. Because of that personal preference, I've subscribed to The Atlantic (and considering others). I remember reading a post on here about a month ago that seemed to indicate I wasn't alone in that trend.
I posit that people are willing to pay for quality journalism that talks about a larger problem, but not for as-it-happens news. The latter has become a race to the bottom and first-out-the-door incentives drive it even lower (social media has certainly contributed immensely to this).
News organisations have never lived just out of subscriptions and/or sales - advertising has always been the major part of their revenue, for most publications.
A market also has the option to decide that a type of product is simply not economically viable.
However, certain products, while not being economically viable, can be socially necessary, so alternative models need to be found. News obviously falls in this category, similarly to public transport, healthcare and education. In those cases, other means of supporting the product can be found - usually, direct state intervention.
> certain products, while not being economically viable, can be socially necessary, so alternative models need to be found. News obviously falls in this category, similarly to public transport, healthcare and education
Totally agree. News can be paid for via government support (BBC), direct public support via donations (NPR, PBS), support from foundations (CSPAN), subscriptions (Atlantic, FT, WSJ). Advertising is the worst way — and if news is of great value, we should pay with money rather than attention AND money.
Patronage model, which (often also with subscription tiers on top of free content) is what bigger non-advertising media outlets seem to use; this works better if you qualify as a nonprofit with tax-advantaged donations, so may not be as useful for for-profit firms, but it's certainly a way that news organizations can exist and pay their staff and bills without advertising.
This version of their site has less visual clutter and flashy graphics: http://lite.cnn.com/en
Spoilers, it's still shit. The biggest problem with CNN is the shitty writing. CNN articles seem to be written for an audience of borderline illiterate idiots. Do yourself a favor and read the NYTimes instead. The biases there are basically the same, you're getting the mainstream American centrist take on things, with the difference being the NYTimes hires people who actually know how to write. CNN is dailymail-tier.
no, the nytimes is no better overall. they still have some good longer-form investigative pieces, but that's probably <1% of their volume. the rest is the same slanted, stimulant filler (corona all the time!) as other outlets.
As I said, I think they have approximately the same content and biases as CNN. I think they come out better than CNN because they have better writers and editors.
CNN articles seem like they were written by highschoolers and rubber stamped by editors who can't be bothered to read anything.
i guess our differing opinions turn on what "better" means. to me, a better writer, and especially a better editor, would correct those unsubstantiated embellishments and biases. so it's a distinction without a difference to me.
There are many ways in which something might be judged and therefore many ways in which something might be called 'better.' I am not saying the NYTimes is better than CNN in terms of what biases they have, what stories they choose to cover or what embellishments they add. I am not saying they have better fact checking. I am essentially saying CNN's articles are written for a less literate audience and they have lazy editors who let poor writing slide. I am not taking about their fact checking or factual accuracy.
I call BS: The NY Times is in no way a "mainstream American centrist take on things", and they now freely admit their Socialist biases. I will agree the writing there is better than most other sources, but that's a low bar these days.
American conservatives think the NYTimes are socialists, and American socialists think the NYTimes are conservative. I think this sort of split reputation is characteristic of American media with a centrist bias.
It really is. They copied the FoxNews formula in 2008. Fired anyone who could edit or fact check anything. They then turned the formula up to 11. Most of the 'news' is pick your flavor and enjoy the editorial. Because that is about all you are going to get out of them. News comes way down on the list of what you get out of them.
This is true for most "news" organizations at the moment. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc., are entertainment. Much of what they produce would fall under the Op. Ed. section of a newspaper. And the speed of the news cycle does not allow for rigorous fact checking and adequate opposing viewpoints to be included. "We have reached out for comment" is a common claim when there is a failure to include opposing viewpoints.
The problem is compounded by social feeds (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that are engineered to only show you information you already agree with being the primary method of consumption. And then the comments within the article or accompanied in the social platform further drive home the biases.
Traditional print journalism, while never perfect or completely accurate, at least presented a consistent and uniform experience for all readers. The news cycle was extended to provide more time for fact checking and information/quote gathering. And the structure of the paper was clear: news, opinion, entertainment, etc. These never mixed. And corrections were clear and available in the same place in future issues.
That doesn't mean biases never existed, but the expectations were much clearer and there was less of an ability to focus on a segment of a market and ignore the views of others.
I advocate for something like consumer warning labels on products: you cannot call something Aspirin unless it is truly, chemically Aspirin. Nobody should be able to label their product "News" unless it is strictly Who/What/When/Where; also, opinion and editorial should be required to be labeled clearly as such. Something akin to the Fairness Doctrine (now defunct) might be a place to start.
A thorny issue to discuss, but given the current state of "journalism", I think it's worthwhile.
Ugh... Even CNN admits that the following headline is a lie... Let's follow the rabbit trail:
> Trump suggests voters should commit fraud
The source that article links is another one of CNN's own articles:
> Trump appears to encourage North Carolinians to vote twice to test the system
The first paragraph of that article then gets closer to the truth:
> President Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to encourage people in North Carolina to vote twice -- once by mail and once in person -- during the November general election to purportedly double check that their initial vote was counted, ...
Of course, that's not "double" checking. That's checking. If you mail a ballot and never check, then you haven't checked.
Moreover... "Appeared." If the author believes Trump was saying that, then say Trump said it. However, the author knows that's not true, so the author said he "appeared" / his words could be twisted. Utter cowardice.
Then that links to this source, which gets even closer:
> President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday during his visit to Wilmington that people who vote by absentee ballot should “check their vote” by attempting to vote in person as well.
Where Trump clearly explains that people should go to their polling places so that the poll workers can check the voter rolls and confirm whether their ballots have been received. If so, then voters will be turned away. If no, they'll already be at the polling place and will be able to cast a ballot. You, I, WECT, and CNN all know that Trump isn't saying to lie about whether you mailed a ballot. To say otherwise is to lie.
The video in the tweet you link to is explicitly as in the headline: Trump tells people to mail in a ballot and then to go vote in person. He repeats it multiple times and is very clear that the "check" is done by them attempting to actually vote, not merely asking to confirm the ballot was received. I had really assumed it would be much more ambiguous than this from the headlines.
> Moreover... "Appeared." If the author believes Trump was saying that, then say Trump said it. However, the author knows that's not true, so the author said he "appeared" / his words could be twisted. Utter cowardice.
Trump is so confused and unclear sometimes that it's hard to tell exactly what he's trying to say, hence the "appeared.". What he says is newsworthy, and some of the most likely interpretations are shocking, so it can't just be ignored. It wouldn't surprise me if he advised his supporters to do something that clearly amounted to voter fraud without actually understanding that it was fraud.
> Where Trump clearly explains that people should go to their polling places so that the poll workers can check the voter rolls and confirm whether their ballots have been received. If so, then voters will be turned away. If no, they'll already be at the polling place and will be able to cast a ballot. You, I, WECT, and CNN all know that Trump isn't saying to lie about whether you mailed a ballot. To say otherwise is to lie.
I don't know how it is in North Carolina, but where I live they never ask if you've already mailed in a ballot at the polling place. They just ask for your name, look it up in the voter roll, and cross it off, and give you a ballot.
North Carolina accepts absentee ballots postmarked on election day (https://www.ncsbe.gov/voting/vote-mail/five-steps-vote-mail-...), so following Trump's advice could potentially bypass the poll worker check if the poll workers are like those in my state. I believe North Carolina has other checks to prevent double absentee/in-person votes from being counted, but fraud is still fraud if the deception doesn't work.
> Trump is so confused and unclear sometimes that it's hard to tell exactly what he's trying to say, hence the "appeared.".
It's irrelevant what he's "trying to say". If he writes "covfefe", the accurate reporting is "he wrote covfefe", not "he appeared to have written covfefe".
Qualifying something with "he appeared to say" is just a way to write anything. Turns out it's not at all what he said? "Well, it appeared that way to me, don't tell me how I have to perceive reality!"
> It's irrelevant what he's "trying to say". If he writes "covfefe", the accurate reporting is "he wrote covfefe", not "he appeared to have written covfefe".
You're asking for a raw transcript, but that's not what the news is. For instance, when the OJ trial was in the news, do you think the papers should have just printed the court reporters transcripts verbatim? The news make judgements about what's important, then summarizes what happened and adds context necessary to understand it, which requires figuring out what he was "trying to say."
> If he writes "covfefe", the accurate reporting is "he wrote covfefe", not "he appeared to have written covfefe".
Actually, if you want to be really nitpicky, "he appeared to have written covfefe" is the most accurate. No one saw him type that word. It could have been some social media aide instead.
Where I live if you are registered to vote by mail and you show up at the polling place on election day, you have to vote provisionally, which means that you have to make a sworn statement about why you are weird, and your ballot will be subject to additional verification to make sure you had a right to cast it.
Without commenting on the factual nature of the content or the content itself:
The biggest headlines for you aren't the biggest headlines for me. And I get quite a different view on mobile than I do on desktop. On mobile I get blasted by the coronavirus and economy sections, which are mostly gloom-and-doom (the article about a possible vaccine is far far down the list in a different subsection). On desktop those sections are there front and center, but the other stuff is visible too, so it's not quite so in-your-face.
CNN has multiple articles/videos about the exact same topics, but the headline---although any individual headline arguably represent its article technically accurately---are not equivalent to each other.
Consider:
"Dow and Nasdaq plunge after record highs" vs "Stock Market Bloodbath: Down and Nasdaq plunge"
"Trump suggests voters should commit fraud" vs "Trump encourages people to vote twice -- which is illegal" vs "Trump appears to encourage North Carolinians to vote twice to test the system"
So, from my point of view very different pictures can be painted with just:
1. Choice of headline.
2. Choice of presentation/order.
3. Choice of material to cover.
My takeaway is that, no, I can't trust it. A charitable interpretation is that the headlines are technically true, but designed to get me to click on them. That's not truthful. (Other interpretations may also be plausible, but would require more evidence.)
The once-per-month approach is an interesting one, which I would imagine removes even more of the lingering "urgency" to keep up with the news treadmill. How long have you been doing it?
Fox News is certainly much worse than this. They habitually and regularly post actual fake news. Of course, they do have real news mixed in there; otherwise the strategy wouldn't work.
Above the fold on my 2016 MacBook running uBlock Origin (so I may be dropping some ads if they have advertorial stuff, not sure), here's what I get:
Trump suggests voters should commit fraud; an uncharitable read, but basically true -- Trump suggested voters in NC vote by mail and in person as part of his contention that vote by mail is easily exploitable by fraudsters. I suspect when this blows up he'll say he was joking, but the words were literally true and nothing about the context of him saying it (let alone the broader context of his attacks on vote by mail and election integrity generally) suggests it's especially a joke. I agree that this is an uncharitable framing.
BREAKING Facebook will limit some ads in the week before the election, but it will let politicians run ads with lies. Clicked on the article and this seems like an accurate summary of events; Facebook will not get into the business of policing lies in political ads generally, but will limit them in the last week of the campaign
Analysis: Donald Trump is already working the debate refs; Analysis implies it's an opinion piece. My biggest objection here is the style of putting asterisks around the word already instead of using <em> tags. It looks like the biggest objection to the headline is that it's the Trump campaign who are working the refs, not Trump himself. I think that kind of "royal we" thing is pretty common, though.
Analysis: Bill Barr's indefensible defense of 2020 voter fraud. This title is all sorts of mangled, the actual thesis is that Barr is alleging systematic mail vote fraud including by foreign actors with no evidence to support it. That seems in keeping with past statements he's made.
Barr interview gets tense when pressed on mail-in voting; this appears to just be a link to the video discussed in the piece immediately above.
AG William Barr: "I don't think there are two justice systems"; this is Barr discussing racial inequality in justice. The headline is a direct quote and surely Barr knew to the extent that this is an inflammatory argument, he was making it.
Opinion: What Barr could have up his sleeve for Trump; dumb title, the op-ed piece's thesis is that the Justice Department customarily avoids announcing any major activity within 60 days of the election to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and that Barr might not respect this precedent. I don't see strong evidence here and as an editor I think I'd have pressed the writer to revise the argument a bit, but it doesn't seem false per se?
Police officer poisoned by Novichok in UK issues cryptic tweet on Navalny; the tweet is clearly deliberately cryptic, and the headline seems true. I would argue this is a bit of a nothingburger as a story.
Pelosi says she was set up by salon owner; Pelosi's defence here seems quite thin. She responds very poorly to criticism and this specific story I think is the kind of personal gotcha that tends to get a bunch of traction. But she did literally say this, so...
Officers covered a Black man's head before he stopped breathing, video shows; there's clearly an implied frame here that the officers action was police abuse, so you could maybe argue that a fairer frame would contextualize the actions better, but again seems literally true
Laid off and now evicted amid Covid-19, a Houston father contemplates homelessness; story seems true, although you can argue whether this is adequately framed in terms of how common or uncommon it is
The US jobs market is gradually recovering from the pandemic lockdown; this seems basically true. We're still down a bunch from highs, but recovery is happening. The headline attributes the job losses to the lockdown in a way that is causally clearer than I think the evidence suggests, but it exists in the realm of truth certainly.
CNN political director: This is a problem for Trump; truly awful headline, and it links to a video whose thesis is basically that Trump is behind in po...
> Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
Damn.
> I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time;
By the American Revolution, newspapers were getting closer to our modern perception of them. But for the hundreds of years between their ostensible invention in Germany and the late 18th century they were quite different. Many only reported foreign news (in part to avoid domestic topics that may have been more sensitive). They offered very little in terms of editorial. In France, one particularly dull one was granted a monopoly, stopping competition.
One other interesting anecdote from the book: For quite some time, the identity of who was conveying the news was paramount. A nobleman's wild story would be given more stock from contemporary audiences than several eyewitness accounts from commoners.
Fake News is far more common than people think (not just the Gell-Mann effect, but that helps...) I quit trusting anything I saw in the media in 1998, when my wife and I saw NBC totally faking a hurricane report in Corpus Christi. The reporter was in a rain slicker, and there was a lackey standing off-camera with a hose spraying water. Corpus was on the dry side of a hurricane deep in the Gulf that wound up hitting near Yucatan - winds were up, but there wasn't a cloud for 400 miles. Fake News then, even faker news now.
Actual news these days comes from message boards such as this.
TV / Radio news is little better than entertainment.
The trouble the news industry is having is that you can get an equal amount of information from social media without all the holier-than-thou garbage coming from news anchors.
