The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free • Hacker News Board

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#241

Post by stjohnswarts » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

DangitBobby wrote: post #182

askxnakjsn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking more along the lines of a true spectrum, like a percentage system. What you have here is a bunch of qualitative truthiness symbols decided arbitrarily, it's not much different from just saying true or false. For example, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marijuana-electron-microsc... this article would lead a passerby to believe that there is equal parts truth and lie in this picture + caption. In real…

I saw one on PolitiFact about Biden a while back. The claim was that he's been fighting to cut social security benefits for the last 40 years. The verdict was "mostly false" but if you read the contents [1], it's "mostly true." You see shit like this all the time. 1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/12/bernie-san...

It's more in the middle. He clearly was going with the flow of politics at the time on budget hawking. It hardly seems like he wanted to eliminate/privatize SS like most conservatives who aren't retired want to do. So there a levels to "cutting social security" like most complicated topics from freezing it to reducing it to eliminating it. I agree though their mostly false doesn't seem reasonable to me from a statistical analysis of what they presented in the article

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#242

Post by pb7 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #229

apearson wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terrible road to go down. Abstaining should not be seen as support.

Abstaining should however be seen as allowing others to act with impunity.

Not really. No one has enough time in their life to be informed and opinionated about every single topic of at least minor importance. No one is superior because they’re perpetually high strung from constant political news cycles.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#243

Post by kyleblarson » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

Of course they left the Wall Street Journal (paywalled and quite expensive) out of their list because it doesn't fit their narrative.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#244

Post by andrewtbham » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #213

andrewtbham wrote: post #173

> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp t…

It's a mistake to judge an organization on one, or even a handful of incidents. There should be a pattern of inaccuracy and bias before you "cancel" a news source. This is one of the unsung problems of the modern world, the growing impossibility of keeping an accurate "reputation" in your brain. Virtually everyone and everything has been accused of being evil, in general, or specifically. It's no longer good enough t…

at least on the topic of tesla, nyt has been wrong and unfair against tesla for about 10 years. i really don't know about other topics... but...

pg repeatedly questions the integrity of nyt and has personally been the victim of their bias.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152?lang=en

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236979160100343812

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#245

Post by arp242 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:26 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #206

arp242 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 7 years ago? I don't know anything about that entire story so I can't comment specifically, but the NYT publishes about 150 articles a day, so there are bound to be some stinkers over the years. It's not great, but dismissing an entire publication over it doesn't strike me as fair.

The NYT used to have industry-leading editorial standards. Just a week or two ago in their reporting on the UFO story, they initially reported it in a "ZOMG ALIENS ARE REAL!" way, which is the most clickbaity thing they could have done...and then silently published a correction after they got the bump in views. The NYT is practically indistinguishable from (modern) BuzzFeed.

Right; but it's one thing to say "they no longer have industry-leading editorial standards" and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect. I don't read the NYT front page – just articles linked here and elsewhere – so my view of it is far from complete and biased; I don't see "ZOMG ALIES!"-type articles for example, but there certainly still seems plenty of content of value on the NYT, in spite of also having content that detracts from that.

You also have to appreciate the NYT's position I think; at the end of the day, a newspaper is in the business selling newspapers. It's not quite that simple as many journalists and publications – quite rightfully – believe they have a greater task than "just running a business", but at the end of the day bills need to be paid, and the NYT is a business.

A business that now has to compete against a plethora of free content, not infrequently written by incompetent hacks (possibly with a less-than-savoury agenda) with almost no editorial standards. Competing against "free" is hard, and is not an easy position for a business to be in and quite likely a big reason for the decline in editorial standards. This is pretty much what this article is about.

"ZOMG ALIENS!" is complete nonsense, but ... it probably also drives traffic, and thus revenue. One way to see this is that this revenue-based clickbait content sponsors the more in-depth quality content and, like advertisement, is kind of a necessary evil. But yeah, it's not great.

As an aside, I have plenty of gripes with the state of the press by the way; especially since the Trump presidency things have ... not evolved in the right direction. But we must also be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#246

Post by a_bonobo » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:26 PM UTC

rukittenme wrote: post #189

a_bonobo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does OP's article say that the bible-burning incident was a 'lie'? New York Post says 'a bible', and your video a single book being burned, can't see whether that's a bible. The original video has been deleted (link is dead here: https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1289512762733785088 ) but quickly picked up by the usual far-right BS twitterati. >The fire was later put out by members of Moms United for Black L…

> so that article OP cites is outrage bait, it's not an informed source. How does this follow? One faction burns a bible and another faction puts it out. How do you choose which narrative to privilege?

The book being burned doesn't look like a bible to me - the breitbart article tries to spin that one book being burned into a NSDAP-like mass book burning event, with bibles being burned - we don't know which faction burned that single book, but breitbart wants the reader very hard to believe that it was BLM people/leftwing people.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#247

Post by brendoelfrendo » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:26 PM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #204

luckylion wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) There are protestors 2) They are doing things 3) "Protestors are doing things" is a lie because they might not "actually" be part of the protestors but instead be false-flag undercover agents? That's wild. You can't have a functioning press under those assumptions, because you don't know for absolute certain that everything is the way it looks. Donald Trump might be a long-term agent of the Democratic Party aiming…

It's more than just whether or not the events are true; I'll assume they are, but the commentary of "protests and riots are [..] an attempt to dismantle all of Western Civilization and upend centuries of tradition and freedom of religion" and "flag burning at the antifa/BLM gathering" most certainly is not. The problem with that last one, to be clear, is that it's trying to associate some alleged terror organisation…

This, to me, is the biggest reason it's presented as a lie. You can present factual events in such a way to convince people to draw incorrect conclusions, and that seems to be what the Breitbart article is doing. I actually like this example of a lie, because it's not an unintentional lapse of editorial oversight but an intentional distortion of fact. The unstated conclusion of the article, that Portland is an anarchist playground in need of correcting, is just as important to the context of the article as the "factual" events it describes. I swear, the HN commentariat can be so literal.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#248

Post by brendoelfrendo » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

awalton wrote: post #117

mythz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You likely want Apple News+ [1] at just under $10 USD /mo - a single cost for a la carte access to a large pool of publications, basically the only premium subscription model that's going to be able to gain mainstream adoption. [1] https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

No, what I want is Google Reader back. And I know I'm far, far, far away from being alone on this. Just give me the text, not the videos and the horrible formatting and poor font choices and all of that bullshit - I'd gladly pay for it, if it still existed. May it rest in peace.

Google Reader was just an RSS reader, and there are plenty of those available, both free and paid. RSS doesn't get you past pay walls, though.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#249

Post by pb7 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #209

dsign wrote: post #118

That's why I buy my "news" at Amazon, as e-books on the topics I'm interested, since for 99.9999999999% of the things happening in the world, nobody really cares about how many months they will have to wait for my opinion.

If you choose to abstain from current events then you assume responsibility for the outcome. Functioning democratic societies require active, engaged citizenry. Passive, disengaged voters are what creates the conditions for Donald Trump to arise.

Extremism on one side causes extremism on the other, and vice versa. Weakly held moderate views that are open to change when presented with new information are more productive to functioning democracy than both extremists who condemn anyone that doesn’t subscribe.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#250

Post by dataduck » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

bjowen wrote: post #184

marcus_holmes wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, who judges whether something is true?

Oh nobody’s even bothered to think about epistemology before.

I know right? Wittgenstein solved the whole thing in 1922 and yet here we are 100 years later, still acting like "knowing the truth" is a hard problem.

(Here's hoping I can avoid the wrath of Poe's law)