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Comment by justaguyonline | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe, "The Truth About the Media's Persistent Vulnerability to Convenient Misinformation"

I mean: We're still dealing with climate change denialism after years of the media allowing false equivalence to obscure the overwhelming scientific consensus around it. Major news organizations will run headlines based straight off the contents of tweets by wikileaks inspite of their repeated false claims in the past like with the "leaks" post-coup in Turkey, or Assange's statements about the Panama papers

It's stuff like this that give me, someone who believes fake news are just articles about things that didn't happen published by news organizations that don't exist on social media, major trust issues with American media today (and don't even get me started on British media)

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> after years of the media allowing false equivalence to obscure the overwhelming scientific consensus around it

Grouping all "media" together isn't meaningful; it's like saying "all programmers are lazy". It doesn't provide information that helps identify and solve a problem.

Some specific news outlets, especially Fox and the WSJ, actively promote climate denial.

I understand what you're saying and agree about Fox and WSJ, but the fact is for years all major media corporations gave airtime to "opposing arguments" made by Think Tank talking heads on global warming despite the universal scientific agreement on it. That's what I mean by false equivalence and that's the attitude, and not purposeful misinformation by some outlets, that's the problem.

Yes, mainstream media has gotten better about that topic in particular, but in general journalists still go for the easier "stories" that can be portrayed as competing sides, or simple narratives in general rather than what would actually inform people about the world.

> in general journalists still go for the easier "stories" that can be portrayed as competing sides, or simple narratives in general rather than what would actually inform people about the world.

Journalists, AFAIK, are supposed to avoid inserting their own judgement, give the reader the information (including opinions of different sides), and let the reader make their own decisions.

We can say that journalists should present "facts", but who says what the facts are? In the end, it comes down to expressed judgments by humans.

That being said, that can be taken to too much of an extreme, as it has been with climate change. I don't need opposing opinions about whether the Sun will rise tomorrow.

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