131–140 of 205 posts
I started my career as a reporter a decade ago. I can't tell you how many stories I filed that an editor twisted into something different to fit their narrative. There were also stories I was directed away from because they would alienate our audience. It's a narrative business.
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I think you're going about this in a way that won't make sense to anyone but individuals like yourself. People watching Fox News all day can't possibly think that it's a picture of reality, unless they use their intuition and rational systems in exactly the opposite sense that you are doing here (and this system of ratings would serve). People are not interested in more information, they are interested in the right i…
Yeah, and lots of people eat junk food despite the nutritional labels. But no one in their right mind would suggest scrapping the those labels. We should always push for more information for consumers.
It has a noticeable, immediate effect.
Accuracy ratings for news would just make people say your rating is biased, I think.
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I had this moment during the prelude to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. First the experts were confindent that the troop movements in Russia were just posturing and saber rattling, there's no way they'll do anything. Next, once they'd entered Ukraine, it would be over in a few weeks. The Russians would win. When the Russians were getting their asses kicked and it looked really bad, the Ukrainians would win by the en…
But that's punditry, not news. News would be accurately reporting on where the Russian troops were and what they were doing at that moment. News isn't supposed to include prediction. That's why Opinion sections were traditionally kept separate from the rest of the paper.
The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables. Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
What's your opinion of John Oliver? I just watched a YouTube video of his show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY . It seemed pretty good, but I'm also very ignorant. What's the best way to become informed about a topic? Or, is it better to stay ignorant?
Read disparate sources knowing they each have their political biases. That is - explicitly read some right (or left) wing news you don't like as a check & balance on the flavor of news you do like to read.
Understand the difference between the news & editorial side of papers.
I would also note that "business news" (WSJ/Bloomberg/etc) tend to be more just-the-facts than your median WaPo/NYT/Fox/MSNBC/NYPost/LAT.
I started my career as a reporter a decade ago. I can't tell you how many stories I filed that an editor twisted into something different to fit their narrative. There were also stories I was directed away from because they would alienate our audience. It's a narrative business.
Excessive cynicism is a real danger too. Democracies rely on an informed electorate to guide decisions. If you throw up your hands and say the truth is unknowable so nothing matters anyway, you're giving into autocracy. There absolutely are forces that would like you to give up on the notion of being able to tell truth from falsehoods.
You may not know absolute truth for absolute certainty, but if you live in a democratic society and you'd like to keep it that way, you really ought to make an attempt to know what's going on.
The more I think about the state of news, the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism. Something similar to a health inspection score. With considerations like: - News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources. - News need to have history of modifications to their article. - Factual errors will cause dings to their score. - Revenue sources/tax forms need to be publ…
You can't produce a system where the EPA gets its funding from the amount of pollution it stops for example. That's a perverse incentive. These types of organizations are by definition cost centers. And must be treated as such.
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Yeah, and lots of people eat junk food despite the nutritional labels. But no one in their right mind would suggest scrapping the those labels. We should always push for more information for consumers.
Junk food makes people fat. It has a noticeable, immediate effect. Accuracy ratings for news would just make people say your rating is biased, I think.
What happened?
In 1909, 1976, and 1998, Congress greatly expanded copyright. Instead, they should have done the opposite, and abolished it. It's mathematically dumb, and is the root cause of our toxic information environment.
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Definitely considered that. I'm a tad nomadic, but I guess I can just change the addresses.
Do they offer an offline viewing option to subscribers? Apple News does offline reading FWIW.
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I can't say for certain but I'm not so sure the people you're describing are a sizeable majority. I think most people are just watching news and doing their best. If a news site has a "C" rating on it -- which would require some sort of government regulation to enforce which would be a whole other thing -- which is then clickable and let's you see "exactly" what it has that rating ( eg "17 inaccuracies in last month…
If they weren’t a sizeable majority, I don’t think we’d be having the same kind of leaders we’re getting in the west tbh.