We Have a Bad News Problem, Not a Fake News Problem | Hacker News Reader

We Have a Bad News Problem, Not a Fake News Problem

snopes.com

48 pointsfraqed25 comments

Part of it is an audience problem.

We have good news, e.g. http://hosted.ap.org

The problem is nobody will read it. It's not sensationalized and dramatized enough. It's not edited into a series of one second video clips with an ominous soundtrack, with an occasional clip of guys in black marching with ak-47s because isis. It requires an attention span longer than 30 seconds.

Then it's a failure of the website in their inability to deliver the message in a format acceptable to the audience. "people are stupid" is a ridiculous cop-out for their inability to understand basic human psychology. People are not stupid, this site is competing with literally thousands of websites doing the same thing. I have no words for sheer arrogance of calling people stupid when they don't read this shitty website, we get our daily moral chiding from nytimes, we don't need more of that.

Uh, most newsworthy topics cannot be articulated in a 10 bullet listicle or 30 second teaser video. Plenty of intelligent people have no problem reading longform journalism, so yes, at least one component of this is in fact "people are stupid." Or they're at least too lazy to confront the complexity of the world.

We accept that schools are boring and psychology isn't required to turn stupid people smart (or uninformed to educated if you'd like). Perhaps if we thought of news as education instead of entertainment, we'd accept it being boring and maybe get smarter.

I wish there was a way to measure if people actually are stupid and see if it is getting better or worse. I don't want to be arrogant, I want to be factual.

I don't get the impression the parent comment is saying "people are stupid". I think the point is "news != entertainment". At least it shouldn't be. If you want to be entertained go watch a movie. If you want to be informed well on a topic then read or watch the "boring" news.

If the incentive structure props up the "news == entertainment" organizations better than the "news == boring facts" organizations we have failed and will ultimately pay the price.

The two do tend to blur together a bit through the actual news regurgitating fake news, though. This isn't a new thing either - the Emma Watson 4chan story a couple of years ago was a good example. That was seeded by a typical fake news website that had tried similar tricks before, and as soon as the first real news site failed to check the source was real and leapt on it everyone else followed suit.

the entire newscycle is complicit. if trump tweets something, 500 news agencies write a variant of a story around the tweet.

the majority of news agencies dont seem to have the self discipline to NOT cover a story the others are, out of fear of lost eyeballs. news agencies could be even more powerful if they stopped amplifying bullshit, and were selective over what deserved attention. instead every company covers every viral event, creating a feedback loop of displacement. noise noise noise.

Article described a few instances of fake news but failed to give an example of bad news. After reading it twice it's not clear if "bad" means "negative" or "of poor quality."

Bad news can be a lot of things just like fake news. Generally stuff like character assignations pieces, extremely partisan stories that have an agenda could be considered bad news.

So basically most of the news at this point is bad news. And thats why all the polls show that only around twenty percent of the people still trust the mainstream media.

Its corporate mainstream media that is part of the problem and some of the worst offenders. I see this as another attempt at blame shifting and an attempt to paint alternative media as a whole with a 'fake news' stigma.

I suspect he didn't want the main point of the article being lost in partisan internet arguments. If he said Fox was bad news, the conservatives would lose it. If he said MSNBC was bad news the liberals would lose it.

I assume Snopes will approach it article by article, episode segment by episode segment, and let the quality of a given source be revealed over time.

- The sciennce articles that come to conclusions the original study didn't, there have literally been hundreds of them in the UK press over the past 10-15 years. The MMR scare is a prime example of bad news (its actually 99% fake but with that nugget of truth in the middle that is distorted so much its fake news).

- All the bad tech news like all the magical batteries that are coming out next year, and haven't actually every come out at all.

- The political news where they attack someone for something they didn't do.

- The news papers hacking into politicians/famous peoples computers to steal private information and publishing stories on it.

- The pieces about a person that are purely ad hominen and have little to nothing to do with the job they do.

- The pieces that endanger people doing dangerous jobs around the globe, especially things like famous people working in Afghanistan and necessitating them to quit their jobs.

- The news that is just "he said" which has even become twitter quotes now. Just presenting that with no actual points, history or anything else to actually make an article.

- Taking quotes from speeches that are the exact opposite of what the person meant, just plain taken out of context.

That right there is 80% of the news we read every single day on news papers around the world. I could go on and on about all the fake/bad news types we see but my conclusion having personally fact checked a lot of news that could be verified is that 95% of it is either a lie or intentionally misleading. Its every news paper I have checked in the UK and the USA. Its scary how bad the news is.

> Even worse, the term "fake news" is now being so broadly applied as to refer to news outlets that evince a political slant (or, currently, those perceived as having "helped Donald Trump get elected").

