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Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

We should start understanding that "independent" rankings won't ever work. Let's not even get started with "fact-checking" places which we can count by dozens per country now, as they all have their own interpretations (or otherwise a single one alone would be enough).

For such a thing to work, it needs to be funded. At the end, it doesn't matter if it comes from public or private hands, it's going to be leaning towards one direction or another, then a group of people will consider it the absolute truth and other group of people will create their own site for "fact-checking".

If humans cannot possibly be objective and independent (yes, that's what I believe after 30+ years in this planet and having met multiple people), then news cannot possibly be. Bearing in mind such a limitation, let's think how this can be possibly improved.

I personally gave up on news being informative and just see it as entertainment - it's a narrative business.

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I think it can work, but will require a very well designed set of rules.

For example, with fact checking, some fact checking is easy. Eg if an article says "the unemployment rate last year was X%". You have to do some research to determine what measure of unemployment they're using, but boom, you can say it is factually incorrect if no measure lists that number. This process is even easier if it's linked to the data source. These are likely the only types of facts that can be checked. This is limiting, but at least it creates some sort of check on what feels like a runaway industry.

Statements like "he was the best president since X" is an unverifiable statement. "best" isn't qualified. An article with a statement like this should immediately be dinged. And it's fine to have a site that makes statements like this! But just not a news site.

Things like bias or swing are not really possible to do as part of this. This is mostly trying to make it matter when news sites drop their standards.

But why would you bother with this? If you want to know last year's unemployment rate objectively speaking, then you just head to wherever the statistics are published by your government and see it yourself. Well, if you can trust your government's statistics that is (and this is an extremely important "if").

So I doubt people are coming to a news site to read a one-liner with some statistic, they want more development, perhaps adding some opinions in between, comparing it with previous governments, whatever.

But yeah, there's not much business in a "news site" that'd just copy-paste statistics.

This is just the bare minimum standards level that a news organisation should meet. And this isn't based on a hypothetical; here's an article from the CBC: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-records-its-...

The graph is entirely incorrect and contradicts the numbers in the paragraph just before it. And good luck finding the source for that statistic I spent half an hour trying to! And all the discussion about this article online was incredibly confused since people were drawing the wrong conclusions from the graph.

I think this journalist and this newspaper should be dinged when errors like this are made. (And also dinged since it hasn't been corrected months after the article was published).

This is just one of many checks that help differentiate lower quality news from higher quality news.

The unemployment rate is far from straightforward. Things like "who is counted as part of the workforce" and "what is employment" - the definitions change pretty often, and a well-rounded source would also have to look at something like COVID and explain how it might have affected unemployment. In many cases, saying "the unemployment rate was X%" with no context would be journalistic malpractice.

Well, step one requires the news receiver to have critical analysis capabilities they apply to the news they receive. That means education which instills critical thinking, which if you've noticed these days is treated like satanic worship by those in control of the entire education vertical.

> If humans cannot possibly be objective

What if we were to try?

Humans also could not run a 4-minute mile, or build a machine that can fly.

And in that sense, we can't.

One person doing something and that something being the norm are wildly different asks.

I agree: if something requires trying, and we are unable to try, then we will surely not succeed. (And I agree we do not try, but perhaps it requires trying to try, or something weird like that.)

But then look at all we've achieved, and sometimes all it takes is one or two people to try and a new movement is catalyzed, gaining steam over time.

Optimism can also be helpful.

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