Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You did no fact checking, and I must scream

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 204 posts

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

#81

Post by cooperadymas »

BeetleB wrote: post #57
smallpipe wrote: post #6

The average journalist has to churn enough stories that they don't have time to be looking up anything. There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.

I was a news junkie for several years (now cured). I was mildly obsessive about fact checking. And oh wow, it is bad. My takeaway was that people who casually read the news (e.g. newspaper, scanning headlines on their favorite news site, etc) are the most misinformed.[1] The one who doesn't follow the news knows he is ignorant and doesn't know the inaccurate information. The one who follows it heavily, and with an ey…

Many wise people would agree with you.

“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”

"The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."

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

#82

Post by zahlman »

dragontamer wrote: post #23
mananaysiempre wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper. [1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.

A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop. Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there. We have to acknowledge what has changed in our world and why things are the way that they are. Perhaps daily news is simply not profitable enough to provide us with quality inform…

> A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop.

> Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there.

I've seen signs of AI slop on AP (and Reuters).

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

#83

Post by eduction »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #12
smallpipe wrote: post #6

The average journalist has to churn enough stories that they don't have time to be looking up anything. There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.

A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper. [1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.

Even if the heyday of profitable journalism fact checkers were a magazine thing. Newspapers generally did not use them, they moved too quickly for that and had too much space (newsprint between the ads) to fill.

On the other hand, in that era a much higher proportion of the news in a paper was directly reported by the journalists - things they physically saw, people they physically talked to or called. They weren’t using some half baked thing from the internet because there as no internet. Although they might run something dodgy from another newspaper or wire service, but that was pretty rare, at least outside of the celebrity gossip and film columns (which were, sexist-ly, considered women’s news and thus not held to the same standards).

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

#84

Post by zahlman »

altcognito wrote: post #18

I'm confused why we are fact checking viral slop. First, you would have to confirm she wrote it. When and where was it published. If you can't confirm that, you shouldn't post it. Stop, go no further. What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?

The fact-check discovered the information to be so implausible that it would arguably have no value to publish even if she did say it (being completely mistaken about all the facts of her own life).

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

#85

Post by jack_h »

travisgriggs wrote: post #32

> The media have comprehensively failed us. Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”. I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself. Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to…

You’re using multiple definitions of “free” here. One is freedom in the Lockean sense, the other is freedom from the properties and consequences of an emergent system. It’s a bit like saying you are free to choose your own mate and have kids without government involvement but you’re still a slave to natural selection.

The concept of the free press does not guarantee that the truth will proliferate, it merely attempts to avoid the problem of the state defining what truth is. It’s an attempt to select the least worst option because no one knows of a perfect solution or even if one exists.

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

#86

Post by BurningFrog »

travisgriggs wrote: post #32

> The media have comprehensively failed us. Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”. I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself. Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to…

The free press has always been for profit!

What's changed is that the profit used to come from advertising. Since everyone read the news, they could charge a lot for ads.

Those days are over, and news now bubble up from social media. That kinda works, but it's far from ideal.

To me the 2019 "Covington kids" incident showed how broken the media had become. All the prestigious media, from NY Times down, reprinted a viral Twitter thread as front page news without any fact check.

The reported "facts" were completely wrong, and even if they had been right, some random kids being rude in a park should never be national news.

Bu that's the news world we live in now.

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

#87

Post by BeetleB »

cooperadymas wrote: post #81
BeetleB wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a news junkie for several years (now cured). I was mildly obsessive about fact checking. And oh wow, it is bad. My takeaway was that people who casually read the news (e.g. newspaper, scanning headlines on their favorite news site, etc) are the most misinformed.[1] The one who doesn't follow the news knows he is ignorant and doesn't know the inaccurate information. The one who follows it heavily, and with an ey…

Many wise people would agree with you. “Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He…

"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."

-- not Mark Twain

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

#88

Post by zahlman »

vintermann wrote: post #45
MountDoom wrote: post #35

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism. In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, y…

Especially the actor one, understanding why someone would take the trouble to check that is almost as hard as understanding why someone would take the trouble to lie about it. Should we expect it of media? Probably. The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract. But looking into it, that…

> The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract.

Which is a rather strange approach to writing the article, because I had to do quite a bit of clicking around to have any understanding of what he was talking about.

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

#89

Post by simonw »

rootusrootus wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But the press of today is a for profit endeavour." It is worth paying attention to the significant rise in prominence of non-profit newsrooms, particularly in the USA. Some notable examples: The Baltimore Banner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baltimore_Banner Founded: 2022 ProPublica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica Founded: 2007 The Texas Tribune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Tribune Founded: 2…

I would like to see more information like this, thanks for sharing. Though at least one of those examples has a red flag for me - The Baltimore Banner gets a non-trivial amount revenue from advertising. For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism. I would also be interested to hear about how older small and alternate news sources compare to these newer ones. To use an exampl…

"For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism."

Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started. Running a newspaper used to be a fantastic business, because you effectively had a local monopoly on advertising to a geographic area. If someone wanted to promote things in your city, you would be top of their list.

Facebook, Google, Craigslist etc completely decimated that business model over the past 20 years and the news industry is still trying to figure out how to fund itself via alternative means.

Historically news organizations have had very strong mechanisms for avoiding advertisers influencing their coverage - the "editorial–advertising firewall". Reputable new orgs like the Baltimore Banner should have policies like that in place today.

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

#90

Post by BurningFrog »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #71
travisgriggs wrote: post #32

> The media have comprehensively failed us. Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”. I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself. Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to…

For-profit media is definitely a problem, but Jeff Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post and Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter because they thought they were more profitable than any other investments they could have made. I believe they did it because they wanted the power that owning a media outlet can provide in order to help protect their actually profitable businesses. It certainly helps that they have their own reven…

Elon was quite clear the he bought Twitter to make it a free speech forum where you could openly discuss things, even from non establishment standpoints.

And that's what it's become.

Post reply on HN