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

101–110 of 270 posts

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

#101

Post by markstos »

skinkestek wrote: post #61
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 co…

So name some names with specific examples.

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

#102

Post by excursionist »

lbenes wrote: post #85
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy just if they were forbidden to change articles after publishing, and not say that. Because currently, they post some bullshit news and create some random outrage. Then someone points at some bullshit claim in their article, and they just quietly change the article (remove the claim, add "allegedly", etc.), and act as nothing was wrong. Or in worst case scenario, they quietly remove the whole article.

I've seen this accusation thrown out there on social media a few times now. When I've asked for examples, no one been able to provide a list showing that this is actually a systemic problem. With resources like the Internet Archive it should be trivial to prove that this really a problem. Can you back up your claims? Journalists are people and make mistakes. But overall, respected institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, an…

I see this happening pretty much every day for political news. I don't keep track of a list, but here is a recent example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/us/politics/bernie-sander...

> Mr. Uygur, a longtime supporter of Mr. Sanders, has also disparaged former President Barack Obama on his show, argued that bestiality should be legal and hosted white supremacist figures, including David Duke. In one clip that circulated on Twitter, Mr. Duke ends an interview by saying, “I am not, what you call a racist,” to which Mr. Uygur replies sarcastically, “No, of course not.”

They added the word 'sarcastically' and also added this after:

> Mr. Uygur called the clip a “complete smear” that had been taken out of context from a combative one-hour interview in which he pushed back on Mr. Duke.

In reality, NYT published a smear about Cenk Uygur, claiming he was supporting and agreeing with this white supremacist David Duke. This was a straight up lie, since Cenk spent the entire interview criticizing and arguing with David Duke, not agreeing with him at all. This caused an outrage among Cenk's supporters, and NYT quietly updated their article so that now it says almost the opposite of the original! Also, note that the smear was published after Cenk decided to run for Congress and the reporter knew that the clip used to support the 'Cenk agrees with David Duke' smear was out of context. [1]

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/ny-times-corrects-report-on-ce...

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

#103

Post by Clubber »

ramblerman wrote: post #90
lbenes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this accusation thrown out there on social media a few times now. When I've asked for examples, no one been able to provide a list showing that this is actually a systemic problem. With resources like the Internet Archive it should be trivial to prove that this really a problem. Can you back up your claims? Journalists are people and make mistakes. But overall, respected institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, an…

Those institutions are not the ones they were 10-20 years ago. And with less and less revenue streams they have resorted to clickbait like the rest. I suggest you wake up to the reality of modern 'journalism'. WaPo just recently messed up completely with the death of Baghdadi (the isis leader). Titling the article about his assassination as "Austere religious scholar dies at 48" They had to change it 3 more times til…

This is absolutely correct, it's shitty that people are downvoting you for it. Matt Taibbi even said as much on Joe Rogan.

Journalists aren't some deity to be put on a pedestal. They are employees that work for a corporation, usually a really big one. That corporation's business model is dying and they are cutting costs to survive and have been for 20 years.

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

tarcyanm wrote: post #86
smt88 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since NYT, WaPo, and WSJ publish unverified info "all the time", perhaps you could prove your point by pulling examples of false info they've published in the last month without a correction? Since it happens so frequently, it should be easy to find one or two, maybe even for each publication.

The deafening silence regarding the fudged OPCW reports is an indictment on most outlets (WP is mentioned explicitly): https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/07/syria-many-media-lie-a... https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/12/15/deluge-of-new-leaks-...

[deleted]

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

#105

Post by fauigerzigerk »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #54
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 be happy just if they were forbidden to change articles after publishing, and not say that. Because currently, they post some bullshit news and create some random outrage. Then someone points at some bullshit claim in their article, and they just quietly change the article (remove the claim, add "allegedly", etc.), and act as nothing was wrong. Or in worst case scenario, they quietly remove the whole article.

This could be an area where the much hyped block chain technology actually makes sense.

But don't ask me what the incentives would have to be for journalistic organisations to adopt the technology.

