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Comment by clarada | Hacker News Reader

This applies to the real world as well. I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias.

I've brought this up in conversation a few times over the years and quite often a similar experience was reported by others. Yet everyone still seemed happy to trust the accuracy of the other articles being reported.

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> I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias.

Same. A few years ago, I worked at a large tech company that a certain well-known news organization likes to cover. After a few articles were published relating to work I was involved in, I found myself thinking "Nope, that's totally wrong" or "Technically correct but presented in a biased way". I decided to cancel my news subscription with them because I realized that they have a certain narrative they want to present to the public, and why should I trust any of their reporting on other topics if the one I was involved in firsthand was just completely wrong?

It was Amazon and The NY Times for me. It was a long time ago so I don’t remember specifics but man, it really changed my perception of journalism.

Actually, this is an even bigger one after working on classified intelligence projects. Being able to watch in real time what is actually happening in some place a news reporter is speculating about and get wildly wrong makes you despair to the point of wondering what they're ever right about. It's even worse to come on a place like Hacker News and see the kinds of wildly wrong things people believe or speculate on, which is doubly frustrating because you can't even legally correct it or even say you know they're wrong.

That doesn’t bother me as much when people get exceptionally easy to verify completely open facts wrong. If they can’t even bother fact checking to the point of a simple google search, why should I trust anything else in the article?

I assume that you’ve read what Daniel Ellsberg had to say about the effect of having access to such information?

<https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...>

Just think how awful the 737MAX was reported on in the press to a 757 stabilizer trim design engineer (me).

Too bad you can't afford to comment on it if you still work there?

I've had the same experience. I've been on the "inside" of a news story a few times in my life, and in every case what was reported was wildly different than the actual situation. It's only a few data points, but also 100% unreliable in those cases.

There's no money in unbiased news. If news organizations want subscribers they need to present a clear voice that is distinct from what other organizations offer, otherwise people will just click the first link on google or facebook and never pay. Unbiased can also mean undiferentiated, so NYT has leaned into technoskepticism, the journal into Karl Rove conservatism(and now just plain old republican or bust), and on and on. A news organization that hasn't made itself into a destination for its readers is forced to rely on cheap farmed out content that's usually either listicles or just straight ripped from a wire service.

There's no money in unbiased news.

I have to believe that's not true. When Bill Gates or Warren Buffett sit down at their breakfast table, do they get fed the same diet of pablum that I do, as an Apple News subscriber? I doubt it. They presumably pay a ton of money for access to unfiltered, unbiased global intelligence.

But I have no idea how to get the newsfeed that people like that must have access to, regardless of cost.

Would that be something like the Bloomberg terminal?

Bloomberg is indeed the first source that comes to mind when I think "Pay a lot more than most people for a premium newsfeed," but then, on my list of trusted news sources, Bloomberg is ranked somewhere between Russia Today and the Brothers Grimm. Their reporters are literally paid to move the markets [1].

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...

Because Business Insider is such a great source. And no, I do not believe the ultra rich employ private inteligence serices preparing morning briefings for them.

If you want just the facts so, try Reuters or AP, basically the source of the majority of news stroies we are fed by media (the exception being in-house investigated stories, but those are rarer by the day and flanked by so much filler articles that it is hard to filter the facts out). Also, professional inteligence organizations can be spectatularly wrong as well. Sometimes a lone, local jourbalist on the ground witj working internet for soke background research has it better. Local, because some random person from far away will lack the necessary backgroing and context to deliver more than some isolated, uninformed, highly objective opinion.

Because Business Insider is such a great source.

Whatever. Read the article. It contains direct quotes.

Accusations of market manipulation are better backed up by strong evidence, because that is actually a fellony.

Illegal or not, it's defamatory if untrue. I assume that Bloomberg would sue for libel if the quote from their reporter were fabricated.

(Read the quote from the reporter carefully: the market isn't what's being manipulated. The news is... and by extension, the reader. The reader is who does the market-moving.)

So, a plain statement of fact then? Your initial claim was that Bloberg rwporters are paid to manipulate / move the market. Said quote doesn't support that.

I said they were paid to move the market, which is the case according to their own reporters. They are not allowed to do that directly, but they have both the right and the ability to choose their subjects and slant their stories to achieve an identical effect.

What is your interest in carrying water for a company whose representatives admit to market-harming journalism practices? More important, what does such a company have to do with my expressed wish for an unbiased news source?

Counterpoint. Trump and Musk.

Trump apparently reads at something close to a 6th-grade level, going by what his staff have said about having to simplify his briefings to the level of Saturday morning cartoons. He's not a potential customer for any premium newsfeed services.

Musk is not an apparent functional illiterate like Trump, but he unfortunately has a long history of choosing poor information sources and reacting accordingly. (The "pedo guy" case comes to mind.) He cares less about accurate news than I do, that much is safe to say. So I doubt he takes advantage of whatever higher-quality sources might be available to him. Not when the latest missive from Catturd69 is free.

I think they are reading the same stuff you have access too. Maybe they have a FT subscription and a Bloomberg one where you don't, but I don't think there's some team of billionaire journalists. Business stuff is different, theyll have employees trying to get insider info, but politics, largely the same.

When people display this kind of blindness to real-world media the term for it is https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect

This is the Gell-Mann amnesia effect mentioned in the post.

And yet we manage to keep ourselves reasonably informed. I subscribe to one of the major papers, and avail myself to a variety of mainstream sources. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times, over multiple decades, that I've ever looked back on an issue and felt that I had actually been misinformed. "You made one tiny mistake so your entire organization is discredited" would have been an unreasonable reaction.

So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.

Regarding a topic that you never come into personal contact with, your entire knowledge of it throughout your life will be media-mediated. How, then, would you ever learn what you had been misinformed of?

Hindsight. You learn more things later, that allow you to look back on the past.

How often do you learn new things later that, even as transmitted through untrustworthy media, allow for clear falsification of the former media presentation?

This isn't zero but it's not very common either. Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction from an untrustworthy media presentation at all; thus, the media accounts are effectively unfalsifiable (unless you go out and seek personal experience).

> Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction

Is it really a big deal then? Experts really care about the details so they will notice inaccuracies, but does that mean that they really matter to the point that the entire notion of journalism and media itself should be discredited?

Saddam had current stockpiles of WMDs. (No, he'd long ago gotten rid of them.)

The attackers on the US compound in Benghazi were regular folks upset about the film "Innocence of Muslims". (They were organized Islamist militants, including groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda.)

"Hands up, don't shoot!" (There's no evidence Michael Brown ever said that.)

Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. (The contents have been repeatedly authenticated.)

Those are four massively popular lies that the media told over 20 years, of which you should be aware. I regularly see media outlets peddle falsehoods that they have been told are false, but I don't know what your specific knowledge is.

> So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.

I think you're proving it true right now.

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