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Comment by anticodon | Hacker News Reader

I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. When I see reports from the country where I live (be it my home country or country where I currently live) I see lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don't fit the current media paradigm, or even obvious lies.

I don't see a point in spending my money and my time to read fake news. I've just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better.

Social networks and Internet in general are much worse in this respect. There's immense amount of bots/government agents (from every government in the world) spreading all kinds of fake information. Then real people start reposting that. You still can do fact-checking but if you'd fact-check everything, it would require as much time as a full-time job. So I'm planning on stopping reading the social networks also because in most social networks there's no way of blocking reposts or filtering out the politics-related messages.

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"all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony.

I'm not trying to suggest that the industry is not without problems, but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not "fake". There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. They also do themselves no favours (IMO) by publishing absurd opinion columns alongside actual news in a way that devalues the overall proposition. And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report - that's why it is in your benefit to maintain a varied news diet from different sources. None of this means they are all "fake news".

I'm not particularly wedded to today's media outlets. If something new is going to come along and blow them out of the water, bring it on. But I'm yet to see an alternative that improves on what they offer. All I see is amateurishness (Reddit crowd sourcing the wrong identity for terrorists multiple times) and all-out propaganda efforts.

I think most news is over exaggerated, not so much fake.

NYT is notoriously bad and often omits and slants things.

I was an NYT subscriber for a long time (years) and during the 2016 primaries and elections I learned how crappy they were. They tried to misinform me! I was paying them and they were lying to me.

First about the Bernie campaign and then about the Trump campaign. I don't pay the news to bullshit me. For a period of six months I read both the NYT and the WSJ. The WSJ editorials are clearly written by morons but otherwise their news had higher predictive value.

I agree entirely with you. It's no wonder people reading the NYT were constantly surprised. My fault entirely after Judith Miller but no longer. Purged them from my rotation.

Same here - long time, >15 years NYT subscriber, I stuck with them even while they were so obviously biased against my boy Bernie but finally it became too much. They just stopped reporting actual news one day and never looked back. They are publishing things that just aren’t true, and their silence is deafening on stories reported by their rivals. As you say, it’s not something I’m remotely interested in paying for.

I feel like WSJ and NPR actually take time and research what their writing about.

Well on the WSJ side there was that whole Pewdiepie makes some Nazi jokes therefore is secretly whistle blowing to recruit 9-17 year olds into white supremacy/anti-antisemitism narrative they were running with. Ignoring the context of the jokes and doing nothing that shock comics haven't been doing for years. But the character assassination probably has more to do with the fact that person has a bigger audience than the WSJ, and more influence and that's where advertisers (their source of money) were going, so they started doing hit pieces on YT's biggest personas to scare advertisers out of spending their money there.

Honestly, I haven’t a clue what the deal is here, but I will make a note to remember to discount their coverage on online stars. Thank you.

When people speak of "fake news" they're generally not talking about news with factual mistakes, but often times where the fact picking mechanism is biased. You can produce a piece that is 100% factual that still omits important facts that are relevant to the story and would paint a completely different picture. Most of the sites you mentioned do that very consistently.

It's ironic to argue the definitions of post-truth, but no. Fake news refers to stories that are fabricated, and usually calibrated to be attention-grabbing, masquerading as news. That is a separate phenomenon from bias, and much worse.

Bias is a problem that can interfere with the output of people who think they are doing good-faith journalism. But anyone with a blog can write what other people will mistake for news, and if they're good, can make it go viral. No relationship with the truth, not even an attempted one, is involved.

Conservative slant headline: Hero CCW Bystander Stops Mass Shooting.

Liberal slant headline: Mass Shooting Underscores the Need for Gun Control Now.

Fake news headline: New Proof That Lizard Men Hired Crisis Actors in Plot to Take Your Guns.

> Fake news refers to...

That might be how you use the term, but that might more correctly called "false news". In common parlance, "fake news" refers to an overall pattern of filtering and narrative-pushing such that consuming lots of these stories (possibly each of them factual) will leave the reader with gross misapprehensions about the world.

This is not a productive argument, but it may be worth nothing that Science [0], Wikipedia [1], and NPR [2] are using it to refer to fabrication, not bias.

[0] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/majority-americans-we...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...

To be honest I think they're pissing into the wind. (As am I when I tell people to use the word "propaganda" instead of "fake news".)

Wikipedia does not belong on that list.

It's useful for non-controversial stuff. I love to peruse it, I love to quote from it. But it can't possibly be trusted for anything as topical as "Fake News".

I love the Michael Scott comment:

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.

(For those who aren't familiar with the US version of The Office: Michael Scott is not meant to be taken literally).

The history is that 'fake news" was used to refer to fabricated stories. Following it's surge in.popularity following the 2016 election, Trump realized the term was catchy and claimed falsely to have invented it, but used it instead to refer to "news Trump doesn't like" of various sorts, thus making it a contentious term.

Exactly. The charge is not "false news"; it's "fake news". Filtered, processed, manufactured, spun, all while generally keeping things technically correct -- the best kind of correct.

Bingo. It comes down to facts and truth being two different things and the news is almost never truthful anymore.

