Fair enough, but that's stupid and it undermines their thesis. Mainstream media rarely lies, although they are sometimes deceived or publish incorrect or inaccurate information (which is different than intentional deception and fabrication) but outlets like Inforwars lie all the time.
I think that is his thesis. From the first article:
> So Infowars often provides accurate data, but interprets it incorrectly, without necessary context. They’re not alone in this; it’s much like how the New York Times reports on real child EEG data but interprets it incorrectly, or how Scientific American reports real data on women in STEM but interprets it incorrectly, etc. This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits.
I think the original thesis is correct, but my best counterexample is the Covington Kids where the media had the original video which gave them the full context, yet they chose to hide that evidence and instead advance the idea that somehow the kids were white supremacists based on the pixels from one close-up photo.
I think another reasonable counterexample is Jussie Smollett's catastrophe, where any fleeting scrutiny whatsoever would tell you that it was fiction, but the media failed to question even the most ridiculous story and ran with the false narrative for weeks.
Basically, the news was just reporting what someone said, so no foul.
> He objected to widely-reported statements by Phillips to the effect that Sandmann had "blocked" him and "would not allow him to retreat."
> But the judge said that these are "objectively unverifiable" and so can only count as opinion, which is unactionable in this case, as it is protected speech.
> Bertelsman also said: "The media defendants were covering a matter of great public interest, and they reported Phillips's first-person view of what he experienced.
> "This would put the reader on notice that Phillips was simply giving his perspective on the incident."
Legal issues aren't really the question. The Covington incident is an example of brazen lying by the media. They had the full video and chose to wildly misrepresent it. That they did so because they were reporting what someone else said is completely irrelevant. They knowingly lied and did so knowing they would be caught.
There is a reason the majority of the public distrusts the mainstream media. Mainstream media outlets are inveterate liars.
Reading the first couple of sentences it seems that the definition of lying has been twisted a bit. Lying is about conveying information with the intent to deceive the listener. The acknowledgment that is made in the article that they believe media often deceives their listeners to advance an agenda by intentionally leaving out important context means that they are lying.
Trying to use a definition of lying that means only making false statements is not a proper definition. There is a big difference between someone who makes a false statement that they genuinely believe at the time and someone who makes a completely true statement but has omitted certain details in order to deceive the listener. The first person is simply mistaken and hopefully will correct themselves with more knowledge. The second example is someone who is using words to manipulate an outcome by getting someone to believe what is ultimately an untruth. It is completely possible to say only true things and be a liar.
"A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies." ― Alfred Tennyson
By that definition, everything is a lie because you can not convey all relevant information ever. I.e. all information exchange is a partial information exchange.
Intent-based analysis is not useful, because you can't know the intent and also the intent doesn't make any difference as to what the effect will be - that well-intended source can have the same or worse misleading effect as an ill-intended source, and the distinction between well-intended vs ill-intended is also in the eyes of the beholder.
You are correct when you say that you cannot convey all relevant information. But your conclusion is still wrong.
For example, a lot of Covid reporting really annoyed me, on both sides. One side would say "Here's facts A and B; see, the vaccine is working!". The other side would say "Here's facts C and D; see, the vaccine is killing people!". Over and over again. What we needed was the article that said "Here's A, B, C, and D, all together, and the reasonable conclusion is that the vaccine is harming some people and helping others, and the benefits outweigh the harm"... or whatever. But I'd never see that article. I'd see one side picking the data that made their side look good, and completely ignoring all data that didn't. And the same from the other side.
It was very obvious (and frustrating) with Covid. But Covid isn't the only issue where that happens. Try to find an article on abortion that regards the fetus as genuinely human, yet still advocates for abortion rights. Or that acknowledges the harm and strain to the mother, while still advocating for restricting abortion. They may exist, but they're really rare. The sides are too busy yelling "my body, my choice" (as if the fetus either didn't exist or were a part of the mother's body) or "baby killers" (as if there were no consequences to the mother).