> Those on the more liberal end of the political spectrum might decry Fox News Channel programming or the National Review's reporting as "biased" and unreliable, just as those on the more conservative end of the spectrum might similarly dismiss MSNBC's programming or The Nation's reporting. But we would be entering perilous territory if we started tagging every news source with a strong partisan political viewpoint as "fake news."

This is the problem. And the Corporate media has swooped in to fan the flames of people who are caught up in the emotions of the election. They think this might win them back some credibility in the eyes of the public or cement there position as the respectable 'real news'. Its deeply disturbing whats going on. The Corporate media and some over zealous activists are attacking the Press itself. Its simply a call for blanket censorship of the press based on some arbitrary designation such as 'fake news'.

It's probably time to go back and rewatch Noam Chomsky's video "The Myth of the Liberal Media". I believe it was from 10 years or so ago. His premise is there is no liberal (or even conservative) media, just a large corporate media.

Yes, and also "Manufacturing Consent"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

The corporate media will do everything they can to maintain the status quo including attacking the alternative media as 'fake news'.

I think there should be a separate category for "Contrived News" where the story/controversy seems to be made up by the media as entertainment.

The Fourth Estate has lost the "should people actually know this to be informed" part of their job, especially considering how every story now starts with "why you need to know, 5 things you need to know, why its important to know" some dumb useless bullshit.

It's not good when the NYPost steps in asking the rest of the media landscape to stop sensationalizing. http://nypost.com/2016/11/20/keep-crying-wolf-about-trump-an...

Corporate media was pushing one candidate heavily, it didn't get elected, now they are pushing story that people somehow read fake news, on Facebook! :), implying that people are not good or smart enough (unlike them). That condescending attitude got us where we are.

Problems are not as simple. There is not nearly enough good reporting, analysis. War is promoted heavily. TechNews are last few years plagued by what I call 'sponsorship reporting'. Apple always get glowing reviews no matter what. What I believe is most troubling, is that even people who participate in this started to believe in this news.

Anyhow, good news is that we are talking about it and push for change is present. We need a lot more respect for other people views before anything can happen. This is most lacking now.

After getting a reference to a Peanuts cartoon, that turned out to not be a Peanuts cartoon but something from ImageBlitz (now defunct) that was also supported by white power nationalists on Stormfront, I am thoroughly vetting everything.

Get a picture > check Snopes > put photo through a photo forensic application > report back to the sender and everybody they sent the image to.

When I'm accused of being left wing because of this due diligence, I make sure my accusers know that I am an equal opportunity debunker. Find me a liberal left leaning image and I'll try to debunk that.

Wasn't it Norm Macdonald who invented "fake news"?

That news is now more truthful than the real news.

The problem is that we have no real journalism anymore. Most journalists now are keyboard warriors that just take hearsay and rumors they heard on Twitter and create a story out of it. If they don't do it, someone else will and it takes too much time to actually investigate it properly.

With the viral nature of social media, false stories become fact really quickly.

I feel like Stephen Glass (the journalist that faked all of those news stories in the 90s while working for the New Republic) wouldn't even get fired if it happened now.

I'm all for the freedom of the press, but there needs to be consequences for completely false stories that could actually hurt someone's livelihood.

when did snopes turn into some kind of political fact-checking website ? Isn't snopes literally two guys running this site from their bedroom? Not biased at all.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/28/snopes-caught-lying-about-...

Snopes has always been a fact-checking website. They apply the same basic methods to every claim they assess.

Two guys in their bedroom can be completely impartial; a major news organisation can be completely biased. The owner of Snopes is a registered independent.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/snopescom/

The article you linked to is, at best, utterly misleading. The specific claim being assessed by Snopes was "American flags were banned from display at the 2016 Democratic National Convention", which was rightly determined to be false. In response to an article by The Daily Caller, Snopes pointed out that both the RNC and DNC used digital backdrops; these backdrops were used to display American flags, amongst other graphics. Fox News complained of a lack of American flags on display, but later issued a correction.

http://www.snopes.com/flags-banned-at-dnc/

The original article we are discussing levels equal criticism at liberal and conservative news sources.

when did snopes turn into some kind of political fact-checking website?

At least since they hired this self-admitted biased person to do political "fact checking": http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/17/fact-checking-snopes-websi... although she isn't the credited author of the item the Daily Caller calls out.

But, The owner of Snopes is a registered independent. This basically guarantees that Snopes is unbiased truth.

Yeah, and Yahoo's two guys in a Stanford dorm, Facebook's just some dude hacking away on a laptop and bitching about girls on LiveJournal.

Companies evolve, you know.

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