Well I think slanted news becomes easier as economic models get leaner. Broke? sell to a person wanting to hide behind earned past reputation. Furthermore, outrage is the most addicting emotion (according to post on HN apologizing for creating the internet) so news that draws a person in, tends to outrage.

being reasonable, means some audience will leave to go to the more addicting outrage.

This is my hypothesis only.

It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell — and they are always on the lookout for facts to back up those narratives. Facts outside of the narrative are simply passed over.

I wouldn’t call this fake news, but it’s also not good journalism.

And yes, Fox News and MSNBC have been doing this for years. But this form of bias now seems to permeate everything, including formerly trusted titans like NPR and the NYT.

Why are you throwing NPR into that mix? NPR remains one of the few news sources that goes out of its way to try and get unbiased reporting in the US.

People are people of course, so it’s impossible to be completely unbiased.

I'm still baffled how NPR screwed up their story on Trump Jr supposedly lying to Congress so badly, though. If you didn't see it, they took his replies to questions about whether any other negotiations to build in Russia were going on at the same time as Cohen's ones, quoted them without context, pretended he was saying Cohen wasn't negotiating in Russia then in contradiction to Cohen's court testimony, and used this to make it look like Trump Jr had lied to Congress. Any fact checker, editor or reporter who'd bothered to check the quotes the story relied on should've caught this. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from a shady conspiracy theory peddler. (The original version: http://archive.is/ozzmb )

That's used to be true but in the past two years they've gotten quite bad. For instance, during the child separation story they called it "President Trump's child separation policy," when describing it. Only weeks later did they call it "the increase of child separations due to President Trump's zero tolerance policy." It was known the day the story broke that he didn't enact the policy.

That used to be true but in the past two years they've gotten quite bad. For instance, during the child separation story they called it "President Trump's child separation policy," when describing it. Only weeks later did they call it "the increase of child separations due to President Trump's zero tolerance policy." It was known the day the story broke that he didn't enact the policy.

Reuters is still pretty decent.

Reuters also rarely reports on local news, which is the crisis outlined in the post.

All news is local news, unless Reuters reports it.

> and they are always on the lookout for facts to back up those narratives

Confirmation bias is fake news. Because you only pick up the details that fit your narrative, shutting down everything else.

A true neutral viewpoint would share all aspects of the story from the get go.

> Confirmation bias is fake news. Because you only pick up the details that fit your narrative, shutting down everything else.

That's a pretty weak strawman.

As a non-US citizen who never set foot near the US, I found the MAGA story to be a pretty blatant example of fake news that was clearly pushed in spite of any fact check or impartiality.

When I first saw the video pushed by US's media corporations my first reaction was to have a very negative opinion about the kid in particular and the whole political movement in general.

But afterwards I had the opportunity to see the whole video, without being subjected to the blatant manipulation, and the real story is radically different than the narrative that was pushed by the media.

Any journalist and specially editors who had access to the video clearly knew they were blatantly lying to the public and were intentionally misrepresenting the events, but they did so to push their agenda. This has nothing to do with confirmation bias.

You are talking about one story. I'm talking about news in general. I don't think most journalists are deliberately lying most of the time, but it's much more likely they suffer from confirmation bias - that's something we are all subject to, by the way. But journalists should go the extra mile, it'S their job after all: they are not supposed to be activists.

> You are talking about one story. I'm talking about news in general.

I'm pointing a clear example where there was a general push for a falsified news report to push a narrative. There is no way around this.

Other examples also exist, but they fly under the radar or aren't so eggregious.

They also feed off themselves on Twitter and it becomes the cyclical thing where the only viewpoint they see is their own.

I interpreted the OP as agreeing with you. I think you might be misunderstanding each other or I’m misunderstanding someone.

The MAGA story wasn't fake news. The kids were there to stir up controversy about abortion rights and wore MAGA hats because they knew it would be inflammatory. They also told the native American that "stealing land is just how it's done" and were very obviously making comments at him. Yes the Black Israelites were terrible people making terrible comments, but let's not hold the kids or especially the school blameless. This is the same school that used to think dressing in blackface, black painted faces with pink or white lips, was okay (there's no problem dressing in all black without the paint). This school knowingly sent kids into a political arena and this is the fallout. Perhaps the school should avoid using children as political props in the future.

> The MAGA story wasn't fake news. The kids were there to stir up controversy

Are you nuts? The kids were standing there exercising their very american right to peacefully assemble and exercise their free speech. Then the counterprotesters crashed the kids' gathering and started chanting right in the face of those kids trying to draw a reaction specifically for the cameras. The only reaction that the activists managed to draw were grins from a random kid and somehow that's enough for the media to cherry-pick footage to vilify a political movement that is supported by the majority of americans and in the process ruin a kid's life.

In who's mind is this ok?

> about abortion rights and wore MAGA hats because they knew it would be inflammatory.

Whether you like it or not, a large number of americans (if not the majority) do hold those opinions, and if you expect to live in a free and open democracy you don't get to fabricate hit pieces in the form of fake news to vilify those who don't share your opinion.

