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

reuters.com

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

#131

Post by logfromblammo »

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.

It'd be fine if published journalism had source control.

Just look at the revision history.

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

#132

Post by bragh »

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…

Retractions are kind of a bandaid. They should not even be needed if journalists did their due diligence. Worst case I personally saw was a claim by a journalism lecturer that a small news site was alt-right from its inception and wrote a long screed lambasting the site - no, it wasn't, it got sold to a different owner a couple of years after creation because the original owners could not monetize it.

They even got the year of the creation of the site wrong. So, a person teaching journalism didn't even bother running a WHOIS query and spending 2 EUR to run a query against business registry. If that is the level of the teachers, then what can you expect from the people they taught?

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

#133

Post by trickstra »

stoicShell wrote: post #106
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 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…

Yes, but you can still find the .0 version in the github. I'd be totally OK if the news were on github and I could easily see how the article looked a while ago (extra credits for git blame feature).

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

#134

Post by trickstra »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #116
stoicShell wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What you're describing already exists - just have news groups publish to `github` or some other `git` server (They could even host their own), and then anybody who wants can clone it.

They are not really eager to provide such searchability, but we can always scrape them and save in a git repo ourselves.

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

#135

Post by pathseeker »

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…

I'm having trouble reconciling how woefully out of touch your comment is with the state of journalism as an industry. Claiming that it "has solved theses issues" is pretty tone-deaf given the article these comments are on.

>No individual journalist wants to be known for getting a story wrong, so incentives are pretty strong to begin with.

For some altruistic ones sure. However, for each one of those, there are 10 writing click-bait articles to generate traffic to questionable orgs and they don't care at all about being wrong.

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

#136

Post by viridian »

datashow wrote: post #107
viridian wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Strange, the first result for me is the one I linked. Same if I search the name of the article. Google doesn't show me yours at all.

Happy to admit I was wrong about this though. I only remember this article because it came up in a thread about Internet Archive removing content sometimes without any explanation.

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

#137

Post by pathseeker »

conistonwater wrote: post #33
VBprogrammer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The top selling newspapers in the UK are tabloids though, rather than well-respected publications. I don't think that contradicts smt88's point.

smt88's point was that the industry has solved this problem, which is clearly wrong. He/she didn't say anything about "well-respected publications", whatever that even means these days.

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

#138

Post by davvolun »

stoicShell wrote: post #106
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 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…

It immediately irks me that I'm defending agile here, but part of the point of agile is that the developer doesn't really know what the end user needs, so it's, in theory, better to get a minimum viable product out that meets the user's need, then refine on subsequent releases, rather than spend years working on releasing something perfect that it turns out doesn't fill the user's need.

From a similar perspective for journalism, I think there's an argument that can be made that it's better to get most of the information out right away, even if some of it is inaccurate, and then correct the inaccuracies later, rather than wait until every piece is confirmed and edited perfectly to release the information. Argument to extremes, think of a hurricane or volcano explosion.

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

#139

Post by gizmo385 »

derision wrote: post #129
nstj wrote: post #127

@dang - arguably misleading title, please consider renaming to “Bloomberg LP fined €5m for publishing fake press release”. Current title can be read that Michael Bloomberg was personally fined.

i'm not sure most people see "Bloomberg" and think of the person rather than the company

I certainly read this as the person, initially.

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

#140

Post by pathseeker »

enraged_camel wrote: post #119
zentiggr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Term limits. Or vote them out next time. Part of the reason the Constitution writers made 2 and 6 year terms, to try to force the House to be responsive to public opinion and the Senate resistant to GIGO cycling of proposed bills. Of course that's all moot with the current 'ideology above sanity', but that's the game today. Term limits.

Term limits is one of those ideas that sound good, but is actually bad. Think about it: why would you want to have lawmakers automatically removed from office after they have gained significant experience in writing and lobbying for legislation and serving in various committees? Terminating someone when they are at the height of their productivity doesn't make any sense, either for business or for government. Further…

>why would you want to have lawmakers automatically removed from office after they have gained significant experience in writing and lobbying for legislation and serving in various committees?

Because passed laws should be about the will of the people. Not how deep the tentacles of a particular politician go. The only reason it takes so long for politicians to climb those ranks and gain power is due to the long line of lifers in front of them. 8 years is more than enough for Presidents to significantly impact the country. There is no reason a senator or a representative needs more than that.

>Every politician would optimize their legislative careers for their post-term private sector gigs

They do this already. The lack of term limits just allows them to continue amassing power and favors to make it more lucrative.

>rather than try their hardest to continue doing a good job so as to get re-elected.

You fundamentally misunderstand what the point of a member of congress. They aren't supposed to be professional politicians. They are supposed to be normal people from each state doing their duty representing that state. It's why congress isn't a full-time position.

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