231–240 of 417 posts
This article is ironic coming from Buzzfeed
It's the same company as BuzzFeed, and the name certainly isn't doing it any favors. But this story isn't BuzzFeed-style junk. It's actually relevant, and most likely factual.
Seems bizarre, but it's true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ive not ever seen the positive effects of this on internet journalism rather than echoing with less details and obfuscating actual information.
There can be positive effects of matching a story, but it depends on the journalists and the publication. Let's say The Wall Street Journal publishes a major investigative scoop, but you only pay for a Washington Post subscription. The Washington Post then matches the story to give readers access to the information, maybe with additional information or a unique angle, and sends a push notification to readers with the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m still struggling to understand why they’d want to block that. Edit: on re-reading I realize it’s so that they don’t get caught for this plagiarism since their modus operandi was plagiarize first rewrite slowly.
>plagiarize first rewrite slowly Obviously publishing work that isn't your own is wrong, but "plagiarize then rewrite" is a very effective method of developing a creative skill. There is a question about when the transformation really becomes "yours". An example: Radiohead - "Creep" was a tranformation for The Hollies "The Air that I Breathe", Radiohead later went to sue Lana Del Rey for "Get Free" which seemingly wa…
Before you complain, note well that among black musicians the groove is the song, the melody being something of an afterthought -- the exact opposite of what prevails in the white concept of music and, in particular, historical understanding of copyright law. Black musicians have been trying to get acknowledgement of ownership of their grooves for decades.
In general, it's not a good idea to use someone else's song as a starting point. In most cases, the original composer is going to be able to establish some form of "substantial similarity" to make you liable for infringement; it will take radical transformation to avoid this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Case in point: On Jan 6, NPR published an article with a 10AM headline and timestamp about the upcoming Trump rally. Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp. Newsmaxx, and thus many if its viewers looked at the headline and headline timestamp and trumpet…
This kind of thing also makes the internet less searchable. I was trying to find some information on the previous activity of a cop who recently became infamous in my area for beating and choking a man who was pleading for his life, to see if he had ever been in the news before. So I used the time window feature on Google, only to get tons and tons of articles published that same day that were backdated years because…
Is that the news website's fault, or Google's fault?
The first two links are to what look like keyword/topic pages with many articles, and it wouldn't be surprising of Google pulled a different date than what you're looking for out of such a page. Some of the other hits appear to be old articles with a "new stories" bar (not sure exactly what you call it, here's an example: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/15/trump-admits-biden-won-ele...).
Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide an example of an article that you feel has a clear political slant?
What about these? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-vaccine-passport/
I would be interested if there are examples of conservative topics where they have either been as hair-splitting as in this example or if they were not as hair-splitting.
I really want to like Snopes, but I'm not convinced that they weigh evidence correctly. For example, they debunked the myth that Marilyn Monroe had 6 toes. First, I don't believe that she did . Or even care, for that matter. But at the time, one of their "facts" was that if she'd had a toe removed, she'd basically have to learn to walk all over again because it would throw her balance completely off. (Note: the artic…
I really want to like Snopes, but I'm not convinced that they weigh evidence correctly. For example, they debunked the myth that Marilyn Monroe had 6 toes. First, I don't believe that she did . Or even care, for that matter. But at the time, one of their "facts" was that if she'd had a toe removed, she'd basically have to learn to walk all over again because it would throw her balance completely off. (Note: the artic…
The notion of "fact checker" is semantic slight of hand meant to give such people an undeserved veneer of special credibility beyond the weak credibility of journalists. It lulls people into a false sense of security. "He's not a journalist. He's a FACT CHECKER. Oooo, trustworthy!" It's an arrogant title that arrogates the supposed authority to check facts and offer pronouncements on them. All journalists, for exampl…
Since then the line between word-of-mouth and journalism has blurred. Journalists don't always fact check (or even explicitly slant their news to mislead), and word-of-mouth goes far beyond urban legends into current events. Snopes' focus isn't the news, per se, but the news as reported via social media. That is sometimes repetition of a supposedly-reliable news source being circulated, or it may require them to run down the original source.
There are now "fact checkers" who make the journalists themselves their primary target, which is both an unfortunate consequence of the way journalism has slipped standards and something that should have existed in the first place to prevent that. They're not supposed to be a Ministry of Truth, but just another source of journalism doing what journalists are supposed to do.
If a "fact checker" is themselves biased, all you can do is build up a web of trust for who is doing good work and who isn't. The good fact checkers have a history of doing it right. Which includes correcting themselves when they do it wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snopes altered those pages when they got called out for it.
Or perhaps they changed their minds once they realized the error? Just because something seems obvious to you doesn't mean it must seem obvious to anyone else. When friends of friends on my social media networks started posting links to their articles (without any context) I certainly got caught "refuting" more than a few of them in the comments until someone pointed this out to me.
if you can't trust fact-checkers to check their facts, then what purpose do they serve? if some rando on twitter or whatever tries to "fact check" the Bee and doesn't see it as satire, then gets called out on it and modifies their statement, then who cares... but if the whole point of your business is to check facts, and is touted as such to the point where major social media sites and search engines directly cite your fact-checkings in a UI-integrated way, then, well...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the exact same because "conspiracy theorists might use it" reasoning just flowing in the opposite direction. Conspiracy theorists with conspiracy theorize regardless of the level of transparency provided by journalist organizations.
What!? NPR's website contains articles with false time stamps. Are you ok with this? Why does the conspiracy theorist angle matter at all? Knowing when an article was written is a useful piece of information that is being destroyed by these always evolving articles. It might not be full on Orwell yet, but these always-mutating-articles are opening the door to an Orwellian future. We need to be able to go back and loo…
It doesn't. That was my point. I wasn't praising or criticizing NPR. I was saying that conspiracy theorists shouldn't be a reason either for or against transparency.