In none of these situations can you give all relevant information. Nobody's got time and attention for that. But you can try to come close, or you can try to only present the parts that make your side look right (and not just right, but obviously right, so that no other position could be reasonable).
They're publishing true things, but not the truth. And the true things they're publishing, they're doing so with the intent of propaganda.
Yeah, I think it's fair to call that lying. And no, that doesn't mean that everything is a lie.
I don’t know where you get your news from, but I have read dozens of articles where they mention potential harm from COVID vaccines along with pointing out that overall vaccination is still recommended due to the rarity of the potential harm versus the overall benefit.
> Over and over again. What we needed was the article that said "Here's A, B, C, and D, all together, and the reasonable conclusion is that the vaccine is harming some people and helping others, and the benefits outweigh the harm"... or whatever. But I'd never see that article.
I agree that this was important but am baffled how you missed the many articles like that in mainstream news sources (NPR, NYT, Washington Post, etc.), as well as the various scientists and public health experts who wrote blog posts digging into those discussions.
By your word and the definition, saying true things is now lying. I don't agree with such a definition. And it's not just about what a word means either. Calling someone lying is essentially declaring you won't engage with the other side, and by your definition, you are not interested in engaging vast majority of anything, and making the meaning of lying nearly useless. People advocating and focusing on the argument they believe in are not lying by omitting to mention the other arguments.
And, more importantly, this kind of rhetoric or definition doesn't help anything, even if there is a clear definition which there isn't one. It's the cynicism, without any use.
Keeping it as simple as possible, we take Fact A. If we're talking about a specific fact (in this case, Fact A) then to state Fact A and assert its validity/soundness/truth etc is not to lie.
If the subject is not Fact A, but Fact A is is given to support a certain other position/fact with regards to the subject and you know that to say Fact A without Fact B (C, D…) will give a misleading impression about the subject then you are, indeed, lying.
We have a phrase in our Islamic tradition that crosses my mind all the time when reading certain news or articles presenting half truths: (كلمة حق أريد بها باطل), which roughly translates to (a word/phrase of truth by which falsehood is intended).
In an effort to be 100% right about a general observation to which some exceptions exist, the author contorts the original argument o ridiculous extremes, asserting that other parties may be fools, may even be crazy, but they're absolutely not liars. I don't know why it's such a stretch to acknowledge that some people are dishonest; this seems like an ego trip of someone so anxious to preserve a reputation or self-perception of superior rationalism that they suspend all other critical faculties like probabilistic estimation. It's easier to debate abstractions than make a real-world judgment call that might be wrong.
But they’re wrong! Read the articles! The one Vermillion linked is FBI Says No One Killed At Sandy Hook. It’s discussing an FBI crime statistics report for the year the Sandy Hook shooting happened. The report lists zero murders in the town of Sandy Hook that year; Infowars thinks this means the shooting was fake.
According to Wikipedia, the FBI report is real and does in fact list zero deaths for Sandy Hook. They say the shooting was investigated by Connecticut state police instead of Sandy Hook local police, and since the FBI crime statistics are based on local police reports, it didn’t include the shooting.
This is such bullshit. There is a world of difference between 'FBI report does not list any deaths at Sandy Hook' (a factually true statement hat might mean different things to different readers) and 'FBI says no-one killed at Sandy Hook.' I call bullshit because the writer is no fool and understands the difference between an omission and a positive assertion (of absence or non-existence). It's really disappointing to see a person of obvious intelligence with a significant following resort to such specious arguments rather than just qualify or venture beyond their original assertion.
It brought to mind a similar talking point reported across far-right media:
The CDC's own official numbers drastically reduce the number of COVID deaths, or conflate them with other illnesses.
You could read the CDC page, and come to such conclusions, and write articles about them (and people did, and linked to those CDC pages even). However, to come away with this conclusion, you would have to ignore the lower part of the page titled, "Understanding the numbers", which goes into why and how they split up numbers due to co-morbidity. (i.e. Official cause of death might be pneumonia, but you most likely wouldn't have had a fatal case of pneumonia without COVID, not unlike cancer also causing a lot of pneumonia deaths.)
