Uh, Coordinated Universal Time [0]?
I can't be the only one who, upon seeing little things like this, immediately has doubts about the accuracy of everything else in the article.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
Just shows that being an expert in one domain means that ... you're an expert in one domain.
Russia has been jamming GPS signals in northern Norway during different military exercises [1]. Russia has denied this, but the foreign ministry has started to share the proof of this with them, [2, Norwegian only]
[1] https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/01/norway-ti... [2] https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/K38ee7/ud-har-gitt-rus...
It only works if every article in a newspaper is written by the same person with the same level of knowledge and ignorance of every topic published. This simply isn’t the case, as newspapers are written by dozens or hundreds of different people working for many different companies and with many different backgrounds.
For example, a new reporter who bones a story about a local car factory has absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of the work of a seasoned reporter for a wire service covering politics in the nation’s capitol a thousand miles away.
It does have a bearing on the overall editorial quality of the paper, unless as a reader you can figure out a predictable reason for editorial quality to drop for only one specific topic. It means that a poorly researched article can get out of the door without being flagged.
Individual articles of clothing, food, and other products coming out of a company are inspected by different people. But when I go to Wendy's and buy some fries, I don't know which people are inspecting and preparing my food, and know who was preparing my food wouldn't be useful unless I already knew a lot about that person. If I went to a restaurant and my fries had mold on them, it would probably be the fault of a small percentage of the workers there. But I would still be justified in distrusting the rest of my food, even if I thought the rest of the food on my plate was probably prepared by different people.
I don't know enough about the individual staff members of my local newspaper or their individual contributions to each article to make an educated distinction between them. If I see evidence that my overall newspaper is willing to publish badly researched articles, it seems very logical to me to conclude, "hey, when you see an article in a subject you're not familiar with, remember that it might be one of the duds. If you see an article by a reporter you're not already familiar with, remember that they were hired by a newspaper that occasionally hires bad reporters."
Being able to write a fluent story is a skill in itself and not necessarily linked to deep knowledge about the subjects the story touches. News publications work off deadlines where it can be - no, strike that, is - most important to have something, anything to publish. Those who can reliably produce the required few paragraphs will rise higher than those who put accuracy above timeliness.
This is not a secret. It's basic journalism. Beat reporting hasn't been common since the 1970's. Almost all journalists are expected to be generalists. Today it's a car crash. Tomorrow it's a labor strike. It's the nature of the business.
Daily news isn't for in-depth research. That's what books, documentaries, and other slow media is for. The daily news is for reporting the news of the day.
...but what about weekly and monthly news? That was the publishing frequency for most of the publications in this area. Those were the magazines those people wrote for, often not hindered by any deep knowledge about the subject matter but gifted with a quick pen - not to mention the advertising department which wanted to keep their clients happy.
If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper.
Then couple hours or days later you get an article on a different topic from the same $NEWS_SOURCE, and you read it like gospel.
What changed over past decades is the way we consume news - it's "unbundled" now; much like we consume movies per-title and not per-channel, we consume news per-story, not per-newspaper. But this didn't improve news quality.
Gell-Mann amnesia exists at scale, it's one of the most trivial things to verify - you just need to talk with people. With your family, friends, or with folks on any social media site / on-line bulletin board. You'll see countless of examples of people who suffer from this amnesia, who can't perform the most obvious generalization from observation - to conclude that, since for any topic they know anything about every news article is utter bullshit, and since their friends report the same observations for their domains, the news on the topics they're not experts on must be bullshit too.
Instead of as a hard fact to be evidenced and justified, I think a better way of thinking about it might be as a kind of parable - a reminder to keep an open mind and not just blindly accept everything you see in the newspaper, or anywhere else.
I am trying to train myself not to continue. I think I’m getting there now.
GPS does not use UTC, it uses GPS time [1], which is at a constant offset to International Atomic Time, TAI [2], which was in sync back in 1958 with Universal Time [3], on which UTC is based. GPS, TAI, and UTC use SI seconds, while UT1 doesn't (a UT1 second is 1/86400 of a complete rotation of earth).
Of course they are all related, but, hey, all time scales are somewhat related and "track each other", given some (time-dependent) offset. Fact is that GPS doesn't run on UTC.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Leap...
> The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. This abbreviation arose from a desire by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union to use the same abbreviation in all languages. English speakers originally proposed CUT (for "coordinated universal time"), while French speakers proposed TUC (for "temps universel coordonné"). The compromise that emerged was UTC, which conforms to the pattern for the abbreviations of the variants of Universal Time (UT0, UT1, UT2, UT1R, etc.).
See also the linked citation: https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/nist-ti...