> Students reportedly got a lot better at spotting questionable sources.
Like that's definitely a step in the right direction, i.e., don't just blindly trust what you see on Insta or FB, but I worry it'll just teach kids to blindly trust mainstream media like the NYTimes, which are not without their own biases.
It gave me a lot of insight about why it's unlikely someone who's invested a lifetime into a career would intentionally jeopardize all of it by not following the journalistic standards and ethics they had learned and studied for so long. About the difference between a factual statement and a biased statement. The purpose of an editor. What are the consequences when an editor makes a mistake. And so on.
At that time a lot of it was also how to develop film and run a darkroom, but that's obviously not taught anymore!
This form of journalism is pretty much dead in America.
Moreover, journalists violate journalistic "ethics" all the time and there is very little risk to your career unless you do something really bad and obvious like plagiarism. Even then, you can often stage a comeback if people like your writing.
Nearly, but we need it to come back.
We can't depend on every citizen having loads of spare personal time to spend doing their own journalistic research on every topic. It's impossible. And we can't just let "entertainment news" become the standard. The current chaos will just keep ramping up and up until the collapse of democracy. Yeah I know, many democracies have collapsed over human history. But we need to do something to bring back journalism, not just educate people about how to do their own journalism. That's about as sustainable as having everyone grow their own food. Which is to say, not sustainable at all.
It's a hard project, students largely presume that news sources have bias, and some clearly do. But telling apart bias from good faith misunderstanding and sincere attempts at simplification of a message for an audience is really hard.
The issue isn't just 'statistics' its audience, its communication, its argumentation, its pre-existing knowledge...its a lot of factors.
Part of this is human nature and, frankly, our evolutionary brains inability to process the amount of information now available.
There is some good research...I'll find it and add it...with undergraduates that shows something really itneresting about information seeking and use behaviors:
* undergraduate engineering students often treat the act of searching for information on ther internet and getting results as directly akin to understanding the information their search returned.
* said differently, they think that the act of googling something is the same as understanding the results - even if they don't click on the results.
Seems like a weird suggestion.
I'm trying to craft a more coherent and unfortunately long response to this whole conversation...HN is making some wild practical epistemic swings at this that are largely without merit.
- Mark Twain
The NYT is not an arbiter of truth. However I am much more likely to pay attention to a piece of journalism from them moreso than my neighbor who can't read saying vaccines are just microchips. At the very least there is a credibility factor that they have.
The US has always had biased media - people forget the famous newspapers of the federalists and the republicans as early as the birth of our country - however at times it was able to align with certain truths between factions. It seems this is what was really lost.
Journalism has taken a huge hit in this country and the effects are widespread. I'm not against hearing an argument for something. I am against hearing an argument based on an unsubstantiated rumor and "we don't know if it's true but WHAT IF IT IS true" reporting that exists today.