By this author's logic, these breathless articles aren't lying about the COVID numbers, they are just "missing context".
Intentionally misinterpreting CDC data, which is easily explained further on down the page, with the assumption that your readers will be too lazy and dumb to scroll down and read and/or understand it is fucking lying, and not incomplete context.
The author of course is making the point that censorship will always be hard, because people can make the argument that they are just reporting the facts. But the story is a simple one in some ways: It didn't used to be hard, because news media was trusted by the public because they exercised good editorial controls. The public trusted them, because they did a good enough job with it. The public lost that trust because they started to loosen standards due to declining revenues as a result of the internet.
The problem of censorship will be solved when somebody figures out a business model for news which makes news media profitable enough to operate with the same editorial standards, and not having to resort to clickbait for ad views. This is the hard part to solve, but if you solve that, the hyper-partisan and fringe news sites will start to lose eyeballs. Currently, the mainstream media is incentivized to be dishonest, and people rightfully have lost trust in them (creating the fringe ecosystem where people seek out news sources which just cater to what they want to hear, or whatever is most stimulating).
Or, to summarize, censorship (or as we used to call it, "honest news") in our current media ecosystem is hard because you impact your profits, and people don't want to do it. A systemic fix is what is needed.
"Instead, it focuses on the (true) facts it wants you to think about, and ignores other true facts that contradict them or add context." What an observation I wonder if this applies to the article itself in like a meta-ironic way.
I mean, this is exactly how they get away with the level of dishonesty they disseminate.
It's akin to what's known as "JAQ'ing off". Is the vaccine going to kill you? Are illegal immigrants coming to kill you for your job? Is Obama a secret Muslim lizard? I don't know, I'm Just Asking Questions.
You'll never pin these people down on a concrete opinion. You'll never get them to say with certainty what they believe. They'll just say they're curious about the "official narrative". They just want to know "what really happened".
And, of course, the answer is never that the "official narrative" is correct. That always needs to be questioned. Always doubt. And always attack those who ever think that maybe something is just as simple and mundane as a guy on a shooting spree in an elementary school.
Same thing with COVID regarding hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. We always need more research, more questioning. No matter how many times neither worked for COVID. We just needed to try again because one guy said it worked kinda one time. And we just gotta try anything. Anything at all except the things that are actually working because the big, mean "establishment" is promoting those.
Just question, never commit.
At some point, you are responsible for the questions you ask, how long you keep asking them, and the ones you never do.
> You'll never get them to say with certainty what they believe.
True enough, but a useful perspective I've heard when it comes to arguing with people online: You're not arguing for the benefit of the person you're arguing, you're arguing for the benefit of the people paying attention to the argument.
It's easy enough (especially with the ability to crawl public social media profiles) what people's beliefs are, by the "negative space" they create. This is how you make the case for what their real motivations are. They will of course deny it, but anyone paying attention can see for themselves.
Intentionally omitting context in order to mislead is still lying. Communicating with the intent of deception is lying. That's absolutely a common meaning of the term.
Lying: "The sky is hi-vis yellow"
Also lying: "Under Biden's EPA—can you believe this, folks?—the sky is blue. Here with us today is a scientist and fellow with the Bullshit Institute for Mercenary Science who will tell us why blue is the worst color for the sky to be, and Paul Ryan to tell us how bad this will be for American families."
The latter is a pattern that a lot of Fox News stories follow, to single out just one set of—yes!—liars; omit the context that it's entirely normal for the sky to be blue, suggest that it's a new thing that's a scheme of the current bogeyman and not long-standing policy, and don't even check to see if there are good reasons it's the way it is (or if you do know any, certainly don't mention them). Like, you can sit there and spot these (perhaps with the aid of a smartphone) all day long watching that channel—hey, gotta do something to stay entertained at the parents' house when they leave the damn TV on, tuned to cable news, all day every day, making conversation difficult. Seriously, it's constant, and my made-up version does condense the process but isn't an exaggeration (check out their extensive coverage of "secret nighttime illegal immigrant flights" for an example of the real deal—there was at least one day when that seemed like all they wanted to talk about, and it was a made-up story in exactly this fashion, but was being covered heavily even on the "real news" portions of their programming).
