Hacker News Reader

> "bat boy" quality

Was bat boy an invention of Weekly World News? If so, WWW was satirical, with intentionally bizarre made-up stories. People were supposed to read it for the comedy, but I guess a version of Poe's Law applies and some people took it seriously. I remember one article of WWW claimed Saddam Hussein was hiding in a submarine in an American lake -- and I bet some people believed this.

The Sun I imagine pretends to be a serious newspaper though.

> submarine in a lake

Made me spill my coffee!

Well, I couldn't find the submarine cover, but this will SHOCK you... the actual Iraqi weapons of mass destruction:

https://weeklyworldnewsvault.tumblr.com/post/130026803238/co...

Warning: that site has plenty more WWW covers, you may lose a good chunk of your time perusing them.

With the targeted aside:

> Get your career diploma at home!

Edit: made even more special after the subsequent one:

> More hair!! Style it fast! With Wild Growth® Hair Oil

> Get your career diploma at home!

Is it much different than getting a “diploma” drum prerecorded videos?

I come from a poor working class area so believe me people didn't get the comedy. It was an early version of "muh space lasers started the Maui fire"

I'm not saying all poor working class people are ignorant and gullible. I'm saying there's a minority who are uneducated and conspiratorial minded.

I had some fun back in College in the 90’s cutting out articles from Weekly World News and tacking them to the bulletin board just outside the physics library. This board was full of cutouts of interesting real science articles, regularly thumbtacked by the librarians.

One example WWW headline was something like “Scientists discover black hole the size of a head of a pin in the Nevada desert.”

Actually, there was more to it than satire and comedy.

WWN was made into what it was by the same guy as was behind the creation of the National Enquirer as a tabloid - Gene Pope.

A graduate of MIT in just 3 years, when he bought up the Enquirer he'd been employed in the CIA's psychological warfare department immediately prior.

This was in 1952, the same year the CIA and other military groups met to discuss the increase in UFO sightings (like the ones making front page news over Washington DC that same year), and started project Blue Book.

Suddenly Gene Pope buys up a struggling periodical, turns it into a tabloid putting stories of UFO sightings next to sightings of Elvis being alive. This was expanded in 1979 to the WWN, where the paired stories became even more outrageous (Bat Boy).

For decades the mere mention of UFOs was typically associated with tin foil hats, and was the result of a likely intentional domestic propaganda effort that took on legs of its own as successful tabloids in their own right.

To this day the term "UFO" tends to be related to "Alien Flying Saucers", rather than "Exaggerated reports of military testing", which seems to be the most related facts we know decades later.

I think despite the bizarre and made up stories on occasion the national enquirer has actually dug up some good scoops. Not often… but it’s surprising!

Here are some of the choicest scoops: https://www.ranker.com/list/national-enquirer-real-news/evan...

I think they also outed several celebrities over the years back when it was taboo.

> This was in 1952... sightings of Elvis being alive.

Remarkably, rumors of Elvis being alive persisted until 1977!

Fascinating, and concerning in light of Grusch. Given this, (which I concur about just from my brief review of Pope & National Enquirer wikipedia articles), then I'd be interested in seeing a data science approach to quantifying proportion of UFO coverage in the Enquirer year by year since its founding, as well as some measure of 'outlandishness' across its entire coverage base over the same period.

As a consumer in supermarkets, it's hard to overstate how powerful the effect of stifling rational interest in the UFO/ UAP topic is when one passes those tabloids in the checkout line every week, which contain any number of random claims in the headlines alongside presumably legitimate and illegitimate UFO-related coverage.

> the same year the CIA and other military groups met to discuss the increase in UFO sightings

I read that as CIA and other military groups met to discuss increasing the UFO sightings and didn't blink an eye, it fit in so well.

Despite that being true, "earthquake lights" are a real phenomenon and do indeed have varied theories with no proven explanation. They have been captured and documented, etc.

I've always gone for "sudden stressing of rock causing piezoelectric effect on a rather large scale that ionises gases in the atmosphere" as my Just So story of why.

The earth has massive electrical fields running in it. I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of electrical discharge occurred between the ground and sky during an even that breaks conduction of said currents.

Wikipedia has such a list of sources it considers reliable and unreliable, and The Sun is very much in the unreliable category.

Could you post the link? I would actually love to have this as a resource.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Potentially_unreli...

Didn’t know about this page either!

I was thinking of this list:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/P...

> Wikipedia has such a list of sources it considers reliable and unreliable

Russell suggests to check where Wikipedia ranks in that list.

Well, the "credibility discrimination problem" is much easier on some sources (the "Rockstar ate my Hamster" headlines runners for example).

> "Rockstar ate my Hamster" I remember playing that on the amiga

Wikipedia is not a primary source.

Or even a secondary source. It strives to be a tertiary source.

Quite.

(I'd thought of noting that it's not secondary either, decided to keep it simple.)

What Wikipedia is generally good at is in providing a synoptic presentation of a topic and identifying sources that document the points, facts, or arguments it presents. I'll often mine it for resources when doing a shallow dive on a topic.

For deeper dives, I'll try to branch out further from both those and other points.

> Wikipedia is not a primary source

Yes, I played on the term "source", as "witness" vs "reporter", to stress in theory the human factor and in practice the paradox (inherent in the difficulties Wikipedia has to have in providing quality).

Wikipedia policies explicity forbid using Wikipedia itself as a source for Wikipedia articles. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:RSPRIMA...

> ancient city of Sodom

God, I can't even. People are in desperate need of media literacy classes.

