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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

>Due to some new regulations increasing speed limits, passed early this year, car accidents are up 12%.

See, that's the rub. You've just said more than the data told you. There's nothing in the stats half of your premise which proves with any certainty that the increased speed limits are the cause of the change in accidents this year. Now you're pushing a political agenda, namely lowering speed limits, while presenting it as part of the basic record of events we call "news", rather than as part of the opinion discourse.

This was even a good faith example. If you were trying to lie with statistics, you could have done much worse.

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If you were going to take this in bad faith, I'm surprised that you considered "3 people died in car accident this morning" to be reporting. If you wanted to be pedantic about it, stick only to the facts, and avoid speculation/opinion, it'd have to be written like so:

"A person who our reporter spoke with who went by the name of Bob Dylan and claimed to be the coroner of James County, said that three individuals passed away recently, and he said he believes that they died due injuries similar to those involved in car accidents. Our reporter also asked the James County Sherriff's Department to corroborate, and a person who claimed to be the spokesperson for the James County Sherriff's department said that there were three individuals in a car accident last night, and they were taken to the hospital."

Anyways, I wasn't trying to write a rigorous example for each, I assumed that the reader could fill in the detailed. I just aimed to give the gist of what it should look like. You'd talk to experts, cite papers, etc.

I think you're wrong here. The idea that a news article should be a "basic record of events" is ridiculous. In this toy example, the most we could quibble with is the words "Due to" and those may be appropriate if there is a reasonable amount of evidence referred to somewhere in the article which suggests an association. In fact, I believe in the case of traffic accidents such a link is sufficiently well documented that the casually refer to it isn't a great sin.

I think this idea that we need to somehow strip all news of even the vaguest hint of a perspective is actually pretty condescending to the average news reader, imagining that they are so stupid and credulous that merely seeing a bit of bias is going to immediately warp their brains.

"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents are up 12% since last year when city council rejected the proposed budget increase for more snowplows and ice control to meet the city's growing transportation needs."

"3 people died in a car accident today, marking 4720 this year alone. Car accidents overall have jumped 12% since AG John Smith added driving-without-a-license to the city's informal do-not-prosecute list."

In our toy example, all of these could be simultaneously true, and the data given does not support one cause over the other. Note that the "due not" need not be present, the intended implication is still clear. (For bonus points, read these examples again, imagining that overall driving increased by about 12% due to people working from home less.)

Sure, there are a million consistent imaginary stories. My point is that _if_ a journalist has a reasonable sense that the speed limit regulations are related to the article in question or that the reader may want to know about them, then they should mention them. Indeed, all these other imaginary scenarios should also be mentioned if there is a reasonable case they may be involved in the increased rate of accidents.

The idea that the journalist should present only the directly related "bare facts" is so silly that I can't even take the suggestion as coming from a place of good faith.

If, in your own words, there's a million consistent imaginary stories, which one gets the special designation of "reasonable"? If there are multiple possible stories that are all plausible explanations of the same data, then how is picking just your favorite one and reporting it adding value?

That isn't what a reporter should do, though. They should report on the news and related information, not just their favorite narrative. I'm not defending shitty reporting, just pointing out that the "bare facts" approach is ridiculous.

Knowing stuff is hard, reporting on stuff is hard, understanding what is read is hard. The solution to these problems is not, nor could it be, restricting one's attention to the "bare facts." Indeed, these are often quite hard to identify and agree upon. We should expect and cultivate a little sophistication in ourselves and our fellow citizens.

For this to work properly, the journalists would have to be experts in the respective field, or would at the very least have to possess enough of an understanding to make these judgements. But reality has become far too complex for that, plus these articles are being written under severe time constraints. Ultimately, what will happen is the journalist using their personal or the editorial biases of the publication to create a narrative consistent with their world view. Whether or not that narrative has any basis in reality is not really their concern.

The question when becomes whether there is any value in publishing these most likely faulty narratives compared to simply reporting the facts. I would argue that there is actually negative value in the former, because the audience ends up less informed than if they had never consumed that piece of media.

> the journalists would have to be experts in the respective field, or would at the very least have to possess enough of an understanding to make these judgements.

This is why journalists will often attribute cause and effect interpretation of facts to expert sources.

Hmm, I like the thrust of your point, here, and I do think that when people think critically about the news, they aren't "stupid and credulous".

But Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that educated, informed readers readily fall victim to, so it's clear that the media seems to have some kind of privilege of credulity.

I wonder if it's really an effect of people reading media primarily for entertainment - isn't there some old saying about "people who read the Times are less I formed than people who read nothing at all?"

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