These cases are lies.
They go beyond making a case for one side, to turning a non-story into a story through lies of omission, entirely on purpose. That's lying. No need to make up facts, in order to lie.
("I argued that, although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts." Yes, sure, OK, but the headline is wrong and he surely knows it—one might say it's a lie. Nb I usually like Slate Star Codex pieces quite a bit, and this one isn't even overall bad, but it's framed more click-baitily than it would be if it were honest, and people going "well ackshually nothing they said was technically false so it's not a lie" is the kind of incorrect pedantry that drives me up a wall)
Fine, but it still invalidates “false facts” as a bright-line rule for algorithmically determining what is lies and misinformation, which is the entire original point that this article is a tangent off of.
Does anyone remember "gamergate"? Hear me out, but I don't thing we have really come to terms with the fallout yet.
The industry was legitimately overrun with nepotism and disclosure problems. They benefited from a toxic and obsessive audience for years. Then their audience turned on them (for a mix of legitimate and illegitimate reasons), but the industry players were the ones who held the microphone. They got to define the story as they saw it - and absolved themselves of any wrongdoing.
And now that toxic ball of highly-technical male youths have grown into a political entity that has too much time on their hands and distrusts media and victim narratives as a rule.
No, just no. It was about the world’s worst ex-boyfriend riling up a hate mob. The “ethics in journalism” pretext was adopted to deflect criticism but it was always a shameful disservice to anyone who legitimately cared about the issue. Among other things, note how the hate was focused on a few women who were not journalists and how frequently the attackers denied that harassment was even happening: if their concern was journalistic ethics, they’d have focused on actual journalists and been quick to condemn the attackers who were making their cause look bad. If you wanted to tackle the issues of reviewers being too friendly with the producers, you’d be looking at the major studios who produce most of the games - not an indie developer and someone who never reviewed her game.
All I know is, if the pitchforks and torches mob went after the gaming press for some indie title instead of decades of bending backwards for EA and the the rest of the AAA’s, it sounds like a pretty crummy misprioritized mob.
Exactly - it’s like finding some guy on the street corner ranting about executive compensation versus worker pay and then learn that he’s talking about the local coffee shop whose owner takes home $80k rather than, say, the Walmart down the road.
Agreed that the hate campaign against indie devs was harassment and uncalled for, and agreed that the movement was largely trash, but you're skimming over a few details that I think are relevant.
A minority of the voices there were criticisms being levelled against Kotaku and IGN across the whole affair, as well as the whole on-site review fiasco. However I tend to refer to that as "pre-gamergate" since this was out there before the Brianna Wu stuff iirc.
Also the responsibility to do good journalism lies with the journalist and their publication, not the game company (the game company cannot objectively cover their own game anyhow). That was a mistake the gamergaters made a lot, and further damaged their credibility.
> Also the responsibility to do good journalism lies with the journalist and their publication, not the game company (the game company cannot objectively cover their own game anyhow). That was a mistake the gamergaters made a lot, and further damaged their credibility.
There’s definitely room to blame both - just as it’s wrong to offer a bribe even if it’s not accepted - but I think it was quite telling how the mob just wasn’t interested in that. There’s probably an interesting story about power gradients and how large companies can manipulate reviews to their advantage by withholding access - similar to how the car review industry works - but it just wasn’t what people were there for.
Objectively the overwhelming majority was not "trash". However, the public at large involved in inventing that label, including you, are trash for categorizing a huge group of people that way without checking if it was true. Luckily, i checked.