I don't have a problem with protesting, free speech, or even speech I disagree with. Civil discourse is important, kind of like we're having here. Claiming these kids were innocent victims of media is just as disingenuous as claiming the first story was completely accurate. The fact is the kids did go there to create controversy and didn't like it when it came with media attention, good or bad. It's like showing up to a WWE match and claiming surprise when someone uses a weapon in the ring.I go back to my original stance of don't use kids as political props and they won't be treated like it.

Fuck the school, but those kids are people and the press slandering them was wrong. Don't let partisan tribalism blind you to the individuals. Kids do not deserve to be slandered because of the school they attend, because they disagree with you about abortion, because they wore dumb hats, or for any other reason you could possibly come up with.

Why do you think the kids were there to create controversy vs supporting a cause they believed in? They were after all just waiting for a bus after attending an entirely different march. It’s not like they put themselves in this position on purpose.

This. I used to think "fake news" was far-right baloney, but I've come to lose all faith in the journalistic integrity of the New York Times and WaPo. This recent piece for the NYT was a bizarrely flattering story about an anti-gay, anti-Semitic hate group is a good example. They have a narrative to push and will push it with any available facts and information.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/us/black-hebrew-israelite...

That was a bizarre article they do mention these people spout out terrible insults and threats and are categorized as a hate group but it turns around and excuses that because it's well, Trump's fault of course, and it's not all that bad because they see it as "preaching".

There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often knowingly dishonest.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter

...Which was 95 years ago.

The difference now that is the rhetoric is often more obviously slanted and more likely to be nakedly inflammatory.

The 50s/60s/70s had more of a tradition of restrained debate. But the politeness was always superficial. Politics was at least as murderous and corrupt as it is now. But the more measured tone, and the superficial respect for critique and analysis, made it appear more civilised.

Now the tone is more likely to be extreme, which creates the illusion that obviously manipulative "fake news" is more the rule than the exception - and that this is historically different, when in fact it isn't at all.

> There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often knowingly dishonest.

Perhaps, but surely the media used to be less biased, and it’s worth striving to get back to that place.

When?

In my lifetime less the last decade. For instance, during the Iraq war, it wasn't uncommon for NYT or other publications to take a moderate right-wing perspective. Now that's virtually unheard of outside of the opinion section, and even there it's only token "conservatives" (quotes because "conservative" means a lot of different things to different people in the era of Trump).

> The difference now that is the rhetoric is often more obviously slanted and more likely to be nakedly inflammatory.

Nah. The difference is that fact-checking and reading multiple sources is way easier these days.

Yup. It was arguably even worse before. Pulitzer himself ran fake news about the Spanish in Cuba as propaganda to support the Spanish-American War:

    By the time [Joseph Pulitzer] actually composed his thoughts for the North American Review, his bed chart included rheumatism, dyspepsia, catarrh and a bad case of shame for the Spanish atrocities in Cuba deliberately invented by his reporters to goose the circulation of his newspapers. - Michael Lewis (1)

It was a part of the news culture of the time, too. It wasn't just restricted to Pulitzer. (2)

[1] Michael Lewis, "J School Confidential", 1993 [2] David R. Spencer, "The Yellow Journalism", 2007

How do you consider this flattering?

"If their interaction with the Catholic students seemed like an expression of bigotry toward white people, some of their most vile language is reserved for black people in the communities where they preach."

"The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, categorized at least 80 groups nationwide that follow Hebrew Israelite theology as hate groups."

Would you rather that NY Times not report on confrontations like this?

That article describes their hateful rants as 'street sermons.' To describe this activity (https://youtu.be/Eg3OihbIaig?t=167) as 'street sermons' is flattering.

This is a group on par with the Westboro Baptist Church, possibly worse. That NYTs article tries to play it neutral, and that is itself a form of bias when you're talking about a group like this. If the NYTs finished off an article about the WBC with a quote from somebody willing to call the WBC a "harmless part of our community," I think you'd see people accusing the NYTs article of being overly sympathetic in that hypothetical too.

(If you think this group is harmless, just look at the comment section of that video and see what kind of people are praising and adoring the Black Hebrews.)

> How do you consider this flattering?

Because it went on after that to blame Trump for it. "We live in these dangerous times so expect people to do more of this, don't blame them...". Then something to the effect of "let's not judge too much their verbal assaults as it's just their preaching style".

I think that's the kind of spin people complain about and call NYT "Fake News". They narrate a story based on an agenda. Try doing a mental experiment and switch sides. Imagine it was the kids with the red hats yelling things these people were yelling at passers by. Take your pick between homophobic rants, c*unt, the n-word etc, and then imagine NYT covering it and saying. "This is a hate group however these are dangerous times we live in and it's just a way for these groups to express their frustration. They use an unorthodox style, and the community doesn't mind it too much, there are far worse things to worry about".

Would you call that a "flattering" report of red hat wearing teenagers? Yeah, I would too. That's the point I think the OP was making here.

It's not just that, but the media's Russia narrative, despite two years of investigations and coming up dry is looking worse than the far right constantly harping on Clinton's emails. Every week it seems there is a new bombshell that turns out to come up empty because there isn't any evidence.

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-w...

If there is collusion with Russia, at least wait until there is proof of it before running with the story as if there were. I just roll my eyes now. Maybe focus on some of the other things Trump is doing, goodness knows, there is enough. All the media is doing by constantly doing this is seem like they're constantly crying wolf and supporting the narrative on Trump's side that the media is simply out to get him because of their bias.