I don't know why, but the thought that 'trustworthy' news sources are pseudo-anonymous or actually anonymous sources on a message board scares the ever-loving-shit out of me.
I don't feel that way. Social media circulates a lot of weird takes. For the many, many hot topics of 2020, I hear a lot of opinions that are something like, I'm bored of this so it's not important and it's all fake news anyway so I can make up my own story. That's a take that sounds like it should be quiet but it's instead really noisy.
> Not really a replacement for quality journalism.
The trouble (in my opinion) is that major networks don't really offer much in the way of "quality journalists."
They've mostly devolved into getting hot takes from pundits and "rah rah our team is great".
I listen to (and donate to) NPR (Iowa Public Radio specifically) because I think they are about as good as you can get for "quality journalism", but even their work devolves into garbage as soon as politics or culture come into play.
It probably doesn't help that a few years ago they redid their program structure to focus less on news and more on "think pieces" [1]
Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon have the day off from Hell, so they go up to check out the Washington DC military parade.
"Look at those M1s," says Alexander, "if only I'd had them I wouldn't have had to prematurely declare victory in southern asia!"
"Look at those F-35s," says Caesar, "if only I'd had them I would've captured all of persia!"
"Look at this cable station," says Napoleon, peering into the window of the Union Trust Bar, "if only I'd had it no one would ever have heard of Waterloo!"
The fact that no information sources can be trusted completely should be a call to humility both in individual decisions and public decision making.
On a side note, I wonder if Thomas Jefferson had so low an opinion of the press pre-1800 (before he was elected and when he was defending the right of the press to be critical of the Adams administration)
When I was 15, there was a bus bombing near my school.
A kid in my class was the grandson of a well known politician. A newspaper ran with a completely made up story about how it was his bus line, and how the grandfather had panicked. A few days later a fact checker called his mom. Not sure if they ran a retraction. It seemed incredibly disrespectful to those who were on the bus. Two died.
About a year after that, some kids that I knew were arrested for cannabis use. The story made the news. Some of it was true, but some was made up. The made up parts were embellishments, they made the story better. Age gaps were exaggerated, romantic narratives inserted...
I think most people who are in the vicinity of a news story irl have such experiences. Often the lies are minor, but just like with ordinary people who tell lies... the little lies make you disbelieve everything they say.
We kind of expect this from book authors and documentarians. Their job is to get a good narrative going. No one thinks "Tiger King" is an honest telling.
IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient.
TJ should have understood this. He was a pamphleteer after all. The rights of man is pure fiction, to quote Yuval Noah Harari. If you dissect a person, you will find no rights inside.
Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously.
I was in the vicinity of a news story once and I interacted with the press. A reporter from a local news station. She asked me what I saw and took notes. There were two follow up questions: "did you notice anything else?", and that's it. The report didn't really include any of the extra details that I provided, just what you could see from the street. It included a clip from a different witness who was much more chatty and added their own... flair.
I say all this because in my limited experience, the embellishments come from average Joes who are eager to say such things to reporters.
I agree but I think it's both. Reporters will know if a witness/interviewee is too straightforward for their purposes and will move out until they find a juicy enough narrative. That way their ass is covered.
> The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
Is there a word for that sort of cinematic (or in some cases literary) device? Opening with "disclaimer" style text to make the movie feel more real. It seems mockumentary adjacent - fiction presented as fact. Pseudo non-fiction?
I've seen it used in other films, too but the only example I can really think of is maybe the Blair Witch Project.
I've been in the vicinity of news/magazine press or knew the subjects personally about a dozen times.
In every single instance the facts were grossly misrepresented and in the three cases at Vice/Motherboard told the complete opposite story of the actual truth.
Vice's article about "Sugar Weasel, the One and Only Clown Escort" is a complete fabrication (well, other than his own self-delusions) and any basic fact checking shows the story to be false immediately.
This is the problem. There's plenty of newsrooms doing solid work. You can't do this any more than you can talk about restaurants while describing fast food burgers and a fancy tapas bar in the same sentence.
There's more interesting problems here. Outlets with actual scientists on staff do better science coverage, local institutions can cover a crisis with a better grasp on the context than a global organization that's sending reporters there for the first time. But before we can have that conversation we need to paint with a narrower brush.
Definitely. I've certainly found my own sources for the kinds of news that I'm interested in. A lot of it is independent journalists/*loggers.
Often enough I can check their sources and check multiple points of view on the same topic. The problem is that's a lot of work. Other people I might want to educate about the facts haven't put in that work -- they've just watched CNN/MSNBC/FOX or read the NYT/etc.
I was interviewed by journalists twice, both times they published a text that contained some of my words but edited to make it say the opposite of what I actually said.
I wonder whether in ten years television will regularly use deepfakes when "interviewing" people, and we will feel equally hopeless about it.
I became interested in Jordan Peterson and the my Google feed noticed. The amount of fabrications that started popping in my feed, from famous outlets, opened my eyes to just corrupt the news media is. Its hard to overstate how despicable and toxic this is.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
You open the newspaper to an article on some subject that you know well, because your salary depends on it. In Tourre's case, finance. In mine, tech. You read the article and see that the journalist isn't a subject matter expert and has made an error about some fact. Often, the error is so small that it doesn't affect the story at all. I call these the "well, actually, some streets are sheltered from the rain" stories. In any case, you dismiss the entire story and stop reading it, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if your technical expertise somehow gave you insight into a place you've never been and a culture you've never interacted with. You turn the page, and forget the gaps in your own knowledge.
> Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I think this is a fantastic comment, especially given the cavalcade of robotic quotations of that "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" passage that happen whenever the press comes up. One should definitely read the newspaper with a certain degree of skepticism, but I feel that people who take the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" to heart often get into weird places (like thinking that reading raw scientific papers is somehow a replacement for reading the newspaper, as if anyone could actually keep up with them in more than a narrow area and science is the only thing that matters).
While I think the self-interest from the Sinclair quote is definitely a reason to doubt "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" dismissals (i.e. maybe the story actually is right, but you think it's wrong because you have biased take), I think the problem you're getting at is ego. A lot of people want to be the guy who is smarter or sees things more clearly than others, so they latch on to ideas that let them superficially dismiss things that others trust as a way of proving their greater insight (maybe only to themselves).
I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history. First rough drafts are always going to have errors, but you'll be the last to know if you wait for those to be corrected before reading. If you keep up with the rough drafts, you'll see the corrections as the stories unfold.
> I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history.
Only, it's not what "the news" are. One can reconstruct the history using "the news" as source material, but it's a grave error to think that "the news" are "a first draft of history."
Try to find how the media covered the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq in 2003, and how they wrote many years later about the same events. What you believe to be a "first draft" was historically completely false. But it was at the time used as an excuse to start the war, which are both now verified historical facts -- both the fake "news" in the major media and the start of the war.
If you are interested in the topic you can even read how the local pressure on journalists makes them "following the editorial policy" even when they know that what they write about is false.
In short, there's no substitute for treating the news as only "pieces of information" which have to be verified, behind which could be different interests and which surely don't have to be true at all.
>> I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history. First rough drafts are always going to have errors, but you'll be the last to know if you wait for those to be corrected before reading. If you keep up with the rough drafts, you'll see the corrections as the stories unfold.
> Only, it's not what "the news" are. One can reconstruct the history using "the news" as source material, but it's a grave error to think that "the news" are "a first draft of history."
> Try to find how the media covered the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq in 2003, and how they wrote many years later about the same events. What you believe to be a "first draft" was historically completely false. But it was at the time used as an excuse to start the war, which are both now verified historical facts -- both the fake "news" in the major media and the start of the war.
I don't really see how that contradicts the idea that the news is a rough first draft of history at all. First drafts have errors, and you've pointed out some errors. Similar things could even happen with established history (for instance a later discovery proving some document that the old history relied on was a forgery or some account unreliable, etc.). You shouldn't expect perfect accuracy with the news, and to criticize it for not being perfectly accurate is to misunderstand what it is.
> to criticize it for not being perfectly accurate is to misunderstand what it is.
I gave example where the news were completely and utterly false compared to what the real truth was -- that's not just "not perfectly accurate" but completely opposite of the truth.
> Try to find how the media covered the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq in 2003, and how they wrote many years later about the same events. What you believe to be a "first draft" was historically completely false. But it was at the time used as an excuse to start the war, which are both now verified historical facts -- both the fake "news" in the major media and the start of the war.
Really? My memory is that the media reports made it very clear that the "weapons of mass destruction" narrative was false; that was what the whole David Kelly affair was about.
The way I remember, the major media in the US claimed WMDs existed until the war progressed and nothing was found. Then, what you remember regarding Kelly you probably have read only later, that is, only after the start of the war, 19 March 2003.
"He explains the irony of the term saying it came about 'because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have,'"
This is why I am subscribed to two news papers from independent owners.
It doesn't help that much though, because the overlap between the two is a lot smaller than you would think, and a significant part of that overlap is content provided by a press service (which is often wrong itself).
Sometimes I wonder whether it even makes sense to try to follow the news. News by definition cannot be objective in how it describes the world, even when factually accurate, because the most important things in the world aren't the things that are novel and interesting, they're the things that are commonplace and boring. Maybe following the news makes us less informed because it biases us to pay attention to the wrong things.
On the other hand, how else do you get informed about going affairs? Most long-form books on a subject are themselves heavily biased to the author's viewpoint.
It's interesting to me that Jefferson, in this text, offers an observation that's formulated very similar to (one-half of) the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, when he says:
"The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowlege with the lies of the day."
For hundreds of years, anyone with personal knowledge of a topic-reported-on knows much if not most of the reporting is wrong.
> IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient.
> Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously.
You have a right to your opinion, of course, but frankly I find this revolting. There's a huge difference between recognizing that imperfect intellectual integrity and flawed critics are common, and dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity as boring, unimportant, and hypocritical.
You don't have to deceive people to be interesting and successful. You just don't. And I think plenty of people manage to not live their lives that way.
I agree, its despicable. I would also suggest there is an enormous opportunity to make money for an organization that pursues and documents the truth, with integrity and to the the best of their ability. Society cannot possibly work if its members inhabit vastly incoherent bullshit bubbles and deep down inside we all know it.
">* dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity*" is far from true. Intellectual integrity is crucial. I a deep sense, it's the main thing that matters.
I mean that a newspaper is a newspaper. A pamphlet is a pamphlet. An Encyclopedia is... etc. Moralizing about it doesn't help much. As TJ says in his speech.
Anyway, I mean this "for one's own sake." Our own Intellectual honesty is something most of us think we just have. In practice, it's a skill. Call outs like this aren't a good way of practicing it, IMO.
If you're just saying "this is how the world works" - yeah, maybe, but not everyone is the same. I'm sure there are some individual reporters and maybe, occasionally, even whole news orgs, that are trying to be better then this.
Not everyone is the same, but too many are. I have similar experiences of newpaper articles: whenever I happen to know the case in deeper detail, I find the newspaper reporting sloppy at best, and drama-seeking and distorting at worst.
I'm not saying everyone is the same, nor being cynical.
I'm saying that the standard TJ sets in the speech, and that most people instinctively judge newspapers by is an unreasonable one for a newspaper. He basically says this himself in the speech. Newspapers are not purely factual, by nature. If you want simple facts, you can read the wire services that newspapers often report based on.
Meanwhile, we wouldn't judge other things by this standard. The pertinent example (considering who is making this statement) is a political pamphlet. Honesty, intellectual and otherwise, is important here too. Some pamphleteers are more or less honest than others. But, we don't expect a purely factual and politically neutral pamphlet. When Jefferson wrote his own stuff, pamphlets, autobiography, etc.... he was working within that medium and the nature of the medium dictates a lot.
This position sometimes reduces to "newspaper are just illegitimate." I mean, if you want statistics on the epidemic... those are available. Read wikipedia^. No narrative. No hype. There are plenty who also tabulate and summarize these for you, including google. They just aren't newspapers.
It's (IMO) either intellectually dishonest or naive to want or expect a newspaper to do exactly what wikipedia does and no more. That isn't what a newspaper is.
In practice, this type of argument (I don't think this applies to TJ's speech) is usually made when someone dislikes a narrative. Either that or they're just sick of bad journalism. But, "just print the facts" isn't a newspaper. Newspaper write narratively. That's what they are. You can get "just facts" if you want. You just need to read something that isn't a newspaper.
This is largely due to the wholesale destruction of the news industry by embarrassed capitalists and politicians over the last 30-40 years. Another reasons is that the same people have removed any ensemble of education which teach children to think even halfway critical about any topic.
We have journalists entering the workforce who have a good chance of having never consumed or witnessed any real journalism in their entire life.
So many of publications we used to know and love employed a sufficient amount of _professional_ copywriters, fact checkers, editors and so forth.
Editors were happy to let journalists take their time on stories that might not pay off for several years knowing it would pay to get things right.
Now-a-days, unless you work at the NYT, Guardian, or other company with mega-bucks and a robust subscription program you will probably never see a fact-checker, photographer, copywriter, and your editor will be not much more than an assembly line manager who may or may not care about the quality of the journalism you produce. If they do care, the likely have no leverage over the moneyed-interests who own the company.
A lot of people these days are not willing to pay for good journalism because they've been tricked into thinking they get "just as good" for free, which they most obviously do not.
And when they "discover" that their free news is run by rank amateurs who don't actually care about journalism and produce the kinds of things the OP rails against, it often seems to fester into a complete denunciation of the entire enterprise.
In fact, it is my belief that this is actually the goal of many unscrupulous practitioners of crappy journalism.
They know they can bankroll and support a crappy "news site" with the left hand and with the right hand use that to slowly tear down the firms putting out rigorous journalism, giving actual facts to citizens which show their ideology and politicians are nothing more than kleptocratic idiots.
Journalism has almost always been payed to a vast extent by advertisers, not subscribers. I don't think the decline in journalism is directly attributable to the pattern of free news.
More likely, it is due to the progressing obsession with profit, metrics-driven businesses. Papers are for-profit companies, so any change they can do that help their bottom line will always win out. We can make more money if we run aggressive titles? Done. We can save money by getting rid of seasoned professionals and people won't stop reading and looking at our ads? Awesome!
Not to mention, the extent to which journalism has declined is probably exaggerated. The style is obviously changing, and it may be more popular and crass. But journalism has always been extremely biased for the status quo, with many events that ruin the common narrative being systematically ignored. A lot of the problems caused by the US military and companies in South America was long ignored in mainstream journalism in the US in the 70s and 80s, just as one example. Watergate was huge news for years, COINTELPRO was quickly forgotten.
