The media fell for a hoax about ivermectin overdoses straining rural hospitals | Hacker News Reader

The media fell for a hoax about ivermectin overdoses straining rural hospitals

reason.com

25 pointsversion_five9 comments

tl;dr KFOR, an Oklahoma TV station, ran a sensational story, either deliberately or through lack of fact checking. Other outlets repeated and then had to publish shame-faced retractions.

Reason would like you to focus on the shame faced retractions and generalize that to the media at large, while ignoring the plethora of bad faith 'news' outlets that just don't give a shit, the fact that KFOR is primarily at fault by a mile, and that commercial/ advertising pressures are the enemy of editorial rigor.

That part of the media is more than happy to propagate a hoax without checking just because it supports their political narrative is worrisome. Which part depends on the story, both sides are prone to this behavior.

That the narrative is fractured along political lines is worrisome. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-pl...

What is unexcusable is that part of the media propagated with glee a hoax depicting by association their political opponents as worm infested animals.

Way to ignore all three points.

I compulsively read Google News and a few "MSM" sources, and had not seen this at all.

The first I heard of it was from some right wing source dunking on Rolling Stone for it.

Who the hell cares about Rolling Stone? Or is "concerned" they were taken in? Do people care about the reliability of general news in Sports Illustrated, GQ, or Playboy (assuming they still exist)?

You know, it just hit me - I don't think there were any magazines in my dentist's office the last time I was there, unless I have amnesia. Of course, these days you don't wait in the waiting room.

You raise good points. Some open questions in this space: What is the influence and reach of media organizations? What responsiblity do they have to the public and to the truth? How about social media influencers? How about social media companies?

The story was propagated on Twitter and by a number of recognizable media outlets (Rolling Stones, Business Insider, MSNBC, The Hill, Newsweek, The Guardian / UK, Daily Mirror / UK), in spite of being obvious (and malicious) nonsense. Assuming a minimum responsibility to the truth, we'd expect some kind of postmortem would be in order.

Small aside: There are no magazines at the dentist because everyone is glued to their mobile phone.

Edit: There won't be any postmortem. I'm having a strange vision of the future. The pretense of truth gradually eroded to its naked conclusion. A media landscape where 'news' are written by GPTn optimizing for engagement.

I click on things from Business Insider, MSNBC, and The Hill reasonably often, the others rarely, and I didn't see any of them cover this. It doesn't prove they didn't, but it makes me skeptical when I'm told they did without proof.

Furthermore, some of those are definitely not "MSM" where MSM = some vague liberal establishment, so I wonder if you've veered away from the party line about the libs being hoaxed.

Newsweek isn't what it used to be, although I'm not sure what it is.

> What is unexcusable is that part of the media propagated with glee a hoax depicting by association their political opponents as worm infested animals.

They could try Ivermectin.

You've got it backwards, it is the lack of retraction and shame for their wilful misreporting that is in focus, deservedly so. The stories are discreetly "updated" as though the challenges to their journalistic integrity finally arrived to give them a chance to restate the general concern more vaguely. This time without the hassle of having to refer to reality. I'd more readily blame the mindset of blind obedience to the medico/politico narrative before any 2nd order motivations of money, an intern's fact-checking time is free.

No I don't. The stories were corrected, but you/Reason are not happy because there isn't a sufficient display of contrition; the implication is that The Media (which in reality is not a monolith) should abase itself. I think this argument is wholly insincere.

People who really cared about truth would prioritize the inaccurate reporting by KFOR, which was uncritically repeated by other outlets. It should be a priority because KFOR is a commercial broadcast operation that can afford its own fact checkers and already has a large editorial and news gathering staff. Other outlets are entitled to rely ont he veracity of their output (to some extent) for the same reason you rely on your local news to bring you basically true and accurate information about weather, proceedings at city hall, fires, crime, and public safety information.

Now, everyone knows that local TV news is often shallow and crap (in my view, a direct result of teh 'action news' format which prioritizes sensation over substance, and an advertising milieu that encourages the public to consume news in the most shallow manner possible in order to show it more advertising). But one still has a reasonable expectation that their output should be basically factual, and it is this expectation that other news outlets relied on.

It's somewhat true that the other outlets should do fact checking. But listen to yourself saying 'an intern's time is basically free' - if facts matter so much to you, why don't you think that's worth paying for? Why would you be content with the idea that core journalistic values of accuracy and reliability should be handed off to what are essentially inexperienced slaves competing for the right to set foot on the lowest rung of the industry ladder? And why aren't you directing that criticism at the original source of the inaccurate story, KFOR? You are angrier at the people who credulously repeated an inaccurate story than the people who originally spread it.

It seems to me you're saying that the default position should be one of no trust, and using this example to underline that. But you're putting more blame on the people who were overly trusting (at other media outlets) than on the people who were untrustworthy (the TV station with access to primary sources and in the best position to do fact checking, that nevertheless chose to put out a highly sensationalized story).

Further, you're buying into Reason's framing of it as a 'hoax'/'viral hoax.' A hoax is a deliberate mistruth designed to spread as widely as possible, whether for profit or amusement. Reason is alleging a case of journalistic fraud int he headline, but is strangely mute din the body of the article, suggesting that the outcome is the result of laziness or bias, and noting merely that the KFOR reporter didn't respond to a request for comment. I could ask, why is Reason being so lazy? Why didn't they have an unpaid intern called the station owner, or even identify the station owner so readers could know who in Oklahoma profits from the spread of such sensationalistic news? If they really believe it was a deliberate attempt to deceive, why do they spend more time castigating the unwitting victims of the deception than the alleged promulgator of it?

By the way, i keep putting 'The Media' in scare quotes because that trope is itself hypocritical. Fox News has made a thing out of calling out 'The Media' for a good 25 years, like Fox News isn't part of the media or like Rupert Murdoch doesn't actually have a huge international media empire of tabloid newspaper and TV outlets.

Reason is part of 'The Media'; I have debunked poorly argued stories for Reason in the past, does that therefore mean that 'The Media' is bad because Reason didn't reconsider its editorial policies? If Reason is so concerned about low standards in 'The Media', where are its in-depth analyses of spam news outlets or (for example) Fox News's tenuous relationship with the truth, as repeatedly examined in the courts? I call bullshit on their professed concern.

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