The idea that the investigation is coming up dry, or that there's no evidence, seems like willful ignorance.

34 people have been indicted, including the president's campaign chairman (Paul Manafort), campaign manager (Rick Gates), lawyer (Michael Cohen), and national security advisor (Michael Flynn). Just today Roger Stone was indicted. Many of these people have pled guilty.

Indicted, yes, but for things unrelated to collusion with Russia. They've been going after them for other things, because they can't produce evidence of the Russian collusion, just a lot of unethical stuff.

Roger Stone was indicted because he tried to dig up the "emails" and for witness tampering. That's unethical/illegal but not collusion with Russia.

"They found no Russian collusion or they would have charged him with it," Smith said. Jay Sekulow, an attorney for the President, told CNN in a statement: "The indictment today does not allege Russian collusion by Roger Stone or anyone else. Rather, the indictment focuses on alleged false statements Mr. Stone made to Congress."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/25/politics/roger-stone-arrested...

The media insinuates it has to do with Russia, and thus you believe it does and there is something to all this talk of Russia, which is disingenuous, because none of the charges have anything to do with that. This is almost like a media backed conspiracy theory. The willful ignorance isn't on my side. I at least read the article.

straight up, you don't know how to read.

>But what Mr. Yasharahla might view as great, others call something else: hate. >But Ms. Beirich said that groups like Hebrew Israelites were also anti-gay, anti-white and anti-Semitic.

> we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell

Link please?

Sometimes I feel like I must live under a rock.

What's the rent like under there? Asking for a friend.

Easy, just look at reporting on mass shootings. What there is a white person doing a mass shooting (e.g., 3 days ago in Florida) the entire paper is about "senseless violence", "deeply disturbed individuals" and unexplained pain and suffering.

When a brown person is doing a mass shooting, there is almost almost always a narrative about terrorism and how obviously the person must have been a terrorist and we just need to somehow find the link, even if the person has no clear link to anything.

The WaPo is pretty balanced on this front. But dont pretend the NYT is unbaised here. WSJ is certainly biased.

These papers' reporting biases have been well known for years. But the GP makes it sound like a particular story aired last week that focused specifically on an AGENDA the papers are pursuing.

An agenda is much more than a bias. It's a set of goals and a strategy for pursuing them. A systematic bias can be a big part of that strategy. But the goals and their origin are far more interesting.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...

Yeah, this is a thing that's been a problem for a while now, and not just with the NYT and WaPo. Media organisations will basically not fact check anything that fits in with their worldview, which for the 'left wing' versions usually means:

- Supports the idea that racism/nationalism/xenophobia is increasing cause of Trump/Brexit/whatever

And the 'right wing' versions often means something similar about immigration and increased crime or political correctness. If a story fits those beats, then they'll often buy it without question, foregoing the basic background research needed in the process.

That's why the Covington Catholic school kids thing got publicised so much; it fit very nicely (at first glance) with the idea that Trump voters are racist/horrible people, seemingly showed a confrontation between them and a native American tribesperson and helped the narrative many organisations wanted to push.

Same with the case of that guy being 'thrown off a plane for speaking Arabic'. He wasn't, but the story fit the whole 'hate against Muslims increased after Trump election' narrative.

Any fact checking at all would debunk these stories and the 'message' being pushed on social media sites, yet it wasn't done until way later.

Same goes with another story I saw about a trans eSports team supposedly getting banned from a gender specific tournament. Team didn't actually exist and the story was a troll job meant to rile up one side, but media sympathetic to said side bought it hook, line and sinker.

Honestly, a good journalist needs to be more skeptical about stories they agree with than disagree with (or at least equally so), and it's clear that most today aren't like that at all.

There are multiple stories about the mistakes that were made with the story you are alluding to in every major reputable news source, I. e. for The Atlantic:

The Media Botched the Covington Story: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...

I Failed the Coving On Catholic Test: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/julie-irwi...

Muddling the Covington Catholic Student Video: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/01/mudd...

That sort of soul-searching does not happen, indeed it wouldn’t fit into even a 24h-channel, at Fox News.

Has Fox News ever led a national media lynching of a high school student?

(That's a serious question, I don't watch them and I'd like to know if they really are as bad as people say or if people just hate them because they don't agree.)

One person that immediately comes to mind is David Hogg. They certainly never held back criticism of him because he's a minor, and a host made a strange attack on him via social media:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/mar/31/fox-news-laura...

That fails to convince me for at least three reasons:

1) Fox didn't say it; it was one host's personal Twitter comment.

2) David Hogg made himself a national media figure voluntarily

3) Criticising someone's GPA and college acceptance rate is not comparable to the hateful commentary about the Covington students.

The main thing I wonder about after reading that story is the aftermath. If eleven advertisers dropped Ingraham over that comment, how many have dropped the liberal media over their attacks on the Convington high school students?

Ahh, yes? They regularly denounced the Florida High School students protesting gun violence as “paid actors”, ANTIFA anarchists, etc.

