Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
While we are at it - please ignore data that long form journalism is dead, the current race to the bottom leads to nowhere. The people who value understanding the world enough to want to pay for it also value understanding the nuance and the multiple perspectives - these are hard to capture in a single paragraph. Do not design your product for the lowest common denominator.
Lastly - please drop the clickbait ads on your websites that you run to augment your income. These ads often contain fake news, and by association they lessen the credibility of your organization in my eye.
In short - respect your audience, build a premium product that is worth subscribing.
For example take a look at the news for their upcoming vote: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/in-depth/vote-february-10--2019
They have numerous articles on the issue (urban sprawl) and unmodified opinion pieces from people on both sides of the issue.
I think the zeitgeist right now is people are afraid to fully own their beliefs AND be open to debate.
Right now there's too much fear of repercussion one way or another. Which is only pushing the extremes further.
So, no, we don't need balanced news. But we need critically inclusive news.
I see two modes to this. On factual matters (flat Earth, anti-vaxxers, chemtrails), I fully support the "figure it out and print/publish only the truth".
In opinion matters (how much tax should the poor/middle/rich pay, should public higher education be free/cheaper, should we implement UBI, etc), I'm far more interested in hearing from both/all sides, even at risk of some of the fringe viewpoints getting more airtime than currently.
"News" is not the simple reporting of facts, probably never was, and inherent in even the apparent reporting of facts is an interpretation of them (if nothing else by virtue of the facts you select to report upon and then emphasis you give them).
There is no one "correct" side amongst people and events, only impressions and accounts, which can vary tremendously.
It's also important not to take a side in the news, but to lay out facts and people issues involved as fairly as possible, rather than what happens these days: hiding datapoints, falsifying statements, taking sides and rarely understanding anything about or relating to the people involved.
Perhaps on stories of grievance or accusation, journalists musy play devil's advocate by asking for a response to opposition and ask the question most people are too afraid to ask.
Taking sides is for the editorial, not news, lest it become merely a TV church espousing gospel and seed faith, while the polarized others are turned off and away. Neither group communicates to the other, and neither challenges the others ideas... a dichotomous, divided-and-conquered, atomized society falls apart.
PS: I've been around the sun a few times, and I note a liability red flag whenever a person espouses black-and-white thinking. It's usually an unreasonableness better kept at a distance.
But this is litterally the position of both camps in the US right now. Donald Trump, Wells Griffith, Jeff Sessions, all have (or had) tremendous power over US energy policies, and they all share (publicly at least) indubitably non-scientific views on the climate change problem.
Or do you double and triple down on denial so your opponents are busy trying to convince you rather than trying to maneuver you into compromise.
After all, based on progress so far your strategy has been exceptionally successful.
But I think the whole issue comes down to a lack of trust in the media - if I already thought that the media is following a political agenda (or just exaggerating to get more views/shares) and then they started pushing climate change heavily, saying we need to aggressively regulate industries and eliminate blue-collar energy jobs in favour of high-tech clean energy (both generally considered left wing policies/strategies already) I would likely look at that with extreme skepticism.
So we're back to the issue of media trustworthiness. I think media needs to earn back the trust of the right in order that climate change reporting be taken seriously. There's still going to be the issue of industry advocates pushing fake science, but that needs a whole different approach to tackle.
There’s 180K people employed in oil, coal, and natural gas jobs compared to 370K in solar. From a pure numbers standpoint this is just a completely farscical angle, but it’s a great example of why there is no true media bias problem, but there is a huge problem with stupid people who will believe anything and vote with fear.
I don't personally think it's a conspiracy - as I said, I believe that we need to attempt to counteract anthropomorphic climate change. But the evidence does bear the idea out.
The idea that Republicans are all just morons is cancerous as fuck. And I'm British - I have no horse in that race. But seeing Democrats actively promote the idea that Republicans are white trash hillbilly redneck bumpkins with sub-80 IQ makes me really dislike those Democrats. Rather than basically claiming superiority over your political opponents, why not try to understand their position, and the circumstances that lead them to believe things different from what you believe? It's supreme arrogance to think you know everything and your opponents know nothing.
Agreed with the rest of your points.
Per that document, page 29, there are ~370k jobs in solar, yes. But there are ~160k jobs in coal, ~360k jobs in natural gas, and ~515k jobs in oil. Plus the ~36k jobs in "advanced gas", whatever that is.
Unless you were talking about just the "electric power generation" column?
Case in point. The BBC trotting out Nigel Lawson as their standard puppet to "balance" pieces on climate change appears to have been about presenting the opposite point of view for balance. From a denier happy to spout easily disprovable fake facts, with no knowledge of the science. Every interview with a climate scientist appeared to come with a space for an unqualified denier. I suspect it's far more an indictment of a sad lack of scientific awareness in the BBC than deliberate political bias. Perhaps inevitable now they've been required to outsource so much.
Far from demonstrating the absurdity of the denier's position, for many of the public, it gave it credibility. For those with enough scientific awareness, yes his "balance" clearly consisted of cringe-inducing lies.
Of course it was made far worse by the BBC taking so long to realise and acknowledge their big mistake. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the memo they had to send around late last year. I suppose cry, I expected much better of them. Maybe a little fact checking too.
And I agree with you're analysis; legacy media typically trot out straw men only to signal how superior their view is.
The one time I heard him talk, he set off all of my kook alarms in the first few minutes of his lecture.
This is sort of third or fourth-hand, so don't just trust it blindly, but what I generally hear is that most of the real "other side" does actually believe climate change is real. They just oppose action because they believe humans aren't the cause, and almost any action we take will be a lot of wasted time and money that could be used better for other things.
The problem is that upon hearing that they oppose action, the "climate change is real" people totally ignore their reasons and lump them in with the crazy "climate change isn't real" people.
I did this once. I had fully accepted the media's narrative that these people were all kooks and idiots, so I was curious what could possibly cause them to think these things. I went and read some of their websites for the same reason I went and read some flat earther websites the other day, for amusement.
Unfortunately it turned out that (surprise) journalists had been wildly misleading me about what these people really believe, probably because journalists as a class of people accept intellectual authority without question, especially in the scientific realm. The problem of fraudulent psychology results is one well known example of this.
Here's what a lot of "climate change denial" really boils down to:
- CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas. We are indeed releasing lots of it.
I've yet to see anyone deny this, although I'm sure there are people out there who do. However this is not mainstream "denial".
- But we don't really know what effect this is having, or if it's really changing the climate
This is where climate change "deniers" separate from journalistic mainstream. They aren't so much in denial as much, much less certain about climate science and its conclusions, to the extent that they often conclude nothing should be done.
- This is partly because the climate is too complex to model, and partly because of scientific bias, fraud and malpractice.
A lot of climate change denial turns out to be a specific case of more general criticisms of the scientific establishment. Their style of argument can easily be ported to criticisms of social science or economics, with hardly any tweaks.
Basically: proclaiming certain doom and that your field of study is the only way to avoid it is a surefire way to get massive amounts of grant money, media coverage and political power. In addition, the "deniers" tend to have lots of evidence of actual serious problems with the science. One recent article I saw pointed out that the thermometer dataset that has been used for over 20 years to measure climate change is full of obvious errors, like temperatures that would be physically impossible or which are clearly the result of bad celsius/Farenheit conversions, or which are taken from thermometers that are literally at the start of airport runways i.e. routinely blasted with jet exhaust.
When errors that are obvious to laymen are discovered in critical datasets that have been used for years to make very precise predictions about very complex things, it is reasonable for some people to conclude the science is less certain than journalists present it, and as a consequence that maybe the costs of inaction are lower than has been presented.
Can anyone point me to hard, unbiased (in your opinion, of course) data that supports the assertion that climate change is caused by humans or otherwise depicts an accurate representation of our current understanding on the subject?
Is it possible that climate change is due to natural and not human forces?
How many were against Einstein for decades? Appeal to consensus among experts is still a fallacy.
Climate change has both consensus and evidence. It seems irresponsible to keep spreading doubt in the face of both.
I think this debate goes round in circles because we rely on news organisations to do several things at once, and they should probably be unbundled.
We rely on them to report immediate, factual events, like a fire in a hotel or an impending storm.
We rely on them to do longer form reporting on social trends, new scientific findings, business and governmental activities, etc.
We rely on them to locate and expose corruption and malpractice amongst the powerful.
We rely on them for book and film reviews.
And sometimes we rely on them to engage in analysis and generally telling us what to think, because figuring out our own opinions on complex topics is hard work. We'd like them to do it for us and then boil things down to an executive summary that we can then adopt wholesale as if it were our own opinions.
It's not clear to me that it makes sense to bundle so many things together, or if this is a useful combination or just an artifact of an earlier era when distributing the written word required lots of equipment and big agent networks. Now the internet exists should we be defending these agglomerations or breaking them apart?
Basically, instead of trying to convince people who still refuse to believe the evidence, they should be switching to something more productive, like building dome cities or building colonies on the Moon or something.
No scientist believes that civilization is going to collapse because of climate change.
The predicted effects, according to the scientific consensus, is that sea levels will rise by a meter or 2 over the next hundred years. That is not an extinction level event. Not even close.
The scale of how bad things are, are more on the scale of trillions of dollars worth of damages. Thats bad, but it is bad on the same scale as another Iraq war, and not bad on the scale of billions dieing.
Also known as a "Squash Match".
If pro wrestling can move on from them, maybe news media should too!
The role of "jobbers" or "enhancement talent" (i.e. performers on the show whose role was to make the real stars look good) faded in the mid-1980's.
