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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

There's an increasingly blurry line between "click bait" and "fake news" with political intent, as they've often been two shades of the same thing.

Tabloids have been making shit up about celebrities for decades. Brad Pitt has cancer! No, wait, he murdered a puppy! No, he kicked an orphan in the face! These things sell papers.

Then people realized the same thing works in politics: Hillary Clinton has cancer! She murdered a puppy! She kicked an orphan in the face! It's a proven formula, people click it, and you will make money given how things are monetized these days.

Attention, any attention, is something you can monetize.

That's the problem. Advertisers don't give a fuck. When they start to pay attention to where they're spending their money they might wise up and deprive these "fake news" sources of any incentive.

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Not only have tabloids been doing it, but all journalism--just look at the 1890s and how "fake" news was. The sinking of the USS Maine?

Also, look at state propaganda in the media in the 1930s and 1940s and even during Vietnam--the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident as a means of generating public support for expanding the war to include mainline ground troops.

I have to conclude that all journalism is mostly lies and state propaganda is behind much of it.

I should add that I was a sports writer for a local newspaper many years ago and that gig was definitely an exercise in embellishment and outright fabrication at times.

What I find most egregious about the recent "fake news" bs is that now private Internet companies deign to tell you what is and isn't truthful information and we just watched how these same companies sided with one and only one presidential candidate. The problem was, even they couldn't carry that side of beef over the finish line!

>I have to conclude that all journalism is mostly lies and state propaganda is behind much of it.

non sequitur

From a few chosen examples, it's a massive stretch to say journalism is "mostly lies".

It's a further stretch to talk about state propaganda without distinguishing between various topics of journalism (political, sports, tech, economic, etc) not to mention source and past performance.

This is just FUD, and it's facile.

"My uncle once lied about that fish he says he caught. Clearly the man has no morals and should never be trusted."

Everything anyone says should be treated with a critical eye and a healthy dose of skepticism. Nobody who's ever achieved anything significant has done it without making mistakes.

The problem is when you throw up your hands and declare the New York Times to be on the same level as the National Enquirer.

Statistics are important here. A source that's reliable 99 times out of 100 is more trustworthy than one that's reliable 1 in 100 times.

I'd argue intensity is as, if not more, important than just "statistics." A source that tells one lie that starts a war is much worse IMO than one that tells 99 lies about celebrity pets.

That's just a different statistic -- one measuring severity of impact, rather than unreliability.

Our kids are not being taught that skepticism is a good thing. I say this as a skeptic who tries to undo the damage our society has done in the constant wash of advertising and school "everyone wins" nonsense.

I praise my kids a lot, but I do it for meaningful things (or steps towards) that they do and for exhibiting the principles that will strengthen them as adults.

I urge my kids to practice skepticism to question the nature of things and people.

That's why as a responsible parent you should slip in a few harmless false truths into their diet to see if they can pick them out.

It's also educational to play games where two or three people tell a different version of the "truth" and you have to guess which one is actually right.

Schools are sadly suffering a deficit of critical thinking. The American ones in particular do not reward it at all, if anything it's punished. You must answer according to the textbook or you lose marks. Such is a test-driven education system.

> Not only have tabloids been doing it, but all journalism--just look at the 1890s and how "fake" news was.

Except now there's so much happening so fast, we can't keep up! Plus with "personalisation", no one's experience is the same. What a headache for future historians.

There's still a few that takes journalism seriously; the Guardian is one. But none can claim absolute truth or neutrality. So fake or not, I guess we still have to resort to multiple sources - or even better, stick our heads in the sand until the madness is over!

(That may or may not be taken as tongue in cheek..)

It's older than all of that, even. The practice of "say or promise anything that will earn followers, acceptance, or profit" has a long and storied history under the brand of organized religion.

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