They did so with no evidence, even though the accusation is far more specific and easily testable than it is in the Covington case. And even after being called out on it, they continued to repeat the smear against better knowledge. The difference is as clear as night & day.

Do you have a link? I can't find one with these searches:

https://duck.com/?q=site%3Afoxnews.com+david+hogg+paid+actor

https://duck.com/?q=site%3Afoxnews.com+david+hogg+crisis+act...

https://duck.com/?q=site%3Afoxnews.com+david+hogg+antifa

I know some crazy people said things like that, but I can't find any evidence that Fox News did.

Yet we have scores more journalists deleting their tweets going after the kids because it reinforced their biases: https://www.mediaite.com/online/journalists-and-celebs-rush-...

> It seems this past week we learned that the NYT and WaPo both have pre-existing narratives they want to tell

Is that new?

In my memory they used to try to tell all perspectives in their own terms. That stopped in the last decade, IMO.

This sums it up well. Either news agencies have more strongly pushed an agenda lately or I’ve become more sensitive to it. Either way, it’s impossible to ignore now and it annoys the hell out of me.

While I think you’re mostly right, worth pointing out that CNN’s “Journalist of the Year” - who worked for Der Spiegel - was recently outed as having completely fabricated the majority of the articles that he’s written over the last several years. Unfortunately it seems that being highly respected doesn’t mean everything published is true...

Feels a bit rich to link to any media as a source now, but here you go: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/german-reporter-stripped-cn...

It's worth considering the industry factors that contributed to this. Sub-editors and fact-checkers have been the first to go in the cataclysmic waves of layoffs journalism has been weathering for the past decade.

Der Spiegel was famed for their fact checking... with one problem. Their fact checkers evidently started with the assumption that their journalists weren't being deliberately deceptive. This combined with the journalist making up shit that flattered the preconceived cultural biases of the fact checkers (e.g. urban germans think that rural americans are backwards gun-toting hicks who believe the earth is flat) and it becomes clear that understaffing wasn't the real problem.

Actually there was another problem at Der Spiegel, cultural again; anybody who questioned the rockstars had their career thrown on the rocks. When Juan Moreno questioned the integrity of the fraud Class Relotius, Der Spiegel's editors didn't believe him, and thought he was just jealous of Relotius. So again, not a problem caused by understaffing.

>Their fact checkers evidently started with the assumption that their journalists weren't being deliberately deceptive.

People reviewing pull requests at our company also have to assume that programmers aren't being deliberately deceptive.

So what? Almost all of our working relationship, heck relationships period, are based on trust.

> "So what?"

Do you really need me to answer this for you? Did you miss the part where it failed in spectacular fashion and will haunt Der Spiegel's reputation for years to come? Not to mention god knows how many innocent people were defamed by this fraud over the years he was allowed to run wild by Der Spiegel's fact checkers.

This guy was publishing "too good to be true" articles for years and none of Der Spiegel's famed fact checkers noticed it. He was eventually uncovered by another reporter, not a fact checker, so to suggest that understaffing in the fact checking department is to blame is farcical.

Yeah it's bad. But the fact that we are talking about 'this guy' and not hundreds of people means it's not as widespread as you might think.

It's impossible to defend against, you have to trust your coworkers, or we'd be living in a police state where nothing can get done.

And yes I know of the other high profile cases at the NyTimes NewYorker etc.

The issue of contention was whether or not understaffing of fact checking departments is the cause of diminished trust in the news industry. I think I've refuted that hypothesis; we've got a newspaper famed for their fact checking department that has taken a hit to their credibility more severe than most other publications.

> The issue of contention was whether or not understaffing of fact checking departments is the cause of diminished trust in the news industry.

Sure, but people distrust things for irrational reasons all the time.

It's funny how this thread criticizes media for making up details to push a narrative while doing exactly that.

> as having completely fabricated the majority of the articles

This is about as fake news propaganda driven as it gets. Your source says "numerous articles" are having issues, not "the majority". The summary on his DE wiki page[0] so far indicates way less than half (aka "majority"). Also your claim those problematic articles are "completely fabricated" seems quite excessive as well. Feels a bit like you intentionally try to bend facts to fit your narrative...

I know journalism has its problems, but it is the best we have to keep the powerful in check.

It’s actually legislative checks and balances that keep the powerful in check.

> CNN’s “Journalist of the Year” - who worked for Der Spiegel - was recently outed as having completely fabricated the majority of the articles

Of course he's going to win awards.

The rest of the journalists, who have to confine themselves to the much more difficult task of developing sources and researching facts, won't be able to compete with someone who just makes up fantastical stories out of thin air.

He was caught in the end, so what's the problem?

If you read up on how he was caught, it was pretty incredible - another journalist at Der Spiegel had to go on a personal mission, on his own time and at his own cost, to prove the guy was lying, and then nearly lost his job because the management couldn't accept it. The fact checking department had been hoodwinked for years despite some truly dubious and insane things that had appeared in his stories.

Yes, he got caught in the end. But he shouldn't have been able to publish such obvious nonsense for years on end. It's quite clear that Der Spiegel didn't catch him because he was telling them what they wanted to hear.

> There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction.

That's a very charitable way of seeing things when you know a lot of these organizations are politically oriented.

