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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a more general problem with journalistic practices. Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense. So they quote people exactly. Quoting exactly means that bad actors can inject falsehoods into articles.

I don't have any suggestions on how to solve this. Everything I can think of has immediate large flaws.

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>Journalists don't want to inject their own judgements into articles, which is admirable, and makes sense.

Is it even possible ? Like, don't you know the political inclination of any website/journal you read ? I feel like this search of "The Objective Truth" is just a chimera. I'd rather articles combine pros and cons of everything they discuss tbh

There’s a difference between having natural human biases you try to avoid when reporting by using the usual context sentence (where, when, to whom something was stated), quote, appositive denoting speaker, quote format and writing “this guy is full of crap” or “you really need to believe this person” while cherry picking statements.

You can easily find examples of each. Both NYT and Slate are considered left leaning and at the same time have been the professional stomping grounds of right leaning writers that started their own media companies that are not left leaning. Everyone has a bias and they don’t have to work somewhere with that same bias, especially if you just stick to the paper’s style guide. On the same substance the two media outlets present the same topic very differently. Sometimes I appreciate the Slate format for the author’s candor and view being injected (like being pointed on Malcom Gladwell). Sometimes I just want to know the facts as clearly stated as possible (I don’t care if the author doesn’t believe in climate change, tell me what happened when North Carolina flooded).

Yes, you’ve rediscovered the curriculum of a journalism 101 class.

So are you saying there are a lot of journalists that never studied, or did they just never pay attention in class?

Because articles that actually do that are few and far between.

Or more likely, the journalists don't know any better and believe the AI hype sold to them and promote it of their own accord.

It’s possible to insert a few sentences factually accounting for a person’s character without inserting a subjective judgement of character.

For example you could say:

Joey JoeJoe, billionaire CEO, who notably said horrible things, was convicted of some crimes, and ate three babies, was quoted as saying “machine learning is just so awesome”.

There, you didn’t inject a judgement. You accurately quoted the subject. You gave the reader enough contextual information about the person so they know how much to trust or not-trust the quote.

"Nelson Mandela, convicted of some crimes, calls for World Peace"

This does often happen (depending on the leaning of the newspaper, it's omitted if the figure is someone supported and emphasized otherwise).

A major problem, though, is headlines don't and can't carry this context. And those are the things most people read.

The best you'll get is "Joey JoeJoe says machine learning is just so awesome" or at best "Joey JoeJoe comments on ML. The 3rd word will blow you away!".

Extreme examples are easy. But you can pick and choose which facts to present to the reader to affect the judgement they’re making. It would be trivially easy to paint Bill Gates as either a legendary humanitarian or a ruthless capitalist egotist to someone that’s never heard of him.

> who notably said horrible things

How do you objectively decide which statements are horrible and which aren't?

The other stuff you listed are facts, but this one would be subjective. That isn't just providing contextual information, but adding personal bias into the reporting.

A journalist's job is to journal something, exactly like how NTFS keeps a journal of what happens.

A journalist doing anything other than journaling is not a journalist.

So people getting quoted verbatim is perfectly fine. If the quoted turns out to be a liar, that's just part of the journal.

You’re describing a PR representative. Simply the decision of what to cover is inherently selective and driven by an individual’s and a culture’s priorities.

That sounds more like stenography than anything else

I don’t think that’s right. First off, we don’t generally define jobs based on the closest computer analogy (we would be unhappy if the loggers returned with a list of things that happened in the woods, rather than a bunch of wood).

The journalist’s job is to describe what actually is happening, and to provide enough context for readers to understand it. Some bias will inevitably creep in, because they can’t possibly describe every event that has ever happened to their subject. But for example if they are interviewing somebody who usually lies, it would be more accurate to at least include a small note about that.

>The journalist’s job is to describe what actually is happening, and to provide enough context for readers to understand it.

The former is a journalist's job, the latter is the reader's concern and not the journalist.

One of the reasons I consider journalism a cancer upon humanity is because journalists can't just write down "it is 35 degrees celsius today at 2pm", but rather "you won't believe how hot it is".

Just journal down what the hell happens literally and plainly, we as readers can and should figure out the rest. NTFS doesn't interject opinions and clickbait into its journal, and neither should proper journalists.

I think you might need a chill pill, I've never met a single journalist or editor who would let "you won't believe how hot it is" pass in more than a tweet.

