This says a thing or two about society.
- economy aims at making money, not being good
- what you pay for is people caring for other people (by integrating facts into valuable knowledge)
Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
281–290 of 468 posts
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would appreciate less emphasis on pretending to cover news from several angles. By doing so they imply that both sides are equally valid even when they're not. For instance I've seen them bring on a climate change denier to give the "other side" on a climate change story; anti vaxxers, et cetera. It's particularly bad when one side is willing to lie.
that arguably is another form of political bias - if I want to push position A, I will choose the most ridiculous and deranged proponent of position B to imply that "all rational people choose position A". Like on the issue of climate change - there's clearly some fraction of people who choose to deny it completely, but the more meaningful debate at this point is around how much we can do to prevent it, and what appr…
It's a "strawman". You see this in fake wrestling: a designedly weak contender is set up to get owned by the audience's favorite protagonist
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#283Want to hear what you want? Pay for the real thing. It s fake news that paid news are better. Advertising allows publishers to not pander to specific audiences.
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#284A few complaints I share with the other people in this thread: - It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently. As someone in tech I can clearly see what they get and what they don't. Extrapolating it - it's not at all clear they understand economics or foreign policy or policy impact or environmental concerns and how to address them ...etc. - Bias: every single on…
> It's not clear that even reputed newspapers like NYTimes/WaPo produce quality content consistently. Example: Washington Post pushed the "Covington boys surround and intimidate native man" narrative that's been completely shattered by about 200 hours of video footage in the last week, and led to Twitter disabling the account that spread it, refutations (oddly enough from the NYT) and various apologies from those who…
That story is a perfect example of perception of a situation and how people view it in many ways. While you say the narrative is wrong, many feel the narrative was right.
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely disagree. I want the facts, backed by people who know the situation. I do not want “fair and balanced.” Not all sides have equal grounding and I’m tired of this false equivalence. We are seriously in times where one side denies climate change. There is zero point in giving them time because it elevates their point to being equal to the one backed by actual climate scientists, not industry that has a vested…
That’s true, but the other side may have good points in regards to other topics. If you ignore them altogether because they are a bit crazy in one regard (well, maybe a lot of regards), then you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Right, there is a nuance, but it's often lost today because newspapers want to appear "independent." They are so terrified of appearing partisan, it dilutes their coverage to nothingness, just covering both sides. It too often is:
"Side A said X"
"Side B said Y"
Well, that's of no help to me. I could simply go to those PR pages myself and see what they said.
So this is not about ignoring them, but about not giving equal credit to both view points or being mouthpieces to propaganda.
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#286This implies that only people who have the means and desire to pay for accurate news will get it. Given that accurate information about the world, our society, and its politics is required for making accurate decisions about how to vote and spend one's time and money, shouldn't we start treating journalism as a public good and funding it independent of anyone's ability to come up with a business model that will work?
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#287Want to hear what you want? Pay for the real thing. It s fake news that paid news are better. Advertising allows publishers to not pander to specific audiences.
>Advertising allows publishers to not pander to specific audiences.
Advertising driven business models force the company to pander to their advertising overlords
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#288What I fail to understand so far is the pricing of the news. Do newspapers really earn tens of dollars/pounds/euros per month per user? I want to pay for the news, but any website I like charges a 2 digit numbers per month, and that is when you subscribe for a year. The way I see it, I should be able to pay them for ads I wont see, maybe some collateral, but current pricing in my mind doesn't reflect reality. What am…
You simply don’t understand how much it costs to run a decent newsroom. Online ads have never been enough to cover costs.
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#289Ironically posted on the NYTimes? I think what's happening isn't that suddenly they are posting fake news, but rather it has been fake news all along. Tons of celebrities have said how they've been misquoted or otherwise smeared by news for a very long time. What's different today is that everyone has a smartphone where they can verify the facts of the story and discover that the news is fake. The journalism crisis i…
>Worse yet, in the face of getting caught they double down on going even further into their false narrative.
This is the common predictable behavior of compulsive liars
Re: Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
#290Another thing that's sort of been a pebble in the shoe of both journalism and education (I mean, at some level they -should- be doing similar things, right?) is that they don't necessarily make it easy for readers to find original sources. A counterexample: if I want to know about the origins of our understanding of geometry, Euclid's Elements is a pretty solid place to start. Or Newton's Principia for physics. Now l…
> But this raises a deeper question: is your Average Joe Citizen (who is not an engineer, but maybe a barista, salesman, banker, etc) equipped to have an opinion about climate change at all?
This comes off pretty condescending. What makes an (assuming computer) engineer any more capable of reading & comprehending reports than a barista or banker?