The one time that something newsworthy happened in my life, we didn't speak to the press, because we didn't particularly want to. That's not a problem for them though, they literally just printed errors and completely made up quotes from us instead.
I guess I should be thankful. It's a valuable lesson to learn at a young age.
Same experience here. I was a elected to a local board and was mentioned in several local newspaper stories. Every story that included events that I had personal knowledge of was incorrect, sometimes in very substantial ways.
A friend of mine was once arrested and it made national news - multiple times (arrest, randomly later on, then trial, etc). What I observed:
1. They often got a lot of details wrong - details very relevant to how the public would perceive him. Easily verifiable details, BTW. A lot of it was just someone on the law enforcement/justice side making statements that they did not bother to verify.
1a. Some of these false facts are now part of his Wikipedia page, with several references to these news outlets. Be wary of facts on Wikipedia if the source is journalism.
2. The national news have a hive mind mentality. Between the arrest and the trial, he would suddenly become headline news, and often with no event triggering it. As if they all suddenly decided (on the same day) to just write a story about him. The reality is more likely laziness - one outlet decided to make it big news and others didn't want to be left behind.
2a. As an aside, another well known freelance journalist said this is common. He once had the scoop on a big story and was trying to sell it to the top news outlets. The most common question was "Is anyone else running this?" followed by "We don't want to be the only ones to run this." The concern was about being wrong in the end, but the facts were easily verifiable and the news outlet didn't want to go through the trouble.
2b. The random big news about my friend with no trigger? A number of times the same news outlet had reported the very same thing at the time of arrest months prior. It was basically recycled news, but presented as if it was breaking news.
3. The local newspapers were the best. They didn't report false facts - they verified them. They had the most detail (continual coverage over months rather than random sensational headlines).
That was 20 years ago. Something similar happened to another friend of mine recently. Half of the latest news reports about him have ridiculously wrong facts (year of arrest, time spent in prison, etc). Stuff that is trivially verifiable. His case was not as high profile. Lesson learned: News stories that are not as big are a lot more likely to have wrong information.
This experience (particularly the false facts) is why I'm adamant about suspending judgment prior to the trial. My sources (news) are unreliable.
(BTW, that first person was easily acquitted - the defense called only one witness, because the prosecution's case was so flawed).
I was once interviewed by a local newspaper. It was not a full-length interview. I just said something quotable as a bystander and so they asked me for some demographic information. I gave them three facts, my name, my age, and the town I lived in. Including my quote, I gave the journalist four facts.
When I read the article, I was horrified that two of the four facts, including a misquote of what I said, were wrong.
I have been interviewed twice for articles in Wired and once for Chemical and Engineering News. I was a first hand observer of an event reported in the Portland Oregonian when I was in high school.
I was not misquoted or otherwise misrepresented in the first three cases. In all of these cases I found the reporting to be accurate.
I do notice mistakes when news publications write about topics relevant to my expertise. But these mistakes often (though not always) would not change the conclusions of the article when corrected. A lot of the mistakes I notice are elementary ones like confusing units of energy and power. They indicate that the writer lacks a subject matter background but they don't invalidate the whole article. When an article says "The new wind farm will generate 180,000 megawatts per year, enough to supply 10,000 Texas households" it's clear enough that "180,000 megawatt hours per year" is what should have been written.
I know that other people have different experiences, where they find that their first hand knowledge of events has been completely twisted by news reporting. Or where their subject of expertise is reported incorrectly in mainstream publications all the time, not only in details but in the major conclusions. I wonder if these howlers are prevalent in online discussions of news accuracy simply because the howlers make for more vivid memories that will spur people to share their experiences in comments.
> TJ should have understood this. He was a pamphleteer after all. The rights of man is pure fiction, to quote Yuval Noah Harari. If you dissect a person, you will find no rights inside.
What a fatuous remark. If you dissect a person, will you find numbers? Concepts? Why would you ever expect to find rights in a man as if they were organs? Naturally, a materialistic view of the universe will lead you down this path, but it's such a patently incoherent metaphysics that you can only wonder about the sanity of the materialist.
I've often wondered if the protections afforded to the press in the first amendment of the US Constitution could have benefited from greater clarity. What I mean by this is that I sincerely doubt the authors intended to protect lies, deceit and libel. It would make no sense whatsoever to create a law that effectively says "You can lie cheat and steal all you want and this shall be protected by the highest law in the land".
Here's the text from the first amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Some might say: Well, libel is addressable through other legislation.
Well, yes and no. It just so happens I was involved in a libel case many decades ago. In this case a newsletter (this was before internet days) had given a competitor a monthly column to author. This competitor decided to dedicate one column to attack our company and print a bunch of outright lies about our products. Things like "they don't test", "they ship their customers untested products", etc. I mean, this guy knew nothing about us and yet he focused an entire page to defaming me and my company.
A meeting with my attorney resulted in letters to the publication's entire board as well as the author/competitor. The only way I can characterize the reaction from the other side was "they shit in their pants". I came to learn a libel lawsuit is a very serious and potentially financially crippling event for someone without the means. Large companies can manage them but individuals can lose their home, savings, job, etc.
I wasn't interested in destroying lives or taking their home and savings. They agreed to print a solid retraction, fire the competitor/author and hire someone without skin in the game to pen that column.
Here's the problem: Retractions don't work. We saw an immediate and lasting hit to product sales. It took about a year to recover from the hit piece. Reputation is something that is hard to regain, particularly when people enter a fearful mental state. In retrospect I should have been smarter and should have gone for a financial settlement of sorts to compensate for the damage they caused. Our competitor actually gained sales and status in the industry as a result of this hit piece.
My point is that lies are like climbing to the top of a hill with a feather pillow, ripping it open and letting the winds take the feathers in all directions. Fixing the damage caused by lies requires finding every single feather, which is impossible.
Sometimes I think we need to rethink this one aspect of the first amendment and either modify it or bolster it externally (through separate legislation) in order to prevent the kinds of lies and manipulation that have been a part of the press since, well, according to Jefferson, the very founding of this nation.
> I sincerely doubt the authors intended to protect lies, deceit and libel.
I think the authors intended to prevent the Government from being able to declare by fiat what counts as "lies, deceit, and libel". That some people will use their freedom to do wrong is the price we pay for freedom. It's still preferable to the alternative.
You actually describe the right way of dealing with lies, deceit, and libel in a free society later on:
> In retrospect I should have been smarter and should have gone for a financial settlement of sorts to compensate for the damage they caused.
Exactly. Another quote from Jefferson seems apt here: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
What I didn't describe was the non-trivial cost, workload and time it took to deal with a very simple libel case. When you have publications, major TV networks, where almost literally every single piece they publish is filled with lies and manipulation it becomes an impossible task.
A couple of years back I decided to highlight such lies to a group of people I was in regular online conversations with. Friends and people I have known for 20 to 30 years, not strangers. The effort and time required to research and gather the evidence necessary to demonstrate falsehoods in just one story per day was significant enough that I had to quit after a couple of months. Not to mention the fact that writing-up articles on these findings and then discussing them until people understood they had been lied to also consumed a ridiculous amount of time.
The problem with the press engaging in constant lies and manipulation is that the vast majority of the population (I'll guess 99%) consumes without questioning any of it. Which, in turn, means people, over time, develop twisted narratives of reality that serve no useful purpose and do nothing but cause damage to society. The roughly 3.3 million people in the US who might be wiser or take the time to dig for the truth are powerless in rectifying the lies and manipulation. Refer to my feathers into the wind analogy on this last point.
I sincerely doubt anyone would propose we should tolerate the level of lies and manipulation weaponized by mass media today. The difference with respect to 1807 is that everyone is now reachable via their phones and computers through myriad services, with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube perhaps being the main culprits.
I do concede and fully understand that this is an area of law that requires very careful consideration and a soft touch. There isn't a simple fix. I don't like the idea of saying "well, just litigate using existing law" because of then massive asymmetry between these large corporations and the people. This approach actually harms anyone who isn't a millionaire or billionaire.
It would be almost impossible for the average Joe to go up against the major news sources except for the most egregious of cases (where a large law firm would take the case for a piece of the action). In other words, large news operators can utterly destroy your life and massively affect public perception and nothing ever happens to them. The simple proof of this is that they are full of lies today, which means they haven't been challenged and suffered enough financially to change their ways.
Sometimes I think the simple addition of the word "truthful" to the first amendment could be enough. IANAL, so I don't know how that could be detrimental. As a lay person it makes complete sense:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the truthful press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
>Sometimes I think the simple addition of the word "truthful" to the first amendment could be enough. IANAL, so I don't know how that could be detrimental. As a lay person it makes complete sense:
>"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the truthful press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
And to make it easier for the press the government can establish a Ministry of Truth to determine what is and is not truthful on their behalf.
No, of course not. Look at the recent events: the governments asked the press to organize their own "Truth Consortium" that would decide what's "fake news" or not and label it accordingly. Why make it a part of government that could, in principle, be made somewhat accountable to the public? Better leave it in the hands of the few owners of the news consortiums. They'll self-regulate all right, with the public interest in their minds first and foremost.
I know this isn't simple. However, there are things that are simple. Things like taking statements out of context or editing videos/audio to distort what was said to fit a narrative.
What I would like to see are articles with a full list of references and sources for the reader to dig into. In other words, if you can't provide backup for your claims, don't publish it. The TV equivalent for that would be a process through which viewers could access sources via an easy to use link to the TV network's website.
In other words, we ought to demand more from the press. We have the technology to deliver more. Lies and distortion should not be tolerated. The rule should be something like: If you can't confirm your claims and back them up with evidence, don't say or print them.
The other side of that would be that it would be OK to print and broadcast opinion (which can be unverified, even lies) with a clearly visible disclaimer. This could be like the equivalent of the disclaimers in cigarette packs, something like "THIS INFORMATION IS NOT VERIFIED AND COULD BE 100% INACCURATE" at the start and end of every article and prominently displayed on video.
Probably a bunch of silly ideas. I'll admit that having been the subject of libel has made me sensitive to just how destructive this can be. People without this experience tend to discount the lies the press/media float every minute of every day as unimportant. It isn't, but convincing the masses they should demand and somehow require better is a nearly impossible task.
The problem is the first word: "we". Who is "we"? Earlier you said you thought 99% of people believe whatever the media tells them. Anyone in that category doesn't think there's any more to be demanded.
> Earlier you said you thought 99% of people believe whatever the media tells them. Anyone in that category doesn't think there's any more to be demanded.
Agreed. Absolutely correct.
Isn't it interesting how if we go deep enough in root cause analysis the answer always seems to be education?
> Isn't it interesting how if we go deep enough in root cause analysis the answer always seems to be education?
Why do you think education is the solution to this problem? Education by whom? Trying to answer that question just creates the same problem we have now. (In fact, if you look at how public education works, and what the explicitly stated objectives were of the people who created that system, education is the same problem we have now. The media is just another branch of the education system.)
When I went to high school --in a third world country-- I studied logic, philosophy, read the Greeks, learned and practiced how to take apart and understand arguments and, generally speaking, learned about things that have escaped US-based educations for decades (I also attended elementary and high school in the US...it's a long complicated story of a family moving around too much). A simple example of this was that I could draw and name all of the capitals of every nation in the world on a blank map of the world (literally, the perimeters of each continent and nothing else on the map. The same for major mountain ranges, peaks and rivers.
The point isn't that finding Aconcagua and Everest on a blank map of the world prepares you for life. The point is to say that our 18 year old leave school without any real marketable skills, unable to think and analyze arguments, engage in real critical thinking and are utterly ignorant about almost everything outside their home town, not to mention the world.
It should come as no surprise that professional manipulators are able to do as they please with an audience steeped in ignorance and unable to exercise critical thinking. The simplest example I have of this is the unimaginable, unthinkable reality to anyone who has lived in any one of, say, two dozen countries, that you have US universities and US college students and graduates actually believing that Marxism, Socialism and Communism are good things. I mean, I can't think of anything more ignorant than that very, very real condition in US education.
It is laughable beyond description to anyone who has lived in almost any country south of the US border, a bunch of countries in Eastern Europe and a bunch of other countries in Africa and Asia.
And yet the young in the US are graduating from high school without skills in logic and critical thinking and then enter college to be pumped with precisely what millions of people who emigrate to the US or aspire to emigrate to the US are escaping.
If that's not the foundation for disastrous results I don't know what is. And it is all centered around a horrible derailment of our system of education.
> the non-trivial cost, workload and time it took to deal with a very simple libel case
Any court case will involve non-trivial cost, workload, and time. Even legal matters that never make it to a court involve non-trivial cost, workload, and time. My wife and I had a condo association threatening us with fines and litigation for something we hadn't done and had shown them proof that we hadn't done; we had to hire a lawyer and spend quite a bit of time, effort, and money just to reach a stalemate until the condo was sold.
However, you can't fix that problem by just passing new laws, because the whole problem is that the way the court system functions does not respect the spirit of the laws to begin with. And it's that way because we citizens have allowed it to get that way, because most people don't have enough dealings with the legal system to (a) see how messed up it is, and (b) see the impact it has on ordinary people who are unlucky enough to have to deal with it.
> The problem with the press engaging in constant lies and manipulation is that the vast majority of the population (I'll guess 99%) consumes without questioning any of it.
And you can't fix that problem by passing new laws either. (I actually don't think the percentage is as high as you say; but I'll agree that it's high enough to be a problem.) The only way to fix it is for enough people to realize that they are being lied to and manipulated and stop consuming the media that is doing it.
> I think the simple addition of the word "truthful" to the first amendment could be enough.
Who gets to decide what a "truthful" press is? Why, the same legal system that we've already established is a mess. So the "truthful" press will end up being...the same press we have now: whoever has enough money to prevail in any legal fight.
Agreed. Agreed. Not an easy problem. Not sure if it's worth giving up though.
I have two family members that have self-radicalized through their consumption of media. One on the left and the other on the right. As you might imagine, one of them lives on CNN/MSNBC and the other on Fox. And, of course, they both use Facebook and are exposed to the many resonant chambers the service offers at both extremes.
