371–380 of 670 posts
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...
(Paraphrasing: Story pulled over potentially breaching content policies, investigating, update after the weekend-ish.)
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It gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That w…
"I'm a professional shopper, and here's what I say you should buy" because someone sent me a free version of it or just straight copy to use in my listicle. It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.
It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.
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"Agenda" has become code for "ideas I don't agree with", used by people who mistakenly believe it (politics) can be compartmentalized from other everyday topics and only trotted out at election time.
I disagree. Agendas are real things. Just because they have one, doesn't mean it is inherently bad or even a disagreeable position... but some people just don't like to be "sold to", regardless of the topic.
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Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.
The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be d…
Still often good comments here, but certain topics devolve into a bad subreddit quickly. The ethos of the rules hasn't scaled with the site.
I would like to give a small defense of Benj Edwards. While his coverage on Ars definitely has a positive spin on AI, his comments on social media are much less fawning. Ars is a tech-forward publication, and it is owned by a major corporation. Major corporations have declared LLMs to be the best thing since breathable air, and anyone who pushes back on this view is explicitly threatened with economic destitution via…
Looks they're gonna investigate and perhaps post something next week. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...
No, you just shipped the equivalent to a data-destroying bug: it’s all-hands-over-the-holiday-weekend time.
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You prefer a "both sides" style of political coverage? At what point in the slide to authoritarianism should that stop? Where is the line?
Or the other side of at what point into ending capitalism in favor of socialism should that stop? Yes, I enjoy "both sides" coverage when it's done in earnest. What passes for that today is two people representing the extremes of either spectrum looking for gotcha moments as an "owning" moment. We haven't seen a good "both sides" in decades
I don't see how one honestly argues in favor of an authoritarian government
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I'm willing to believe it was not an ad. They are just lazy / understaffed. It's hard to make $ in journalism. A longstanding and popular way to cut corners is to let the industry you cover do most of the work for you. You just re-package press releases. You have plausible content for a fraction of the effort / cost.
Unfortunately, government is like that were most bills are written by lobbyists and barely if at all modified by the actual congress critter sponsoring it.
Most bill in the US Congress are not actually meant to pass, they are just (often poorly written) PR stunts.
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I'm also trying to understand. The agenda is to publish about Trump and Elon? Is that correct?
The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern
I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.