The media do not issue corrections unless they are forced to do so and they publish dishonest hit pieces all the time, like the one on David Reich[1]. They run with their prejudices and then write articles about how awful it is that other people can contradict their prejudices with facts[2]. They decide they’re going to write a hit piece and solicit material for it, publicly, when their lack of good faith is obvious and wonder why trust in the media is at an all time low and dropping[3]. Good journalists exist. Whether good journalistic institutions do or not is an open question, but the idea that the NYT is one of them is a joke.

[1]https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/letter-response-jan-17-article...

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/how-conserva...

[3]https://twitter.com/globaldan/status/1088570101283110915?s=2...

> "all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony.

For me it's not important, if the news is a lie or that they just build the distorted model of reality by omission of the facts. Withdrawing the fact is equivalent to lying, although it may have a different name.

I think the problem is that media was always mostly a way to spread government propaganda. "We are the best, other countries are either clueless or evil." Because there was no internet, there were no big issues with it, because it was hard to check if it's true or not.

Now, there's internet, so, for example, people can read media of other countries (still difficult because of different languages, but possible). In order to fight the threat to the mental model "we're great, others are evil", somebody invented the term "fake news". Now, everything that contradicts "official" point of view can be simply called "fake news".

Well, but media also lies in both ways. I've been indirecly object of media pieces and I was surpised of the little connection of what really happenned and what they told the public. I was involved in the issue and I know who they talked to and what they talked about. At least two newspapers and one TV station lied, and the left ones cherry picked the info they liked.

IDK if that is fake news, propaganda or whatever. Its certainly a symptom of something bad that is happening there.

but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not "fake". There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story

Waiting for the retraction of the Covington story based on the full video? To be given the same prominence, not buried in the small print on page 16.

Also waiting for the blue-ticked accounts on Twitter who called for violence or doxxing of those boys to be banned.

It may be false, but not that hyperbolic. I had the same experience with media pieces about my country or areas of my expertise.

> stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc

These newspapers are useless. I'm interested in increased resolution of reporting on my immediate environment, I want to know about the backstabbing and backroom deals local politicians do, the local murderers and the town rapists, the crimes refugees do or don't, exact breakdowns of economical utility of refugees, exact numbers on town expenditures and big land sales. I want statistics and news on things that matter and change my immediate environment.

All this is missing from national editions. All of this is missing from local newspapers dealing with local trivia only and have the same content anyway because they are owned by the same conglomerate. I have to look up all of it myself if the information is publicly available, if not then the newspapers don't do their job in unlocking it.

Daily newspapers are competing with other outlets and weekly editions and radio and TV in reporting the big, everyday occurrences. They don't have a pitch.

"lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don't fit the current media paradigm" is something done by every single outlet, including NYT, WSJ and the Washington Post (and obviously Fox News and friends), and it's not new. Don't you remember the Iraq war ?

>There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction.

They go far deeper than this. Anyone that follows any polarizing issue is well aware that pushing a narrative via omission of key details (or not covering a story at all because it doesn't fit their narrative) is rampant among the established media. Sure the stuff they write about usually actually happened but you have no idea which particular articles are being spun and which way they're being spun (though you can take an educated guess).

It's hard to tell if they're intentionally spinning a narrative of if they're woefully ignorant of their own cognitive bias and go around confirming their bias.

In any case, if the NYY, WaPo or WSJ is publishing half truths and half the story I don't see that as being categorically different from Fake News(TM) because the affect on the population at scale is similar.

I probably mostly agree with your post but I hear this a lot:

> And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report

And it’s not really addressing what people mean when they talk about media bias. The media appears to be more biased than it used to. Specifically it represents fewer viewpoints on certain (typically political) issues. It would be interesting IMHO if we talked about this when we talked about media bias. “Completely avoiding bias is impossible” misses the point and isn’t very interesting.

I 100% agree. I was born in Myanmar (Burma) and in the last few years, the news that I've been reading on NYT and BBC (the only two sources that I used to respect) are exaggerated and/or biased and/or inaccurate.

Some of the HN readers will be very skeptical about my comment and this may get removed/buried, but I can only say that only when you have lived in a place and experienced the culture and dynamics between different ethnic/racial/religious groups there, you will understand what I mean. E.g., Some people outside of the US can see the current president and think the country is pretty stupid to have elected him. But we all know that the reality is not that simple.

The gist is to not trust the news outlets with blind faith and get riled up, even if they are 'reputable' that they are reporting unbiased/non-exaggerated/agenda-filled news. There are a lot of interested/invested parties that benefit from conflicts like that, so if the article is quoting just one side of the story (e.g., if the story is only presented by the INGOs, UN and NGOs that receive funding), I usually take it with a big grain of salt.

Just my two cents.

I think there is some kind of illusion that the previous generation of medias were impartial and fair.

But news always had an agenda. People with power always affected news. And even without that, the sheer imperfection of human nature makes any kind of communication a distored version of reality.

It does feel like it's getting worse though, but I think it's just a feeling: we now have so many sources, and points of view, that we can see more clearly how much BS we are being fed with.