It has been truly painful to watch both of them walk deeper and deeper into dark caves of ignorance and hatred fueled by the lies and manipulation each camp produces every minute of every day. We have tried to pull them out of their caves to bring them back to some semblance of reality and failed miserably. The algorithms at play are far more powerful than anyone one could do other than isolating them from society for a year somewhere on earth.
I've said this before, the kinds of algorithms that help you dive deeper into learning how to tile your bathroom, build a table or learn how to use photoshop, the recommendation engines, are horribly suited for matters of politics and related domains. If you are tiling your bathroom it is actually good to be exposed to more and more material related to what you are doing. It will help you learn and do a better job. If, on the other hand, you end-up triggering the "hate Trump" or "hate Biden" (or pick something else) branches of the recommendation engines you are treated to a constant stream of garbage that, unimpeded, results in self radicalization over time.
Other than the race for click dollars, I don't understand why social media companies, google, etc., don't exercise a bit of social responsibility and use some of their AI prowess to avoid these kinds of self radicalizing trips down deeper and darker holes.
Back when I studied Philosophy in high school, many decades ago (not sure kids read the Greeks any more) we read and discussed Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". I never thought I would live through a real-life reenactment of the tale.
This of course has echoes in the present. I think the public may not be better informed/closer to the truth than 20 years ago, but not much worse either. A lot of things probably just weren't widely reported or could stay under the radar before the internet and social media took over. Now when "undesirable news" inevitably gets out, it has to be countered with contradictory narratives and misinformation. It's gotten to the point that aligning yourself politically one way or the other implies you must adopt a volume of their favored fiction in addition to a shared interpretation of the real facts.
> "It's gotten to the point that aligning yourself politically one way or the other implies you must adopt a volume of their favored fiction in addition to a shared interpretation of the real facts."
being truly independent is a lonely row to hoe in my experience. nobody likes or trusts you, because you're not all in on their side. despite this very real cost, more and more people are adopting an indepedent stance, which i find hopeful.
News organizations have to compete for people's attention so they present the news in a way that impacts people's emotions most strongly. Fear is a favorite subject. Most news is framed in a way that highlights how it MAY negatively effect the reader. FEAR is a very effective way to get and keep people's attention.
Also, the news has to compete with entertainment so it's entertaining. It's the first "Reality TV." You may get some information that you can use but the goal is to keep your attention by entertaining you.
Most people would be better informed by reading a newspaper once a week and spending the other free time reading a good book. Everyday news is a waste of time.
A primary concern with "the news" is that it has no incentive to be correct, especially when it is reporting on predictions. Consider a situation where a respected economist releases a report that predicts a high likelihood of economic recession. "The news" will circulate something like "HIGH PROBABILITY OF RECESSION, SAYS FAMED ECONOMIST". The impending recession will be the talk of the people for the next several weeks.
If the recession arrives, "the news" will report on the economic bloodbath, credit itself for reporting on the prediction of the recession in a timely manner, and give itself awards for accuracy in reporting.
If the recession does not arrive, "the news" will report on the surprising market strength and why economists predicted the future incorrectly, credit itself for reporting on the inaccuracy of our once-great financial system, and give itself awards for accuracy in reporting.
A related aspect is that a nice, solid, impartial fact-based news organization will often report on what various public figures have said. Since they are impartial, objective, and just reporting the facts, they will of course refrain from commenting on the truth of said declarations - that would be the reporter's biases showing!
"X says Y" is objective news. "Y is actually not true" is journalists showing their biases!
You're right. It gets really gnarly, really quickly. "X says Y" is objective news, but it is extremely difficult to evaluate Y without deep knowledge of both the background of Y and the reliability of X.
"Y is actually not true" is partial, biased journalism, but can also serve as critical information about the truth of Y, or the reliability of X!
The safest bet is to be aware of what the news is claiming, but remember at all times that the news is a signal repeater, not a signal generator. Whenever possible, one must find primary documents or videos.
“ I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. “
This is the best quote, because they sensed to be true what we now know is true for pew research data. The more you watch and read the news, the more likely you are to be less informed about the state of things.
This is obviously the case when you recognize that the media focuses on the long tail of interesting topics. The average is never interesting enough to sell clicks/papers, so the entire focus is on outlier events (this is how Trump got focused on and eventually elected).
This dovetails with something I've been thinking much about recently: providing a classical education, or at least a dose of it, to my kids. Jefferson was a big proponent of this as well [0]
My reasoning is that there are few other venues that young people, in their formative years, encounter such examples of deep critical thinking. I used to think it snobbery to reference Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, etc. But reading the Republic, Apology, Ethics, etc. really prompts you to think about your life and how it relates to other in a society in a very meaningful way. It also teaches you to be more critical of all ideas.
It seems to me that such perspectives are more important now than they've ever been. Jefferson and others have espoused the idea that an educated populace is required for a functioning democracy. While that may have been true in the 18th century, it is certainly more poignant in a world where people have an instant and unending stream of comment and opinion coming to them wherever they are.
A classical and a mythological education are both important and missing today. I wrote recently:
> A mythological education is distinct from the common school subjects. It builds in the mind intuition for second-order effects, for the first lesson a child learns from one hundred stories is that every thing you do will have unintended consequences, something years of schoolwork fails to teach. Myths give us shared art and common culture—a set of characters with which we can play in and enjoy together. In any culture rich with myths, their vocabulary is enlarged far beyond words, to allegories and metaphors. The quality of thought follows.
(To this end I've been writing a book of fables, mostly for my children, but serializing them by newsletter right now, which is turning out more popular than I expected.)
I think this is very insightful, and is touched on quite a bit in Harari's Sapiens, which is alluded to in a sibling to parent post, which also mentions Jefferson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364993
I picked up an old copy of Grimm's Tales on a whim and read some every now and then before bedtime. Also Aesop's fables just to refresh my memory of them. I enjoy them both and think it's a worthwhile format.
> Myths give us shared art and common culture—a set of characters with which we can play in and enjoy together. In any culture rich with myths, their vocabulary is enlarged far beyond words, to allegories and metaphors.
This has been a discussion for some time with my friends, the utility of religion in humanity for social purposes and communications purposes.
I hadn't thought much of the importance of "studying the classics" to the ends of teaching cultural vocabulary, but I do think critical thinking and logic should be core subjects like math and reading.
We have a hard time talking to each other these days (eg, Republicans vs Democrats in US).
So I also feel that education, specifically a liberal arts foundation, could broaden people’s minds so that we’re not just shouting at each other, but can actually converse as somewhat rational beings.
But this boils down to initially defining the "purpose" of education. The US can't even agree on what the purpose of education is. Many see it as you do - broaden minds and encourage thinking. Many others see it as life-skills 'training' designed to teach adult survival skills. Still others think education should point specifically, and directly to work, or, in other words, be 'job-skills' based.
We don't even have a clear understanding of what is best, nor do we have an agreement on when each serves its best purpose. The whole thing is a mess.
Looking at https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo..., this is definitely a good list of "foundational texts of Western civilization" as they say, but the world is a lot more interconnected than it was in 1696, and this curriculum leaves out most of it. There's nothing wrong with studying one part of the world or one community of ideas as long as you're open about it, but I don't think I would be comfortable calling this a well rounded education in the modern world.
The about page says "students study the works of history’s greatest thinkers." I mean, come on. There's not a single "great thinker" in all of history outside of Europe, the Roman Empire, and the US? How are you supposed to defend the ideas of Western Civilization if you have no idea what the alternatives are?
It reminds me a little of some culinary schools where the whole curriculum is based on French cooking, and you take like one class on "global cuisine" that covers the entire rest of the world. You can't pick one focus area and claim it's all you need for a full education.
> It reminds me a little of some culinary schools where the whole curriculum is based on French cooking, and you take like one class on "global cuisine" that covers the entire rest of the world. You can't pick one focus area and claim it's all you need for a full education.
Who said school had anything to do with having a full education? That's kind of the whole point of the unschooling movement.
Culinary Schools primarily focus the curriculum around French cooking because thats the predominant skillset that you will be required to know to work in a volume, commercial kitchen. French cooking training is a broad test of their ability to execute important techniques. It's fitting the curriculum to the students and the expectations that they have.
If you're in culinary school to begin with, you probably care about food and you will be able to teach yourself the rest from that base.
SJC is the same way. They're fitting the curriculum to the expectations and desires of their incoming students. The whole point of that education is to teach you how to think for yourself, not to fill your head with data points.
School, ...ANY... school, is just about establishing a baseline to make you comparable against your peers. Rigorous education has very little to do with it.
In both cases, I don't think you really understand the point of what you're looking at.
> Who said school had anything to do with having a full education?
A few quotes from the website:
"With interdisciplinary, world-changing teachers like Einstein, Descartes, and Socrates, St. John’s students have a competitive advantage in any field."
"Offering comprehensive undergraduate and graduate liberal arts programs"
"Our liberal arts undergraduate program is a truly comprehensive education that is perhaps the most rigorous in America."
"St. John’s College is persuaded that a genuine liberal education requires the study of great books—texts of words, symbols, notes, and pictures—because they are both timeless and timely. These books are the most important teachers. They illuminate the persisting questions of human existence and they bear directly on the problems we face today. They express most originally, and often most perfectly, the ideas by which contemporary life is knowingly or unknowingly governed. Their authors can speak to us almost as freshly as when they spoke for the first time, for what they have to tell us is not of merely academic concern, nor is it remote from our true interests. They change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits."
> If you're in culinary school to begin with, you probably care about food and you will be able to teach yourself the rest from that base.
I know many people who went to culinary school in America because they were inspired by the food they grew up with and wanted to learn more so they could start a restaurant or study it or something, and were disappointed when it was mostly French cooking and their culture was barely touched on. In that case, the school did not fit their expectations and desires. I'm sure that culinary schools meet most student's expectations or they wouldn't continue to exist, but I think it's worth mentioning that all the top schools seem to follow the same basic pattern, at least from what I've been told. It's not like you can pick the French school or the West African school or the Japanese school when you're an American looking to enter a school in your country. Anyway I think I should stop talking about this because I really don't know much about culinary schools, I just meant it as a loose analogy.
> SJC is the same way. They're fitting the curriculum to the expectations and desires of their incoming students. The whole point of that education is to teach you how to think for yourself, not to fill your head with data points.
I'm not sure what you mean by data points, but I guess what I'm saying is if I wanted to design a curriculum around the fundamentals of thinking for myself, I would want to make it as varied and and broad as possible. I want to know how everybody thinks, not just people near me. If I'm reading the foundational texts of American history, I also want to read those of Chinese history. I want to read the Koran along with the Bible (and maybe multiple translations/interpretations of each). I want to read Ramayana along with the Iliad.
I understand that not everybody wants the same things as me! Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with studying Western thought. I just think it's wrong to talk about the greatest books and thinkers and teachers when there's an implicit "of the Western canon" next to each of those. Just be open about it, and it's ok.
> School, ...ANY... school, is just about establishing a baseline to make you comparable against your peers.
No modern student should believe that their only peers are Western-educated.
> In both cases, I don't think you really understand the point of what you're looking ...
> I know many people who went to culinary school in America because they were inspired by the food they grew up with and wanted to learn more so they could start a restaurant or study it or something, and were disappointed when it was mostly French cooking and their culture was barely touched on. In that case, the school did not fit their expectations and desires. I'm sure that culinary schools meet most student's expectations or they wouldn't continue to exist, but I think it's worth mentioning that all the top schools seem to follow the same basic pattern, at least from what I've been told. It's not like you can pick the French school or the West African school or the Japanese school when you're an American looking to enter a school in your country. Anyway I think I should stop talking about this because I really don't know much about culinary schools, I just meant it as a loose analogy.
It's not much different than people who aimlessly go to college without a specific goal in mind. It's a hilariously reckless thing to do and really naive.
All of these schools are really upfront about what their curriculum is before you apply.
Are we really advocating for catering to people who do not do their due diligence?
Maybe we can agree that there's concerns on both sides. You shouldn't join a college without researching it, and colleges should try their best to represent themselves as transparently as possible.
Personally I also hold college administrators to higher standards than high school students.
I’ve noticed this to be a common criticism of collections of western thought. It has some validity.
Do you know of any similar lists for eastern thought? I know of some of the big eastern authors but I’d love an equivalently better list of “Great Books” for the eastern tradition.
I don't, I meant to ask about that. I'm sure there are similar lists, I wonder if there are good ones in English though.
I really don't have a problem with a collection of Western thought, I just feel like this is pretty explicitly framed as a complete education, the greatest ideas in history, etc. Just be open about what the focus is and what it leaves out.
This reads like it is a statement about today's press
> Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
It's just so sad. The biggest one lately for me has been watching the riots which are happening all over the US. The really crazy thing is that all of these things are livestreamed usually by 10s of people in every city, who are standing a few feet from the people burning buildings and attacking people. You can virtually attend all of these things from your office.
To watch buildings burning, people chanting that they want to abolish the police, or burn peoples homes "fire fire gentrifier.", "out of your homes and into the streets" (while throwing things at windows, spray painting the outsides of homes, and shooting fireworks at homes), "all cops are bastards" etc.
And then to see reported in the news that these people are "peaceful". It's a sort of paranoid schizophrenia that I think we're seeing. People are watching their own cities burn, then reading CNN say that it's all fake, and that there is such a thing as peaceful arson, or a peaceful riot, that somehow looting is justified, and repeating that.
The news isn't just wrong at this point, they are actively trying to mislead people. It's really, really awful.
Don't think that just because you're your own editor you can't be deceived by editing. You're feeding yourself with the material that you're seeking out.
edit: just spend a day only looking up the millions peacefully marching, rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams. (Also, give me some information about the people you've seen attacking and burning private residences, because I don't know of a single example of this.)
After the day you can go back to watching what you normally watch, but if you can't find all of these boring people walking through the streets with signs, I don't know what to tell you. If the millions protesting actually had the aim of burning middle-class people out of their homes, middle-class people would have been burned out of their homes.
If there's any problem imo, it's that the protests are generally unfocused street wandering. If there were a specific focus or target, they would be effective at accomplishing that target. But when the target becomes anything other than generalized racism, the ad-hoc coalitions fall apart.
> I don't think anyone is claiming the protests are 100% peaceful.
Some people certainly are, I've heard a few people who attended the riots in Seattle claim the police were the only ones rioting. They're very adamant about that 'only' and any evidence to the contrary is met with "well he's a cop in disguise." It's a case of No True Protestor.
It's very tiresome when people demand you believe their transparent bullshit.
I think your comment here perfectly illustrates exactly the problem I'm talking about.
>rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams.
These aren't "right wing livestreams". It's people, at the protests, with cameras. Some of the bigger ones are people like Unicorn Riot, who has been active in Minneapolis for quite some time, and Regg Ikagnedo.
In some cases, the "press" end up being protestors themselves and end up fighting with the police. I really struggle to understand why you would cast any of this as right wing.
Indeed. And the fact that large scale peaceful protests are happening is irrelevant to the point here. The fact is that some violent protests are happening, but some of the media is flatly denying there is any violence happening whatsoever.
Exactly - but they do it because "the other side" is trying to show protests as exclusively violent because it serves the narrative that "normal" and "peaceful" people don't have reasons to protest, only violent criminals. So it's a vicious cycle where objectivity is nowhere near the top of priorities, which is naive to expect even outside of it, given how mainstream media functions and is funded today.
What? Are you seriously claiming that all of the livestreams that display riots are from right wind people? And even if they were, would it mean that they are fake or what?
Anyway, you can just go and see some of the aftermath images that the media publish.
If someone was peaceful all day and then commits murder, maybe the murder only takes 5 minutes, or 30 seconds ... would you proceed to characterize their day as mostly peaceful?
I mean, mathematically yes, but it points to how this word ‘mostly’ is what journalism teaches is a weasel-word. It renders the statement meaningless.
Not at all, I am protesting an abuse of the language that makes for a nearly Orwellian level of nonsense in thinking and speech.
‘Most of the protestors were non-violent’ is an intelligible and probably accurate statement.
‘Mostly peaceful protests’ first of all intrinsically refers to the protest as a singular entity, not addressing the individuality. That’s not my doing, that’s in the phrase, making the protest the subject, as opposed to the people.
Secondly if you reread what I wrote, my main complaint is that the word ‘mostly’ is what journalistic editors refer to as a ‘weasel-world’. Weasel words make a statement that sounds descriptive but in fact could apply to almost anything.
Moving past semantics, it is worth noting that the violent protestors would be completely ineffectual without masses of nonviolent protestors to hide among.
Anyway, I would love it if this writing falls on receptive eyes, I am concerned that the implication you made: that what I am writing is bigoted, could indicate you are not very interested in what I actually mean.
That does not match my experience at all with the many peaceful protests in SF lately. Your sources may be cherry-picking to push a certain political narrative.
I'm genuinely happy that SF is seeing peaceful protests, but I spent 2 weeks driving through National Guard checkpoints in my city due to violent unrest, and I'm aware of at least 5 other cities who were similarly affected. Minimizing the presence of violence on either side is wrong. The "few bad apples" narrative doesn't work for cops or protesters, or we wouldn't be seeing what we're seeing.
The complete disregard for locality and generalizations over an entire continent-sized country don't help either. It's like if a report on the Belarus election situation was used to insist the entirety of the EU was collapsing, while at the same time a report over protests in, I dunno, Sweden was used to show that everything in Belarus is peaceful.
The police and the general population have very different flavors of bad apple.
The "good" protestors have no ability nor obligation to remove or control the "bad" ones. It's shameful that some see fit to dismiss the message of them all for the actions of a few. And anyway, the goodness or badness of violent or riotous protests through the lens of history is more than a little bit complicated.
The police do have such an ability and obligation. They are organized and they are in a position of power. It is shameful that some see fit to excuse the entire enterprise because not all cops are bad.
It's really disheartening. Until recently I lived in Capitol Hill, Seattle, 4 or 5 blocks away from CHAZ/CHOP. I saw with my own eyes what was happening. I saw with my own eyes buildings get set on fire multiple times within a block of my apartment. I saw with my own eyes the riots, looting, violence, nightly political shows of force. Just two days ago they were molotov cocktailing a police precinct. There's even video evidence of all of this.
Yet all I read about on mainstream news is how it's actually mostly peaceful. I see Facebook friends who live 2000 miles away from Seattle re-posting news articles about how there's nothing really going on in Seattle. But I've seen with my own eyes what's going on.
It's really approaching a 1984 level of situation, where we're expected to just believe whatever we're told, even if we obviously see the problems. Where everybody is supposed to just accept what the media is telling us, rather than what we can see is happening. If they want something to disappear (like rioters throwing molotov cocktails) they just don't report on it, and it ceases to exist. But you can bet if a Republican starting throwing molotovs for their political beliefs it'd be front-page CNN for days on end. It's all so political and so manipulative.
It's not that I don't believe you, it's that I would love to see the videos of this happening and not just you promising me super hard that you saw it with my own eyes (which you somehow dropped 4 times in your post)
I've had people online tell me that I definitely could not have seen the numerous peaceful protests that have happened in Portland, and that I'm a lying shill for observing that the city I live in is in fact not a burnt-out hellhole patrolled by antifa death squads.
Your profile is 4 months old, right around when the riots started in Minneapolis. You have 0 karma points. Several of your comments are dead/flagged. I'm wondering if you're some kind of political shill.
To be clear, it is not that bad, which is the point. Many cities protested without these issues. Most protesters are nonviolent. Most cops are not directly evil (murder, assault, intimidation).
Probably because what happens on a single city street or block isn't reflective of the thousands of other streets and blocks in the city and the dozens of people involved aren't reflective of the thousands upon thousands who are peaceful and justifiably angry about the current state of policing in the USA.
I love this part: “I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.“
When I read the headlines or scan articles here on HN I’m under the impression that I know things and understand things, but it’s really just surface level.
I like the idea of ignoring news and instead read quarterly long form magazines or books. The really important stuff will bubble to the surface and be examined more intelligently.
Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to. I realize it's a borderline case, but a username like that is going to forever exert a trollish skew on every thread (especially on this site, given the particular celebrity you're referencing) and we've learned that it's better to deal with this earlier than later, so I've banned the account. Happy to rename and unban it if you want to pick a more neutral username.
I would pay quite a bit for a newspaper in Jefferson's proposed format. To be quite certain that something is true for current events, the reports on those events would likely have to be delayed days or weeks after they broke. I would be fine with that and is the complete opposite of today's instant, viral seeking, click-bait, emotionally charged media landscape.
Edit:It would be even better if this paper was connected to a prediction market where people could bet real money on if the "Truths" and "Probabilities" events will be shown to be false at certain time steps in the future.
The closest thing might be the bloomberg terminal. It costs 2k a month, but you can get a news feed of the topics you care about and it will be accurate and factual. And then people instantly make bets based on that news.
That was a "hard to believe this is true, but it is in Bloomburg" moment for me.
A nice summary of the situation a year after the article came out in 2018 can be found here[1]. I wonder what their rational for not retracting the story. Just one little line somewhere that few would notice would have put the controversy to rest, but if they did it now. so late after the fact, it would just add to the intrigue instead of diffuse it.
2k a month is not in my current (one can dream) budget for news sources, but I would like to check one out sometime. I don't need the real time option, which is much of what people pay the 2k for, so maybe a 15 minute delay option, like there used to be with free stock quotes, could be a lot cheaper.
Whenever I think of media, I keep going back to Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter. It seems a very appropriate metaphor that there is no personal ill-will on the part of the reporter but still the quill just keeps writing in a scandalous way.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadWell ain't this the cold, hard truth, eh HN? How many times have we seen science and technology just completely butchered, twisted, manipulated, or sometimes, all three, by the "truth-seeking journalists" over there at the establishment media companies? Yet we [willfully] ignorantly turn the page to the next section, say on sports or local affairs, and assume we are being fed facts.
Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag.
This submissions feels more like launching point for arguing, little value to community.
And since you brought up feelings, this reply to my post feels like I may have struck a nerve with one of the aforementioned "establishment media companies" that you may hold near and dear to your heart. Is this how constructive conversation works?
How about this: let's talk about the situation I alluded to in my original comment, something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Something that has countless documented occurrences in (sorry to use this word again) establishment media companies. Does this meet your criteria for providing value to the community?
Newspapers are no different than anything else. Errors are found in all writing.
My only points are: Evaluating truth based on the identity of the source instead of the content in question is not a good approach. Journals, thesis can and are all written with errors and misleading information.
I stand by original comment that this thread and the content was put here to cause injury to the a persons confidence that they can know what is happening in the world from reading the news. Which is a very particular viewpoint.
That's pretty flimsy evidence to accuse somebody of wrongthink.
Use of the phrase "establishment media companies" seems like poor evidence for accusing somebody of being dangerous. But perhaps I misread your comment and the remark about red flags had nothing to do with your previous remark about dangerous people?
Okay.
> Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag.
Wait. Aren't you doing what you say is the "more dangerous"?
> This submissions feels more like launching point for arguing, little value to community.
So lets nip it in the bud and prevent discussion? Your comment feels like an attempt to curtail an interesting discussion before it happens because it threatens your own bubble and prejudices.
So, similar concerns, different approaches that yield very different results.
Tribalism coming out in force with these downvotes. This is why there's a walkaway movement.
This is a network that literally had to settle a libel suit and has more coming.
What else do news agencies have to make money?
The could sell stories and news for a subscription. But the news can be had for free in other places.
They can't really sell classifieds anymore since Craigslist, Facebook, and forums have taken those posting monies away.
I posit that people are willing to pay for quality journalism that talks about a larger problem, but not for as-it-happens news. The latter has become a race to the bottom and first-out-the-door incentives drive it even lower (social media has certainly contributed immensely to this).
However, certain products, while not being economically viable, can be socially necessary, so alternative models need to be found. News obviously falls in this category, similarly to public transport, healthcare and education. In those cases, other means of supporting the product can be found - usually, direct state intervention.
Totally agree. News can be paid for via government support (BBC), direct public support via donations (NPR, PBS), support from foundations (CSPAN), subscriptions (Atlantic, FT, WSJ). Advertising is the worst way — and if news is of great value, we should pay with money rather than attention AND money.
Patronage model, which (often also with subscription tiers on top of free content) is what bigger non-advertising media outlets seem to use; this works better if you qualify as a nonprofit with tax-advantaged donations, so may not be as useful for for-profit firms, but it's certainly a way that news organizations can exist and pay their staff and bills without advertising.
The BBC has, at times, been pretty good.
Spoilers, it's still shit. The biggest problem with CNN is the shitty writing. CNN articles seem to be written for an audience of borderline illiterate idiots. Do yourself a favor and read the NYTimes instead. The biases there are basically the same, you're getting the mainstream American centrist take on things, with the difference being the NYTimes hires people who actually know how to write. CNN is dailymail-tier.
CNN articles seem like they were written by highschoolers and rubber stamped by editors who can't be bothered to read anything.
I don't believe it. Show me a quote from an authority at the NY Times admitting the paper has a "Socialist" bias.
The problem is compounded by social feeds (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that are engineered to only show you information you already agree with being the primary method of consumption. And then the comments within the article or accompanied in the social platform further drive home the biases.
Traditional print journalism, while never perfect or completely accurate, at least presented a consistent and uniform experience for all readers. The news cycle was extended to provide more time for fact checking and information/quote gathering. And the structure of the paper was clear: news, opinion, entertainment, etc. These never mixed. And corrections were clear and available in the same place in future issues.
That doesn't mean biases never existed, but the expectations were much clearer and there was less of an ability to focus on a segment of a market and ignore the views of others.
> Trump suggests voters should commit fraud
> Bill Barr's indefensible defense of 2020 voter fraud
> Officers covered a Black man's head before he stopped breathing, video shows
> Dr. Fauci says it's conceivable but not likely a vaccine will be ready in October
The only one I think is questionable is the second, but even that one doesn't seem like it contains factual inaccuracies to me
A thorny issue to discuss, but given the current state of "journalism", I think it's worthwhile.
How much healthy information vs how much sugary fructose information!
Going to repeat this to hopefully spread the idea.
> Trump suggests voters should commit fraud
The source that article links is another one of CNN's own articles:
> Trump appears to encourage North Carolinians to vote twice to test the system
The first paragraph of that article then gets closer to the truth:
> President Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to encourage people in North Carolina to vote twice -- once by mail and once in person -- during the November general election to purportedly double check that their initial vote was counted, ...
Of course, that's not "double" checking. That's checking. If you mail a ballot and never check, then you haven't checked.
Moreover... "Appeared." If the author believes Trump was saying that, then say Trump said it. However, the author knows that's not true, so the author said he "appeared" / his words could be twisted. Utter cowardice.
Then that links to this source, which gets even closer:
> President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday during his visit to Wilmington that people who vote by absentee ballot should “check their vote” by attempting to vote in person as well.
> https://www.wect.com/2020/09/02/wects-jon-evans-interview-wi...
Then finally 3-4 links deep WECT links to a f-in Twitter post:
https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/13012842454495764...
Where Trump clearly explains that people should go to their polling places so that the poll workers can check the voter rolls and confirm whether their ballots have been received. If so, then voters will be turned away. If no, they'll already be at the polling place and will be able to cast a ballot. You, I, WECT, and CNN all know that Trump isn't saying to lie about whether you mailed a ballot. To say otherwise is to lie.
Trump is so confused and unclear sometimes that it's hard to tell exactly what he's trying to say, hence the "appeared.". What he says is newsworthy, and some of the most likely interpretations are shocking, so it can't just be ignored. It wouldn't surprise me if he advised his supporters to do something that clearly amounted to voter fraud without actually understanding that it was fraud.
> Where Trump clearly explains that people should go to their polling places so that the poll workers can check the voter rolls and confirm whether their ballots have been received. If so, then voters will be turned away. If no, they'll already be at the polling place and will be able to cast a ballot. You, I, WECT, and CNN all know that Trump isn't saying to lie about whether you mailed a ballot. To say otherwise is to lie.
I don't know how it is in North Carolina, but where I live they never ask if you've already mailed in a ballot at the polling place. They just ask for your name, look it up in the voter roll, and cross it off, and give you a ballot.
North Carolina accepts absentee ballots postmarked on election day (https://www.ncsbe.gov/voting/vote-mail/five-steps-vote-mail-...), so following Trump's advice could potentially bypass the poll worker check if the poll workers are like those in my state. I believe North Carolina has other checks to prevent double absentee/in-person votes from being counted, but fraud is still fraud if the deception doesn't work.
It's irrelevant what he's "trying to say". If he writes "covfefe", the accurate reporting is "he wrote covfefe", not "he appeared to have written covfefe".
Qualifying something with "he appeared to say" is just a way to write anything. Turns out it's not at all what he said? "Well, it appeared that way to me, don't tell me how I have to perceive reality!"
