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In today's world of race to the finish (/ bottom) journalism, I think it should be mandatory for all publications to have an addendum to each article, which contains: * list of sources of information and original research conducted ( including names of interviewees, only anonymized with a justification, links, etc ) * a sign-off by a journalist (note: not supposed to imply responsibility or liability for accuracy of…
In today's world of race to the finish (/ bottom) journalism, I think it should be mandatory for all publications to have an addendum to each article, which contains: * list of sources of information and original research conducted ( including names of interviewees, only anonymized with a justification, links, etc ) * a sign-off by a journalist (note: not supposed to imply responsibility or liability for accuracy of…
Well-respected publications have internal checks and balances that do all these things for investigative stories already. You seem not to know enough about how the journalism industry has solved these issues to make a proposal. The system does work fairly well. Screw-ups of investigations and scoops are big news because they're rare among serious journalistic outfits. No individual journalist wants to be known for ge…
There are also countless of "articles" in those (like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ) that are nothing more than a press release with some shallow context sprinkled in, without any independent verification or actual journalistic work.
This doesn't provide a risk of publishing false information ("we are just reporting on the press release"), but is often misleading and of little value to the reader.
At the minimum a list of sources with a link to the press release (and probably nothing/little else) would make it easy to see that a article is nothing more than a shill PR.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well-respected publications have internal checks and balances that do all these things for investigative stories already. You seem not to know enough about how the journalism industry has solved these issues to make a proposal. The system does work fairly well. Screw-ups of investigations and scoops are big news because they're rare among serious journalistic outfits. No individual journalist wants to be known for ge…
> No individual journalist wants to be known for getting a story wrong, so incentives are pretty strong to begin with. I think in a lot of places this isn't nearly as true as maybe it once was. The top selling newspapers in the UK pretty much habitually print anything that drives sales / their agenda and when they get a slap on the wrist they just print a minimal viable retraction. When that occasionally lands them i…
In today's world of race to the finish (/ bottom) journalism, I think it should be mandatory for all publications to have an addendum to each article, which contains: * list of sources of information and original research conducted ( including names of interviewees, only anonymized with a justification, links, etc ) * a sign-off by a journalist (note: not supposed to imply responsibility or liability for accuracy of…
Only because there doesn't seem any way to fuck this up right now, doesn't mean there, in fact, isn't. The ongoing pattern is that "at the time it seemed like the right thing to publish", when in fact it's just about spinning the spin. You can't prove how certain the publishers were about their spin at the time of publishing, not even with your suggested solution, that I guess, would only get more journalists fired,…
This reminds me something I read recently: The Court concluded that "because the articles in their entirety were substantially true at the time they were published—even though the investigators' suspicions were ultimately deemed unfounded—they cannot form the basis of a defamation action.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> list of sources of information and original research conducted This is something that is ostensibly already in a typical article. Or are you suggesting that the reporter list everything that was researched, and every one who was talked to, regardless if it made it into the published version of the article?
> This is something that is ostensibly already in a typical article. It really isn't though. Most sources are not mentioned in a typical article. Prominent interviewees are mentioned by name, but more often then not information comes from a quick Google search, someone not established enough to be mentioned (eg you would mention a professor, but not a young research assistant/secretary), or even Reddit. Not to mentio…
Sure, and this info should be attributed to the reporter, who gets full blame when it's wrong. Though I do agree it'd be nice (in a world where the First Amendment didn't exist) if there were a rule banning such weasel phrasing such as "Some say that" and "according to several experts [who are never named or specifically referred to]"
As for articles being a rewrite of press releases or other articles; yes, that's obviously an issue, and one that many journalists get irate about. But even in most of those cases, the sourcing is clear: "[Regurgitated rewrite of news lede], as first reported by the New York Times [link to original article]".
But for the archetypical article containing original reporting, here's an example of how a source involved in an article might not get listed:
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/business/drunk-driving-br...
Behind-the-scenes writeup that acknowledges an expert who isn't named in the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/reader-center/breathalyze...
The reason why the expert wasn't named, even though he was very helpful throughout the reporting process, was because the article's ultimately relied on the content of original documents. The expert helped lead the reporters to those documents, but his expert opinion was not needed and thus not cited for the article's authoritative conclusions.
It's true that reporters often won't credit where they first got a tip or where they saw something. But if they do their own parallel reconstruction – e.g. they first read an anecdote from a viral tweet/Reddit thread, but then they track down the original source themselves – as a reader, I ultimately care who the reporter and their editor explicitly say they vetted/vouch for, when it comes to the published version of the info.
When the internet started we all thought that the truth would finally prevail only to find out the non-truth is easier to amplify.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are blasphemy laws for instance. Right to be forgotten. Etc.
Which means that freedom of speech is (in some cases) limited because of the religious freedom of others. It doesn't mean that freedom of speech doesn't exist, it means that the "balancing exercise" between certain Rights is performed differently. Edit: There is no state in the world where there exists some sort of "absolute freedom of speech".
Here's an article from 2016 that seems to contemporaneously describe the incident at hand: https://web.archive.org/web/20161123142234/https://www.bloom... > Vinci SA fell victim to a fake release claiming the French builder had fired its finance chief amid accounting irregularities, prompting the stock to plunge before the company denied the report. > Bloomberg News was among the few news organizations to report from…
> “We are a victim of a hoax,” Vinci was the victim of a hoax, Bloomberg was happy to report it without doing enough fact checking, they were spreading and part of the hoax.
Bloomberg literally compensates its writers for moving markets. So, the super micro case, this one and many others before these..no surprises here.
In today's world of race to the finish (/ bottom) journalism, I think it should be mandatory for all publications to have an addendum to each article, which contains: * list of sources of information and original research conducted ( including names of interviewees, only anonymized with a justification, links, etc ) * a sign-off by a journalist (note: not supposed to imply responsibility or liability for accuracy of…
If you inject personal liability to journalism, the news industry is dead in six months.