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You did no fact checking, and I must scream

shkspr.mobi

191–200 of 204 posts

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

#191
post #156
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you criminalise it? Currently journalists are free to not sell their immaterial rights under these conditions where they're transfered to a corporation that puts an editor between them and the publish button.

The name at the top of the article is still the journalist's. They might be selling (through ads or a subscription) an article written by a Pulitzer winner, but in fact it is partly written by an editor, and the journalist hasn't even checked it. Isn't it like selling "beef" lasagnas that contain horse meat?

Usually, at least in the US, when a journalist does not want to have their name on an article any longer it is removed. Infamously this happened somewhat recently at NYT, where after doing a decent report on something israeli the editors felt that there was a risk it might make readers less genocidal so they made rather sweeping changes and hence the journalists had their names removed.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And, of course, there was the blocking of federally protected ATS-B data, and the expulsion of journalists who had written critical stories.

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

#196
It has been said that Italy is extremely vulnerable to fake news. I am not sure that we are more vulnerable than others, but it is a fact that local media provide news that is sloppy at best if not even willfully deceitful.

A couple of examples found in a book I read recently about the Fukushima incident:

- “Tokyo, a capital in agony. «We will never live here again.»”, from La Repubblica (March 20th, 2011) [1] The lead paragraph of the article reads, “Fear and nightmare of radiations: four million have already fled what was perceived as a model city”. At the time, Tokyo had 13 million people; a loss of 4 million would have meant a catastrophic collapse of the city and would have been recorded by the local media. None of this happened.

- “Fukushima, ten years after the tsunami and nuclear disaster. A return to normalcy amid abandoned lands and fears of radiation”, from Il Fatto Quotidiano (March 11th, 2021, ten years later) [2]. The lead paragraph says, “It was the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Twenty thousand people died.” The number 20,000 refers to the victims of the tsunami, but there is only one (disputed) victim caused by the nuclear accident.

[1] https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2011/03/20/news/tokyo_capit...

[2] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/03/11/fukushima-dieci-...

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> high quality writing is going other places. Where is that again?

A good chunk are going to substack. Some are going to other platforms. A few folks are posting on BlueSky/X but really running their own platforms (eg Michael Koffman).

So far x/bsky seem to at least be the consistent discovery platforms for finding these folks who have split off.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look at american vaccine policy?

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

#199

It is exceptionally rare for a human to care about the epistemological roots of any claim I would go so far as to say that the median human with a 100IQ doesn’t even understand the concept of what constitutes a “fact” or how you would dicriminate fact from opinion or has even heard the word “epistemology” Expecting anything close to that in the context of celebrity gossip… well at that point the author needs to manag…

If I might be more optimistic, I think people may actually care about a statement being rooted in reality, but people may not be likely to slow down and engage in suspicion of something they would not expect to be false. (Though the size of that window may be its own problem!) If I see someone claiming they have the cure for cancer, then I consider it a bit fantastical and want to investigate further. If a supposed q…

> I think people may actually care about a statement being rooted in reality

People say they do

However if asked, the vast majority wouldn’t have any ability to tell you how they would measure reality

Most people still believe in gods so you’re already working in a completely different concept of “real” and “reality.”

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. For me, the press today is a for influence endeavour. Most journalists have a POV the majority of topics they write about they express that POV with how they discuss the topic. For example, which people they quote, generally only ones that agree with their POV. If they present an a opposing view they always couch it and phrase things to push the reader to discount t…

> To put it more simply, most journalists are trying to change the world to see things their way. This is a good thing. Aside from the bit where it's always been like this anyways, we, as modern humans, don't have the time to evaluate everything from first sources. You can't read every scientic study or the 500 pages of tax documents that were studied to produce a report on someone committing tax fraud. I don't need…

And if that info is wrong because inconvenient counter examples are deprecated and ignored?
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