Bruce Willis denies selling rights to his face • Hacker News Board

Re: Bruce Willis denies selling rights to his face

#11

Post by elbo_ » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

chiph wrote: post #3

I see comparisons with David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen selling the rights to their back catalogs. While this firm seems a little sketchy to me and probably didn't really own the rights to his likeness, I think it's something he and other older actors should consider to provide a financial legacy for their heirs. I imagine the contract would contain things like what an acceptable use would be, payments for using it,…

This seems like a dystopian path to go down. In 200 years will all actors be judged on their ability to wear the face of actors who lived before them? When current actors get old and can't act, just let them stop acting. I don't see what the world gains from continuing to plaster Bruce Willis' face onto action dudes, aside from a few people lining their pockets.

Re: Bruce Willis denies selling rights to his face

#12

Post by andsoitis » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #4

What's really interesting about this story is just how many sites published it without verifying. They just heard it from another news site and copied it. It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere?

Extending that thought, I think a lot of readers here also assumed truth to the story, as evidenced by the the discussion the other day.

Re: Bruce Willis denies selling rights to his face

#13

Post by ksec » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #4

What's really interesting about this story is just how many sites published it without verifying. They just heard it from another news site and copied it. It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere?

This has been the case for quite some time, and most people are still not aware of it, Not even on HN. And if the folks on HN dont know, that you could guess 99% of the mainstream reader doesn't know.

The whole news publishing itself is now an echo chamber. Regardless of Social Media or not. They all wanted clicks and first headline stories.

Once you understand how that industry works, how being correct has little to no business incentive, and how the PR industry works with submarine articles, which all together forms a positive ( or negative ) feedback loop. And if you are an expert or actual industry professionals in the field, You will then realise everything you read in newspaper are nothing more than gossip.

Re: Bruce Willis denies selling rights to his face

#14

Post by ewzimm » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #13

esperent wrote: post #4

What's really interesting about this story is just how many sites published it without verifying. They just heard it from another news site and copied it. It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere?

This has been the case for quite some time, and most people are still not aware of it, Not even on HN. And if the folks on HN dont know, that you could guess 99% of the mainstream reader doesn't know. The whole news publishing itself is now an echo chamber. Regardless of Social Media or not. They all wanted clicks and first headline stories. Once you understand how that industry works, how being correct has little to…

Although obvious, I think it’s worth mentioning plenty of great examples of this even beyond the modern media. For example, “less than 1% of people become addicted to OxyContin” (Purdue Pharma) or “AIDS was created by the CIA” (Da Baby, also the KGB), or “Thomas Jefferson had a child with Sally Hemmings” (James Callender).

You can likely find similar stories carved into Sumerian tablets somewhere.

I do think it’s gotten worse in some areas, but the identification of the issue as a modern product of the Internet echo chamber also seems a bit misleading, as it might cause someone to misidentify the problem as a uniquely modern one that we could fix with changes to rules of publishing platforms alone. I’m not sure that the echo chambers in the modern media are worse than they were in Europe during the Hundred Years’ War, for example.

Re: Bruce Willis denies selling rights to his face

#15

Post by rchaud » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #4

What's really interesting about this story is just how many sites published it without verifying. They just heard it from another news site and copied it. It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere?

> It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere?

Was there a list in the 2000s when these sites were just called 'blogs'?

You don't need a list. You can simply look at the stories they post on their sidebar, judge the cadence of the writing and decide if it's for you or not.

Re: Bruce Willis denies selling rights to his face

#16

Post by esperent » Wed, Oct 05, 2022, 3:22 AM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #12

esperent wrote: post #4

What's really interesting about this story is just how many sites published it without verifying. They just heard it from another news site and copied it. It's actually a good measure of a site's journalistic worth: did they publish this fake story? Then they are probably not worth your time. I wonder if there's a list anywhere?

Extending that thought, I think a lot of readers here also assumed truth to the story, as evidenced by the the discussion the other day.

Yeah but we are not journalists. Of course everyone should make an effort to verify the things they read, but journalists are held to a higher standard because verifying information like this and then making it available to us in an easily consumed format is literally their job.

The journalists who published this failed at their jobs. We non-journalists who read and believed them just made a trivial and unimportant mistake.