Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 270 posts

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#61

Post by skinkestek »

the_duke wrote: post #3

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…

You are onto something.

I very much respect journalists and some of them are really brave, on par with ambulance crews, firefighters and police officers who put their lives on the line to rescue others.

Sadly, like how a very few police officers abuse their positions to punish random teenagers etc certain journalists are extremely harmful.

I've seen cases were journalists have done untold damage to individuals and communities because they couldn't be bothered to verify their sources before going out, guns blazing, to tell that someone is an abuser/fraud/racist etc.

This can go on for weeks and months but when the evidence finally piles up they publish one small retraction notice :-/

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#62

Post by SN76477 »

the_duke wrote: post #3

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…

Freedom of press is a great thing. Unfortunately we do not see enough journalists earning authentic trust. It has indeed become a race to the bottom.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#63

Post by dgellow »

zmzrr wrote: post #20
singularity2001 wrote: post #17

Doesn't this violate the freedom of speech?

I am not saying it necessarily applies to this case, but France, like all countries in the EU, does not have actual freedom of speech.

It's ... complicated. France does have a concept of "liberté d'expression" (literally "freedom of speech"), but it isn't equivalent to the US 1st amendment.

That won't help you if you don't read french, but you can see here that while the "Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen" from 1789 has a concept somehow similar to "freedom of speech", a lot of exceptions have been created since then.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9_d%27expression#En...

In practice you're correct that France doesn't have what US citizen mean by "freedom of speech". Though that becomes messy because the literal translation of the expression actually exists in the law, but with a different meaning.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#64

Post by auiya »

coldcode wrote: post #36

There is no real penalty for publishing fake news as if it was truth. Whole websites and media companies do it as a matter of course (often for political or manipulative purposes). 5.6M to Bloomberg is pocket change. There are of course still journalists with a burning desire to report the truth, but it's far easier and profitable to ignore it today. When the internet started we all thought that the truth would final…

> There is no real penalty for publishing fake news as if it was truth

This depends on what country in which you operate. Many countries have made publishing fake news illegal.

> When the internet started we all thought that the truth would finally prevail only to find out the non-truth is easier to amplify.

When the Internet started, we didn't realize it would be commercialized so heavily that basically 3-4 companies control it all.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#65

Post by dgellow »

chki wrote: post #23
zmzrr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not saying it necessarily applies to this case, but France, like all countries in the EU, does not have actual freedom of speech.

That's not true. At least not for the common definitions of "freedom of speech".

The "freedom of speech" discussed here is a legal concept, known as the 1st amendment of the US constitution. The common definition isn't really relevant. And it's true that France doesn't actually have such a thing guaranteed by the law. The closest you have is "liberté d'expression" which isn't as broad as "freedom of speech" in the US sense, and doesn't guarantee the same level of freedom.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#66

Post by jacquesm »

the_duke wrote: post #3

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…

I'd love to see this for politicians. Lie and you're automatically removed from office and fined/jailed.

Also, I never understood why a vote is a one way street, why can't I recall my vote if the politicians that gained my vote with their programs and promises then end up breaking those promises and not implementing their programs.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#68

Post by dmos62 »

jacquesm wrote: post #66
the_duke wrote: post #3

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…

I'd love to see this for politicians. Lie and you're automatically removed from office and fined/jailed. Also, I never understood why a vote is a one way street, why can't I recall my vote if the politicians that gained my vote with their programs and promises then end up breaking those promises and not implementing their programs.

I sympathize, but the ability to recall your vote, i.e. unelect, at any time would make your attitude towards your initial vote less serious and elections/unelections would cycle too fast to govern. Sometimes a bad government can be better than no government. Burden of citizenship.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#69

Post by smt88 »

72deluxe wrote: post #46
smt88 wrote: post #13

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…

I wish I could find a link but wasn't there a guy who went round editing wikipedia articles for elderly "famous" people, and then when they died he waited to see which publications' obituaries for said individual matched his wikipedia falsehoods? It just proved that "journalists" weren't doing any research and were just scraping wikipedia. And getting paid to do it. I remember when Michael Jackson died and channel Fi…

Failing to verify a celebrity birthdate is not the same as failing to vet a source for an impactful investigative piece. There are people paid to write fluff who don't do much research, but the stakes are low.

You still haven't refuted anything I wrote. Clickbait and low-effort articles are pervasive. Everyone knows that. But you can generally trust publications with known journalistic standards and a good record.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#70

Post by codetrotter »

smt88 wrote: post #13
the_duke wrote: post #3

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…

New publications that pop up would benefit from better citing the sources of their articles, because then when an article they write is shared and someone says "I have never heard of that publication, I don't trust it", the person that shared the item could refer the other person to the sources that were being cited instead of arguing about the trustworthiness of the publication itself.

As for established publications; from their point of view they can probably manage fine because they have a good reputation already, but I think it would benefit society at large if they too got better at citing sources so that we can rely less on reputation alone.

Reputation is a proxy for trustworthiness, but greater source transparency allows for the trustworthiness of individual articles to be judged with less work and thus less time needed, which means that deliberately misleading articles, factually wrong information and honest mistakes can all be caught sooner.

Post reply on HN