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

#106

Post by stoicShell »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #54
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 be happy just if they were forbidden to change articles after publishing, and not say that. Because currently, they post some bullshit news and create some random outrage. Then someone points at some bullshit claim in their article, and they just quietly change the article (remove the claim, add "allegedly", etc.), and act as nothing was wrong. Or in worst case scenario, they quietly remove the whole article.

I think it's the same when we ship beta software to users and then expect the first batch to essentially debug it — then comes the proverbial ".1" patch which fixes most glaring issues. (as if they weren't obvious in the first place)

Now why do we do that in software? because "agile", cost, "let's ship and risk breaking some things and see what happens? We'll fix things later in some update, on a need-to basis"

Well I think journalism has gone the same road: "let's publish first and risk breaking some truths and see what happens? We'll fix things later in some update, on a need-to basis"

Can't really blame the business entities themselves. I wholeheartedly agree with GP though, there definitely needs to be more regulation and parent's point is one of the most salient target for that — it's disingenuous at best to silently update/remove, not to mention actually false from a documentation standpoint, it skews history basically. Very dystopian. News articles should be versioned exactly like git, we should be able to diff each public update.

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

#107

Post by datashow »

viridian wrote: post #96
lbenes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this accusation thrown out there on social media a few times now. When I've asked for examples, no one been able to provide a list showing that this is actually a systemic problem. With resources like the Internet Archive it should be trivial to prove that this really a problem. Can you back up your claims? Journalists are people and make mistakes. But overall, respected institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, an…

You cite the Wall Street Journal as a respected institution, but I know I've seen them do this. Part of the problem with this type of thing is that publications often go out of their way to erase the existence of an aritcle if they intend to delete it. Here's an example of an articles scrubbed from existence, including from the internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20170301000000*/http://www.wsj.c... http://w…

Funny, I searched "The filing was a response to a FOIA lawsuit brought in March by conservative organization Citizens United", and the first result in google is from here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-vs-foia-1443136...

Aslo, if you search "url:http://www.wsj.com/article_email/" , you won't find any active link at all. It seems they have changed their website structure.

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

#109

Post by Karunamon »

joshlegs wrote: post #92
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 like how OP commenter is essentially arguing that the government should regulate journalism, which fundamentally misunderstands the role of journalists -- that is, it is a direct check and balance on the government, except that it relies on the free market for competitive regulation. A journalism outlet which consistently gets things wrong SHOULD fail. Trying to regulate journalism massively fails not only in its i…

One avenue that I think hasn't been fully explored/exhausted yet is false advertising regulation. Calling your product "news" carries a an entirely reasonable expectation that the product is free of falsehoods. (I'm not getting into bias, just absence of lies)

What would happen if we made that term (or synonyms like "journalism") protected advertising terms, so that you're required to either live up to it, or call yourself something else?

Another idea under this hypothetical law would be to have retractions/corrections carry the exact same amount of publicization as the original story. In other words, if you spend 10 minutes during primetime talking about something that turned out to be a lie, you get to spend 10 minutes on primetime about how you screwed up. You lie on a front page article that was up for a week? Your correction features in the same place for a week.

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

#110

Post by stoicShell »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #105
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy just if they were forbidden to change articles after publishing, and not say that. Because currently, they post some bullshit news and create some random outrage. Then someone points at some bullshit claim in their article, and they just quietly change the article (remove the claim, add "allegedly", etc.), and act as nothing was wrong. Or in worst case scenario, they quietly remove the whole article.

This could be an area where the much hyped block chain technology actually makes sense. But don't ask me what the incentives would have to be for journalistic organisations to adopt the technology.

First thing would be to de-correlate this 'news blockchain' entirely from any sort of 'coin', 'token', whatever 'currency' thing — a blockchain is a distributed database, period, 'crypto-coins' being just one application for this storage.

There are several ways to do it then but a standard would likely emerge, as in: "we commit to mirror-publish our content to ThePressChain."

You'd likely store only text (say the raw html) on the blockchain though, so using links for pictures etc; which implies your CDN is archived publicly for later retrieval (I suppose a deal with archive.org or equivalent is in order to bolster such a paradigm).

Post reply on HN