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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> the takeaway for journalists here is clear: be skeptical of your sources, triple-check your facts, and don’t ever assume that your colleagues are doing the same.

That should be the first thing they teach you in Journalism 101, these days.

I get sick of reading news stories that are all the same AP story, with different ads around it.

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The sfsrandard article included quotes from the Cruise spokesperson, and correctly attributed the statements they were made by first responders to those first responders.

I don’t see why TheIndustry would take this sanctimonious tone about “lessons for journalists” when they are doing the exact same thing here, just repeating the statements of spokespeople.

I don’t see a lesson for journalists, here. Readers need to correctly parse statements like “according to <some spokesperson>.” When an article describes multiple contradictory statements by different organizations, it should be possible for people to infer that it is too early to make a conclusion.

It’s not journalism anymore, it’s visits to your ad riddled pages. Regardless of what truth you post. That’s what it’s become now. That’s web journalism. “I heard it on TikTok” is next.

There are a few institutions trying to keep it dignified but it’s become a bazaar.

>It’s not journalism anymore,

The "anymore" there means something changed. I don't think there was ever a time in which journalists did not regularly print statements from officials like police and firefighters as fact not worthy of questioning. Sometimes we get into a mindset that everything is getting worse when in reality it is just that we are now more aware of how bad it has always been.

Hey now, telling me I’m more aware sounds an awful lot like “woke” /s. Logic to the illogical. I do think you are right however, I think the standards have dropped as far as what makes above-the-fold news. Maybe that’s a sign that everything is benign and @TerryXPickleCaster is breaking news. Or that we have become desensitized to the war that is raging currently? I very much think they are current news. I also know in this always online world of 25/7 news, you can talk in circles (hi fox), but I do see a decline in journalistic integrity. Questions being asked of officials on camera that should never be asked during a live broadcast. The question to the sheriff of PA over that manhunt. “Little rascals style”. Questions to WH press secretary. Questions to parliamentary figures. It’s like people just want to troll people for jokes instead of asking serious journalistic questions. I know what you’re saying though. There was always the National Inquirer.

There are certain things that are noticeable worse now; sometime in the last decade or so it became respectable to print news articles that boil down to:

"Someone on Twitter said X"

Which is next to useless, you can find someone saying anything on Twitter.

Newspapers have been dedicating space to that sort of thing for literally centuries. Reprinting an angry tweet from some rando isn't much different than printing an angry letter to the editor from some rando.

Before it was restricted to letters to the editors and maybe "rando on the street" segment, now more and more entire articles are written about posts on twitter/reddit - obviously it's easier for the journalist, but there's no checking, no digging, nothing.

The "here's a random person's opinion" style journalism is not new and isn't a result of Twitter or any social media. Whether that content is in a letter to the editor or in an article about a tweet doesn't matter. Neither required any checking or digging by a journalist. I don't know what distinction you are trying to make between the two, but I don't see much of a difference.

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