Why are screenshots seen as the gold standard for documenting deleted content? They are easily faked.
That said, I agree that journalists should be held to account. One of the victims of the decline of print media are local news outlets who are checking each other. I've noticed a trend in my own local paper to view themselves as above reproach, the singular check on all that is evil, but not likely to correct their own mistakes. Perhaps some of what you are talking about could check that.
See https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims...
Besides that there is nothing that prevents us from in the future to store voice/video and digital/biometric signatures and whatever to document interviews or events. For some part it will still be based on trust of a source in others it will be based on evidence. In science based on ability to reproduce methods and data.
Each professions has the standard it deems optimal within the trade-offs of risks, costs, etc. Those obviously differ: holding journalism to the standards of a criminal trial would essentially make it impossible.
That's especially true if you require to personally inspect all the evidence. Because if you don't trust a journalist, why trust any other person?
Say the story is "Senator used campaign funds for vacation". The reporter sees bank statements to that effect.
Are (photos of) bank statements "evidence"? Because they aren't signed. And even if they were, the photo could easily be faked. You wouldn't even have a specimen to compare signatures. In a trial, they'd get someone from the bank as a witness. But you don't accept just the journalist's assurance that any quote is accurate. So... Should the guy from the bank stop by at your place?
In fact, I can't think of any evidence you can transmit over http that wouldn't just be attacked as "fake" by those motivated to believe that. Case in point: birth certificates.
Meanwhile, there is like no evidence of respected news organisations making up facts. The whole narrative of these supposed failures of "mainstream media" is essentially fiction[0].
Journalism also doesn't work like science publishing in that it relies less on synthesis of previously reported facts. Scientists also don't offer any "evidence" for the meat of their papers, i. e. the stuff that's new. Almost by definition, citations can only cover old information.
So there would be footnotes referencing election results to support the claim that "President Trump" is an accurate representation of the guy's name and title. Plus a lot of footnotes like "as told to me by XX". That wouldn't help anybody. In fact, the source is typically named in every article using interviews, and even for anonymous sources that fact is disclosed. Those references are just embedded in the text, not referenced via footnotes.
So, is this a debate about formatting?
0: The example you're thinking of happened 18 years ago. You should come up with a more recent one, or you're liable to just proof that these events are extremely rare.
Edit: I removed the mobile part of the URL. Other edit: s/spend/spent
Obviously some stories would hard to 'cite your sources' due to the stakes or secrecy, but there are many categories of stories where journos can put a partial or full source dump. Interview stories could attach full and unedited interview recordings for example.
Here's a list of how journalism can do better as a profession:
- Not acting defensive about criticism of journalistic practice
- Attaching your raw sources
- Adding an edit log to all published stories. 'Attaching the git history' would be fairly interesting to see sometimes!
- Disclosing advertiser / sponsorship links and the political / religious opinions of writers as a 'writer profile'. Maybe a public journo friend list too so we could identify if certain cliques tend to have certain opinions. Also add their CV if possible to see what publications journos have written for.
- Attaching to stories everyone involved in it, such as other journalists, editors, managers, politicians, executives, external pr firms, and so on. Will let you see the influence of specific people in stories.
- Putting major retractions / corrections up front and center (above the fold) If you retract a story for example or have a major correction, put that retraction in the same spot where the story was most viewed. So if the story was in the bottom item in the culture section, then put the correction there. But if it was front page news, then put that correction right on the front page too.
Are (photos of) bank statements "evidence"?
On Wikipedia, you can't do that, but that's because everything we do is as anonymous editors with no reputation.
The whole thing runs on trust. It has to bottom out on people making observations in the real world, so betrayal is always possible. Trustless knowledge gathering is a fantasy for crypto-enthusiasts.
It would be great if there was a service like the waybackmachine but which could be use to archive on demand, and make those archives publicly available.
The internet archive is great for this, but they also respect robots.txt and don’t guarantee that they’ll archive pages you request.
Then you don't need "secure" storage of the actual archives, you can have as many copies as possible with as many people as possible and not worry about someone tampering with the archives.
Of course they'd be stupid to offer any guarantees without payment. That's what their service https://archive-it.org is for. Only for organisations, unfortunately.
In regard to respecting robots.txt: I would consider any organisation running a bot and not respecting robots.txt as somewhat shady. ignoring it could even have consequences for admissibility in court.
https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://archive.is/ https://webrecorder.io/
Probably some of the other sites supported by this extension have on-demand archiving too:
https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive
For archiving on your own computer, this LWN article is pretty interesting:
Websites are very unreliable in this regard. They can be edited on the fly, are hard to store and are even easier to fake. Any archive or caching site can be purged of captured content. It's much harder to suppress an image once it's been passed around.