Live data from Hacker News

You did no fact checking, and I must scream

shkspr.mobi

181–190 of 204 posts

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

#181
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

These problems are not economic. They are a function of an extremely broken process. The lack of money for people doing work on the ground through this model is part of why it is dying and high quality writing is going other places.

It is economic. Significant amounts of advertising dollars were once spent on ads in local newspapers and TV stations. That is no longer the case. Expecting media content to remain high quality when the revenue stream that once supported investigative journalism has dried up makes no sense.

Any time you read or view a piece of content, follow the money trail that got it in front of your eyeballs, ears or fingertips -- it may well be enlightening.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to judge whether or not he was using the right kind of speech?

Just curious. I'm even open to change my mind a bit about 2025 Twitter.

My display name looked a bit like his. Hadn’t logged in for a few days, bam. What a sad, sore rich boy he is.

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

#183
post #169
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friend, I think your cynicism's clouding how you're interpreting my words. What you're interpreting as blind trust is me just saying that people are people and people gonna people, yanno? And lol, nah. The amount of bullshit I've seen from my peer group is laughable and I've had a tendency to be very aggressive in pushing back on bad reporting. Like the Chicago Tribune -- they weren't including all of the facts in th…

Thanks for your last paragraph. You apparently have a lot more inside infos then I ever will, and still, you confirm my observation. There is no unbiased reporting. However, I am not willing to compromise on this. If there is no way I can get unbiased infos, I dont want any "journalism" anymore. If it is a lost cause, so be it. And, that is not cynicism, it is plain despair. I just dont want to be lied to, no matter…

I hear you on the despair and hope you can find a way to work through it.

When I felt it more (heh it's definitely not gone) it was out of a feeling of not being able to contribute, or not being able to understand things to the degree that I felt was meaningful and moral. There's so much to do to understand what's going on around us and the lack of available resources is... not great. But so much of it is just a matter of starting to look into something and see where it goes. For me, it was researching parking tickets and towing that got me started after my car was illegally towed. For you, maybe a pot hole destroyed one of your tire and nobody in your area's looked into why pot holes aren't being fixed.

Feel free to email me if you ever want to chat about this more, or if you'd like to brainstorm ways to figure things out. My email isn't hard to find.

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

#184
post #176
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe self-reported stats are worth anything in this context. Many conservatives have learnt to keep a low profile, since in many circles, right wing association has become a synonym for evil. This is a baseless conspiracy theory. > Besides, I am not a U.S citizen, so your quoted stats are not relevant to my statement above them. These patterns hold for every country in the Anglosphere. Canadian leftists…

> This is a baseless conspiracy theory. Well, I beg to differ. Just reading HN, accusing people of fascism has become a lot more common-place then, say, 10 years ago. Offline, I have had a lot of chats with people that share my sentiment, which I would consider rather centrist. The left has gotten so very aggressive when it comes to disagreements that they started to push anyone away to the right who isn't willing to…

> Just reading HN, accusing people of fascism has become a lot more common-place then, say, 10 years ago.

People are far more open about having conservative ideas today than they were 10 years ago.

> The left has gotten so very aggressive when it comes to disagreements that they started to push anyone away to the right who isn't willing to agree with everything they currently have on their agenda.

Right, but was their hegemonic power appreciably greater in 2022 than in 2015? Cancel culture peaked midway through the Trump presidency. These days you get people using their real names and faces commenting: “DEPORT BUTTON” under videos of ethnic minorities. It’s possible that journalists are just claiming to be neutral or left-leaning in the way that campus conservatives used to feel compelled to, but the more likely explanation seems to be that journalists are simply overwhelmingly centrist or left-leaning.

> However, personal experiences are always ancedotal. Still, it is all we, as individuals, have.

We have statistics, we don’t have to rely on anecdotes. You’re deferring to an anecdote and insisting that the data is wrong. It’s possible it doesn’t align with your anecdotal experience because of a selection bias on your part, or because the data doesn’t map from the Anglosphere to whatever country you are from, but the data is there.

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

#185
post #135
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh, it's not entirely that simple. In the same way teachers are, some people are just compelled towards it because it's what feels "right" to them. And, just, don't forget that a lot of the people who are "sticking around" went to j-school and now have a significant amount of debt. So leaving journalism isn't exactly the cleanest option for them. Donate to your local investigative nonprofit.

If honest journalists are “sticking around” that would mean loaning those shady editors with ulterior motives some of their credibility, thus helping to prop the latter up.

So it seems like a net negative.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious. I'm even open to change my mind a bit about 2025 Twitter.

My display name looked a bit like his. Hadn’t logged in for a few days, bam. What a sad, sore rich boy he is.

OK, that's super annoying!

As someone overly prone to provocative wordplay, that could have been me...

Quite separate from the political censorship issues though.

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

#187
post #97

Good reading for the ever-dwindling group of people who like facts. I remember there was a friend of mine who was of the opposite political persuasion, generally, than myself. He posted something that was demonstrably wrong to Facebook. And I was embarrassed for him just as much as I be embarrassed for myself having posted something so inaccurate. So I offered a friendly correction, but he replied in an unexpected wa…

Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore. Reality is whatever you feel it is, or whatever you feel you want it to be, and the internet (the current iteration of it) is perfectly content to feed you that reality, and fake/real is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish. I've also been in similar discussions and have since given up - even if you show incontrovertible evidence to…

> Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore.

Is there any factual basis for this claim?

I don't have any evidence, but I would speculate that if you got longitudinal data somehow, it would show that more people today care about objective fact than they did in 1950.

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

#188

The BBC pulled that article/episode - which is the main difference between different media spheres today. We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content. High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce. The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. May…

> The BBC pulled that article/episode Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced. It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to g…

News agencies will make mistakes, it happens.

The difference is entirely in how you respond to it. There’s mainstream “news” networks which wont even do that.

Post reply on HN