Also, what non-right wing conservative person is baited by that headline? Its so fing transparent to whom they are appealing.

Those kind of storys are not written seriously and tend to be a bit satirical. They are mocking the "boffins" who do this kind of research. They don't expect the reader to believe a word of it.

Which is to say, that the target audience may in fact be the exact opposite of the one gp suggests.

> "ancient city of Sodom was blown up by an atomic weapon"

This is hyperbole at best. Sodom and Gomorrah have been confirmed to have experienced a "heat event" that caused pottery to exhibit the same chemical glazing that happens in a nuclear blast. Note that a nuke is not required for this form of glazing to appear, just very high temperatures.

See https://youtu.be/SDiYb20iAsM for an informal discussion.

I guess a partial truth is easier to sell than a complete fabrication.

> The Sun [...] were also reporting (incorrectly) that Ebola was spreading at Burning Man

Can you substantiate this claim? I'm searching for such an article from The Sun and can't find anything. I have found numerous stories about the burning man ebola hoax, but none of them say The Sun participated in it.

I'm not saying you're lying, but maybe you fell for some fake news about fake news. I found this Reuters article about a faked screenshot of a Forbes article, purporting to show Forbes spread the hoax (they didn't): https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-burning-man-forbes...

They may have removed the text, regardless I removed the reference to it in my comment. They also alleged that people were getting "trench foot", or as they described it at the time, "a world war one disease".

I was at Burning Man during the rain/mud, went bare foot for a few days, did not get "trench foot", nor did anyone else I knew there. Their unbelievably trashy reporting during that (everybody is fighting and getting trench warfare diseases, etc) is one of the reasons I'm unusually motivated to comment on their reliability as a source of information today.

If anyone cares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_foot

but be warned not so nice pictures

Also known as:

> immersion foot syndrome[6] and as a nonfreezing cold injury (NFCI)

quote of cause:

> It can occur in temperatures up to 16 °C (61 °F) and within as little as 13 hours. Exposure to these environmental conditions causes deterioration and destruction of the capillaries and leads to damage of the surrounding flesh.[7] Excessive sweating (hyperhidrosis) has long been regarded as a contributory cause. Unsanitary, cold, and wet conditions can also cause trench foot.[8]

Idk. how warm it was there, but looking at other clothes worn probably not ~<16C, additionally even if the mud is that cold as long as you take brakes to warm up your feed e.g. in the mid day sun and don't walk through the night it still would be very unlikely. Then not having to walk in the same wet boots you have been wearing (wet) since weeks also helps.

And even if some one got NFCI it likely was only a case which comparable with what people had in WW1 was quite harmless. I.e. not really what people think about when mentioning trench foot (and knowing what it's about).

So all in all misleading and in a very intentional and knowing manner.

I am not sure, many times in front of The Onion¹ I get the drive "I should post this on HN".

Maybe we could have a parallel twin site for non serious "news"?

Edit: ¹or other sources mixed with the serious ones: for example, the pages from Andy Borowitz on The NewYorker. This just came out in real time... https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-calls-...

I remember a while back there was a Twitter account called "Hacker News Onion". My favourite headline: Developer accused of unreadable code refuses to comment.

    Maybe we could have a parallel twin site for non serious "news"?

https://fark.com

Yep, it's still around

Probably because the vast majority of people on the internet don't know anything about British newspapers or their quality.

I'd say The Sun and Daily Mail are (in)famous enough that knowing their worthlessness is essentially media criticism 101. Certainly on a site like HN where the participants aren't "the vast majority of people on the internet".

> media criticism 101

You have to understand that this is (likely purposefully on both sides) not compulsory or well-attended. Hell, it really should be a grade 9 required class but that would make it harder to lie to future constituents. Can't have that. Same with law and various other essential life skills like drivers ed which are conspicuosly absent from general curricula.

I didn't mean it literally but in the idiomatic sense of being common knowledge if you're at all media literate (which I hope most HN readers are!) Where I'm from, media criticism has a fairly strong emphasis in the highschool (equivalent) curriculum, but definitely should be even stronger, especially in this post-truth era.

(Drivers' ed is hardly an essential life skill in many parts of the world, btw.)

Its far more important than most of the compulsory stuff you learn first of all, and second, its better to have thr schools manage it and get it done early when its easy to provision all the materials and obviously a car which not everyone has.

Lastly, media literacy is basically (as far as I'm aware) not really compulsory or required for most students. I'm saying it should be. They are the perfect age to learn about how these systems subjugate and weaponize their personal data, emotions, etc

Where is that at [country]?

I'd like to have a survey done, "What would you associate to the expression 'Page 3'".

Poor suggestion based on articles that you disagree with and how it was presented. I don’t understand why people jump to censorship as a solution to their own biases.

If you read the article, they’re only reporting on the light. No explanation was given. Are you now denying it never happened or that you just don’t like the outlet; since they’re two different things.

You think a user's ability to have a choice in where their content comes from is censorship? Do you think the block feature on Twitter is censorship as well?

HN is not an "everything goes" platform, it has specific guidelines and policies designed to drive a higher quality conversation and higher quality sources of information, which is one of the reasons it stands out as a good aggregator for me. And I'm of the opinion that UK tabloid spam doesn't meet the criteria, not because of their political bent (I don't know what it is *), but because of their consistently wobbly and expedient relationship with the truth when it happens to be incompatible with their business model.

* I'm guessing faux conservative, since at least one of them is owned by Rupert Murdoch, same owner of the famously high quality Fox News who just lost a high profile $787.5 million defamation lawsuit for false reporting on voting machines.