You're asking for a raw transcript, but that's not what the news is. For instance, when the OJ trial was in the news, do you think the papers should have just printed the court reporters transcripts verbatim? The news make judgements about what's important, then summarizes what happened and adds context necessary to understand it, which requires figuring out what he was "trying to say."
> If he writes "covfefe", the accurate reporting is "he wrote covfefe", not "he appeared to have written covfefe".
Actually, if you want to be really nitpicky, "he appeared to have written covfefe" is the most accurate. No one saw him type that word. It could have been some social media aide instead.
The biggest headlines for you aren't the biggest headlines for me. And I get quite a different view on mobile than I do on desktop. On mobile I get blasted by the coronavirus and economy sections, which are mostly gloom-and-doom (the article about a possible vaccine is far far down the list in a different subsection). On desktop those sections are there front and center, but the other stuff is visible too, so it's not quite so in-your-face.
CNN has multiple articles/videos about the exact same topics, but the headline---although any individual headline arguably represent its article technically accurately---are not equivalent to each other.
Consider:
"Dow and Nasdaq plunge after record highs" vs "Stock Market Bloodbath: Down and Nasdaq plunge"
"Trump suggests voters should commit fraud" vs "Trump encourages people to vote twice -- which is illegal" vs "Trump appears to encourage North Carolinians to vote twice to test the system"
So, from my point of view very different pictures can be painted with just:
1. Choice of headline.
2. Choice of presentation/order.
3. Choice of material to cover.
My takeaway is that, no, I can't trust it. A charitable interpretation is that the headlines are technically true, but designed to get me to click on them. That's not truthful. (Other interpretations may also be plausible, but would require more evidence.)
Edit: List formatting
Instead I use Wikipedia once a month : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:August_2020_events
The once-per-month approach is an interesting one, which I would imagine removes even more of the lingering "urgency" to keep up with the news treadmill. How long have you been doing it?
And yes DeMorgan's law here too.
Trump suggests voters should commit fraud; an uncharitable read, but basically true -- Trump suggested voters in NC vote by mail and in person as part of his contention that vote by mail is easily exploitable by fraudsters. I suspect when this blows up he'll say he was joking, but the words were literally true and nothing about the context of him saying it (let alone the broader context of his attacks on vote by mail and election integrity generally) suggests it's especially a joke. I agree that this is an uncharitable framing.
BREAKING Facebook will limit some ads in the week before the election, but it will let politicians run ads with lies. Clicked on the article and this seems like an accurate summary of events; Facebook will not get into the business of policing lies in political ads generally, but will limit them in the last week of the campaign
Analysis: Donald Trump is already working the debate refs; Analysis implies it's an opinion piece. My biggest objection here is the style of putting asterisks around the word already instead of using <em> tags. It looks like the biggest objection to the headline is that it's the Trump campaign who are working the refs, not Trump himself. I think that kind of "royal we" thing is pretty common, though.
Analysis: Bill Barr's indefensible defense of 2020 voter fraud. This title is all sorts of mangled, the actual thesis is that Barr is alleging systematic mail vote fraud including by foreign actors with no evidence to support it. That seems in keeping with past statements he's made.
Barr interview gets tense when pressed on mail-in voting; this appears to just be a link to the video discussed in the piece immediately above.
AG William Barr: "I don't think there are two justice systems"; this is Barr discussing racial inequality in justice. The headline is a direct quote and surely Barr knew to the extent that this is an inflammatory argument, he was making it.
Opinion: What Barr could have up his sleeve for Trump; dumb title, the op-ed piece's thesis is that the Justice Department customarily avoids announcing any major activity within 60 days of the election to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and that Barr might not respect this precedent. I don't see strong evidence here and as an editor I think I'd have pressed the writer to revise the argument a bit, but it doesn't seem false per se?
Police officer poisoned by Novichok in UK issues cryptic tweet on Navalny; the tweet is clearly deliberately cryptic, and the headline seems true. I would argue this is a bit of a nothingburger as a story.
Pelosi says she was set up by salon owner; Pelosi's defence here seems quite thin. She responds very poorly to criticism and this specific story I think is the kind of personal gotcha that tends to get a bunch of traction. But she did literally say this, so...
Officers covered a Black man's head before he stopped breathing, video shows; there's clearly an implied frame here that the officers action was police abuse, so you could maybe argue that a fairer frame would contextualize the actions better, but again seems literally true
Laid off and now evicted amid Covid-19, a Houston father contemplates homelessness; story seems true, although you can argue whether this is adequately framed in terms of how common or uncommon it is
The US jobs market is gradually recovering from the pandemic lockdown; this seems basically true. We're still down a bunch from highs, but recovery is happening. The headline attributes the job losses to the lockdown in a way that is causally clearer than I think the evidence suggests, but it exists in the realm of truth certainly.
CNN political director: This is a problem for Trump; truly awful headline, and it links to a video whose thesis is basically that Trump is behind in po...
Damn.
> I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time;
Double Damn.
Andrew Pettegree's Invention of the News covers this in much greater detail: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/19/invention-news...
One other interesting anecdote from the book: For quite some time, the identity of who was conveying the news was paramount. A nobleman's wild story would be given more stock from contemporary audiences than several eyewitness accounts from commoners.
TV / Radio news is little better than entertainment.
The trouble the news industry is having is that you can get an equal amount of information from social media without all the holier-than-thou garbage coming from news anchors.
Not really a replacement for quality journalism.
The trouble (in my opinion) is that major networks don't really offer much in the way of "quality journalists."
They've mostly devolved into getting hot takes from pundits and "rah rah our team is great".
I listen to (and donate to) NPR (Iowa Public Radio specifically) because I think they are about as good as you can get for "quality journalism", but even their work devolves into garbage as soon as politics or culture come into play.
It probably doesn't help that a few years ago they redid their program structure to focus less on news and more on "think pieces" [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2018/08/16/6392099...
===
Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon have the day off from Hell, so they go up to check out the Washington DC military parade.
"Look at those M1s," says Alexander, "if only I'd had them I wouldn't have had to prematurely declare victory in southern asia!"
"Look at those F-35s," says Caesar, "if only I'd had them I would've captured all of persia!"
"Look at this cable station," says Napoleon, peering into the window of the Union Trust Bar, "if only I'd had it no one would ever have heard of Waterloo!"
Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVbH1BVXywY
On a side note, I wonder if Thomas Jefferson had so low an opinion of the press pre-1800 (before he was elected and when he was defending the right of the press to be critical of the Adams administration)
A kid in my class was the grandson of a well known politician. A newspaper ran with a completely made up story about how it was his bus line, and how the grandfather had panicked. A few days later a fact checker called his mom. Not sure if they ran a retraction. It seemed incredibly disrespectful to those who were on the bus. Two died.
About a year after that, some kids that I knew were arrested for cannabis use. The story made the news. Some of it was true, but some was made up. The made up parts were embellishments, they made the story better. Age gaps were exaggerated, romantic narratives inserted...
I think most people who are in the vicinity of a news story irl have such experiences. Often the lies are minor, but just like with ordinary people who tell lies... the little lies make you disbelieve everything they say.
We kind of expect this from book authors and documentarians. Their job is to get a good narrative going. No one thinks "Tiger King" is an honest telling.
IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient.
TJ should have understood this. He was a pamphleteer after all. The rights of man is pure fiction, to quote Yuval Noah Harari. If you dissect a person, you will find no rights inside.
Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously.
I guess we have define what ideas we expect the news to deliver.
The narratives that these deaths fit into make them meaningful. The stories of people dying of covid. People dying of political violence.
If drug deaths or suicide rates are increasing, and it's been making news then associated deaths are a part of this narrative.
I say all this because in my limited experience, the embellishments come from average Joes who are eager to say such things to reporters.
> The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
So solemn, so respectful and complete bs :D
I've seen it used in other films, too but the only example I can really think of is maybe the Blair Witch Project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclai...
Also
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DanBrowned
In every single instance the facts were grossly misrepresented and in the three cases at Vice/Motherboard told the complete opposite story of the actual truth.
Vice's article about "Sugar Weasel, the One and Only Clown Escort" is a complete fabrication (well, other than his own self-delusions) and any basic fact checking shows the story to be false immediately.
This is the problem. There's plenty of newsrooms doing solid work. You can't do this any more than you can talk about restaurants while describing fast food burgers and a fancy tapas bar in the same sentence.
There's more interesting problems here. Outlets with actual scientists on staff do better science coverage, local institutions can cover a crisis with a better grasp on the context than a global organization that's sending reporters there for the first time. But before we can have that conversation we need to paint with a narrower brush.
Often enough I can check their sources and check multiple points of view on the same topic. The problem is that's a lot of work. Other people I might want to educate about the facts haven't put in that work -- they've just watched CNN/MSNBC/FOX or read the NYT/etc.
And most of those get it wrong.
I wonder whether in ten years television will regularly use deepfakes when "interviewing" people, and we will feel equally hopeless about it.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
You open the newspaper to an article on some subject that you know well, because your salary depends on it. In Tourre's case, finance. In mine, tech. You read the article and see that the journalist isn't a subject matter expert and has made an error about some fact. Often, the error is so small that it doesn't affect the story at all. I call these the "well, actually, some streets are sheltered from the rain" stories. In any case, you dismiss the entire story and stop reading it, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if your technical expertise somehow gave you insight into a place you've never been and a culture you've never interacted with. You turn the page, and forget the gaps in your own knowledge.
I think this is a fantastic comment, especially given the cavalcade of robotic quotations of that "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" passage that happen whenever the press comes up. One should definitely read the newspaper with a certain degree of skepticism, but I feel that people who take the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" to heart often get into weird places (like thinking that reading raw scientific papers is somehow a replacement for reading the newspaper, as if anyone could actually keep up with them in more than a narrow area and science is the only thing that matters).
While I think the self-interest from the Sinclair quote is definitely a reason to doubt "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" dismissals (i.e. maybe the story actually is right, but you think it's wrong because you have biased take), I think the problem you're getting at is ego. A lot of people want to be the guy who is smarter or sees things more clearly than others, so they latch on to ideas that let them superficially dismiss things that others trust as a way of proving their greater insight (maybe only to themselves).
I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history. First rough drafts are always going to have errors, but you'll be the last to know if you wait for those to be corrected before reading. If you keep up with the rough drafts, you'll see the corrections as the stories unfold.
Only, it's not what "the news" are. One can reconstruct the history using "the news" as source material, but it's a grave error to think that "the news" are "a first draft of history."
Try to find how the media covered the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq in 2003, and how they wrote many years later about the same events. What you believe to be a "first draft" was historically completely false. But it was at the time used as an excuse to start the war, which are both now verified historical facts -- both the fake "news" in the major media and the start of the war.
If you are interested in the topic you can even read how the local pressure on journalists makes them "following the editorial policy" even when they know that what they write about is false.
In short, there's no substitute for treating the news as only "pieces of information" which have to be verified, behind which could be different interests and which surely don't have to be true at all.
> Only, it's not what "the news" are. One can reconstruct the history using "the news" as source material, but it's a grave error to think that "the news" are "a first draft of history."
> Try to find how the media covered the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq in 2003, and how they wrote many years later about the same events. What you believe to be a "first draft" was historically completely false. But it was at the time used as an excuse to start the war, which are both now verified historical facts -- both the fake "news" in the major media and the start of the war.
I don't really see how that contradicts the idea that the news is a rough first draft of history at all. First drafts have errors, and you've pointed out some errors. Similar things could even happen with established history (for instance a later discovery proving some document that the old history relied on was a forgery or some account unreliable, etc.). You shouldn't expect perfect accuracy with the news, and to criticize it for not being perfectly accurate is to misunderstand what it is.
I gave example where the news were completely and utterly false compared to what the real truth was -- that's not just "not perfectly accurate" but completely opposite of the truth.
Really? My memory is that the media reports made it very clear that the "weapons of mass destruction" narrative was false; that was what the whole David Kelly affair was about.
It doesn't help that much though, because the overlap between the two is a lot smaller than you would think, and a significant part of that overlap is content provided by a press service (which is often wrong itself).
Sometimes I wonder whether it even makes sense to try to follow the news. News by definition cannot be objective in how it describes the world, even when factually accurate, because the most important things in the world aren't the things that are novel and interesting, they're the things that are commonplace and boring. Maybe following the news makes us less informed because it biases us to pay attention to the wrong things.
On the other hand, how else do you get informed about going affairs? Most long-form books on a subject are themselves heavily biased to the author's viewpoint.
"The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowlege with the lies of the day."
For hundreds of years, anyone with personal knowledge of a topic-reported-on knows much if not most of the reporting is wrong.
It had an opposite effect on me. Maybe because it wasn't a specialized are. It was just regular news.
> Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously.
You have a right to your opinion, of course, but frankly I find this revolting. There's a huge difference between recognizing that imperfect intellectual integrity and flawed critics are common, and dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity as boring, unimportant, and hypocritical.
You don't have to deceive people to be interesting and successful. You just don't. And I think plenty of people manage to not live their lives that way.
">* dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity*" is far from true. Intellectual integrity is crucial. I a deep sense, it's the main thing that matters.
I mean that a newspaper is a newspaper. A pamphlet is a pamphlet. An Encyclopedia is... etc. Moralizing about it doesn't help much. As TJ says in his speech.
Anyway, I mean this "for one's own sake." Our own Intellectual honesty is something most of us think we just have. In practice, it's a skill. Call outs like this aren't a good way of practicing it, IMO.
I'm saying that the standard TJ sets in the speech, and that most people instinctively judge newspapers by is an unreasonable one for a newspaper. He basically says this himself in the speech. Newspapers are not purely factual, by nature. If you want simple facts, you can read the wire services that newspapers often report based on.
Meanwhile, we wouldn't judge other things by this standard. The pertinent example (considering who is making this statement) is a political pamphlet. Honesty, intellectual and otherwise, is important here too. Some pamphleteers are more or less honest than others. But, we don't expect a purely factual and politically neutral pamphlet. When Jefferson wrote his own stuff, pamphlets, autobiography, etc.... he was working within that medium and the nature of the medium dictates a lot.
This position sometimes reduces to "newspaper are just illegitimate." I mean, if you want statistics on the epidemic... those are available. Read wikipedia^. No narrative. No hype. There are plenty who also tabulate and summarize these for you, including google. They just aren't newspapers.
