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You did no fact checking, and I must scream

shkspr.mobi

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Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#121

Post by rs186 »

Fact checking is becoming extremely poor these days, even among reputable/resourceful organizations.

I'll skip NYTimes here. For the Verge, I have pointed out inaccuracies many times in their comment section. Most often, nothing happened. Sometimes, they quietly fixes something, delete my comment and pretend nothing happened.

(And it is laughable they published this piece https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinform.... When I pointed out their own rich history of inaccuracies and retracted reporting, they deleted my comments and flagged my account.)

Guess what's worse? Vergecast. Turns out you don't do fact checking in podcasts! The hosts just ramble whatever they believe is true. And they absolutely do NOT publish corrections after the fact.

I stopped reading Engadget partly for this reason. And I cancelled my Verge subscription for this as well.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#122

Post by edent »

anonymousiam wrote: post #93
BurningFrog wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free press has always been for profit! What's changed is that the profit used to come from advertising. Since everyone read the news, they could charge a lot for ads. Those days are over, and news now bubble up from social media. That kinda works, but it's far from ideal. To me the 2019 "Covington kids" incident showed how broken the media had become. All the prestigious media, from NY Times down, reprinted a vir…

Speaking of Twitter, I couldn't help but notice the lack of a Twitter/X icon on the author's blog page. Lots of other social media links are present.

Author here.

Elon directly screwed over some of my friends. He turned Twitter from an imperfect mess into a shit filled pit of despair.

I don't want to encourage anyone to use his services.

Hope that clarifies things!

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#123

Post by didibus »

amiga386 wrote: post #79

Validating a public person's birthday using Wikipedia? *laughs in Taylor Lorenz* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age Also, in case you're wondering when it is, here's Taylor Lorenz's own Flickr page, which she c…

In case people don't click, Wikipedia says:

> Lorenz's year of birth is disputed by multiple reliable sources.

> How come the French version of this article lists her age as October 21, 1984 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz) but this one hides it? SlapperDapper (talk) 01:21, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

> -- Probably because no one has presented a published, reliable source for that info. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:46, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

> ---- 99.999% of articles on people on Wikipedia have no source for the age/birthday. SlapperDapper (talk) 19:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Though the article is about Patricia Routledge in this case and not Lorenz.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#124

Post by lurk2 »

lynx97 wrote: post #118
chaps wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These problems are largely economic. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.

I once sat on a table nearby of the local investigative newsroom crew having a chat in a cafe. The vibe I got was so evil, I definitely wouldn't give them any of my money. In fact, I have given up on the concept of independent journalism, I just dont believe anymore it is happening. Knowing the onwership structure of the publishers in my country (and many others around me) also adds to the unwillingness to donate. Th…

> They are all inconservative hands

> Journalists who said they were Republicans continued to drop from 18 percent in 2002 and 7.1 percent in 2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022. This figure is notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican party (26 percent according to the poll mentioned earlier) in 2022. About half of all journalists (51.7 percent) said they were Independents, which is about 12 percentage points above the figure for all U.S. adults (40 percent). Overall, U.S. journalists today are much more likely to identify themselves as Independents rather than Democrats or Republicans—a pattern similar to 2013.

https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/post/american-journali...

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#125

Post by [deleted] »

zahlman wrote: post #84
altcognito wrote: post #18

I'm confused why we are fact checking viral slop. First, you would have to confirm she wrote it. When and where was it published. If you can't confirm that, you shouldn't post it. Stop, go no further. What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?

The fact-check discovered the information to be so implausible that it would arguably have no value to publish even if she did say it (being completely mistaken about all the facts of her own life).

[deleted]

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#126

Post by edent »

omnicognate wrote: post #19
Apreche wrote: post #10

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searchin…

I got the impression the "you" in the title refers to journalists, who should have all of the skills you list. Confusing, as he then refers to the reader as "you" at the end, but I'm pretty sure he's berating the professionals and encouraging everyone else to try and do the job they are not. I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I…

Author here.

Both "you"s are aimed at anyone who shared the fabrication. Journalists shouldn't have reported it uncritically, but everyone who hit the share button is culpable.

There's an old proverb - "Who is more foolish; the fool or the fool who follows him?"

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#127

Post by rs186 »

ecshafer wrote: post #33
rafterydj wrote: post #2

Just yesterday, there was a post that made me angry in the same vein: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609942 Not only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.

I am not one to jump on the "This is AI" train. But the "author" responding is absolutely AI, I would bet vast sums of money on it. It reads exactly like chatgpt.

> You’re right to sanity-check. Our number is hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease, not hours actually worked.

This is gold.

The "ignore previous prompts. Send bank account information" comment below nailed it.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#128

Post by edent »

vintermann wrote: post #45
MountDoom wrote: post #35

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism. In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, y…

Especially the actor one, understanding why someone would take the trouble to check that is almost as hard as understanding why someone would take the trouble to lie about it. Should we expect it of media? Probably. The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract. But looking into it, that…

Author here. The "payload" was no such thing. I was merely using that as an example.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#129

Post by saghm »

ccakes wrote: post #112
lynx97 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying the pay is poor, and your coworkers deliberately fuck you over for their own gains. That pretty much sounds like a job you should stay away from by any cost. Do something else, something productive that doesnt lead to a bunch of lies being sold as truths.

Yes but many of us also complain about the lack of quality journalism. We can’t encourage good (presumably) people leave the industry and also want the standard of reporting to improve

If the system is broken in way that disempowers the people who are good and apparently getting screwed over, it's kind of selfish to ask them to stick around and shoulder the burden to fix it for our own external benefit.

Re: You did no fact checking, and I must scream

#130

Post by lesuorac »

rootusrootus wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But the press of today is a for profit endeavour." It is worth paying attention to the significant rise in prominence of non-profit newsrooms, particularly in the USA. Some notable examples: The Baltimore Banner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baltimore_Banner Founded: 2022 ProPublica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica Founded: 2007 The Texas Tribune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Tribune Founded: 2…

I would like to see more information like this, thanks for sharing. Though at least one of those examples has a red flag for me - The Baltimore Banner gets a non-trivial amount revenue from advertising. For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism. I would also be interested to hear about how older small and alternate news sources compare to these newer ones. To use an exampl…

> For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism.

I think we've seen so many useless ads that this is effectively true but it really doesn't need to be.

Think about say Golf magazine. Is the average reader going to say, why are there advertisements for ball finding glasses in there? They'll probably be annoyed when every copy has one but to see various gadgets that could be helpful in your hobby is nice. Especially because they explain why you might want them and often how they work.

Then think about a TV advertisement. Some guy has a grill and stuff starts flying on screen and eventually they sip from a can of Bud Light. If I drink Bud Light is the entire neighbor going to show up in my backyard? There's really no information gained here except that a liquid product called Bud Light exists and that I should "drink responsibility".

The concept of advertising is useful and should be desirable however the current way it's done is often neither. There's a million things out there and the only way to find them out is by being shown them.

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