>However, the public at large involved in inventing that label, including you, are trash for categorizing a huge group of people that way without checking if it was true
I watched the whole thing happen, on social media - what do you mean "without checking"? I didn't come into this late like you say you did.
If you're implying the ethics violations was the centre focus, then that's not true at all once the focus shifted. Everything related to Brianna Wu and related parties was completely out of pocket from the gamergaters.
>Luckily, i checked.
How? You're asserting I'm stating a falsehood and that you confirmed its a falsehood, but you provide no citations or links. That's shoddy journalism. ;)
That is incorrect and it is obvious you never actually bothered to look at the places you're making things up about. You and/or the articles the read those things from are straight up lies, and it's impossible for you to convince me otherwise because i was there, saw what was being discussed and written day in and day out constantly being completely contradicted by journalists straight up lying to cover their jobs. You read the articles, didn't check, and got taken for a ride.
I also saw it unfold and used that as the basis for my post. I’m not surely what meaning you hope to derive from continuing to pretend that story is true but I hope you find some greater meaning in life than defending an old lie.
"Gamergate" was the finest example of the worst people you know actually having a point. Or maybe the worst people glommed onto it because it was a way to shit on the people they like shitting on.
But their targets were also just ultimately, not worth it. They were mediocre people putting out mediocre product that would have gotten consigned to the dustbin of humanity had they been left alone.
It was just a bunch of mediocre shitheads not able to accept the reality that they were mediocre shitheads.
Not to mention, after a while, after finding out more about everything in general, the real irony is that just about every industry is overrun with nepotism and disclosure problems. Like what went on with regards to kickoff Gamergate was relatively tame compared to just the past month vis a vis FTX/Alameda.
I think another thing to keep in mind was that, at the time, the only people making money to play video games were basically industry reporters and reviewers. So these were glamorous and desirably positions, and they played gatekeeper.
We take for granted that "professional streamer" is now a thing. The content creator industry is a little less centralized, and that took pressure away.
From my short stint as a tech columnist, the number one goal is to get the copy in by deadline. So deliberate lies, not so much, just no time to craft a great lie, joking/not joking. Getting it exactly right in a short time frame, easy to be approximately right, which in some cases is interpreted not well.
There's a lot of vigorous dissent here because lying requires intent: One's statement(s) must be intended to deceive people. I think this formally/technically correct dictionary-wise, but kinda missing the point.
If your goal is to help people understand media better, they do need to know that most media deception is accomplished by simply avoiding relevant facts rather than voicing outright falsehoods. In other words, as a media consumer, your primary question should be, "What are they not telling me?" This is why it helps to multi-source your news.
That is a very instructive lesson to learn - something we should teach kids in school, really.
I'll buy the thesis, but the media does it to such an extreme that it's basically irrelevant. It's always possible to find someone claiming something, so you can always find a source. Fox News has simply displayed Tweets at times.
At a certain point you're just creating evidence out of thin air, like a crappy magician's trick.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 34.5 ms ] thread> So Infowars often provides accurate data, but interprets it incorrectly, without necessary context. They’re not alone in this; it’s much like how the New York Times reports on real child EEG data but interprets it incorrectly, or how Scientific American reports real data on women in STEM but interprets it incorrectly, etc. This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits.
I think another reasonable counterexample is Jussie Smollett's catastrophe, where any fleeting scrutiny whatsoever would tell you that it was fiction, but the media failed to question even the most ridiculous story and ran with the false narrative for weeks.
https://www.businessinsider.com/covington-kid-nicholas-sandm...
Basically, the news was just reporting what someone said, so no foul.
> He objected to widely-reported statements by Phillips to the effect that Sandmann had "blocked" him and "would not allow him to retreat."
> But the judge said that these are "objectively unverifiable" and so can only count as opinion, which is unactionable in this case, as it is protected speech.
> Bertelsman also said: "The media defendants were covering a matter of great public interest, and they reported Phillips's first-person view of what he experienced.
> "This would put the reader on notice that Phillips was simply giving his perspective on the incident."