The industry consolidated, from a collection of regional operators focused on live events, to two main companies with national footprints and a focus on television (i.e. WWF and WCW). Competition heated up between the two, and the "squash matches" that had filled out live event cards were not compelling to the newer television audience.
With the dawn of The Attitude Era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_Era), squash matches became virtually extinct. They had already become more rare in the preceding years. Much of the Attitude Era can be seen as a postmodern deconstruction of the old-school tropes that came before. In this environment, a group of former-"jobbers" even formed an on-screen faction dealing wit the concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_J.O.B._Squad), which elevated them to moderate stardom by breaking the fourth wall for an increasingly-informed audience.
Today, some performers will still never have the same potential for stardom as other top performers. But no one is kept on the roster to always lose. It's too boring, and doesn't really work to enhance the winners.
You are correct, of course. The industry changed only because the "mark" fans "smartened up" and demanded it!
>"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." -President of the United States
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...
> "[..Its cold right now..] What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!" -Leader and representative of the United States
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/10900742540104048...
Remove the deliberately goofy language you've used ("conspiracy theorist," "new world order") and just say "someone who believes the danger of climate change is not real and is a lie perpetrated by the political left." When you've done that, you have a rather mainstream conservative American position.
What you see as deliberately manufactured, idiotic strawmen are sometimes just idiots.
For example, I would be interested in listening to a reasonable anti-vaxxer. Not the "vaccines-cause-autism" one, (although this point deserves an honorable mention), but someone with more methodical approach. I know it's hard to find a voice of reason in the choir of conspiracists, but who said making good press should be easy?
I also would be interested in listening to a good flat-earther. I see it as a very good mental exercise for the reader: if I had now knowledge about the shape of our planet, could I actually tell the truth from the false here?
Same goes for climate (non)changers, Russian hackers and so on.
Take the coverage of the Covington High School protest, for example. When the available facts seemed to support the narrative that white, male, MAGA-hat-wearing, anti-abortion Catholic students were racially harassing a defenseless Native American elder, the media was shouting "fascism!" from the rooftops.
But when more facts emerged in the form of a longer video showing the high school students being abused, and with no mere smirk, by a group of overtly racist Black Hebrew Israelites no less--and the Native American elder accosting the students rather than the other way around--suddenly that no longer serves a narrative the left wants to tell, and there's been comparatively little coverage of the aftermath of the mob unleashed by the initial reporting, of the death threats to students and the high school's temporary closure.
This is why it is crucial for the media to present the facts from more than one, very specific angle, even when the facts are largely not in dispute.
Except that that was also reported mostly everywhere. Also, one sided 'evil-looking' harassment is news that is more interesting to most people because it might signal some trend. No-one (left or right) would have found a word-fight between evenly-wrong grey characters very interesting if that was the story in the first place. Because it just isn't.
That doesn't make the mainstream press left-biased. I think it actually isn't.
That you would rank the Covington kids as "evenly-wrong" with their racist (not to mention adult) abusers is incredible.
(Not debating the "even-ness of wrongs", as that is a six-year-old's excuse for punching their sibling - "They started it!!")
We are seriously in times where one side denies climate change. There is zero point in giving them time because it elevates their point to being equal to the one backed by actual climate scientists, not industry that has a vested interest, like coal, in continuing to deny it.
If you ignore them altogether because they are a bit crazy in one regard (well, maybe a lot of regards), then you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
"Side A said X"
"Side B said Y"
Well, that's of no help to me. I could simply go to those PR pages myself and see what they said.
So this is not about ignoring them, but about not giving equal credit to both view points or being mouthpieces to propaganda.
However, it's more subtle that that. It is a fact that so-and-so holds this-or-that position or belief, even if that position is wrong or incorrect. Those kinds of facts should be reported on, especially when they encode the beliefs and position of a major politician or political faction. A reporter also cannot outright contradict such a person, except in very clear cases, without seeming partisan, so they have to juggle with the prominence or try to inject a more authoritative counterpoint.
It's a hard line to walk, even when newsrooms were fully staffed.
For instance, your climate change (which was called until a few years ago "global warming") test rubbed me the wrong way because you mentioned the "climate scientists". There is no such thing as a climate scientist because there is no climate science. There is climate research or climate studies but not Science. Science means application of Scientific method: (a) making observations -> (b) formulating hypothesis (falsifiable predictions) -> (c) proving or rejecting the hypothesis through experimentation. Climate studies lack the third step and therefore they are not science.
Should I dismiss the rest of your argument based on my own test of "the person fails to understand the difference between science and ontology"?
In fact if you investigate it, you'll find a lot of so-called "climate change denial" is not so much denial as skepticism about the robustness and motives of climate science. There are some remarkably famous climate change skeptics you wouldn't expect, like a former head of Greenpeace who wrote an interesting essay that basically claimed oceanic acidification (due to extra CO2 being absorbed) was junk science. I didn't bother digging in to the merits of that specific debate, but when even the former heads of ecological charities are flagging problematic scientific practices, and when I've witnessed quite a bit in other non-climate fields, it's not a big stretch to believe that academia may have been exaggerating or mis-interpreting things to unlock grant money. Certainly other areas of science have developed a big problem with that (p-hacking etc).
https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
I've found that just browsing through their opposing headlines is a nice balance.
Has "Fake News" ever knocked trillions of dollars off the stock market because they ran an unverified story that implied the president would be impeached?
https://nypost.com/2017/12/02/abc-news-corrects-flynn-bombsh...
At some point there needs to more accountability for these organizations than "Oh, sorry about that"
I'm not sure why the media and journalists still get held up to some nostalgic ideal of brave upholders of truth. The majority of news organizations are owned by billionaires pushing their own agenda or giant corporations that only care about profit. Truth is secondary at this point.
So yes, it has been assumed to have happened.
- It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently. As someone in tech I can clearly see what they get and what they don't. Extrapolating it - it's not at all clear they understand economics or foreign policy or policy impact or environmental concerns and how to address them ...etc.
- Bias: every single one of them have bias. The burden is on me to spot bias and think objectively. Why do I have to pay do that? At least present news as it is? I'm not sure if even that would work - there could be bias in what gets chosen for reporting.
- The user experience is pretty bad. That I have to use an adblock after paying for the already expensive subscription is ridiculous. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of pixels and tracking embedded in their site.
- Big picture: By design, news focuses on the now and misses the big picture quite often and usually by a huge margin. E.g., the relentless focus on petty issues in last election (both major party candidates) and not enough attention at all on concrete policy measures. This extends to privacy issues (Facebook and the like) until it's too late. Wars/conflicts, foreign policy, long term economics.
For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier.
This is exceptionally difficult. My favorite example is choosing which photo to run for a story. Let's say a photographer take photos of Trump at an event. He has a photo of Trump smiling, a photo of Trump frowning, a photo of Trump scowling and a photo of Trump laughing. Which one is correct? They are all technically correct because they happened, but they all convey different tones, some of which will be completely inappropriate in the context of the story it runs with.
There was a very famous image of the UK miner's strike, at the battle of Orgreave, 1984. Another photographer captured the same scene that day. They give a very different impression.
Both images compared: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/06/photogr...
It’s just that one doesn’t give much context, it’s just a miner.
It's similar to when people try to claim that journalism without bias in writing is not possible. No, it's very possible. See articles of the New York Times from decades ago. This [1] is the first article on what would become "Watergate" from the NYTimes. The article does nothing but provide a detailed and objective recounting of all information available. There is no speculation, and I certainly can't tell anything about the author's biases, political leanings, etc. And keep in mind that this is a huge event - that is what would eventually lead to the impeachment of Richard Nixon. That tempered and impartial reporting, over decades, is what gave the New York Times the reputation that it's rapidly destroying today. Imagine if that article was written by the New New York Times of today.
The problem of course is that that article is 'boring'. It's not going to drive a million clicks and be shared on social media sites getting those upvotes to get to the top which leads to even more clicks and even more money. Hacker News is definitely higher brow than most social media sites. Regardless, this [2] is a list of all submissions to this site from the New York Times. Go and see what gets upvoted and eventually makes its way to the front page (following are all 30+ point submissions from first page):
- Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing (nytimes.com)
- Opinion: A.I. Could Worsen Health Disparities (nytimes.com)
- Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued (nytimes.com)
- This is Your Brain Off Facebook - study offers glimpse of unplugging (nytimes.com)
- Another Side of MeToo: Male Managers Fearful of Mentoring Women (nytimes.com)
- Foxconn Is Reconsidering Plan for Manufacturing in Wisconsin (nytimes.com)
And so on. It's frequently sensationalized and hyperbolic reporting that often even starts the ball rolling with a fake title. No, AI isn't going to worsen health disparities. No, no company wants to get sued. And no, male managers are not fearful of mentoring women. And it's only downhill from there. Even the articles that seem real, often quickly expose they're just click grabbers. For instance the "Foxconn is reconsidering plan" states. The lead paragraph states,
"It was heralded a year and a half ago as the start of a Midwestern manufacturing renaissance: Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics behemoth, would build a $10 billion Wisconsin plant to make flat-screen televisions, creating 13,000 jobs. President Trump later called the project “the eighth wonder of the world.” Now that prospect looks less certain."
Several paragraphs later you get, "Foxconn said that it remained committed to creating 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin and that it was “moving forward with plans to build an advanced manufacturing facility.”" In other words they are doing what they said they would do. This is not meaningful or good reporting. But it gets those clicks, and that's all that matters now a days.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/22/archives/4-being-hunted-i...
