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Comment by a_d | Hacker News Reader

This approach could save journalism from the scourge of fake news. The specific issues are:

1) opinions masquerading as news. 2) misinterpretation of facts/data. 3) misrepresenting the facts. 4) cherry picking (not showing full picture, such that the meaning changes). 5) insufficient context / history about the topic.

All these issues with reporting could be mitigated with expert + crowd annotation — esp where the author and the subject (say people mentioned in the news) can come and add more context.

When objective function is speed and clicks, sometimes depth on a topic suffers. This is true whether news is human or machine generated. In that case, continual engagement with the original article, amendments and updates become a very important tool.

If journalism is defined as a search for truth, then news annotation could be the thing that saves it.

HN, thoughts?

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I am not so sure; there's rarely a strong incentive to misrepresent a paper on e.g. number theory, but that is not the case when it comes to issues in politics or business. We already see this to some extent with Wikipedia-- the pages on math and hard science are generally accurate and well-written. Biographies are much more a mixed-bag, even aside from the fact that the subject themselves can edit their page, I know there are companies that offer to create or manage wiki pages for PR purposes.

It might be better to take an approach similar to "open science". Have the reporters publish their raw footage and interview transcripts to address misrepresentation/cherry-picking, and get them to commit to answering follow-up questions from readers to allow the readers to get additional information. Having more of a back-and-forth could improve the quality of the reporting, allow for spurious objections to be debunked, or ensure that the author gets taken to task if their bias taints the story.

This seems time/capital intensive and therefore impractical in the age of listicles, but on further consideration I realize that many "name brand" bloggers popular on HN essentially follow this model-- for example, Matt Levine and Brian Krebs. However it's not clear whether their model can be applied to all areas of journalistic interest instead of specific niches, or if it requires a rare kind of individual to make it work.

The really tough barrier is getting enough people with the required expertise to do the annotation.

Annotation sites like to say, "Hey, we have this paper and we have this paper." Meanwhile, thousands of new scientific papers are published every day. Of course, the majority of those are not going to be of interest to any journalist. But even when we whittle the pile down to those that are, there is still a huge amount of work to do, and some qualified person has to do it.

And why would they do it? I'm an academic researcher. So I have the required expertise to do this kind of annotation for papers in my narrow specialty. But my life is full with my own research and publishing and teaching and advising and committees and paperwork .... And every October I have to write up a report on my achievements for the past year. Getting a paper published counts for a lot in that report. Annotating someone else's paper is not going to count for much at all. If I start substituting the latter for the former, then my career is going to go down the tubes pretty rapidly.

I think it would be great if this kind of thing could actually happen. But I don't see how to make it happen.

journalism from the scourge of fake news.

Journalism isn't suffering from a scourge of fake news.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146

You don't need to have an increase in fake news to have an increase in the perception of fake news. Another way to get an increase in the perception of fake news is to change the structural graph through which news propagates. The two most outspoken people I know of on the topic of the problem of fake news both happen to be twitter users (Elon Musk, Donald Trump).

I don't really understand how this is a response to what I said.

The Science paper I linked was meant to show that the twitter graph has properties which spread fake news through its part of the news propagation graph. The people I referenced were meant to show that people on the graph with such a property are talking about the fake news problem as if it is real. Taken together, my response to you was trying to get at the idea that fake news, even if not a thing from the perspective of one node on overall news propagation graph, can seem very real from another position on the graph.

So basically, I disagree with the claim that fake news doesn't exist, in a subtle way.

I disagree with the claim that fake news doesn't exist

I got that bit, it's just not a thing I argued.

It is, and has been for decades. Usually, when I read articles on a topic which I have researched, I find the reporting tends to be "wrong" in some sense. Charitably this can be blamed on time or space constraints: the articles need to be ready for publication while the story is relevant, so the author has insufficient time to achieve expertise; or even if the author is an expert, they are incentivized to publish only the most interesting (and perhaps most superficial) details on the subject. Less charitably, you might suspect that the author (or their editor) has a bias depending on what they elide or emphasize. Herman & Chomsky wrote about this topic[0] examining the various filters that determine what gets reported and from what angle.

However, it's recently become politically controversial to acknowledge this fact, I think because Trump uses "fake news" to disqualify criticism of himself and his administration[1]. But let's not pretend that journalism is without faults or bias just because (on average) the virtues of the fourth estate outweigh their flaws.

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

1. He's hardly the first person to have issues with his press coverage, but it seems like he's getting a bit more traction with his complaints. It helps that he has an observably hostile relationship with the press. But the term "fake news" was originally applied to right-wing blogspam/memes that showed up during the 2016 election, which were highly slanted, based on cherry-picked information if not outright lies.

You don't need Trump for this, just taking the term for what it says. Are there are various quality problems with journalism? Sure. Is journalism as a field plagued by a problem of straight-up, unchecked fabrication of 'news'? Not really. That problem is not a journalism problem.

It doesn't have to be literally false to misinform, and informing the public is (in my opinion) the main point of journalism. How erroneous/slanted does it have to be before we can assert fakeness? I think it's fair to say that if I have a worse understanding of the world as a result of consuming news media then that constitutes "fake news".

It has to be fake news to call it fake news. Simple term, simple criterion. If you want to talk about other ways in which news can be inaccurate, you can use one of the many terms for that. It is not 'fair to say' that something that isn't actually fake news is fake news. That's a weird thing to insist on when complaining about inaccuracies.

I am not using the phrase ‘fake news’ in the way Trump uses it (to seed doubt and cast aspersions). I mean to say: “sometimes, I know the details (inside story) of a story/situation. When I read an article about it - I can always tell precisely what got misreported or misinterpreted - which causes me to wonder, what else is getting (mis-)reported like that - about things I don’t know”. Probably the choice of the phrase ‘fake news’ is too extreme. I meant to convey a more subtle point.

That is using 'fake news' the way Trump uses it - 'news reporting I don't like or I think is in some way wrong' rather than 'news that is actually fake with the deliberate intent to mislead'. What you seem to be talking about is sometimes called 'Gell-Mann amnesia effect' - a term I also think is pretty awful (for different reasons) but again, that's not 'fake news'.

Leaving that aside and to your actual point - one way to think about this is 'what major journalistic mishap could have been fixed/avoided by crowd annotation'. Judith Miller's reporting in the run up to the Iraq war? Wen Ho Lee's case? Jayson Blair? It doesn't seem obvious to me it would have made a whit of a difference in any of those nor many others.

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