A while ago a Ukranian coworker drew my attention to the case of Pulitzer prize winning NYTs journalist Walter Duranty, who during the 1930s wrote numerous fraudulent articles denying the existence of famine in Soviet territories and particularly the deliberate man-made famine in Ukraine (recognized as a genocide by 16 countries including well respected first world countries such as Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question#Ot...)

The NYTs didn't admit error until the 1990 when they called his work "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." (https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-not...) By then the damage to public opinion was already done, to the extent that even today I worry somebody will respond to this post telling me that Walter Duranty was in the right for one reason or another. Why did it take them nearly 60 years to fess up?

Indeed, there was a lot of bias in the past which was harder to see, because getting alternative sources was hard. Only a few NYT-size organisations could have a foreign correspondent & foot his telegram bills.

But I think there's something else too: Now that raw facts are a commodity, the value that NYT etc add (for their fan base) is the filtering and the opinions.

Aaron Swartz wrote an interesting piece on why he didn't read the news: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

There was a Canadian sentenced to death in China recently

It took me ALL DAY before it clicked in my head that this wasnt either of the Canadian diplomats recently arrested

I looked around and nobody seemed to notice this

All the outlets and discussions were fixed around an escalation in the trade war, and this convicted drug dealer had nothing to do with that.

It was like how can I point that out while still disagreeing with a Chinese municipal level capital punishment. Damn, people are going to think I’m making excuses for The China. This whole thing is built to ostracize thought.

WaPo, for one example, might not wish to alienate the government of the country which sources much of its owner's economic activity.

Indeed. For me, the traditional newspaper now falls into a kind of uncanny valley. I still follow it, because it's the best thing I can find at being not-shitty, but it's still a weird local maximum.

* If I want hyper-updated "news" (ie: hot-takes), I can follow basically anyone on the scene of anything on Twitter. Of course, this has no filter: the more people "on the ground" I follow, the greater the likelihood I ingest bullshit, personal biases, misreporting, misinformation, and just general hot-takes.

* If I want the bird's eye view, I can subscribe to magazines that have long-form, multi-page articles covering a story or issue over its history and range. However, when I read a "bird's eye view" story on something I know intimately, I tend to tear it to pieces as a "Hollywood" misrepresentation, written chiefly to narrate the story the reader already expects to hear on the subject, not to challenge or inform.

* If I want strictly local affairs, I can follow everyone from City Hall to my state or provincial legislators on social media. This exposes me to fewer hot-takes than following randos on social media, but still means I'm basically hearing whatever a public official wants me to hear.

* Newspapers fall in the middle: a bit local, a bit national, a bit of real reporting, a bit of reprinting press releases and AP stories, usually crappy at international affairs, often still just quoting the mayor and being done with a local story, short-term enough to "refresh" every day and every weekend, long-term enough to sometimes cover events a week at a time or even issue a correction.

> all news are fake news now.

"Fake news" is as old as the newspaper industry itself. Vlad the Impaler got his (in-)famous renown because at some point he dared impose some extra trade taxes on the Transylvania Saxons who were doing business in his native Walachia. As it happens, the print thing had just gotten off the ground so that those Saxons and their business partners further to the West used the newly created medium in order to propagate most of the "fake news" for which Vlad is now known.

My local city's best-selling, and supposedly most prestigious, newspaper is always publishing pretentious opinion pieces about the problem with fake news and how we must trust well-established outlets with professional ethics, etc. like themselves. They have even organized debates on fake news and so on.

Then you open that newspaper, and most of what they publish about the city is inflammatory pieces bashing the current city government, which are based mostly on lies. For example, blaming on it decisions from other administrations where it has no competence at all, or even decisions from the previous, opposing city government (which they praise because that party gives newspapers more subsidies). I have even read news about physical objects (a pedestrian crossing, a streetlight or whatever) that you could just go and see with your own eyes that they were plain false, describing things that just outright hadn't happened, no discussion possible.

In national or international newspapers it's more difficult to calibrate the trustworthiness of a news piece, because they involve stuff that happens far away, but every time I see a media outlet riding the high horse of "the internet is full of fake news, trust us instead", I cannot help thinking about the case of this newspaper and not trusting at all.

I'd rather read opposing opinions from people who at least acknowledge to be biased, and then form my own view, than trust supposedly unbiased news that are probably as fake as whatever bots spew.

Disclaimer: I'm not even much of a supporter of the current major, I didn't even vote for him, although next election I probably will just out of disgust for that paper's shameless manipulation.

> I've just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better.

Your experience is consistent with this article: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

> So I'm planning on stopping reading the social networks also

Yeah, you and me both. Isn't it interesting, though, how much more addicting the scrolling feeds are?

Ignorance is bliss

I too stay away from mainstream reporting that's always filled with propaganda. Are there any alternative source of genuine news? So far I haven't found any.

There is not much I am afraid. You might for example find a foreign outlet like Al-Jazeera reporting about some country it doesn't have interest building a narrative about, but anything about it's corner of the world or especially Qatar is just not going to be unbiased by any means.

Then maybe BBC or Reuters, but always compare coverage of the same event and you'd see there is always a slant or spin involved.

There are good independent journalists out there [1]. While they are naturally biased individuals, you quickly learn their biases and apply correction. If you subscribe to a few of them, their coverage averages out to about neutral.