I couldn't put it better. I'm longing for the day someone creates a website that scans all news, detects and removes anything but the facts, and presents it to me as terse prose with a picture or two if strictly necessary. No ads. No cookies. No commentary. No opinion. Just the facts - all of them.
- Elephants are big.
Which one of these is a fact? English is unusually elegant in this regard. A fact does not mean true, it means something that can be shown to be indisputably true or false -- something that is falsifiable. The first statement is the fact. Because the second statement has no defined or falsifiable meaning it is an opinion. An elephant may be big compared to a mouse, but they're infinitesimally small compared to a planet. What does big mean?
In the New York Times' Watergate article [1] you'll find every statement made is a fact. Compare this to their writing on contemporary issues, particularly ones that are politically charged, and you'll find it's a night and day difference. The articles generally severely lack for facts and what facts are provided are often in the form of quotations which, in turn, are often non-factual.
Of course facts alone are not the end of the story. Facts can be misleading: 'Uber drivers were engaged in 47,341 more accidents including 27 more fatal accidents than all the licensed taxi drivers in New York.' That implies one thing, yet it omits a rather critical piece of information - how many miles did both drive? And there is also a bias in the stories that are covered. A news organization that chooses to only cover stories that reflect positively upon one side of an issue, or those that reflect negatively upon the other side, would be actively misleading their readers even if each story was independently factual and in no way misleading.
So aiming for factual reporting is certainly just a benchmark rather than the finish line. But it's really pretty easy to do, and it's something that'd leave us with magnitudes greater reporting quality than what we have today.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/22/archives/4-being-hunted-i...
The journalistic emphasis in selecting just one ( viewpoint, photo,lede ) is partly why the news is so broken.
If the photo supports the central truth of the piece then run it, otherwise you’re undermining yourself.
Doesn't the Washington post charge for articles with named sources?
Almost every time I follow a link to them the source has been "someone familiar with the matter". However, one time I was surprised see there were actual names attached to the quotes, but they obscured most of the page and wanted me to pay a dollar to read it.
Personally, I use the main site just to scan headlines and see if there's anything interesting.
Everyone's biased, but I don't think I'm more of an objective thinker than a trained journalist who's taken classes to study it and write about it specifically. I don't believe many people can spot bias as well as they think they can just from a reporter's writing.
And yeah, they aren't experts at everything they cover. It's not a scientific journal. They should use sources for that stuff and if they don't, you should move on. Remember they also don't write specifically for experts so details get left out.
But, where I get worried is what happens to the public commons when the labor of large scale journalism which is out of the reach of a single journalist (or even a small confederation) resources wise gets lost. Would it be replaced by individuals or small federations that are as effective? I mean, I don't think effective journalism will die anytime soon on the whole. But, I wonder if pockets will go extinct, and I'm nervous about what that means. I still don't think I've really seen it all that much yet.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxQaod7tWvYK_Naia54Gc...
The question is, has he remained independent from his decidedly partial funder?
I see it's all video in that investigation, do the videos look like they've been manipulated?
A bit of a tangent but: this is how you keep secrets in the Information Age. You can't actually keep a secret, but you can fog up the air with so much competing nonsense that nobody knows what to believe and the secret is indistinguishable from noise.
Murders in Chicago the last 10 years:
2009 - 463
2010 - 456
2011 - 449
2012 - 514
2013 - 455
2014 - 464
2015 - 512
2016 - 808
2017 - 683
2018 - 588
The problem with that is that the person with the byline isn't the only one that matters. Editorial oversight is equally important. You need the guy who's enthusiastically digging into a story and the guy who keeps his enthusiasm in check. I don't think those can be the same person.
A young journalist named Relotius who worked for "Der Spiegel" was found to have his stories a little bit too perfect. He acknowledged that some parts of his stories were "beautified" by him to make them more appealing to the readers.
So, while the core of a story might still be true, nobody really knows what happened and what was added by him. Nobody believes anything of these stories anymore after all.
It totally blew his career up (he was formerly found to be one of the "rising stars" of German journalism and had already got some awards for his work) and the Spiegel also found himself under heavy criticism, although they already have a concept in place, where another editor always fact-checks the other editors work.
So: Enthusiasm in journalists can go really wrong.
I think you are underselling it. Quoting from Der Spiegel[1], "he included individuals in his stories who he had never met or spoken to, telling their stories or quoting them. (...) He also made up dialogue and quotes."
[1] http://m.spiegel.de/international/the-relotius-case-answers-...
[1] https://digiday.com/media/inside-spiegels-70-person-fact-che...
I think you have a typo. Are you saying that you switched to FT (Financial Times), or that you got rid of the FT as well?
Anyway, if you are a US-based reader, one way to avoid some of the bias and noise is to subscribe to a non-US paper. You don't have reporters and columnists trying to sway voters, because that's not who the audience is. Plus you might discover that interesting events do take place outside of the US. (And uninteresting events. Brexit seems like it should be interesting, but all the daily political ins and outs are, in my non-UK view, a bit tedious...)
Unfortunately it seems the only way to effectively reduce bias is to go straight to the primary source and judge for yourself, which is time-consuming.
Your personal bias, of course.
We see in this thread many people who condemn newspapers because they report differently than they themselves would, and then have the gall to call that "bias".
But say, do you look forward to daily reports in your newspaper how on XY street there was no traffic accident yesterday? Or that no criminal escaped from YZ prison last month?
It's perfectly legitimate to focus on the interesting parts. You want to learn about an elephant's anatomy? Read a biology textbook, not journalism.
Thanks for a case study. That's exactly what the press does - describe only the tail and call everyone who objects tail-phobes. No, I'm not going to pay for such baloney. If they find advertisers gullible enough to pay for it - good for them. Otherwise, good riddance.
> It's perfectly legitimate to focus on the interesting parts.
Of course. It's also perfectly legitimate for me not to pay for it if I'm interested in whole picture, not tail hairs. Let the tail hair enthusiasts finance it.
Sure, don't pay for it. I don't pay for Magic: The Gathering cards. But I also don't troll message boards how WotC deserve to die because they neglect XBox games, thus showing their bias towards Collectible Card Games.
If they describe only what they care for, and only in a way they care for, it's the definition of biased. I challenge you to provide a definition of this word that would not be equivalent to this.
> But I also don't troll message boards how WotC deserve to die because they neglect XBox games
I don't care if they survive on their own - but they are whining that unless people start en masse paying for them, they'd die. I say - in that case good riddance, just as you would say if somebody asked you to pay for local MtG tournament because otherwise they can't survive. If they want my money - they have to provide quality content and do decent work. If they want to prostitute themselves to partisan politics and clickbait - ok, that's a way to make a living too, but I won't pay for it.
Oh, and another thing: I don't think any MtG club ever driven anybody to suicide or ruined somebody's life or career. Media does it all the time (Gawker, finally and deservedly resting in peace, pretty much was built for it). For example: https://quillette.com/2019/01/30/the-death-of-a-dreamer/ And then they want my sympathy. How about "no"?
P.S. you don't have to like my arguments or agree with it, but calling me "troll" just because you disagree with me is rude. Just so you know.
Right or wrong, noble intentions or not, it's not an accurate portrayal of America as a whole on the part of the BBC. If CNN ran a front page column every time someone in the UK died of alcohol poisoning, would you consider that unbiased coverage of the UK?
Well, actual verified accounts and statistics for one. BBC loves nothing more than highlighting USA shootings - despite near historic record lows of gun violence and definitely lows of gun ownership to crime ratios.
BBC does this because they want to “prove” how much better they are not being allowed the choice of how to defend yourself. It’s British smugness 101.
Btw... Did you see the school shooting last week where the aggresor was wearing a smash the patriarchy shirt - no you probably did not, and definitely didn’t see it on BBC.
Narrative and Bias. BBC can be trusted at all on firearms anywhere.
Now look at this list of only school shootings in America and tell me again that the BBC is unfairly reporting on too many of them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_...
What percentage have they reported on, anyway? Low single digit?
Your "near historic record lows" are how many orders of magnitude more than in other countries?
You’ll be happy to know there are less school shootings today than the 90s. [0]
As opposed to other countries, where guns are available they are used... shocker! The fact is that where guns are in the USA, our rural areas have violence rates as near European rural rates. We have a lot of metropolitan areas with populations of 250k+ where our crime is, those are areas with illegal guns, that go with the drug, gang, poverty, inequality of social mobility, and gang problems. We have issues in the cities - but it’s not because of guns. That violence committed with guns is falling, despite record gun availability. The CDC found that where we have 10k homicides including all the drug and gang violence per year, we have 500,000 to 3,000,000 successful and legal defensive gun uses. And... to wrap up the “but other countries” argument, I don’t care what other countries to, in the USA we have a fundemental freedom to defend ourselves with the lost effective means of personal protection ever invented, it’s a natural right enumerated as a civil right.
[0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...
All of those things would make national news if they occurred in the UK.
In the UK you go to jail for defending yourself [0,1,2]. The UK police themselves tell you the only legal tool for self-defense is a rape alarm [3].
If you think it's good the UK government has made the choice for people on how best to defend themselves, that's cool. I understand how if you've grown up with that culture, it's probably difficult to understand the freedom of choice we have in the USA.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1461346/Five-years-i...
[1] https://metro.co.uk/2017/12/11/pensioner-jailed-shooting-bur...