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/court-rules-that-being-cal...
There is a reason the majority of the public distrusts the mainstream media. Mainstream media outlets are inveterate liars.
Almost always it is an highly curated set of facts; often intentionally designed to mislead people.
The author is not pushing the idea that the media is honest, rather that the way we describe their dishonesty is inaccurate.
My personal interpretation is that as long as you say factually true things you are sort of protected both on defamation and ethics claims.
Trying to use a definition of lying that means only making false statements is not a proper definition. There is a big difference between someone who makes a false statement that they genuinely believe at the time and someone who makes a completely true statement but has omitted certain details in order to deceive the listener. The first person is simply mistaken and hopefully will correct themselves with more knowledge. The second example is someone who is using words to manipulate an outcome by getting someone to believe what is ultimately an untruth. It is completely possible to say only true things and be a liar.
"A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies." ― Alfred Tennyson
Intent-based analysis is not useful, because you can't know the intent and also the intent doesn't make any difference as to what the effect will be - that well-intended source can have the same or worse misleading effect as an ill-intended source, and the distinction between well-intended vs ill-intended is also in the eyes of the beholder.
For example, a lot of Covid reporting really annoyed me, on both sides. One side would say "Here's facts A and B; see, the vaccine is working!". The other side would say "Here's facts C and D; see, the vaccine is killing people!". Over and over again. What we needed was the article that said "Here's A, B, C, and D, all together, and the reasonable conclusion is that the vaccine is harming some people and helping others, and the benefits outweigh the harm"... or whatever. But I'd never see that article. I'd see one side picking the data that made their side look good, and completely ignoring all data that didn't. And the same from the other side.
It was very obvious (and frustrating) with Covid. But Covid isn't the only issue where that happens. Try to find an article on abortion that regards the fetus as genuinely human, yet still advocates for abortion rights. Or that acknowledges the harm and strain to the mother, while still advocating for restricting abortion. They may exist, but they're really rare. The sides are too busy yelling "my body, my choice" (as if the fetus either didn't exist or were a part of the mother's body) or "baby killers" (as if there were no consequences to the mother).
In none of these situations can you give all relevant information. Nobody's got time and attention for that. But you can try to come close, or you can try to only present the parts that make your side look right (and not just right, but obviously right, so that no other position could be reasonable).
They're publishing true things, but not the truth. And the true things they're publishing, they're doing so with the intent of propaganda.
Yeah, I think it's fair to call that lying. And no, that doesn't mean that everything is a lie.
Here’s the first example I found: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/health/cdc-vaccine-heart-...
I agree that this was important but am baffled how you missed the many articles like that in mainstream news sources (NPR, NYT, Washington Post, etc.), as well as the various scientists and public health experts who wrote blog posts digging into those discussions.
And, more importantly, this kind of rhetoric or definition doesn't help anything, even if there is a clear definition which there isn't one. It's the cynicism, without any use.
Keeping it as simple as possible, we take Fact A. If we're talking about a specific fact (in this case, Fact A) then to state Fact A and assert its validity/soundness/truth etc is not to lie.
If the subject is not Fact A, but Fact A is is given to support a certain other position/fact with regards to the subject and you know that to say Fact A without Fact B (C, D…) will give a misleading impression about the subject then you are, indeed, lying.
But they’re wrong! Read the articles! The one Vermillion linked is FBI Says No One Killed At Sandy Hook. It’s discussing an FBI crime statistics report for the year the Sandy Hook shooting happened. The report lists zero murders in the town of Sandy Hook that year; Infowars thinks this means the shooting was fake.
According to Wikipedia, the FBI report is real and does in fact list zero deaths for Sandy Hook. They say the shooting was investigated by Connecticut state police instead of Sandy Hook local police, and since the FBI crime statistics are based on local police reports, it didn’t include the shooting.