IMO a hallmark of honest journalist is ability to openly discuss the journalistic process & toolkit. Call it journalism's equivalent of Kerckhoff's principle.

Another good check mark is ability to criticize errors in the media and issue correction and retractions.

[1] for example Tim Pool, https://twitter.com/Timcast

Democracy Now is good for US news

> I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now.

This 'fake news' thing is just a recent meme that people strengthen through confirmation bias, and then pass around to justify their irrational behaviour.

One example of irrational behaviour: working class conservative voters voting against their interests for generations, and then blaming the country's problems on the 'deep state.'

The thing that is worrisome, is that we seem to be in a post truth era.

We have gone beyond disagreeing about our opinions and our values, and are starting to solipsistically disagree on plain facts now.

Yes, I agree.

My personal technique for dealing with this is try to look at multiple online news sources, not just one. I'll look at one from each side of the political spectrum and try to triangulate what a reasonable person should think.

Think about what? A system that doesn't care about you? A reasonable person should think for himself and not on the basis of soulless news columns.

What are you saying, that people should read no news sources at all? That's absurd. You need to know actual information if you're going to make an informed choice.

an informed choice about what? the news is full of things you can't have an impact on. focus on things you can impact, like your own life and the people around you.

An informed choice about, oh, I don't know... voting? Whether they support the actions of their local politician? What they should protest? What causes they should support? These are foundational elements of how democracy functions, it would be nice for them to work well.

This is deeply intellectually disingenuous and a bit masturbatory even. News isn't only events you can or cannot effect, it is context setting, value creating and signal driving.

The idea that your local culture is superior to foreign also is problematic, not in a normative way, but in that it almost certainly limits new ideas and general diversity.

The solution is more likely that information is hard to parse and more information is harder. The thing not mentioned in this that I think is the most critical part of the "change" is that historically fringe and minority ideas were kept in check because of basic principals of attention economy. If 10 people believed things, there was most often a limit as to how many those 10 would reach. Now fringe ideas can speak to MANY people, and can be dynamiclly adjusted to catch.

Previously the only real organization that had huge reach was the government and we built a Rube Goldberg machine to insure that one voice didnt dominate. Facebook, Twitter and Google are all bigger than all governments and there is no checks and balances other than one dudes whims in each case. Im all for free market, but this information delivering system is too large, too unregulated and probably for better and worse is going to deliver a deeply different world than we all grew up in. That new world seems more reactive.

Are you absolutely sure that making an informed choice is a useful thing? Speaking politically, the correlation between spending more and achieving political office is very high.

Getting your information from friends and family is not going to be worse than sourcing it from talking heads in a studio or newspaper editors. Anyone who, eg, gets their political information from me is going to get information sourced largely from reading parliamentary documents. How is that going to be worse than what they get from the media? There are politically interested people in every community to pick up the slack.

A radical view, but politics would be better off without mass, coordinated outrage. Compromise and thought should be the order of the day.

> Getting your information from friends and family is not going to be worse than sourcing it from talking heads in a studio or newspaper editors

Of course it is. Especially these days, your friend is just as likely to have gotten the news they're giving you from a Facebook meme page than from anything with on the record quotes from officials involved.

> There are politically interested people in every community to pick up the Slack

Yes there are. Journalists! That's what a journalist is. They're interested, they research, they present their findings. If you are reading parliamentary papers and reporting the contents to your friends, you are a journalist.

Just deferring to individuals in the community you know is a nice idea but it doesn't cover it. For instance, who was looking into Theranos other than journalists at WSJ? Best I can tell, no one was. Their reporting on the company was invaluable.

The reason the correlation between spending and winning is high is because people donate to politicians they think can win. If advertising spend could buy elections Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg would be president and politicians would usually be rich before they got elected, not as a consequence of getting elected.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867

> the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1

> Because campaign spending correlates strongly with election results, observers of American politics frequently lament that money seems to buy votes. However, the apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: The best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. Acting strategically, campaign donors direct their funds toward the “best” candidates, who would be more likely to win even in a moneyless world. These donor behaviors spuriously amplify the correlation between spending and votes. As evidence for this argument, I show that (non-strategic) self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results, whereas (strategic) externally-financed spending does.

  Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg's net worth is 300X Romney's.

John Kerry's net worth far exceeds Romney, too.

Forgive me for speaking imprecisely. The message I wanted to convey was that you can’t just buy votes with advertising or lobbying.

John Kerry is also an excellent example of how money won’t buy the presidency, thank you.

I built Read Across The Aisle to help people do this. It's totally free, with no tracking or PII monetization — just a side project I decided to launch. It also includes free WSJ access, thanks to a generous partnership they offered us.

http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com

This seems to require a browser plugin. There is no Firefox plugin, so I'm not sure how you're going to get as many users as you hoped.

We're on Chrome and Brave, and iOS. Firefox will happen eventually, but since this is a free side project we can't develop for every platform.

That’s just destructive cynicism. If It were true, it’s the end of democracy, because the process of deciding needs information.

That would be a severe thread to your life, and you should be mobilizing everything you have to stop it, by, for example, founding your own “unbiased” news.

"I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now."

Can't tell if Russian troll farm agent or just someone with poor English skills...

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