It seems legitimate to report on that considering schools are places that parents send their kids every day and have historically viewed them as safe. Add that most schools are publicly-run institutions and you have an interesting story of children shooting children at government run locations. If that doesn’t seem newsworthy to you, the bias may be in your own interpretation.
And you are also wrong about that. [0] My comment wasn’t about number of school shooting - but narrative. You don’t hear about them unless they fall into a given narrative. You don’t question what you are seeing at all, just happily accept it because it fits your bias.
[0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...
Even if we just focus on K-12, you could download this [1] data from US Naval Postgraduate School and run a trend line all the way back to 1970.
While your source that has no data at all - that does seem more trust worthy. Not to mention rate vs incidents.
The source I provided is literally only data, with no editorializing. It comes from this source: "The School Shooting Database Project is conducted as part of the Advanced Thinking in Homeland Security (HSx) program at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS)."[1] It also has a publicized data set you can examine.[2]
You are not biased at all, but anyone who dares disagree with you must be.
"The (K12SSD) table at right shows that the majority of “school shootings” over the last 48 years occur outside while on school campus. When tied in with non-shooting “school shooting” definitions, such as brandishing, we get a very different picture. By this project’s definitions, if someone on the sidewalk outside the school brandished a gun, that was a “school shooting”. Three percent of “school shootings” in the database involve no shots being fired at all. And if we include single shots (regardless of from where they came, or if they were suicides, or if they were late at night, etc.) those add up to 63% of all incidents."
http://www.gunfacts.info/blog/school-shooting-database-and-p...
I hardly think K12SSD's releases come "with no editorializing".
We could have a long discussion about what should and shouldn't be included in the data set. Should a bullet that hits a school building be counted? Should brandishing count? Should we only count incidents where people die? Does there need to be 4 or more injured? etc.,
The comment about editorializing was in reference to how one source was a news article interpreting a data set (the definition of a narrative) and the other was simply a data set.
Of course we all have our personal biases that can never be fully eliminated. But if you wanted to summarize the "current state of America" in one web page, statistically speaking some bastard shooting 3 bystanders in a botched robbery in a high crime area of East St. Louis (made up, but similar to stuff I've seen on the front page before) shouldn't even approach making the list.
It was written for children, essentially the print equivalent of ABC's Behind The News bulletin [2]. The writing level wasn't too far removed from the "adult" papers (I gather broadsheets are written to a 12 year old reading level and tabloids lower than that). Articles were a mix of mainstream news and kid specific stuff. There were fewer articles than an adult paper, but was basically all there with the extraneous stuff removed. It was completely independent.
I used to subscribe to the FT. It's pretty balanced in its reporting, with good news coverage. Surprisingly perhaps, without the bias you might expect of a financial paper. For a while I'd be surprised to see well argued pieces making a case for less inequality, higher taxes, or a universal basic income. Then you stop being surprised they're not just a vehicle of the Tory party, like the Telegraph and Times mostly now are.
I haven't seen the print paper in a very long time, but I go to their website and see the following headlines: Sunday Times journalist was murdered by Assad, Bitter split on assisted dying hits Royal College of Physicians, Snow Alert as Britain stuck in deep freeze, Killer driver law a farce - says Olympic star, Labour MPs branded cowards for 'selling votes' to help May's deal, Job interviewer 'was like abusive ex', Giving Statins to older people could save 8000 lives a year, Times Christmas appeal attracts record donations, Improve or face closure - Steiner schools warned, Woman reunited with train driver who stopped her killing herself.
Where is the news? Virtually every headline is either exaggerated or clickbait or both. The article on the killing of the journalist is at least news worthy, but the headline is way over the top -- "US court determines Assad regime liable in journalist killing" would be much more neutral. There is a debate on assisted dying in the Royal College, but when has there not been? What's this about? It might snow in Britain. In February. Wow. "Killer driver law"... obviously a story, but obviously not unbiased... The rest of it is fodder for the tabloids. What the heck happened to the newspaper?
The Times is one of the oldest and most respected newspapers in the world. And while it has always been biased (as they all are), it has an amazing reputation for journalism since the latter half of the 1700s! But people don't want news. They want shock and awe. It drives me crazy.
Example: Washington Post pushed the "Covington boys surround and intimidate native man" narrative that's been completely shattered by about 200 hours of video footage in the last week, and led to Twitter disabling the account that spread it, refutations (oddly enough from the NYT) and various apologies from those who came after the child on question.
Also I don't see how it's whataboutism when I'm agreeing with the general thesis.
Edit: it's not me modding you down, I think your second post was quite reasonable. I wish HN didn't downvote civil discussion like this.
Either the children surrounded the man and one boy stood threateningly close (as the Washington Post reorted at https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/20/it-was-gett...), or this did not happen.
As it turns out (Bari Weiss at the NYT viewed over 200 hours of footage) this did not happen. The man moved into the middle of the boys and stood very close to one of them. You can watch this from multiple angles and multiple cameras on YouTube and confirm this for yourself. David Brooks in the NYT also has an excellent summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/opinion/covington-march-f...
Reality is not a matter of perception.
However my comment was about how that actual scene can be viewed differently by people, and is exactly what is happening. This is not a matter of scientific facts being disputed, it's an interpretation of a real life event that took place. Too many people, the scene of 30-40 boys yelling and acting how they did invoked a sense of fear and intimidation to them. Too many others, it was just 'boys being boys'.
The other reason people are so miffed over this is because of the actual people in it and the narrative. For one, a boys family had the means to hire a PR firm to help with the ordeal (again, a place of privilege). And two, there is so much hand wringing over this boy and this event, but for some reason when many young men have been shot or hurt by cops it's often met with negative depictions of the person hurt. You can call this whataboutism all you want, but that's the reality of it. Why in this instance where a boy and his group of friends, that are clearing acting up and provoking others (not even touching the negative nature of their hats), are given a free ride as 'boys being boys' but yet we chastise people who get in trouble with cops? Aren't those same people "just being boys"?
You mentioned a fact was a matter of people interpreting a narrative. "While you say the narrative is wrong, many feel the narrative was right." That is not how facts work.
> There is no doubt the events going on were a powder keg of problems waiting to tip off.
Nobody is discussing whether there were "many problems".
We are debating whether children surrounded and intimidated an old man as reported by the Washington Post. We are doing so because WaPo was cited as an example of 'real news'.
That did not happen. WaPo was wrong.
> This is not a matter of scientific facts being disputed
Do you think the boys surrounded and intimated the old man?
You keep discussing unrelated issues without specifically answering whether you believe this happened or did not happen.
I'm speaking to how some watched videos and felt they agreed with WaPo on the matter. There is no 'fact' to this story beyond an interpretation of events. This isn't a situation of clear cut and dry (like the recent released footage of the Chicago officer). It's people reacting to a situation and how it's making them feel.
> We are debating whether children surrounded and intimidated an old man as reported by the Washington Post. We are doing so because WaPo was cited as an example of 'real news'. > That did not happen. WaPo was wrong.
Your statements are perfectly proving my point. To people that scene and moment gave them a sense of intimidation. You cannot tell them their feelings and interpretation of the situation is wrong. If I walk up to you and stand in your face, and you tell me that it made you feel intimidated I don't have the right to go "Stop, you're wrong".
> You keep discussing unrelated issues without specifically answering whether you believe this happened or did not happen
Im trying to explain to you why that particular situation is not something you can clearly point to as fake news. I'm trying to paint a larger picture to the whole matter and why many took issue with it.
Since you're so hung up on the matter, yes to me I viewed the way those kids acted as intimidating and inappropriate. If I saw that many kids in a group, wearing those hats, and chanting the way they did I would not want to be near it.
Yes there is. Either the boys surrounded and approached the old man to stand intimidatingly close as WaPo reported, or they did not.
>> Do you think the boys surrounded and intimated the old man?
> that particular situation is not something you can clearly point to as fake news.
Yes it is. Things are real, or they are not.
You seem genuinely confused about the nature of reality.
Let's not continue communicating.
The video clearly shows boys standing around a man, with one of them face to face with him. That is right in the video, clear as day. That is very much a clear fact. What you seem intent on breaking down is whether or not this was seen as some form of intimidation tactic and I'm trying to explain to you that people can, and do, interpret personal encounters like that in varying ways.
You seem to be one who can't understand the way in which people are able to react and interpret actions of people different. You asked me my opinion of the situation and then proceeded to tell me that my perception of reality is wrong. I watch that video and I personally feel that they are being intimidating, how am I in a 'confused nature of reality'. I am watching people confront each other and reacting to the situation.
Your whole argument on this video boils down to "your personal feelings don't match mine, so you're wrong".
> The video clearly shows boys standing around a man, with one of them face to face with him.
Did the boys surround and approach the old man to stand intimidatingly close as WaPo reported?
Answer Y or N.
> > You seem genuinely confused about the nature of reality.
> how am I in a 'confused nature of reality'.
That is not the what I wrote. I've included the real quote above.
I say that you're confused about the nature of reality because you repeatedly say a documented fact is a matter of perception, and cannot say whether you believe it is true of false.
We are on Hacker News right now. If someone reported we were having this conversation on Ars Technica, that would be false. That is not a matter of perception or feeling. This is how facts work.
Do you the footage of the old man approaching the group of boys and standing very close to one of them is fake?
>> Did the boys surround and approach the old man to stand intimidatingly close as WaPo reported? Answer Y or N.
>>Do you the footage of the old man approaching the group of boys and standing very close to one of them is fake?
You have not answered any of these questions. Instead, you've either changed topic or made up your own questions and answered those.
The issue is not that I think your answers are wrong, it's that your answers don't exist.