As a counterexample, I have deep respect for weather forecasters because they are professionally and legally bound to state nothing but the scientific journal at hand.

"Typhoon 14 located 500km south of Tokyo, Japan with a pressure of 960hPa and moving north-northeast at a speed of 30km/h is expected to traverse so-and-so estimated course of travel at 6pm tomorrow."

"Let's go over to Arizona. It's currently 105F in Tuscon, 102F in Yuma, ..."

Brutally to the point, the readers are left to process that information as appropriate.

Journalists do not do this, and they should if they claim to be journalists.

>they are professionally and legally bound to state nothing but the scientific journal at hand

In America, just about every meteorologist editorializes the weather to a degree. There's nothing scientific about telling me "it's a great night for baseball" (great for the fans? Pitchers? Hitters?) or "don't wash your car just yet" but I will never stop hearing those. I don't, and the public doesn't seem to think that infringes on journalistic standards, because the information is still presented. Maybe this is different than what you mean -- if you're talking about a situation where journalists intentionally created the full context and pushed the information to the side, obviously that is undesirable.

I will add that weather as a "news product" actually gains quite a fair bit from presenter opinion, and news is a product above all.

The journalist is making a product for the reader in the best case, their job is to help the reader. The second example you mention is a typical example of clickbait journalism, where the journalist has betrayed the reader and is trying to steal their attention, because they actually serve advertisers.

But the first example is not very useful either. That journalist could be replaced by a fully automated thermometer. Or weather stations with an API. Context is useful: “It is 35 degrees Celsius, and we’re predicting that it will stay sunny all day” will help you plan your day. “It is 35 degrees Celsius today, finishing off an unseasonably warm September” could provide a little info about the overall trend in the weather this year.

I don’t see any particular reason that journalists should follow your definition, which you seem to have just… made up?

>your definition, which you seem to have just… made up?

See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/journal

Specifically noun, senses 2B through 2F.

I expect journalists to record journals and nothing more nor nothing less, not editorials or opinion pieces which are written by authors or columnists or whatever.

Dictionary similarity is not how people get their job descriptions. If you want to just pick a similar word from the dictionary, why are journalists sharing this stuff? Journals are typically private, after all. If someone read your journal, you might be annoyed, right?

Or, from your definition, apparently:

> the part of a rotating shaft, axle, roll, or spindle that turns in a bearing

I don’t think these journalists rotate much at all!

A better definition is one of… journalism.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/journalism

journalism, the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such print and electronic media as […]

That said, I don’t think an argument from definition is all that good anyway. These definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive. Journalism is a profession, they do what they do for the public good. If you think that it would be better for the field of journalism to produce a contextless log of events, defend that idea in and of itself, rather than leaning on some definition.

Why favor a definition of “journalist” that approximately nobody else uses? It seems like it would just make it hard to communicate.

You're describing a microphone / voice recorder, not a journalist.

There are of course places you can go to get raw weather data, but a journalist might put it in context of what else is going on, interview farmers or climatologists about the situation, etc.

There are lots of kinds of journalism, but maybe most important is investigative journalism. They are literally doing an investigation - reading source material, actively seeking out the right people to interview and asking them right questions, following the leads to more information.

Thats.. not what journalism means. I don’t know where you got that definition, but I can’t find anything similar. Processing and displaying information is a huge part of journalism - ie assessing what is truth or fiction and communicating each as such. Wikipedia: > A journalist is a person who gathers information in the form of text, audio or pictures, processes it into a newsworthy form and disseminates it to the public. This is called journalism.

You’re injecting that “ie” — Wikipedia doesn’t say it as such.

They’re describing collating and you’re describing evaluating.

And to add, evaluating is the responsibility of the reader.

If you're also tasking "journalists" to evaluate for you, you aren't a reader and they aren't journalists. You're just a dumb terminal getting programs (others' opinions) installed and they are influencers.

> A journalist's job is to journal something, exactly like how NTFS keeps a journal of what happens.

Your choice of metaphor points out problems with your definition. Avid Linux users will be immediately biased against what you wrote, true though it may be, because you assumed that NTFS is the predominant, or even good example of journaling file systems.

Sounds like you would be a bad journalist.

So they should report anything anyone says?

Because selecting whom to report is editorializing by your standards. It creates a bias and gives importance aome over others.

Woke Derangement Syndrome has taken the best of us.

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