This is such bullshit. There is a world of difference between 'FBI report does not list any deaths at Sandy Hook' (a factually true statement hat might mean different things to different readers) and 'FBI says no-one killed at Sandy Hook.' I call bullshit because the writer is no fool and understands the difference between an omission and a positive assertion (of absence or non-existence). It's really disappointing to see a person of obvious intelligence with a significant following resort to such specious arguments rather than just qualify or venture beyond their original assertion.
tl;dr sophistry masquerading as objectivity.
The CDC's own official numbers drastically reduce the number of COVID deaths, or conflate them with other illnesses.
You could read the CDC page, and come to such conclusions, and write articles about them (and people did, and linked to those CDC pages even). However, to come away with this conclusion, you would have to ignore the lower part of the page titled, "Understanding the numbers", which goes into why and how they split up numbers due to co-morbidity. (i.e. Official cause of death might be pneumonia, but you most likely wouldn't have had a fatal case of pneumonia without COVID, not unlike cancer also causing a lot of pneumonia deaths.)
By this author's logic, these breathless articles aren't lying about the COVID numbers, they are just "missing context".
Intentionally misinterpreting CDC data, which is easily explained further on down the page, with the assumption that your readers will be too lazy and dumb to scroll down and read and/or understand it is fucking lying, and not incomplete context.
The author of course is making the point that censorship will always be hard, because people can make the argument that they are just reporting the facts. But the story is a simple one in some ways: It didn't used to be hard, because news media was trusted by the public because they exercised good editorial controls. The public trusted them, because they did a good enough job with it. The public lost that trust because they started to loosen standards due to declining revenues as a result of the internet.
The problem of censorship will be solved when somebody figures out a business model for news which makes news media profitable enough to operate with the same editorial standards, and not having to resort to clickbait for ad views. This is the hard part to solve, but if you solve that, the hyper-partisan and fringe news sites will start to lose eyeballs. Currently, the mainstream media is incentivized to be dishonest, and people rightfully have lost trust in them (creating the fringe ecosystem where people seek out news sources which just cater to what they want to hear, or whatever is most stimulating).
Or, to summarize, censorship (or as we used to call it, "honest news") in our current media ecosystem is hard because you impact your profits, and people don't want to do it. A systemic fix is what is needed.
Nobody is claiming that there isn't a major problem, just that one proposed solution is fundamentally misguided.
It's akin to what's known as "JAQ'ing off". Is the vaccine going to kill you? Are illegal immigrants coming to kill you for your job? Is Obama a secret Muslim lizard? I don't know, I'm Just Asking Questions.
You'll never pin these people down on a concrete opinion. You'll never get them to say with certainty what they believe. They'll just say they're curious about the "official narrative". They just want to know "what really happened".
And, of course, the answer is never that the "official narrative" is correct. That always needs to be questioned. Always doubt. And always attack those who ever think that maybe something is just as simple and mundane as a guy on a shooting spree in an elementary school.
Same thing with COVID regarding hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. We always need more research, more questioning. No matter how many times neither worked for COVID. We just needed to try again because one guy said it worked kinda one time. And we just gotta try anything. Anything at all except the things that are actually working because the big, mean "establishment" is promoting those.
Just question, never commit.
At some point, you are responsible for the questions you ask, how long you keep asking them, and the ones you never do.
True enough, but a useful perspective I've heard when it comes to arguing with people online: You're not arguing for the benefit of the person you're arguing, you're arguing for the benefit of the people paying attention to the argument.
It's easy enough (especially with the ability to crawl public social media profiles) what people's beliefs are, by the "negative space" they create. This is how you make the case for what their real motivations are. They will of course deny it, but anyone paying attention can see for themselves.
Lying: "The sky is hi-vis yellow"
Also lying: "Under Biden's EPA—can you believe this, folks?—the sky is blue. Here with us today is a scientist and fellow with the Bullshit Institute for Mercenary Science who will tell us why blue is the worst color for the sky to be, and Paul Ryan to tell us how bad this will be for American families."