I was being very cafeful to be civil though - even though this is difficult with someone who won't give a firm opinion on something. I succeeded in that.
You haven't said I was uncivil before either - we've had a few discussions about articles I've written that have been on HN and you once disliked me criticising the Bay Area.
Email is in my profile if you'd like to discuss further.
Mike
> > The video clearly shows boys standing around a man, with one of them face to face with him.
I suspect they've only seen the short context-less clip, not the actual video, and that's why they can't answer yes or no.
> If I walk up to you and stand in your face, and you tell me that it made you feel intimidated I don't have the right to go "Stop, you're wrong".
Makes me think they never watched the many videos of the old man doing this, not the boys.
But they said they watched the videos and it wouldn't be civil to say they're not telling the truth.
This has always been and will always be the case. There is no possibility for objectivity; unless they compile every fact about the universe and present them all to you (quite a dull read), there’s inherently an editing process and selection of facts the writer thinks is important. You will, and should, always have to think for yourself. Even if news were presented in as dry a fashion as possible, you’d still have to think (or what’s the point?). And the facts will always be incomplete.
NYT went berserk after the 2016 elections if you ask me. Now every article feels like an opinion piece.
Since then It is extremely difficult to find a neutral news with clear facts. I distrust the NYT as much as I distrust Fox news.
I worry when I see these comments. They seem to make the same mistake that the BBC did when they presented equal time to climate change deniers as they did to climate change scientists.
After becoming a paying customer they do not remove the ads from apps, pop ups on the website, etc etc. I was annoyed so I decided to cancel. The cancellation process was also quite annoying. Couldn't just do it through a form, I had to chat or call. I was on hold in the chat room for 35 minutes before someone got on and asked me what I wanted. At that point I was quite annoyed.
The person in chat was perfectly friendly and handled the rest of the cancellation process swiftly.
I am happy to pay for content but I'll be damned if I am going to pay and still be subjected to popups and ads between every paragraph.
If I wanted to cancel, I'm not going to be able to call though, as I live in Australia. I thought there were laws in some states of the U.S. that meant you have to be able to unsubscribe through a form though?
It's bad enough calling to complain/cancel a local company - I've paid several pounds a time; I certainly avoid it if at all possible, and would more so with an overseas company.
Shifting to a subscription-only revenue model is not an easy proposition, and requires a huge adjustment that most newspapers are not yet ready to make.
Source: I used to work for a major regional newspaper.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/conde-nast-to-put-all-titles-be...
> “The New Yorker, which introduced a metered paywall in late 2014, generated about $115 million in paid-subscription revenue in 2018, up 69% from 2015, people familiar with the matter said. That revenue includes consumers who subscribed to the digital and print editions, although subscribers today no longer have the option of subscribing solely to the print magazine. The New Yorker’s regular renewal price for a print and digital bundle is moving to $149 a year from $119. The magazine will publish 47 issues this year.”
Granted, there’s a big difference between publishing 47 issues of long form writing a year, and 365 issues of a much longer daily-reported newspaper.
EDIT: not to mention that the Times and other big newspapers probably see themselves as informing the public discourse. It probably wouldn’t fly to put general newspapers behind a paywall, though the FT has greatly increased profitability with this strategy.
and as far as paying for ads, I find it absurd that anyone pays for cable tv anymore.
1) its my cheapest option to have local channels
2) of the DVR options (so I don't deal with those ads), it still has the best experience (tried Hulu, DirecTVNow, YouTubeTV) - YouTubeTV was the closest, but they inject ads you cannot skip in on demand programs and replace your "recordings" with on demand programs as soon as the network makes them available.
cheaper than an antenna? Do you live somewhere with too much interference?
And then when I couldn't take it anymore and went to cancel, their retention department had the gall to suggest the message was not from them and maybe was from my browser.
Fuck you, New York Times. Paying subscribers should not see ads or be hassled to be tracked by the ad industrial complex. Raise your prices if you have to.
In general though, I agree that paying customers should not be subjected to ads. But as someone who worked in the news industry (quite some time ago now) I don't think newspapers have learned that lesson yet or can afford to do that.
If I was going to have to go through that to cancel my subscription to a British newspaper, I'd just cancel the DD - a few taps in my bank's app.
I want to point out that advertising doesn't have to be intrusive. While this isn't appropriate for an independent journalistic institution like the NYT, the vast majority of for-profit publishers actually can continue with an ad-driven model without degrading their site's experience. One solution is to accept paid contributions to articles by advertisers with actual expertise in the subject matter. For e.g. marketing or tech periodicals, this works quite well.
Advertorials are an even worse solution than ads.
Obviously this needs to be properly disclosed, but the result is very different from an advertorial, i.e.: _actual_ expert commentary on a well-researched piece.
No. If an advertiser is paying to publish it, it's an advertorial, full stop. Why would they pay to produce and publish an actual quality article that doesn't push an agenda in some non-journalistic way? It's literally the job of advertisers to push an agenda.
I had never considered the click-bait outlet "HuffPost" as "quality journalism".
"We can start with the fact that “free” isn’t a good business model for quality journalism." Well, paid journalism is not a guarantee either: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/claas-relotius...
Stopped reading after this. Whining does not suit the NYT well. It is an outstanding newspaper and has basically, also thanks to the internet, a world wide audience. It is better prepared to the changing business model as most other newspapers. Whining here about google and facebook is rent seeking.
I don't blame them. It's not their fault that the news site decided to share their name with a trash clickbait site.
It is the fault of BuzzFeed News, yes.
We should all be extremely concerned about what the writer is getting at. If you're going to call it whining, and say they need to change their business model, what should they change it to?
I am not in the news business. Nor am I am in the diesel motor business. It is not my task to suggest solutions to a changing business environment. The NYC can now, thanks to the internet, deliver its content to a world wide audience. A paywall can be easily established. I pay for good news (e.g. "The Economist"). For institutions like the NYT or "The Economist" it would take quite some skill to screw this up. The market may move into "the winners take it all" direction.
I agree that free news is a problem to many newspapers. Fake news are another problem. But solutions like screaming for government subsidiaries (e.g. in Germany) or getting fees from google or facebook are not solutions. Taxing eCars to pay employees that produced diesel engines to save jobs is not a solution either.
If you don't want to get indexed by google because you are afraid they "steal" your content, then this can be solved by one line in your robots.txt file
And it is really hard to ask for redistribution of common news without any further added value.
Since that business is integral to democracy, it would seem we all have some stake in its success.
Thanks for clarifying this for me. Based on this, there is nearly no business I am not in. Does that make me a businessman extraordinaire?
If we shift toward paying for content, is there not going to be a market for subscriptions to fake news as well as subscriptions to real news? Paying for content alone doesn't solve the problem of fake news. How does Joe Average even know which subscriptions are the right subscriptions? Please don't let an algorithm decide for them.
In terms of payment itself, I feel the going rate is a big issue. Checking the NY Times just now, they're asking $5 per week of me for a basic subscription. Let's make the math easy and call that $250 per year, and assume four subscriptions are needed to be sure we have a well rounded intake, giving a $1000 per year news budget. For a person with a net income of $100k+ per year, maybe this is not a big spend. But for people on lower incomes - who I would argue are likely the people most susceptible to fake news - this becomes a much greater expense and will discourage them from subscribing to anything. Compared to freely available news, it would be putting disadvantaged people at a even greater disadvantage, and let's face it - in a democratic society, I'd rather everybody have access to the same information, than know half the population is making decisions based on garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.
In terms of what the new model should be, I don't think I have any answers. I just know that I have a budget for news and it is not in the order of a thousand dollars a year for a well rounded intake, however I also want everybody to have access to the same news, so I don't think paywalls are a good idea.
It doesn't solve fake news, except that subscriptions might keep the production of real news economically viable. Internet-ad revenue probably can't support real journalism at all. It's too labor intensive.
Real news is expensive to produce, you have to pay reporters to spend their time finding the facts; fake news is cheap, since lies can be made up in your pajamas.
The internet makes it that they don't need to fill pages and pages every day just to be tossed into the trash bin. A year old article can still be valuable, and it can be augmented with additional sides and updates. It just takes diligence and work, not to mention setting up publishing and formatting abilities way beyond the average cookie cutter CMS. Investing in their own production processes and technology, in other words.
But nobody's doing that. They're just making the churn more efficient. At most they'll link to some previous articles, forcing you to do the sifting yourself, and only linking one way.
By the time a newsworthy event reaches mainstream level, it's already been going for a while. That's the point at which I'd want to read a brief one pager of backstory, before diving into current events, surrounded by more context. Take the conflict in Syria: it might just be me not paying attention and being too busy with other stuff, but I genuinely missed when that started. When it did enter my radar, everyone was talking about it like we all knew how it happened. Well, if you take a random person on the street, someone who was upset at the (staged?) pictures of a dead kid... How many can tell you what that conflict is about and get close to the truth? I bet it's incredibly low, the only difference is I'm being honest about my ignorance instead of doing the stupid primate thing of pretending to be in the know in fear of looking foolish (and, I guess, western propaganda being just that when it comes to these subjects).
There's your hole in the market. That's what people want to pay for: not being the person who can't join in on interesting conversations. Well, are our current journalists up to that task? I very much doubt it, cos most have no ability beyond being a newsperson, jacks of no trade at all. Instead of letting experts do the talking, we're letting self important pretenders do it, and then, mostly to push an agenda.
