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How can you know what news is real?

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Re: How can you know what news is real?

#121

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

edejong wrote: post #79
zouhair wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's short sighted. It's because of this flawed logic that a lot of Americans think they have the best education/healthcare in the World. Just now that they started to look at what is happening elsewhere that they are starting to understand what they are lacking. Here is the thing, and it works for everything in life: Knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it, even if it is not clear what use…

No, the statement 'knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it', is balderdash. An individuals knowledge is like a garden. It needs to be kept in order and it takes time to maintain. There is simply too much information being produced and a limited bandwidth to ingest this information. To select the right information is of the essence. Form a strategy of knowledge gathering. For example, one can decid…

So, because you found one, rather extreme case, where blindly consuming disparate pieces of information is maybe harmful you're arguing the entire premise is flawed?

The statement is not "at the sacrifice of all else, memorize everything possible."

If you take any advice to a logical extreme it will likely become bad advice. Maybe you should try to consider things from different angles before you capriciously write them off.

Re: How can you know what news is real?

#122

Post by neonate »

k_sze wrote: post #110

I'm an avid reader of Chomsky. He often gets his sources from financial and foreign policy publications. I think I remember him writing something to the effect of: the best source of truthful journalism is in the finance and foreign policy publications, the reason being that those publications help powerful people form their opinions and make decisions, and none of the powerful people would be subscribing to publicat…

You're right. He has been saying that for many years and I've heard many variations. The WSJ is famously his favourite newspaper, though that may have shifted post-Murdoch.

Re: How can you know what news is real?

#123

Post by dang »

ra120271 wrote: post #12
sojmq wrote: post #6

"only 15 billionaires and 6 corporations owning the majority of U.S media outlets" Wow, such stinking antisemitism in this article. I had hoped we, as a society, could do much better

I went back and re-read the article with your comment in mind and struggled to recognise any overt anti-semitism. Could you provide some examples?

He's trolling, for who knows whatever internal reason.

Re: How can you know what news is real?

#124

Post by madiathomas »

pjc50 wrote: post #108
_akei wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those in power will certainly prefer your kind of thinking. With your kind of thinking, Nelson Mandela wasn't going to be released from jail. I doubt they were even gonna send him to jail. They were going to quietly execute him. Apartheid wasn't going to be defeated, and black South Africans were still going to be treated like animals in their own country. It was reporting by British media, politicians, celebrities a…

> It was reporting by British media, politicians, celebrities and ordinary citizens that put pressure on the apartheid government to end apartheid Not just British, it was a global effort and a global boycott. The British government of the time wasn't a supporter of Mandela. > I am sure Hitler was going to prefer that other countries don't report on what was happening so that he can continue to eliminate all German J…

I singled out Britain because they were the most vocal in the fight against apartheid. Maybe it was because they were our former colonisers. They are the ones who imposed sanctions that helped. As for US, it was in fact the CIA who gave apartheid government intel which led to the arrest of Nelson Mandela.

Re: How can you know what news is real?

#125

Post by madiathomas »

lm28469 wrote: post #118
_akei wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those in power will certainly prefer your kind of thinking. With your kind of thinking, Nelson Mandela wasn't going to be released from jail. I doubt they were even gonna send him to jail. They were going to quietly execute him. Apartheid wasn't going to be defeated, and black South Africans were still going to be treated like animals in their own country. It was reporting by British media, politicians, celebrities a…

I'll focus on my town and country before thinking about things happening 10k kilometres from me and on which I have absolutely no power whatsoever. That's why we're supposed to elect competent politicians btw, to take care of the serious business we citizen know jack shit about. We can take a current event, hong kong, besides posting memes on reddit and #thoughtsAndPrayers on twitter what are people outside of the re…

Believe me, those memes are helping to raise awareness. We must always raise awareness. We won't always succeed but we must always try our best.

Re: How can you know what news is real?

#126

Post by edejong »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #121
edejong wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the statement 'knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it', is balderdash. An individuals knowledge is like a garden. It needs to be kept in order and it takes time to maintain. There is simply too much information being produced and a limited bandwidth to ingest this information. To select the right information is of the essence. Form a strategy of knowledge gathering. For example, one can decid…

So, because you found one, rather extreme case, where blindly consuming disparate pieces of information is maybe harmful you're arguing the entire premise is flawed? The statement is not "at the sacrifice of all else, memorize everything possible." If you take any advice to a logical extreme it will likely become bad advice. Maybe you should try to consider things from different angles before you capriciously write t…

Personally I am of the opinion that one should always consider the knowledge one gathers similarly to the food one eats and the friends one keeps. One burger doesn’t make you fat, nor does one bad friend make you criminal. But we’d better make conscious decisions lest we’ll be a 200kg drug dealing gang member who believes the earth is flat.

Re: How can you know what news is real?

#127

Post by masonic »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #71
jajag wrote: post #25

I find the idea that there can be an unbiased news source deeply problematic. All reporting of an event has to be from a perspective, and has to make decisions about what to report, what to leave out; what to emphasise, what to play down. An honest news source should be one that is one that is honest about its own biases.

There is nothing wrong with bias. All media has biases, and those that a required to be unbiased, such as the BBC, end up causing other biases with equality of camera time making every issue a discussion. Which has been well exploited by certain minority views. What has changed is the mainstream media used to care a lot more about being honest. Now they often couldn't give a toss. I don't mind media being partisan, i…

  the mainstream media used to care a lot more about being honest
Quite the contrary, in the USA, anyway. Think back to Hearst and the "yellow journalism" era.

Never in the history of the world have individuals had such ease of access to original sources, such as eyewitness accounts, texts of legislation, etc. Yet people generally stay within their bubbles.

Re: How can you know what news is real?

#129

Post by pixl97 »

empath75 wrote: post #44
jajag wrote: post #25

I find the idea that there can be an unbiased news source deeply problematic. All reporting of an event has to be from a perspective, and has to make decisions about what to report, what to leave out; what to emphasise, what to play down. An honest news source should be one that is one that is honest about its own biases.

There’s a difference between bias and just making shit up. I think people are capable of dealing with biased reporting of actual events. Up until recently, most reporting in the us was done by Americans working for American companies who generally were trying to tell the truth the way they saw it even if the way they saw it was biased. What changed in the 2016 election is the torrent of foreign governments who were s…

2016?.... No 2016 is when a lot of people finally noticed it. It was occurring long before that. Large multinationals have been consolidating news for decades. Noam Chomsky has been warning about this for quite some time.

Re: How can you know what news is real?

#130

Post by pixl97 »

remote_phone wrote: post #30

Overall this post is crap. The whole point about people choosing what they want to read or get reported on only reinforces bubbles. That’s what Facebook did. However I agree that the media is biased and it is worse now than ever. I think even more than being biased, it’s what they choose to report on or not report on that matters. Look at the coverage of Andrew Yang on MSNBC. There are over a dozen instances of ignor…

This happens every political season and has for decades. The media organizations have winners they have ready picked. This really blew up in their face in 2016 with the pied piper candidate.
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