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

reuters.com

161–170 of 270 posts

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

#161
post #51

Why? Didn't Fox News set a precedent when they won that lawsuit and courts agreed they had the right to lie in the news? Edit: Oh, because it's no the US.

Even Snopes knows that's false. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-skews/ But nice try...

Thanks for the correction!

I wish I could edit my comment. :-(

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

#162
post #85

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…

Here is an article from CNN criticizing NYT on their terribly botched Kavanaugh story recently. https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/16/media/new-york-times-kavanaug...

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

#163
post #13
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…

Even if that is true, there is clearly a trust problem with journalism, and the list of "well-respected" publications is dwindling, and there's no real way to audit whether they are trustworthy. I don't support the type of government regulation the OP proposes, but I do like the transparency ideas.

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

#164
post #51

Why? Didn't Fox News set a precedent when they won that lawsuit and courts agreed they had the right to lie in the news? Edit: Oh, because it's no the US.

Even Snopes knows that's false. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-skews/ But nice try...

This shows why fake information is so powerful. No wonder it's used in politics.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

But parent's aren't really talking about mistakes, like errors in software. They're talking about lies.

Sure, go ahead and get all the information you have out right away. But qualify their accuracy level. There's a difference between "Foo frobnicated a Baz", vs. "a certain quux told us[0] that Foo frobnicated a Baz" (with [0] leading to details like the top post mentions). The former is stating a possibly inaccurate information as if it was a sure fact. Essentially, it's lying. The latter form lets the reader understand the degree of uncertainty involved, and choose how much they're willing to believe it.

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

#166

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…

Representatives don't write legislation, that's what their staff is for, and experience is a valuable assent in a staffer. The longer a poltician's term lasts, the more they trend towards being the governments representative to the people instead of the people's representative in government.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Lies are still protected free speech in most circumstances. Additionally you have the problem of policing who decides what is illegal

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

#169
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story is so odd to me. On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story, saying that all these big companies were hacked, why didn't anybody sue them? It was a major accusation! It just kinda...disappeared.

>why didn't anybody sue them? What exactly would they sue them for? Defamation and libel claims don't just require the defendant to be wrong, they have to have known or ought to have known that the claims were false. If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.

>If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.

I guess that would be up to the courts to decide, wouldn't it? Considering they said Apple and AWS were compromised, that's a lot of firepower.

I'm skeptical that "some anonymous source told us, and we choose to believe it" would pass legal muster, especially when you are publishing something as a major media source. But anything is possible.

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This story is so odd to me. On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story, saying that all these big companies were hacked, why didn't anybody sue them? It was a major accusation! It just kinda...disappeared.

> On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. If the story were true, under what circumstances could Bloomberg reports have come into possession of a compromised sever to satisfy this requirement? > On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story Journalists evaluate and report what they're told by sources. For instance: they don'…

>If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest.

So where is the retraction or followup reporting? Do they still believe it to be true? That's interesting in itself, is it not?

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