The Quillette expose linked here about the geneticist bullied into suicide should lead us all to ask: why are we letting these morons tell us anything? They just want to enter industries and scenes they don't know, mine them for brief moments of relevance, and leave behind a wreck of human dignity. All over a ten minute talk they couldn't be bothered to understand, because bullying a sperg was more useful to them.
I’d rather have a journalist spend a week on a story (or more) and give more context instead of basically rehashing what was said by both sides.
I like The Atlantic, as it is mostly long form, not breaking news, but the impact of social media and 24/7 news has affected it as well.
Either way, I think the more you focus on the larger picture through long form journalism instead of the daily machinations, the better informed we will be and less spun up all the time.
I need to point out that the NYT is doing this. They probably have one of the more advanced CMS setups and their tech team puts out some really interesting things as well.
As to your other point, I want to see good, factual, long form content, but a lot of people will not read that. They only want the headline and bullet points. So newspapers need to adapt to that and ensure the main facts are presented right up front, but then have the detail and back story for those that want to do a deep dive.
It's a real mix and that's my problem. I want to pay for something that's good. I don't need all the bullshit filler, and in fact seeing the bullshit filler makes me not want to pay at all because it's an insult to my time.
Fake news is paid for with advertising and collecting info on the readers. Sometimes you have to pay for it as well.
Newspaper I paid for reported falsely that a friend of mine's parents had neglected their spinal meningitis daughter and she died. They rushed her to the hospital in their van knocking off the rack on top to get her help because they couldn't wait for an ambulance. She died anyway, and they charged the parents even if they did everything correctly to save her. From that day I learned of fake news.
> they charged the parents
So the newspaper just reported the fact that they had been charged?
> From that day I learned of fake news.
You learned to label things you don’t agree with as fake news.
Parents were not charged with neglect until after the article was written saying they neglected their daughter. There was no neglect just dirty laundry.
It made me skeptical of news ever since.
One of the things that irks me is the rhetoric that Trump-era distrust of the media is somehow undermining democracy or whatever. If you aren't distrustful of the media you are a naive and dangerous fool. I remember the overwhelming majority of US mainstream media pushing the Iraq war with stories that relied on bias and bogus sources. Interviews with officals & experts that had skin in the game. Blind faith in the media is even more dangerous than the also dangerous posture of not paying any heed to what they have to say.
That being said, I do wish google or some other search engine would get better about favoring original sources rather than other sites that just take stories and rewrite them. I hate seeing a headline to a story only to find out that it is just re-reporting what some other site reported. Often it is a game of telephone where site A rewrites a story from site B that rewrote a story from site C.
If a search engine could find a way to return the original site first then it would help highlight original reporting and make re-reporting less worthwhile.
The author of the article, David Chavern, since he took over the reins of the News Media Alliance, has argued that media cross-ownership rules are antiquated, that greater consolidation of news firms would be beneficial to citizens.
"A new op-ed from trade association News Media Alliance’s president and CEO David Chavern dismisses the contributions of leading tech services and argues publishers should form a cartel and extract rents by implementing controversial new regulations. In reality, though, leading tech services have taken great steps to empower publishers in the Internet Age, while the “cartel solution” would do little to bolster innovation."
link: https://springboardccia.com/2019/02/01/nmas-cartel-solution-...
Stuff like that is an absolute deal breaker and turns lots of users away from subscriptions entirely, before even talking about article/content quality.
There's also the awful "1,99 a month!" line of advertising that only tells you it's actually 39,99 after you click. I might actually be willing to pay that price, but not after being made a fool.
Also, if you work in media, sell me a completely frictionless day pass. Without the need to create an account. Sometimes I just want to read that one series that I found interesting, and it's not worth 29,95 and the hassle of maintaining another account and unsubscribing later.
Where do I get it? Is this something we need to create? I'd love a fact check o meter on each journalist as well, but I think that'd be very open to bias, so I don't know how that'd happen.
Anyway, I don't subscribe to newspapers because I don't like their model, not because I don't want to support the journalist. I have no clue if I'm missing a massive part of how the newspapers actually front a lot of money to make journalism better by paying expenses for journalists. I'm no expert on the ins and outs of journalism. I just see a lot of crap reporting that doesn't hold water and I'm tired of reading op-ed pieces falsely labeled as journalism.
I find there are some journalists I'd like to block and never read their trash again from each paper and some I would like to go back to over and over again. (Chris Wallace is a good one)
The fact that I can't get consistency from any one of the above is frustrating and I'm not paying 10 bucks a month per newspaper, the most I'll do is turn my ad blocker off.
I want to give journalists my money, but I don't want to give a newspaper with a single agenda my money.
I imagine you could get a pay scale based on page views, and a model where if you don't use the subscription you get ads.
It'd be interesting to see built.
I was also thinking it'd be nice to see recommendations separated from the hosting. I guess there just aren't enough people interested in it.
plus a reputation system
that's it, that's all we need to change right now... seriously, it will work
I was thinking about this last night and I think it'd be interesting to see authors actually have to cite another post that has a good strong counter argument to theirs and point out places where they disagree. It probably wouldn't work on a systemic approach but might work if an individual with this sort of temperament did it.
* https://www.bendbulletin.com/ - the local paper. They're the only ones with a reporter sitting through sometimes excruciatingly long city council meetings full of stuff like 'modifications to the sign code' - but also things like zoning reform that may make housing not so horribly expensive.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/ online - seems to be a decent national level newspaper. You can also get a deal on it via Amazon Prime.
* https://www.economist.com/ - good coverage of events around the world, and some more in depth analysis.
It's probably too much, but... I feel like these are critical times in terms of being informed and involved.
There's definitely a huge bias in almost all news sources. The Economist explicitly states their position on matters, The Financial Times and AFR are much more implicit. The BBC does pretty well on sticking to facts, but now they're appending their stories with opinion pieces from editors.
TR does do a very good job of simply fact reporting.
News is only the first rough draft of history [1] [2].
Newspapers are definitely not perfect, and they definitely make errors, but there's no better way to get such a breadth of timely, relatively reliable information to a general reader.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Barth#Legacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Graham#%22First_rough_dra...
You're looking in the wrong place. You'll find the first rough draft of history in a newspaper, you'll find the final draft in a book (or at least the most polished draft).
I often find lots of bugs in software that's been rushed out the door to fill and urgent need, it's the name with newspapers.
I think these articles are pretty comical coming from the New York Times, a for profit company, that has been cutting costs amidst really serious editorial failures.
I would believe this much more if it was from an independent news source. It’s like a car salesman telling you great buying a car is.
It’s reasonable that the Times would have such a biased, unfounded article. But not so much that anyone pay attention to or make decisions based on it.
So arguments like this article, even cloaked under “opinion” don’t carry weight because it’s just propaganda to sell more papers.
There's nothing about those things that is mutually exclusive. If your entire business depends upon you being a truth teller it is in the interests of both the company and your shareholders for you to tell the truth. Manufacturing a story could be devastating for NYT's reputation, and consequently for their shareholders.
Extra care and attention to detail isn't going to just happen unless there's enough money flowing in solid journalism to allow for it.
It's quite possible that the cost cutting is connected to the editorial failures, and is a consequence of falling revenues. And the NYT as a whole is in a position to see how those things relate.
This isn't to place the NYT above criticism. They could stand to up their game. The profession at large could when it comes to painting accurate pictures of the world and the NYT is better than lots of sources. But it isn't going to happen unless people can get paid to do it.
And unless we pay for it, it's another place we'll be the product. Because the other models for journalism are (a) selling our attention to advertisers or (b) propagandists selling our pre-decided opinion.
Many people I know who have been interviewed said something to the effect that "newspapers twist words to fit their angle". They also happened to be in positions of power, so it's hard for me to tell if they simply wanted to control the narrative and the newspaper wasn't going along for the ride it if the newspaper was the one with the hidden agenda. Probably a mix of both.
One huge leap forward was the rise of Wikipedia. Now the journalists recite Wikipedia facts for background, so I see fewer sentences like "Sea turtles, like other mammals,..."
But if you don't pay someone to go out into the world and do the labor-intensive work of investigating the truth, you'll certainly get lies written from the comfort of someone's desk.
Lies and opinion are much cheaper to produce than accurate factual reporting, since there's less overhead.
I think what's happening isn't that suddenly they are posting fake news, but rather it has been fake news all along. Tons of celebrities have said how they've been misquoted or otherwise smeared by news for a very long time.
What's different today is that everyone has a smartphone where they can verify the facts of the story and discover that the news is fake.
The journalism crisis is self-created because they have been pushing a fake narrative and are now getting caught. Worse yet, in the face of getting caught they double down on going even further into their false narrative.
This is the common predictable behavior of compulsive liars
Basically, a story of a person driven to suicide by biased, sensationalized and unfair coverage. To say it doesn't make me sympathize with the members of the outlets committing the deed is a large understatement. While I understand that not everybody in the press is like that, such things are considered totally acceptable, and people doing this would probably be then welcomed to work in any other press outlet. Until the time that producing such baloney has real consequences enforced by the people in the industry, I would have very little sympathy for them complaining about declining respect - and declining money that comes with it.
Did you not unsubscribe to their emails that you didn't wish to receive?
I wouldn't mind paying youtube premium channel if I can get a truly centrist opinion pieces, factual reporting and random excerpts into topics like science/philosophy/comedy/culture.
Sadly afaic again, most of the 'online' content is way too left (or the worse option: way too right). What I wouldn't give for a bbc like channel in the US that runs 1-1.5 hrs every day of content. Any recommendations?