It's (IMO) either intellectually dishonest or naive to want or expect a newspaper to do exactly what wikipedia does and no more. That isn't what a newspaper is.
In practice, this type of argument (I don't think this applies to TJ's speech) is usually made when someone dislikes a narrative. Either that or they're just sick of bad journalism. But, "just print the facts" isn't a newspaper. Newspaper write narratively. That's what they are. You can get "just facts" if you want. You just need to read something that isn't a newspaper.
^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_dat...
We have journalists entering the workforce who have a good chance of having never consumed or witnessed any real journalism in their entire life.
So many of publications we used to know and love employed a sufficient amount of _professional_ copywriters, fact checkers, editors and so forth.
Editors were happy to let journalists take their time on stories that might not pay off for several years knowing it would pay to get things right.
Now-a-days, unless you work at the NYT, Guardian, or other company with mega-bucks and a robust subscription program you will probably never see a fact-checker, photographer, copywriter, and your editor will be not much more than an assembly line manager who may or may not care about the quality of the journalism you produce. If they do care, the likely have no leverage over the moneyed-interests who own the company.
A lot of people these days are not willing to pay for good journalism because they've been tricked into thinking they get "just as good" for free, which they most obviously do not.
And when they "discover" that their free news is run by rank amateurs who don't actually care about journalism and produce the kinds of things the OP rails against, it often seems to fester into a complete denunciation of the entire enterprise.
In fact, it is my belief that this is actually the goal of many unscrupulous practitioners of crappy journalism.
They know they can bankroll and support a crappy "news site" with the left hand and with the right hand use that to slowly tear down the firms putting out rigorous journalism, giving actual facts to citizens which show their ideology and politicians are nothing more than kleptocratic idiots.
More likely, it is due to the progressing obsession with profit, metrics-driven businesses. Papers are for-profit companies, so any change they can do that help their bottom line will always win out. We can make more money if we run aggressive titles? Done. We can save money by getting rid of seasoned professionals and people won't stop reading and looking at our ads? Awesome!
Not to mention, the extent to which journalism has declined is probably exaggerated. The style is obviously changing, and it may be more popular and crass. But journalism has always been extremely biased for the status quo, with many events that ruin the common narrative being systematically ignored. A lot of the problems caused by the US military and companies in South America was long ignored in mainstream journalism in the US in the 70s and 80s, just as one example. Watergate was huge news for years, COINTELPRO was quickly forgotten.
I'm familiar with HN commenters not reading the linked article, but this is the first time I'm coming across a commenter not reading the title.
I guess I should be thankful. It's a valuable lesson to learn at a young age.
Spend a little time on /r/conspiracy and consider that most of these people are not joking and their thinking is _entirely_ narrative driven.
1. They often got a lot of details wrong - details very relevant to how the public would perceive him. Easily verifiable details, BTW. A lot of it was just someone on the law enforcement/justice side making statements that they did not bother to verify.
1a. Some of these false facts are now part of his Wikipedia page, with several references to these news outlets. Be wary of facts on Wikipedia if the source is journalism.
2. The national news have a hive mind mentality. Between the arrest and the trial, he would suddenly become headline news, and often with no event triggering it. As if they all suddenly decided (on the same day) to just write a story about him. The reality is more likely laziness - one outlet decided to make it big news and others didn't want to be left behind.
2a. As an aside, another well known freelance journalist said this is common. He once had the scoop on a big story and was trying to sell it to the top news outlets. The most common question was "Is anyone else running this?" followed by "We don't want to be the only ones to run this." The concern was about being wrong in the end, but the facts were easily verifiable and the news outlet didn't want to go through the trouble.
2b. The random big news about my friend with no trigger? A number of times the same news outlet had reported the very same thing at the time of arrest months prior. It was basically recycled news, but presented as if it was breaking news.
3. The local newspapers were the best. They didn't report false facts - they verified them. They had the most detail (continual coverage over months rather than random sensational headlines).
That was 20 years ago. Something similar happened to another friend of mine recently. Half of the latest news reports about him have ridiculously wrong facts (year of arrest, time spent in prison, etc). Stuff that is trivially verifiable. His case was not as high profile. Lesson learned: News stories that are not as big are a lot more likely to have wrong information.
This experience (particularly the false facts) is why I'm adamant about suspending judgment prior to the trial. My sources (news) are unreliable.
(BTW, that first person was easily acquitted - the defense called only one witness, because the prosecution's case was so flawed).
What's funny though is that although this is true, we still tend to believe all other news stories as though they are 100% true.
When I read the article, I was horrified that two of the four facts, including a misquote of what I said, were wrong.
I was not misquoted or otherwise misrepresented in the first three cases. In all of these cases I found the reporting to be accurate.
I do notice mistakes when news publications write about topics relevant to my expertise. But these mistakes often (though not always) would not change the conclusions of the article when corrected. A lot of the mistakes I notice are elementary ones like confusing units of energy and power. They indicate that the writer lacks a subject matter background but they don't invalidate the whole article. When an article says "The new wind farm will generate 180,000 megawatts per year, enough to supply 10,000 Texas households" it's clear enough that "180,000 megawatt hours per year" is what should have been written.
I know that other people have different experiences, where they find that their first hand knowledge of events has been completely twisted by news reporting. Or where their subject of expertise is reported incorrectly in mainstream publications all the time, not only in details but in the major conclusions. I wonder if these howlers are prevalent in online discussions of news accuracy simply because the howlers make for more vivid memories that will spur people to share their experiences in comments.
What a fatuous remark. If you dissect a person, will you find numbers? Concepts? Why would you ever expect to find rights in a man as if they were organs? Naturally, a materialistic view of the universe will lead you down this path, but it's such a patently incoherent metaphysics that you can only wonder about the sanity of the materialist.
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letter...
I've often wondered if the protections afforded to the press in the first amendment of the US Constitution could have benefited from greater clarity. What I mean by this is that I sincerely doubt the authors intended to protect lies, deceit and libel. It would make no sense whatsoever to create a law that effectively says "You can lie cheat and steal all you want and this shall be protected by the highest law in the land".
Here's the text from the first amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Some might say: Well, libel is addressable through other legislation.
Well, yes and no. It just so happens I was involved in a libel case many decades ago. In this case a newsletter (this was before internet days) had given a competitor a monthly column to author. This competitor decided to dedicate one column to attack our company and print a bunch of outright lies about our products. Things like "they don't test", "they ship their customers untested products", etc. I mean, this guy knew nothing about us and yet he focused an entire page to defaming me and my company.
A meeting with my attorney resulted in letters to the publication's entire board as well as the author/competitor. The only way I can characterize the reaction from the other side was "they shit in their pants". I came to learn a libel lawsuit is a very serious and potentially financially crippling event for someone without the means. Large companies can manage them but individuals can lose their home, savings, job, etc.
I wasn't interested in destroying lives or taking their home and savings. They agreed to print a solid retraction, fire the competitor/author and hire someone without skin in the game to pen that column.
Here's the problem: Retractions don't work. We saw an immediate and lasting hit to product sales. It took about a year to recover from the hit piece. Reputation is something that is hard to regain, particularly when people enter a fearful mental state. In retrospect I should have been smarter and should have gone for a financial settlement of sorts to compensate for the damage they caused. Our competitor actually gained sales and status in the industry as a result of this hit piece.
My point is that lies are like climbing to the top of a hill with a feather pillow, ripping it open and letting the winds take the feathers in all directions. Fixing the damage caused by lies requires finding every single feather, which is impossible.
Sometimes I think we need to rethink this one aspect of the first amendment and either modify it or bolster it externally (through separate legislation) in order to prevent the kinds of lies and manipulation that have been a part of the press since, well, according to Jefferson, the very founding of this nation.
I think the authors intended to prevent the Government from being able to declare by fiat what counts as "lies, deceit, and libel". That some people will use their freedom to do wrong is the price we pay for freedom. It's still preferable to the alternative.
You actually describe the right way of dealing with lies, deceit, and libel in a free society later on:
> In retrospect I should have been smarter and should have gone for a financial settlement of sorts to compensate for the damage they caused.
Exactly. Another quote from Jefferson seems apt here: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
A couple of years back I decided to highlight such lies to a group of people I was in regular online conversations with. Friends and people I have known for 20 to 30 years, not strangers. The effort and time required to research and gather the evidence necessary to demonstrate falsehoods in just one story per day was significant enough that I had to quit after a couple of months. Not to mention the fact that writing-up articles on these findings and then discussing them until people understood they had been lied to also consumed a ridiculous amount of time.
The problem with the press engaging in constant lies and manipulation is that the vast majority of the population (I'll guess 99%) consumes without questioning any of it. Which, in turn, means people, over time, develop twisted narratives of reality that serve no useful purpose and do nothing but cause damage to society. The roughly 3.3 million people in the US who might be wiser or take the time to dig for the truth are powerless in rectifying the lies and manipulation. Refer to my feathers into the wind analogy on this last point.
I sincerely doubt anyone would propose we should tolerate the level of lies and manipulation weaponized by mass media today. The difference with respect to 1807 is that everyone is now reachable via their phones and computers through myriad services, with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube perhaps being the main culprits.
I do concede and fully understand that this is an area of law that requires very careful consideration and a soft touch. There isn't a simple fix. I don't like the idea of saying "well, just litigate using existing law" because of then massive asymmetry between these large corporations and the people. This approach actually harms anyone who isn't a millionaire or billionaire.
It would be almost impossible for the average Joe to go up against the major news sources except for the most egregious of cases (where a large law firm would take the case for a piece of the action). In other words, large news operators can utterly destroy your life and massively affect public perception and nothing ever happens to them. The simple proof of this is that they are full of lies today, which means they haven't been challenged and suffered enough financially to change their ways.
Sometimes I think the simple addition of the word "truthful" to the first amendment could be enough. IANAL, so I don't know how that could be detrimental. As a lay person it makes complete sense:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the truthful press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
>"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the truthful press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
And to make it easier for the press the government can establish a Ministry of Truth to determine what is and is not truthful on their behalf.
I know this isn't simple. However, there are things that are simple. Things like taking statements out of context or editing videos/audio to distort what was said to fit a narrative.
What I would like to see are articles with a full list of references and sources for the reader to dig into. In other words, if you can't provide backup for your claims, don't publish it. The TV equivalent for that would be a process through which viewers could access sources via an easy to use link to the TV network's website.
In other words, we ought to demand more from the press. We have the technology to deliver more. Lies and distortion should not be tolerated. The rule should be something like: If you can't confirm your claims and back them up with evidence, don't say or print them.
The other side of that would be that it would be OK to print and broadcast opinion (which can be unverified, even lies) with a clearly visible disclaimer. This could be like the equivalent of the disclaimers in cigarette packs, something like "THIS INFORMATION IS NOT VERIFIED AND COULD BE 100% INACCURATE" at the start and end of every article and prominently displayed on video.
Probably a bunch of silly ideas. I'll admit that having been the subject of libel has made me sensitive to just how destructive this can be. People without this experience tend to discount the lies the press/media float every minute of every day as unimportant. It isn't, but convincing the masses they should demand and somehow require better is a nearly impossible task.
The problem is the first word: "we". Who is "we"? Earlier you said you thought 99% of people believe whatever the media tells them. Anyone in that category doesn't think there's any more to be demanded.
Agreed. Absolutely correct.
Isn't it interesting how if we go deep enough in root cause analysis the answer always seems to be education?
Why do you think education is the solution to this problem? Education by whom? Trying to answer that question just creates the same problem we have now. (In fact, if you look at how public education works, and what the explicitly stated objectives were of the people who created that system, education is the same problem we have now. The media is just another branch of the education system.)
The point isn't that finding Aconcagua and Everest on a blank map of the world prepares you for life. The point is to say that our 18 year old leave school without any real marketable skills, unable to think and analyze arguments, engage in real critical thinking and are utterly ignorant about almost everything outside their home town, not to mention the world.
It should come as no surprise that professional manipulators are able to do as they please with an audience steeped in ignorance and unable to exercise critical thinking. The simplest example I have of this is the unimaginable, unthinkable reality to anyone who has lived in any one of, say, two dozen countries, that you have US universities and US college students and graduates actually believing that Marxism, Socialism and Communism are good things. I mean, I can't think of anything more ignorant than that very, very real condition in US education.
It is laughable beyond description to anyone who has lived in almost any country south of the US border, a bunch of countries in Eastern Europe and a bunch of other countries in Africa and Asia.
And yet the young in the US are graduating from high school without skills in logic and critical thinking and then enter college to be pumped with precisely what millions of people who emigrate to the US or aspire to emigrate to the US are escaping.
If that's not the foundation for disastrous results I don't know what is. And it is all centered around a horrible derailment of our system of education.
Any court case will involve non-trivial cost, workload, and time. Even legal matters that never make it to a court involve non-trivial cost, workload, and time. My wife and I had a condo association threatening us with fines and litigation for something we hadn't done and had shown them proof that we hadn't done; we had to hire a lawyer and spend quite a bit of time, effort, and money just to reach a stalemate until the condo was sold.
However, you can't fix that problem by just passing new laws, because the whole problem is that the way the court system functions does not respect the spirit of the laws to begin with. And it's that way because we citizens have allowed it to get that way, because most people don't have enough dealings with the legal system to (a) see how messed up it is, and (b) see the impact it has on ordinary people who are unlucky enough to have to deal with it.
> The problem with the press engaging in constant lies and manipulation is that the vast majority of the population (I'll guess 99%) consumes without questioning any of it.
And you can't fix that problem by passing new laws either. (I actually don't think the percentage is as high as you say; but I'll agree that it's high enough to be a problem.) The only way to fix it is for enough people to realize that they are being lied to and manipulated and stop consuming the media that is doing it.
> I think the simple addition of the word "truthful" to the first amendment could be enough.
Who gets to decide what a "truthful" press is? Why, the same legal system that we've already established is a mess. So the "truthful" press will end up being...the same press we have now: whoever has enough money to prevail in any legal fight.
I have two family members that have self-radicalized through their consumption of media. One on the left and the other on the right. As you might imagine, one of them lives on CNN/MSNBC and the other on Fox. And, of course, they both use Facebook and are exposed to the many resonant chambers the service offers at both extremes.
It has been truly painful to watch both of them walk deeper and deeper into dark caves of ignorance and hatred fueled by the lies and manipulation each camp produces every minute of every day. We have tried to pull them out of their caves to bring them back to some semblance of reality and failed miserably. The algorithms at play are far more powerful than anyone one could do other than isolating them from society for a year somewhere on earth.
