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Comment by lawl | Hacker News Reader

> but I'm highly skeptical of internet sleuths and their ability to string a few searches and documents together into an accurate narrative / provide context to complex systems

Me too, but i'm just as sceptical when it comes to "real" journalists. Journalists aren't domain experts in everything. Read some random news about tech stuff, it's often times filled with clear indications of them not really understanding the topic. Which isn't meant to bash journalists, they have limited time for research, need to write an article, and again are usually not domain experts.

The question is how do we fix this?

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Follow journalists who have domain expertise in technology?

You can use a shitty news article about a particular relevant topic that contains some questionable issues, and then search around for people that actually know what they are talking about.

Exert some of your own effort to find good sources. Don't trust the first thing you read. This is ultimately the problem imo.

Yep, thats one solution. But then do you really need journalists? Ultimately this ends in you having a some people you trust in certain areas. Quite how it works in real life. E.g. real life friends asked me what i think of covid tracking apps because they trust me on topics like this.

It's also not without failure modes. Lets say you just follow certain journalists/sleuths on certain topics that's basically filter bubbling by design.

Doing your own research to finding sources is imo the best thing, but it just doesn't scale. If i personally checked every single thing i've read today, that would be a full time job (aaand we've just invented journalists again to solve THAT problem)

I feel like you asked the question and demonstrated how the answer is yes.

Well i also said i don't think journalism works in the post before. So my position on this is still that i don't think we have a solution.

That seems fair, at least in the context you describe (not sure i'm there but that's not important).

I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided.

The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...

> I think the 'pay attention to the media source and journalist and decide if you think they're good' is a viable route in the meantime even in the context you provided.

I don't like this, again because of filter bubbles. It's very easy to fall into a 'i don't agree with this person, they must be wrong' trap.

> The look stuff up yourself kinda thing always reminds me of the conspiracy theories that people develop after they 'research'.... it's so easy to find what you want to find...

I would argue that this is what we're doing on HN though. HN has a policy of preferring the primary source.

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