He's got both a news channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/Timcasts/videos) and an Op-Ed channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe02lGcO-ahAURWuxAJnjdA).
Crowd source investigative reporting. Focus on supporting the reporter instead of the news network. Build a system that creates a reputation for the reporter and a mechanism to crowd source news that the general public is interested in.
I could go on, but then there would be more text for you to read. I guess I could add that cryptocurrencies and blockchain would be useful technologies in a tool like this. (reputation tracking and crowdsourcing)
Because that's what we're losing. The idea that JoeBlowKnowsTheTruth.com holds the same level of accountability, rigor, and seriousness as an actual news organization is what's gotten us into this mess.
The big MSM companies know they have the power to spread fake news and have a good amount of people blindly believe.
Some of these alt-media sites are political and put a spin on stories as well.
In other words you are looking for journalists who are good at winning prizes from their peers. But this risks becoming a self-contained system where journalists are "reputable" because they parrot what other "reputable" journalists think.
If IronWolve pays for journalism from sites that strike him as being thorough and trustworthy, then IronWolve's own judgement is as (small) exogenous contribution to the system.
Of course it is also possible that IronWolve is a fool who pays for foolish journalism. But if so, then that's his problem.
I think you're missing the difference between journalism and editorialism. The latter has become our standard of "news" nowadays. A quick glance at the top alt-media sites shows literally nothing but unsourced, opinion driven fear mongering and click bait. It's not about winning awards or thinking "correctly", it's about operating within the bounds of good faith arguments, and adherence to ethical standards agreed upon by society at large. You can enjoy all the political opinions you wish, but don't confuse them with fact based news reporting.
The decline of integrity in mainstream media is actually what has gotten us into this mess. If the quality of mainstream news reporting did not decline so widely there would not be a vacuum for sites like JoeBlowKnowsTheTruth.com to draw an audience.
News organisations and their journalists are completely responsible for the scenario and trying to blame anyone else is just a scapegoat for their own bad work, the consequences (decline in readers/revenue, journalist layoffs) are theirs to face.
I think you mean, mostly (with a few exceptions), tell the truth? I feel like you're likely searching specifically with news agendas you agree with, rather than reading a broad range of mainstream sources and pulling the threads together yourself.
I mean, if you really want very dry, just fact news, follow a news agency [1], but I suspect you don't really want facts...
You know what an op-ed piece is, right? If you don't, here's a definition:
> An op-ed, short for "opposite the editorial page" or "opinion editorial", is a written prose piece typically published by a newspaper or magazine which expresses the opinion of an author usually not affiliated with the publication's editorial board.
The NYT itself felt it's reporting was bad enough it warranted an apology: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-public-e...
If you think it isn't, I can only suggest you have a bizarre concept of reality.
No, not at all. It's only proof that it's a point of view they thought their readers should know about.
Here's a contemporaneous editorial that expresses a very different view: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/01/opinion/the-bioweapons-en.... You can find all kinds of contradictory opinions in the NYT op-ed section, so it'd be nonsense to say the NYT endorses the view of every one (or any particular one) it publishes.
> If you think it isn't, I can only suggest you have a bizarre concept of reality.
I'd suggest your concept of reality is more bizarre than mine.
I will never support NYT, not because I support FB, but because they disguise their media campaign as one meant to protect the individual's privacy, when in reality NYT has a very strong monetary incentive to go after FB. These ulterior motives further decay the trust the general public has in news media of all kinds and it's disappointing to see HN gobble up NYT article after NYT article just because FB is unpopular here.
It's like raising a sev-1 ticket against a team/project you hate or escalating far and wide every single mistake a coworker makes - it tarnishes the reputation even while being completely truthful with respect to the statement made.
You're not wrong that NYT would have a motivation to report negatively about FB. But that doesn't automatically mean that is the motive, though. All their reporting I've seen has been notable, and not hysterical. There's been additional good reporting by TechCrunch and ProPublica, I'm not sure how NYT's coverage differs.
How do you know this information never left the device? Or, given the nature of the FB API, that it used the device at all?
I'd pay double or triple their current price if they announced support for anonymous access backed by frictionless anonymous payment.
A counterexample: if I want to know about the origins of our understanding of geometry, Euclid's Elements is a pretty solid place to start. Or Newton's Principia for physics.
Now let's look at a news topic like climate change. Give me data I can dig through for myself. I'm sure it's available, but it's not something you'll usually see journalists directing their readers to.
Of course, most readers aren't equipped to use the data if they did have it, so on a practical level it makes some sense not to bother including it.
But this raises a deeper question: is your Average Joe Citizen (who is not an engineer, but maybe a barista, salesman, banker, etc) equipped to have an opinion about climate change at all? We take for granted incredible access to information, but outside our professional specialty most people rely on other people to tell them what to think, and those people may be accredited by other people, with various biases, agendas, traditions, etc all the way up.
And even with the people who are working directly with data, there are occasionally political pressures on them to arrive at certain conclusions (diet research in particular is infamous for this).
All that said, I do believe in the value of journalism to educate. But I think a journalism worth paying for will look more like educational material than the journalism we have today.
This comes off pretty condescending. What makes an (assuming computer) engineer any more capable of reading & comprehending reports than a barista or banker?
Seriously, fake news has not been invented in the past three years, it was just 'democratised' with the help of twitter and facebook. The large majority of publications, even reputable ones like the NYT, have contributed to the spread of false information and knowingly mislead the public more than once.
But I like to think that there are still readers out there who want to know what is really happening, so that they can make educated guesses as to what will happen next. Presumably these readers want these insights in order to make money, which suggests that papers oriented to investors and business executives are the most likely to provide information that is actually predictive, rather than reinforcive.
The problem is that papers of this sort are also the most likely to charge hefty subscription fees, and put up strong paywalls.
It's that simple.
But paying for something via tax is a pretty weak way of ensuring accountability, which is the entire point behind the concept of voting with your wallet.
"Want me to stop lying? Pay me to tell the truth then."
And while I do agree that MSM fakeness mostly comes in the form of "technically facts, mischaracterized and cherry-picked," there is also a lot of just straight untruths as well, but laundered through anonymous sources. The effect is the same, in that you come away believing untrue things.
E.g., this is fake.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...
And this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...
Another form of fakeness is "honest" mistakes (that always seem to coincidentally play into some popular narrative) that are hyped in headlines, but then only quietly corrected later, e.g., stuff like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russi...
So the casual reader will be left believing lots of untrue things, as they catch the headlines and miss the corrections.
A journalist does not add any value when writes about some other people doing something and this is being public knowledge. Previously this type of information technically differentiated paper they sold. So, people paid for the differentiated paper. Not for the news per se. Internet provided free distribution and there is no more paper to sell. Hence, nothing to pay for.
Exactly the same happened to the music industry when it was selling plastic--CDs--differentiated by music bits on it. When distribution digital become free and people stopped buying CDs the industry collapsed and only Spotify revived it with an innovative business model. And now people pay for easy access, for service, not for the music.
So, for the press, it is only specialized information and analysis are worth paying for. It's unique POV or data that adds value should really have a price. Just news is a loss leader to attract an audience in this equation. Exactly the same like Stratechery, for example, publishes free weekly posts and podcast to get the audience to pay for daily analysis.
When the press, in general, understand basic economic forces, it will be able to be sustainable. Readers do not need a gazillion of bloggers calling themselves journalists that write basically exactly the same news about an event or device that require effectively zero experience except typing. The price for this is exactly zero. This is a marketing expense to attract users for the real thing.
But there are not so many outlets that produce that real thing. Most produce instant junk news that has zero value and think that this should make a living.
That's not to say their point is not perfectly valid about fake news, it is.
It's that the attitude of telling us it's our fault and we should change our ways is already a losing mindset.
For people in a country like India, where print newspapers (that have ads) can be bought for a whole month for about ₹150 or so (a little more than $2), subscriptions to foreign sources are quite expensive. Absurdly, there are newspapers in India that charge more for the digital edition (compared to print), while still showing plenty of ads and having the benefit of adding trackers! (Example: The Hindu)
Unless mainstream news outlets improve their business models and the user experience, I for now have very less sympathy for them. The fact that Facebook and Google are a lot more worse for everyone is why I even have sympathy for these organizations in the first place.
Edit: found this writeup that exicitly states no tracking for subs. Thanks again for mentioning them!
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2018/03/ars-pro-now-free-of-tr...
That is a chilling and terrifying idea. Even if I pay for news, a lot of other news and non-fiction content is still freely published.
As long as people believe some free news is trustworthy, there will be an incentive to create fake news.
Of cource, just like software developers with no formal training, there are plenty of news writers with no formal training either. And just like developers, these journalists can self learn proper journalism themselves or hack it and give a bad name to other journalists.
Whatever they learned in school is taking back seat to pushing an agenda.
I watch either CBS or NBC about once a month to laugh and smh at corporate BS/lack of journalistic integrity prostituting itself with somatic entertainment, propaganda, a lack of understanding and a lack of well-researched nuance. The only viable form of news is user-/no strings grant-supported. Ad-supported inevitably loses its soul. There's no getting around the reality that ad-supported is fundamentally journalistically unethical and readership immoral.
And no, I have no idea what "fake porn" might be, if such a thing exists.
Several other countries in Europe has the same model and it just doesn't work.
I think there might be a solution where state funds support a local-news system, where the funds are institutionally separated from influence - maybe similar to how the Fed is supported by the State yet remains politically separate from it (ideally).
There are institutional structures beyond the state and market that can produce public goods.
