The CNN porn scare is how fake news spreads
theverge.com
theverge.com
Journalists are always going to be wrong some of the time and several factors have been ramping that error rate way up but this has been discussed at length for at least a decade now. But, for the most part, legitimate news sites at least try to vie for truth as one of the competing demands on the business.
What's genuinely new is sites whose entire business model is predicated on intentional dissemination of knowingly false stories as a major part of the media landscape. Alex Jones style journalism has always existed at the fringes of the media landscape but now are becoming the main news source of a significant proportion of the country and that's worrying.
Trying to label other things as "fake news" muddies the waters and distracts from the issue.
And this does not only happen to journalist, but normal people too. It is thus a good reminder to people to check before they retweet or share that article.
If there's anything to take away from this, it's that the DNC et. al did not learn their lesson and we're going to be stuck with four more miserable years under Trump come 2020. You cannot attempt fix the outcome of a primary election and still expect everyone to like you.
Fake news is outright fabricated.
They usually make up shit about celebrities and see what sticks, then beat that drum until people tire of it.
But my mom, who has a doctorate degree in a medical profession and is a director at a medical organization, firmly believes in everything and anything that's mentioned in a tweet that is aired on CNN. Or posted on Facebook overlaid on a picture of a Minion.
CNN under Ted Turner used to have a world-class news team, they'd check sources, they'd investigate the veracity of any claims, they'd get boots on the ground to do their own research. They wouldn't hesitate to get actual experts on the air, people with qualifications relevant to the situation at hand.
They also had the luxury of being able to dig into a story before "breaking" it, there was time to get everything lined up. Now we're in an unrelenting hurricane where something pops up on Twitter and literally five minutes later CNN is parroting it as if it's news.
There's no budget for fact checking. There's no time. There's no buffer against the stream of half-truths, propaganda, and pure bullshit pouring out of this thing we call the internet.
There used to be a substantial difference between The Washington Post and Weekly World News. Today that gap has shrunk to the point where pseudo-news stories end up being published without adequate fact checking and retractions come way too late, if they ever do at all.
CNN's coverage of the first Gulf War was respectable, they had people in Baghdad observing the situation on the ground. Even their September 11 coverage was pretty good, though they were working on their home turf. By the time complex geopolitical struggles like the insurgency in Iraq or the constantly shifting nature of ISIS emerged they had no ability whatsoever to present a coherent story.
Now I wouldn't trust CNN to report on something as numerically simple as the election. They have "experts" on the air that are so obviously political shills it's ridiculous: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/14/video-cnn-has-trump-...
It's almost as if people don't care for actual news any more. They're tired of eating their vegetables.
> At least American's respected Walter and the news was the news, not personal outrage or even worse intentionally false information.
Well, CNN was either calling its own content "inappropriate" or they were saying that something occurred. Is the Verge so interested in promoting this "fake news" meme that they won't even believe CNN's own statement that "inappropriate content" was aired on CNN?
> Even if porn was aired on CNN, it’s clear that a lot of publications ran with a story based on tweets from one person before verifying the facts.
They are condemning the race to be first at the expense of verification. "Fake news" might be an annoying buzz word, but I strongly support the main point of their article: journalistic integrity requires checking your source.
Edit: However, I guess we both will agree with how shalmanese described the situation above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041290)
That's the point of theverge: one reports it because another site did it and nobody wants to be the one who didn't have any headline about such event. Which site wants to be the last one to publish something?
Source checking takes a time, being left out of the event costs too much...
(disclaimer: I did comment on the previous thread)
I'm not sure what can be done to increase the costs for being wrong, but as a whole humanity does need to find a way to solve that.
If its just their customers being impacted, the businesses don't care. What will it take for companies will get the hint that there's actual losses being sustained from their actions, even if they themselves are not seeing the losses?
It's called externalities, and they're everywhere. Exxon Mobile doesn't pay for the damage their oil causes to the environment. Factories don't pay for the smog they create. Carly Fiorina never went to jail over lies that incited a shooting spree. Home Depot still processes credit cards. The Independent is still reporting the news based off tweets.
The biggest challenge in the world right now, bigger than anything else we've faced as a species, is how to make sure someone pays for their own externalities. As we become more connected and more global, our lies and our byproducts aren't just hurting those around us. They're hurting the entire world.
If someone is uneducated, that's everyone's problem, specifically because they do vote and do have kids. We shouldn't take that away from them, however we should do a better job at not producing uneducated citizens in the first place.
In the era when the media channels themselves are extremely cheap (i.e. the Internet), the extremes are not as dangerous as they used to be, and risking going to extremes became much more valuable. However, with the cost of channels gone, the cost of quality becomes a much more significant burden, and optimising for speed became much easier, at the cost of quality. Add on top of that the willingness of various groups to pay for the costs of such media (optimised for speed as opposed to quality), it is clear where such abundance comes from.
Note: By "media quality" I mean an amalgamate of different elements like topics covered, quality of writing/reporting, production quality, amount of research etc.
Where is the line essentially?
I told a joke at work a few years back, "hey did you hear Betty White dyed?" The obvious joke is she "dyed" as in changed her hair color, but it sounds like "died". Someone overheard me and it wasn't long before I heard people mourning one of their favorite celebrities.
News agencies are exactly like that.
According to these articles, there was porn on CNN over large parts of the east coast, for 30 minutes. 30 minutes of porn on CNN in significant parts of the US, on Thanksgiving evening, and only one person noticed it and decided to post anything about it online? That smells very suspicious.
For instance, I read this story earlier on Variety and it was presented as fact. If you go back to the same url [2] the story and headline have completely changed.
Previous Headline: Cable Operator Snafu in Boston Leads to Porn Airing on CNN...
Current Headline: CNN, RCN Deny Reports of Porn Airing on Channel in Boston
[1]: http://www.snopes.com/cnn-half-hour-porn/ [2]: http://variety.com/2016/legit/news/cnn-porn-boston-rcn-cable...
But according to the content page, Snopes does't know. It's probably or most likely false but CNN and RCN are still investigating, so we don't know for certain.
But just as some news are keen to run with any rumour as news, Snopes seems keen to mark rumours as False as quickly as possible for the same reason; put content online that gets clicks.