Live data from Hacker News

Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

nytimes.com

241–250 of 468 posts

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#241
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we must present news from all sides: 1. The side that thinks that everyone should have human rights. 2. The side that thinks that only people who look, talk, pray, and fuck like they do should have human rights. 3. The side that wrings its hands and moans about civility/balance/decorum/etc. as though one side hasn't enthusiastically been building (and filling) concentration camps for immigrant children. 4. Billi…

Indeed. There is way too little news specifically targeted at nr. 4, even though that group is rapidly growing.

Billionaires so it the other way round: buy a paper and tell it what to print.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#242
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example: The narrative in many news outlets that the Covington students were doing nothing wrong. Quote: "It’s not rape if you enjoy it." for example why that's not right.

Do you know what whataboutism is?

In many cases it's the same news organizations getting the story wrong both ways. It's a very interesting case study in bias. (and the power of PR firms)

Also I don't see how it's whataboutism when I'm agreeing with the general thesis.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#243
What I fail to understand so far is the pricing of the news. Do newspapers really earn tens of dollars/pounds/euros per month per user? I want to pay for the news, but any website I like charges a 2 digit numbers per month, and that is when you subscribe for a year. The way I see it, I should be able to pay them for ads I wont see, maybe some collateral, but current pricing in my mind doesn't reflect reality. What am I missing in this picture? Please help me understand.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#244
post #145
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe journalists should go out on their own via Patreon etc.?

There are journalists that do that, e.g. Tim Pool. I watched a series he did on the so-call "no go zones" in Sweden which is worth watching. You can see he tries hard to push through the competing narratives and get to just the facts. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxQaod7tWvYK_Naia54Gc...

Reporting on this reporting: https://www.indy100.com/article/sweden-trip-crowdfunded-righ...

The question is, has he remained independent from his decidedly partial funder?

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#245
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what whataboutism is?

In many cases it's the same news organizations getting the story wrong both ways. It's a very interesting case study in bias. (and the power of PR firms) Also I don't see how it's whataboutism when I'm agreeing with the general thesis.

Cool. I thought you were saying that it's OK to lie about bad people but you're not. Totally support reporting on anything that happened (and yes a kid said this)

Edit: it's not me modding you down, I think your second post was quite reasonable. I wish HN didn't downvote civil discussion like this.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would appreciate less emphasis on pretending to cover news from several angles. By doing so they imply that both sides are equally valid even when they're not. For instance I've seen them bring on a climate change denier to give the "other side" on a climate change story; anti vaxxers, et cetera. It's particularly bad when one side is willing to lie.

that arguably is another form of political bias - if I want to push position A, I will choose the most ridiculous and deranged proponent of position B to imply that "all rational people choose position A". Like on the issue of climate change - there's clearly some fraction of people who choose to deny it completely, but the more meaningful debate at this point is around how much we can do to prevent it, and what appr…

> Presenting a climate scientist who advocates a move to solar panels against a conspiracy theorist who thinks climate change is an invention of the new world order to seize control of the manufacturing industry is not a balanced presentation of the available angles.

But this is litterally the position of both camps in the US right now. Donald Trump, Wells Griffith, Jeff Sessions, all have (or had) tremendous power over US energy policies, and they all share (publicly at least) indubitably non-scientific views on the climate change problem.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#247
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont consider BuzzFeed as quality either. Wishing a meme producing site wasnt sharing the name as whats supposed to be a news site. My other issue is when they dont properly check the source of a story like the MAGA teens whom they claimed were doing things they clearly were not if you saw the full video.... Fake News goes both ways... If the "mainstream" media wont check sources better then they are just as much a…

BuzzFeed News produces pretty good news reports. It's not the same as BuzzFeed proper.

[deleted]

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#248
Another thing that's sort of been a pebble in the shoe of both journalism and education (I mean, at some level they -should- be doing similar things, right?) is that they don't necessarily make it easy for readers to find original sources.

A counterexample: if I want to know about the origins of our understanding of geometry, Euclid's Elements is a pretty solid place to start. Or Newton's Principia for physics.

Now let's look at a news topic like climate change. Give me data I can dig through for myself. I'm sure it's available, but it's not something you'll usually see journalists directing their readers to.

Of course, most readers aren't equipped to use the data if they did have it, so on a practical level it makes some sense not to bother including it.

But this raises a deeper question: is your Average Joe Citizen (who is not an engineer, but maybe a barista, salesman, banker, etc) equipped to have an opinion about climate change at all? We take for granted incredible access to information, but outside our professional specialty most people rely on other people to tell them what to think, and those people may be accredited by other people, with various biases, agendas, traditions, etc all the way up.

And even with the people who are working directly with data, there are occasionally political pressures on them to arrive at certain conclusions (diet research in particular is infamous for this).

All that said, I do believe in the value of journalism to educate. But I think a journalism worth paying for will look more like educational material than the journalism we have today.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#249
post #32

I want a service where I can subscribe to journalists not news papers. I want to know that they are getting a portion of my subscription and being successful. I want 0 advertising in this news paper. Where do I get it? Is this something we need to create? I'd love a fact check o meter on each journalist as well, but I think that'd be very open to bias, so I don't know how that'd happen. Anyway, I don't subscribe to n…

That sounds like your feed would become a series of blogs by the same authors. Perhaps if kept under the thumb of a responsible organization and editor that could work, but in my experience whenever a respected reporter goes off to create their own blog their writing tends to devolve into fringe posts crafted just to please their niche audience.

Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

#250

I would love to pay for real news, but I can't find anyone making it consistently. The New York Times at its best produces "mostly believable" if slightly confused material, and at its worst outright propaganda.

I agree. One of the most consistently fact-based publications I've found it Financial Times, though it's pretty dry.
Post reply on HN