I've said this before, the kinds of algorithms that help you dive deeper into learning how to tile your bathroom, build a table or learn how to use photoshop, the recommendation engines, are horribly suited for matters of politics and related domains. If you are tiling your bathroom it is actually good to be exposed to more and more material related to what you are doing. It will help you learn and do a better job. If, on the other hand, you end-up triggering the "hate Trump" or "hate Biden" (or pick something else) branches of the recommendation engines you are treated to a constant stream of garbage that, unimpeded, results in self radicalization over time.
Other than the race for click dollars, I don't understand why social media companies, google, etc., don't exercise a bit of social responsibility and use some of their AI prowess to avoid these kinds of self radicalizing trips down deeper and darker holes.
Back when I studied Philosophy in high school, many decades ago (not sure kids read the Greeks any more) we read and discussed Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". I never thought I would live through a real-life reenactment of the tale.
being truly independent is a lonely row to hoe in my experience. nobody likes or trusts you, because you're not all in on their side. despite this very real cost, more and more people are adopting an indepedent stance, which i find hopeful.
After all, they aren't usually the ones interjecting political nonsense into discussions every chance they get.
[0] https://archive.org/details/freepress00bellgoog/page/n12/mod...
Also, the news has to compete with entertainment so it's entertaining. It's the first "Reality TV." You may get some information that you can use but the goal is to keep your attention by entertaining you.
Most people would be better informed by reading a newspaper once a week and spending the other free time reading a good book. Everyday news is a waste of time.
If you don't agree, just say why. Don't downvote.
If you don't agree, just say why. Don't downvote.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
If the recession arrives, "the news" will report on the economic bloodbath, credit itself for reporting on the prediction of the recession in a timely manner, and give itself awards for accuracy in reporting.
If the recession does not arrive, "the news" will report on the surprising market strength and why economists predicted the future incorrectly, credit itself for reporting on the inaccuracy of our once-great financial system, and give itself awards for accuracy in reporting.
"X says Y" is objective news. "Y is actually not true" is journalists showing their biases!
"Y is actually not true" is partial, biased journalism, but can also serve as critical information about the truth of Y, or the reliability of X!
The safest bet is to be aware of what the news is claiming, but remember at all times that the news is a signal repeater, not a signal generator. Whenever possible, one must find primary documents or videos.
This is the best quote, because they sensed to be true what we now know is true for pew research data. The more you watch and read the news, the more likely you are to be less informed about the state of things.
This is obviously the case when you recognize that the media focuses on the long tail of interesting topics. The average is never interesting enough to sell clicks/papers, so the entire focus is on outlier events (this is how Trump got focused on and eventually elected).
My reasoning is that there are few other venues that young people, in their formative years, encounter such examples of deep critical thinking. I used to think it snobbery to reference Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, etc. But reading the Republic, Apology, Ethics, etc. really prompts you to think about your life and how it relates to other in a society in a very meaningful way. It also teaches you to be more critical of all ideas.
It seems to me that such perspectives are more important now than they've ever been. Jefferson and others have espoused the idea that an educated populace is required for a functioning democracy. While that may have been true in the 18th century, it is certainly more poignant in a world where people have an instant and unending stream of comment and opinion coming to them wherever they are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_education...
> A mythological education is distinct from the common school subjects. It builds in the mind intuition for second-order effects, for the first lesson a child learns from one hundred stories is that every thing you do will have unintended consequences, something years of schoolwork fails to teach. Myths give us shared art and common culture—a set of characters with which we can play in and enjoy together. In any culture rich with myths, their vocabulary is enlarged far beyond words, to allegories and metaphors. The quality of thought follows.
(To this end I've been writing a book of fables, mostly for my children, but serializing them by newsletter right now, which is turning out more popular than I expected.)
I picked up an old copy of Grimm's Tales on a whim and read some every now and then before bedtime. Also Aesop's fables just to refresh my memory of them. I enjoy them both and think it's a worthwhile format.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
This has been a discussion for some time with my friends, the utility of religion in humanity for social purposes and communications purposes.
I hadn't thought much of the importance of "studying the classics" to the ends of teaching cultural vocabulary, but I do think critical thinking and logic should be core subjects like math and reading.
So I also feel that education, specifically a liberal arts foundation, could broaden people’s minds so that we’re not just shouting at each other, but can actually converse as somewhat rational beings.
We don't even have a clear understanding of what is best, nor do we have an agreement on when each serves its best purpose. The whole thing is a mess.
>The whole thing is a mess.
Then let's use different terms to refer to the reality of these differences. Here's a first crack:
Educating includes broadening minds and encouraging thinking.
Training includes the dictation of knowledge and application of specific skills.
Learning "life-skills" is a specific but important part of training.
All educating includes training, but not all training includes education.
The terms "education" and "training" are often conflated and should not be.
> Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
> Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The about page says "students study the works of history’s greatest thinkers." I mean, come on. There's not a single "great thinker" in all of history outside of Europe, the Roman Empire, and the US? How are you supposed to defend the ideas of Western Civilization if you have no idea what the alternatives are?
It reminds me a little of some culinary schools where the whole curriculum is based on French cooking, and you take like one class on "global cuisine" that covers the entire rest of the world. You can't pick one focus area and claim it's all you need for a full education.
Who said school had anything to do with having a full education? That's kind of the whole point of the unschooling movement.
Culinary Schools primarily focus the curriculum around French cooking because thats the predominant skillset that you will be required to know to work in a volume, commercial kitchen. French cooking training is a broad test of their ability to execute important techniques. It's fitting the curriculum to the students and the expectations that they have.
If you're in culinary school to begin with, you probably care about food and you will be able to teach yourself the rest from that base.
SJC is the same way. They're fitting the curriculum to the expectations and desires of their incoming students. The whole point of that education is to teach you how to think for yourself, not to fill your head with data points.
School, ...ANY... school, is just about establishing a baseline to make you comparable against your peers. Rigorous education has very little to do with it.
In both cases, I don't think you really understand the point of what you're looking at.
A few quotes from the website:
"With interdisciplinary, world-changing teachers like Einstein, Descartes, and Socrates, St. John’s students have a competitive advantage in any field."
"Offering comprehensive undergraduate and graduate liberal arts programs"
"Our liberal arts undergraduate program is a truly comprehensive education that is perhaps the most rigorous in America."
"St. John’s College is persuaded that a genuine liberal education requires the study of great books—texts of words, symbols, notes, and pictures—because they are both timeless and timely. These books are the most important teachers. They illuminate the persisting questions of human existence and they bear directly on the problems we face today. They express most originally, and often most perfectly, the ideas by which contemporary life is knowingly or unknowingly governed. Their authors can speak to us almost as freshly as when they spoke for the first time, for what they have to tell us is not of merely academic concern, nor is it remote from our true interests. They change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits."
This statement is especially grandiose: https://www.sjc.edu/application/files/2615/9916/9280/St_John...
> If you're in culinary school to begin with, you probably care about food and you will be able to teach yourself the rest from that base.
I know many people who went to culinary school in America because they were inspired by the food they grew up with and wanted to learn more so they could start a restaurant or study it or something, and were disappointed when it was mostly French cooking and their culture was barely touched on. In that case, the school did not fit their expectations and desires. I'm sure that culinary schools meet most student's expectations or they wouldn't continue to exist, but I think it's worth mentioning that all the top schools seem to follow the same basic pattern, at least from what I've been told. It's not like you can pick the French school or the West African school or the Japanese school when you're an American looking to enter a school in your country. Anyway I think I should stop talking about this because I really don't know much about culinary schools, I just meant it as a loose analogy.
> SJC is the same way. They're fitting the curriculum to the expectations and desires of their incoming students. The whole point of that education is to teach you how to think for yourself, not to fill your head with data points.
I'm not sure what you mean by data points, but I guess what I'm saying is if I wanted to design a curriculum around the fundamentals of thinking for myself, I would want to make it as varied and and broad as possible. I want to know how everybody thinks, not just people near me. If I'm reading the foundational texts of American history, I also want to read those of Chinese history. I want to read the Koran along with the Bible (and maybe multiple translations/interpretations of each). I want to read Ramayana along with the Iliad.
I understand that not everybody wants the same things as me! Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with studying Western thought. I just think it's wrong to talk about the greatest books and thinkers and teachers when there's an implicit "of the Western canon" next to each of those. Just be open about it, and it's ok.
> School, ...ANY... school, is just about establishing a baseline to make you comparable against your peers.
No modern student should believe that their only peers are Western-educated.
> In both cases, I don't think you really understand the point of what you're looking ...
It's not much different than people who aimlessly go to college without a specific goal in mind. It's a hilariously reckless thing to do and really naive.
All of these schools are really upfront about what their curriculum is before you apply.
Are we really advocating for catering to people who do not do their due diligence?
Personally I also hold college administrators to higher standards than high school students.
Do you know of any similar lists for eastern thought? I know of some of the big eastern authors but I’d love an equivalently better list of “Great Books” for the eastern tradition.
I really don't have a problem with a collection of Western thought, I just feel like this is pretty explicitly framed as a complete education, the greatest ideas in history, etc. Just be open about what the focus is and what it leaves out.
> Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
"don't vote for that guy, he's a french traitor who burns bibles! if you elect jefferson, rape and murder will be legal!"
"oh yeah? well, my opponent's gunning to marry his kid off to the british crown and make us colonists again and establish an Adams dynasty!"
To watch buildings burning, people chanting that they want to abolish the police, or burn peoples homes "fire fire gentrifier.", "out of your homes and into the streets" (while throwing things at windows, spray painting the outsides of homes, and shooting fireworks at homes), "all cops are bastards" etc.
And then to see reported in the news that these people are "peaceful". It's a sort of paranoid schizophrenia that I think we're seeing. People are watching their own cities burn, then reading CNN say that it's all fake, and that there is such a thing as peaceful arson, or a peaceful riot, that somehow looting is justified, and repeating that.
The news isn't just wrong at this point, they are actively trying to mislead people. It's really, really awful.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1300243540497166341?s=20
edit: just spend a day only looking up the millions peacefully marching, rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams. (Also, give me some information about the people you've seen attacking and burning private residences, because I don't know of a single example of this.)
After the day you can go back to watching what you normally watch, but if you can't find all of these boring people walking through the streets with signs, I don't know what to tell you. If the millions protesting actually had the aim of burning middle-class people out of their homes, middle-class people would have been burned out of their homes.
If there's any problem imo, it's that the protests are generally unfocused street wandering. If there were a specific focus or target, they would be effective at accomplishing that target. But when the target becomes anything other than generalized racism, the ad-hoc coalitions fall apart.
If fewer than 50% of protestors engage in violence, wouldn't it then be accurate to describe the protest as 'mostly peaceful'?
Some people certainly are, I've heard a few people who attended the riots in Seattle claim the police were the only ones rioting. They're very adamant about that 'only' and any evidence to the contrary is met with "well he's a cop in disguise." It's a case of No True Protestor.
It's very tiresome when people demand you believe their transparent bullshit.
>rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams.
These aren't "right wing livestreams". It's people, at the protests, with cameras. Some of the bigger ones are people like Unicorn Riot, who has been active in Minneapolis for quite some time, and Regg Ikagnedo.
In some cases, the "press" end up being protestors themselves and end up fighting with the police. I really struggle to understand why you would cast any of this as right wing.
What? Are you seriously claiming that all of the livestreams that display riots are from right wind people? And even if they were, would it mean that they are fake or what?
Anyway, you can just go and see some of the aftermath images that the media publish.
I mean, mathematically yes, but it points to how this word ‘mostly’ is what journalism teaches is a weasel-word. It renders the statement meaningless.
Seriously pause and reflect since that usually comes up with very severe bigots and is pretty far down the dehumanization ladder.
‘Most of the protestors were non-violent’ is an intelligible and probably accurate statement.
‘Mostly peaceful protests’ first of all intrinsically refers to the protest as a singular entity, not addressing the individuality. That’s not my doing, that’s in the phrase, making the protest the subject, as opposed to the people.
Secondly if you reread what I wrote, my main complaint is that the word ‘mostly’ is what journalistic editors refer to as a ‘weasel-world’. Weasel words make a statement that sounds descriptive but in fact could apply to almost anything.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Moving past semantics, it is worth noting that the violent protestors would be completely ineffectual without masses of nonviolent protestors to hide among.
Anyway, I would love it if this writing falls on receptive eyes, I am concerned that the implication you made: that what I am writing is bigoted, could indicate you are not very interested in what I actually mean.
The "good" protestors have no ability nor obligation to remove or control the "bad" ones. It's shameful that some see fit to dismiss the message of them all for the actions of a few. And anyway, the goodness or badness of violent or riotous protests through the lens of history is more than a little bit complicated.
The police do have such an ability and obligation. They are organized and they are in a position of power. It is shameful that some see fit to excuse the entire enterprise because not all cops are bad.
Neither is as simple as that.
Yet all I read about on mainstream news is how it's actually mostly peaceful. I see Facebook friends who live 2000 miles away from Seattle re-posting news articles about how there's nothing really going on in Seattle. But I've seen with my own eyes what's going on.
It's really approaching a 1984 level of situation, where we're expected to just believe whatever we're told, even if we obviously see the problems. Where everybody is supposed to just accept what the media is telling us, rather than what we can see is happening. If they want something to disappear (like rioters throwing molotov cocktails) they just don't report on it, and it ceases to exist. But you can bet if a Republican starting throwing molotovs for their political beliefs it'd be front-page CNN for days on end. It's all so political and so manipulative.
Might be a shill, but more likely just a contrarian who isn’t being well treated on HN.
I think you would be pleasantly surprised.
When I read the headlines or scan articles here on HN I’m under the impression that I know things and understand things, but it’s really just surface level.
I like the idea of ignoring news and instead read quarterly long form magazines or books. The really important stuff will bubble to the surface and be examined more intelligently.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Edit:It would be even better if this paper was connected to a prediction market where people could bet real money on if the "Truths" and "Probabilities" events will be shown to be false at certain time steps in the future.
We're still waiting for the Supermicro retraction.
A nice summary of the situation a year after the article came out in 2018 can be found here[1]. I wonder what their rational for not retracting the story. Just one little line somewhere that few would notice would have put the controversy to rest, but if they did it now. so late after the fact, it would just add to the intrigue instead of diffuse it.