Hacker News Reader

>In this case, I think the resource was looking for just a stock photo.

God forbid they just write their article with no photo at all. Better to use a wrong one apparently.

this captures a meta-observation very well.. a "PhD" worth of knowledge is needed to discern, but publishing a stock photo for a news item is incentivized to be a moment's decision. Compare and contrast to "any idiot can ask hard questions that take days to reply correctly to" .. there is a power asymmetry at work in the public eye. Guideropes and economic assumptions disappearing into a sand-storm of digital information.

basically, not looking good for the future of reliable media

I think a PhD study would be needed to know accuracy rates of media over time across many outlets before such a generalization can be made that "media accuracy has gotten worse".

How does one even measure accuracy? Number of corrections might indicate it, but who is to say that all of media is forthcoming with corrections. How does one control for digital vs non-digital distributions? Is the rate of accuracy different per medium, and how would that roll-up for the overall organization?

I think the meta-observation still holds. The response to "media organizations are all inaccurate and this has gotten worse!" - is asymmetric compared to the effort to make the statement. Happily hacker news has a culture where statements are assumed to be opinions (unless otherwise presented with a citation or somethign), and opinions are generally not held to be worth much in this discourse.

Articles should not have images that are misleading or confusing, but I do understand why most news articles have something when it comes to imagery. Most news website designs are optimized for at least one image per article, and social media sharing almost requires it if you expect any kind of engagement at all. But it’s not a problem the media world should have to solve at the expense of the reader experience. (Disclosure: I’m a journalist and digital editor who spends way more time than I’d like trying to pick the least harmful stock or file image in the cases where we just don’t have a good image for a story.)

Maybe a practical compromise is to use whatever image you can find but actually explain in the caption that sausage making process in what the image is and why it was chosen. For example, recently on YouTube a video had footage of go carts but they used an F1 analogy and explained that F1 footage is hard to come by and expensive.

> Better to use a wrong one apparently.

I think this is hypercritical. If there is a story about some dolphin, if there is a picture of 'any' dolphin to give context, is that then the "wrong one" and suddenly a ding against the newspapers accuracy worthy of running a correct? Particularly when there is a context line stating "this is just a random dolphin to give you an image of a dolphin."

> Better to use a wrong one apparently.

Humans are very visual creatures - in some ways - yes. Even conceding that the picture is the "wrong" one, which again I think is a hypercritical judgment.

> In this case, I think the resource was looking for just a stock photo. I did not read the article and immediately think, "Oh yeah, random tower in the middle of nowhere USA, this is for sure a picture of that tower". Perhaps just me..

Yeah, I'd assume it's just you. My default assumption for a photo next to a piece of text is that the two are directly related, in particular the photo being the subject of the text.

Okay, so maybe they wanted to have a photo, but there's no way to frame this that makes the journalist or the outlet look good. Intentionally or not, choosing a wrong photo is still screwing with readers' perception of reality.

I'm skeptical it would be just me given there is some prominent text right below the image that says "not the radio tower".

> Okay, so maybe they wanted to have a photo, but there's no way to frame this that makes the journalist or the outlet look good. Intentionally or not, choosing a wrong photo is still screwing with readers' perception of reality.

Doing a search for how other news websites reported this story, only the CNN used the "correct" image. A few others used different images without even giving context it was a different tower. A few of the other ones are certainly more egregious, not labelled at all..

Other/wrong image:

https://www.fox9.com/news/radio-tower-stolen-wjlx-alabama

https://nypost.com/2024/02/11/news/alabama-radio-station-wjl... (about a minute into the top clip, there is B-roll with generic radio tower images)

https://boingboing.net/2024/02/09/200-foot-radio-tower-stole...

Actual image:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/08/us/stolen-transmitter-radio-t...

No image:

https://www.al.com/news/2024/02/someone-stole-a-jasper-radio...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/09/radio-...

> Okay, so maybe they wanted to have a photo, but there's no way to frame this that makes the journalist or the outlet look good. Intentionally or not, choosing a wrong photo is still screwing with readers' perception of reality.

Choosing a "wrong" photo that is CLEARLY labelled, I don't agree with this opinion. I find that hypercritical. Seemingly we simply disagree.

The Guardian never publishes a link or an academic reference to the source of scientific articles it pretends to quote.

As you say, it also waits until a reader notices factual mistakes, the other ones just slip through. Last point, you don’t have any backing to conclude that their mistakes are honest, and not the result of intent of bias. Given their bias is always in the same direction, I do not believe for a second that The Guardian isn’t putting its thumb on the scale when they only reproduce the part of scientific studies that goes in their editorial direction, conveniently leaving the rest unsaid.

> As you say, it also waits until a reader notices factual mistakes, the other ones just slip through.

I don't believe I said that. My impression is that they certainly do pro-actively correct mistakes and do not rely on just readership. At the very least, the 'corrections' section is discoverable from their home page. I can't find the corrections part of some other news websites.

Please provide evidence that the Guardian does not do any of their own corrections.

> Last point, you don’t have any backing to conclude that their mistakes are honest, and not the result of intent of bias.

I don't think you have any backing for that either. Though, what backing would anyone need for any kind of slant for "we published a generic picture of a radio tower" (with clear context note on the image) - how is that a slant due to bias?

> I do not believe for a second that The Guardian isn’t putting its thumb on the scale when they only reproduce the part of scientific studies that goes in their editorial direction, conveniently leaving the rest unsaid.

I would ask you please provide backing for this assertion/opinion. (It's going to be difficult to determine whether it's your bias in reading something to think an extraneous assertion is an omission compared to something you think that is related but is either unrelated or incorrect. But, if you have a good resource that has done the systematic research, and relies on reproducible science, that would be an interesting read)

> The Guardian never publishes a link or an academic reference to the source of scientific articles it pretends to quote.

This is not true. A single counter-example is all that is needed to disprove the assertion "the guardian never.." Counter-example:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/10/asthma-of-th...

In this section, the source article is linked (which is: https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035232/), that section is:

> When Attwood first identified EoE in the late 1980s, it was vanishingly rare, with estimated rates of less than 10 per 100,000 people. But just like food allergies, which are also mediated by eosinophils, EoE has become increasingly common in all age groups, from young children to the over-70s, for reasons we do not fully understand.

> Estimates from the British Society of Gastroenterology suggest that it now affects approximately 63 in 100,000 people, which Attwood says is sufficient to make it technically “a common disease”.

The same article links other studies..

One last response.. I think we should take a step back.

A clearly labelled image of a radio tower for a sensationalist story that a radio tower in Alabama was stolen, that.. that clearly labelled image is evidence of "left wing bias" and the "the guardian... putting its thumb on the scale." I don't think this is the story to choose for that particular hill to die on.