Make the 'base' service free, but offer a better 'tier' (or whatever) as a paid service (Q&A with journos, a free journal, ability to filter and tune news feed, etc)
There are many ideas and almost all the better ones don't likely involve pay-walling the site (either for all or after XX articles)...
I'm a broken record on this, but I think Craigslist should connect local classified services to a new local journalism project. DNA Info is dead now, but if there were 500 DNA Infos, with reporting funded handsomely from Craigslist revenues, we could really fight against fake news from the bottom up.
The ideal service I see is something that bundles a local news source with a national and international news source.
Then it might be easier for a casual reader to differentiate between journalism and opinion.
I don't want individual subscriptions, but I'd be happy to pay once.
PS: I also like The Guardian.
Advertising driven business models force the company to pander to their advertising overlords
Ad supported news is a real shit show. It’s what got us CNN and Fox. They’ve effectively segmented the audience so people hear what they want to and tightened up the demographic for ads. They have to keep people watching and clicking so they can serve up another ad. How do you do that? Get them fired up over some controversy on a regular basis and tell them what they want to hear in between controversies.
- economy aims at making money, not being good
- what you pay for is people caring for other people (by integrating facts into valuable knowledge)
I am actually kind of glad that the media landscape is changing, because they way it has been has been terrifying. I'm not american, so I can't speak for new york times but the layoffs in the shit-media that was buzzfeed and others like it is just good news.
I'd rather see a world without a news media than with them being the only option. But I do pay, for alt-media.
I politically mostly agree with the NYT, but I can't stand their morale high ground with the continuous shaming of the other side of the aisle.
NYT can whine all they want, but until they stop producing fake news themselves no reason to pay... If all papers produce such low quality biased content, I prefer the free ones, at least there is more honesty there about what I am getting for what I pay for.
It's garbage. Utter, complete garbage. I've been reading it daily online for the past week and it's 99% political opinion nonsense.
(I'm not referring to anti-Trump or anything, it's actually anti-opposition in Australia; for America it just seems to attack "the left").
- https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html
- https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_eve...
However, in the last few years, a switch to a greater subscription income has taken place (see first link above, also here: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation-...).
When you ask Venezuelans onsite they'll shake their heads in disbelief about the third US-backed coup attempt in this decade, and the press lies. This time also backed by the EU.
The internet has created a zero-cost distribution platform, and "news" platforms which exploit irrational emotional responses in order to further an agenda will always exist.
If quality news is gated by a paywall, there exists a cutoff with respect to salary beneath which quality news is inaccessible. Even if some could afford it and choose not to, there still exists an informational membrane between two classes of people. This system inherently couples poverty with less education. That is unacceptable! The playing field must be even for all, and the same knowledge should be accessible by all citizens who wish to participate politically.
There exists a concept in Game Theory called Perfect Information [0]. To quote Wikipedia, a sequential game has perfect information if each player, when making any decision, is perfectly informed of all the events that have previously occurred.
If we don't maintain a system which facilitates perfect information, then most people beneath this socioeconomic membrane will follow the path of least resistance and end up subscribing to free platforms which exist to exploit them. Remember, if the product is free...
And if we allow this to happen, then we create ideological chasms between socioeconomic classes, which leads to distrust and prevents cohesive inter-class political activity. This hurts the lower class the most, as they must rely on human resources more than financial resources in order to exact meaningful change within their lifetimes.
It may be that the only solution is a network of journalist cells and news organizations which are paid for by public donations, university funding, tax money, fundraising, and any and all ethical means of revenue collection which still allow the product itself to be free.
As most browsers of Hacker News are surely Open Source enthusiasts, it would be very beneficial to take the time to gain a deeper understanding of why you appreciate Open Source software, the benefits it has both to empower the individual and society as a whole, and what mechanisms must exist to ensure such a system continues to exist.
If you can identify these root concepts, you can then generalize them and try applying them to your understanding of the news distribution model and the future of journalism, and perhaps you might uncover new insights.
I like your post but free news at a high quality level isn’t sustainable. Even charities need donors.
A lot of people used to say Open Source wasn't sustainable. Red Hat, one of the most prominent and influential Open Source companies, has over 10k employees (many of them engineers who take the salary of 2-3 journalists) just got bought for $34 billion.
You're gonna have to back up your claim that free news at a high quality level isn't sustainable.
The result is I didn't pay and didn't read the article.
Seems to be an effective measure if your goal is to reduce clicks and deter readers
- Fact based journalism.
- A clear list of sources that we can check ourselves.
- No biases in the choices of titles in order to sell a predefined narrative.
- No ads in order to keep outside interests of dictating narratives.
I agree with your other points but be careful what you wish for because you just might get something worse.
Such a Fact based news organization doesn't exist anymore. Ever since the 2016 elections, each outlet had to dig deeper into their partisan trenches.
Since then I get my information from a mix of reading multiple news outlets, together with some independent long form podcasts that don't have as much an agenda as mainstream newspapers.
What I would like is for the journalist to report the fact and let us reader chose if it is negative or positive.
The facts can include the views of external people giving their views on it (as long as it is clearly documented in the sources that it is the views of someone external). But if the journalist himself takes a side, then all bets are lost.
Trump says he's on same page as intel chiefs after insulting them
Erin Burnett: Tapes don't lie, but Trump ...
Even some Republicans balk as Trump targets US spy chiefs
None of those would violate your criteria, but any reasonable person would say they are negative. At some point you just have to accept reality and stop expecting news outlets to bend over backwards trying to make it seem like both sides are the same.
>> Trump says he's on same page as intel chiefs after insulting them
after "insulting them"? The choices of words here makes us already take a stance even before opening the article.
>> Erin Burnett: Tapes don't lie, but Trump ...
Seriously? The title already takes a stance on the view that Trump is lying all around.
>> Even some Republicans balk as Trump targets US spy chiefs
The choice of the word "Even" to make it look like it is absolutely extreme.
Those are the headlines on Fox News:
Trump Jr. calls out Schiff after report shows mystery calls weren't to dad
Trump dismisses border wall negotiations as 'waste of time'
Those are the same type of headlines with bias on the other side.
It attributes the stance to Erin Burnett, which you said is fine.
Saying "Even" is perfectly justified here. Parties, especially the Republican party, tend to march in lockstep with their president. The fact that GOP members are opposing Trump on this IS the story
But as long as "fake news" is all free, and "serious journalism" is hidden behind a paywall it's hard for it to compete with the viral effect of free stories on any aggregators. If the NYTimes wants people to read their content, they need to make it discoverable, not lock it away.
Obviously NY Times has a stake in this, so no need to go further into that angle.
The problem "regular" media is facing today is increased scrutiny w.r.t. neutrality. They're simply not reporting neutrally.
I'm by no means a Trump-supporter (not even American), but when I consistently see traditional media re-reporting internet rumours as truth every time they have the possibility to add a "Look at how bad Trump and his supporters are"-angle... And then often later shown to be wrong, even traditional media is portrayed as spreading fake news. Because they are!
Need an example? How about this very recent incident with MAGA teens and the intervening Indian? This was worldwide reported by "traditional" media as an anti-Trump story. No checks. No verification.
And it was all fake.
So tell me again. Why should I trust them more than, for instance Info wars? Both sides are clearly partisan.
That's a pretty damning statement to make about yourself.
Would you rather news media only report things so inconsequential that everyone involved is happy to be publicly outed?
I don't pretend to have an actual answer to how we'd build such a mechanism or what it'd look like, but there's a need for it nonetheless. Maybe some trusted-to-be-accurate-and-confidential third party that can say "Yes, this unnamed source is legitimate"?
Are you suggesting that reputable newspapers are making up unnamed sources or are too careless to privately confirm that they're real?
> I don't pretend to have an actual answer to how we'd build such a mechanism or what it'd look like, but there's a need for it nonetheless. Maybe some trusted-to-be-accurate-and-confidential third party that can say "Yes, this unnamed source is legitimate"?
It's been invented, and it's called journalism. That trusted-to-be-accurate-and-confidential third party is the newspaper itself.
It's a possibility, yes. Are you denying that possibility?
"That trusted-to-be-accurate-and-confidential third party is the newspaper itself."
That's not a "third party", by the very definition of "third party". Unless you're suggesting a newspaper (or other publication) that's entirely disconnected from its journalists and editors?
This incentive is diminished for news outlets like the BBC, though not completely because they are funded by TV license fees which the British public complain about frequently.
The worst part though is that in it's ubiquity, I don't think anyone realizes that it's happened. There just isn't much objectivity left in journalism from any source.
It's hard to expect unbiased news when journalists inject their opinion into everything because they think they're fighting the good fight.
So eventually I started reading a lot of non-mainstream media (that was not alt-right ;)) and I found it to be very well researched and it happened to be for free. For specific topics there are also good blogs and websites of political advocacy and research organizations.
Sorry NYT, but your content is not that life important and awesome. I might be biased because I'm not from the U.S.
Media in the US has consolidated to a handful of players, who have many conflicts of interest. These result in a big business bias in media today.
It's rare to get news and commentary written from the labor point of view, and that's needed a lot more than financial expansion of entities like the NYT.
Progressive minded people should simply start to fund labor centric media and compete with the big money majors. I'll bet that competition goes pretty well, and some of that can be seen in TYT today, largest online news and opinion entity there is, by views. TYT owns under 35-40, operates on a mix of AD revenue and membership income to avoid having those same conflicts of interest, and that allows it to differentiate nicely from the usual players.
Besides that, what makes you think news is more accurate if its paid for ?