The latter is a pattern that a lot of Fox News stories follow, to single out just one set of—yes!—liars; omit the context that it's entirely normal for the sky to be blue, suggest that it's a new thing that's a scheme of the current bogeyman and not long-standing policy, and don't even check to see if there are good reasons it's the way it is (or if you do know any, certainly don't mention them). Like, you can sit there and spot these (perhaps with the aid of a smartphone) all day long watching that channel—hey, gotta do something to stay entertained at the parents' house when they leave the damn TV on, tuned to cable news, all day every day, making conversation difficult. Seriously, it's constant, and my made-up version does condense the process but isn't an exaggeration (check out their extensive coverage of "secret nighttime illegal immigrant flights" for an example of the real deal—there was at least one day when that seemed like all they wanted to talk about, and it was a made-up story in exactly this fashion, but was being covered heavily even on the "real news" portions of their programming).
These cases are lies.
They go beyond making a case for one side, to turning a non-story into a story through lies of omission, entirely on purpose. That's lying. No need to make up facts, in order to lie.
("I argued that, although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts." Yes, sure, OK, but the headline is wrong and he surely knows it—one might say it's a lie. Nb I usually like Slate Star Codex pieces quite a bit, and this one isn't even overall bad, but it's framed more click-baitily than it would be if it were honest, and people going "well ackshually nothing they said was technically false so it's not a lie" is the kind of incorrect pedantry that drives me up a wall)
The industry was legitimately overrun with nepotism and disclosure problems. They benefited from a toxic and obsessive audience for years. Then their audience turned on them (for a mix of legitimate and illegitimate reasons), but the industry players were the ones who held the microphone. They got to define the story as they saw it - and absolved themselves of any wrongdoing.
And now that toxic ball of highly-technical male youths have grown into a political entity that has too much time on their hands and distrusts media and victim narratives as a rule.
Depression Quest was a free game.
A minority of the voices there were criticisms being levelled against Kotaku and IGN across the whole affair, as well as the whole on-site review fiasco. However I tend to refer to that as "pre-gamergate" since this was out there before the Brianna Wu stuff iirc.
Also the responsibility to do good journalism lies with the journalist and their publication, not the game company (the game company cannot objectively cover their own game anyhow). That was a mistake the gamergaters made a lot, and further damaged their credibility.
There’s definitely room to blame both - just as it’s wrong to offer a bribe even if it’s not accepted - but I think it was quite telling how the mob just wasn’t interested in that. There’s probably an interesting story about power gradients and how large companies can manipulate reviews to their advantage by withholding access - similar to how the car review industry works - but it just wasn’t what people were there for.
I watched the whole thing happen, on social media - what do you mean "without checking"? I didn't come into this late like you say you did.
If you're implying the ethics violations was the centre focus, then that's not true at all once the focus shifted. Everything related to Brianna Wu and related parties was completely out of pocket from the gamergaters.
>Luckily, i checked.
How? You're asserting I'm stating a falsehood and that you confirmed its a falsehood, but you provide no citations or links. That's shoddy journalism. ;)
But their targets were also just ultimately, not worth it. They were mediocre people putting out mediocre product that would have gotten consigned to the dustbin of humanity had they been left alone.
It was just a bunch of mediocre shitheads not able to accept the reality that they were mediocre shitheads.
Not to mention, after a while, after finding out more about everything in general, the real irony is that just about every industry is overrun with nepotism and disclosure problems. Like what went on with regards to kickoff Gamergate was relatively tame compared to just the past month vis a vis FTX/Alameda.
We take for granted that "professional streamer" is now a thing. The content creator industry is a little less centralized, and that took pressure away.
One small reference: https://gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolat...
If your goal is to help people understand media better, they do need to know that most media deception is accomplished by simply avoiding relevant facts rather than voicing outright falsehoods. In other words, as a media consumer, your primary question should be, "What are they not telling me?" This is why it helps to multi-source your news.
That is a very instructive lesson to learn - something we should teach kids in school, really.
At a certain point you're just creating evidence out of thin air, like a crappy magician's trick.