Very difficult due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
How can you know what news is real?
91–100 of 135 posts
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#92I have, sadly, given up. I can't stand watching/reading the news and feeling that I am quite possibly being manipulated, so I have completely given up. Anything I do read, I mistrust. I don't want to be ignorant towards what is happening around me, but I feel like I have no choice, I don't want to become bitter and "pick a side", I prefer to remain ignorant. Even when friends say "Oh, but try this source, they are so…
This is exactly the effect that the news-spammers want to achieve. If you don't pick a side, you're not voting, or you're not an informed voter. So you've opted out of democracy. Which is nice, you've relieved yourself of a whole bunch of stress, and nothing changes in the short term. Until something goes wrong. It's not that there won't be elections, they'll just be won by the same party for years on end. You person…
It certainly could be that they’re intentionally making the news an indecipherable morass. But continuing to participate in it wouldn’t prevent the catastrophe you predict. If anything, abandoning the chaotic media and helping to collapse their ad revenue might be more effective.
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#93The real question is why are people following the news anyway? It's pure entertainment at that point. "Hey Karen have you seen that a girl was raped and murdered 1000 miles away from you ? Have you heard what _unknown politician of a third world country you couldn't even place on a map_ said ! that's outrageous. A cop killed an innocent man today #thoughtsAndPrayers". The world would be a much better place if everybo…
Well that's short sighted. It's because of this flawed logic that a lot of Americans think they have the best education/healthcare in the World. Just now that they started to look at what is happening elsewhere that they are starting to understand what they are lacking. Here is the thing, and it works for everything in life: Knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it, even if it is not clear what use…
Accusing a solid argument of being flawed and replacing it with a bulk of nonsense lol
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
identify potential biases in a source and then filter the information of that source through a bias lense, then use another source and do the same thing to triangulate "the truth" giving up on consuming news because everything might be biased is simply lazy
>giving up on consuming news because everything might be biased is simply lazy Not at all; it's a valid strategy. The events and the state of the world can be deduced from observing the (near) past just as well as from reading the news, perhaps even better. A person can stay reasonably well informed by skipping on the news, and instead observing actual events, actual outcomes, that is the (near) history. Both in pers…
You just described "the news", which is different then opinion shows which are very common.
Many people with a personal agenda lump the news in with opinion shows when they hear things they don't like.
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#95You can't the only thing you can do is to read as much as you can from mixed sources with different biases and.. and fact check your self if you can... never trust the mainstream media... they lie as hell... on both sides of the political spectrum...
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#96The real question is why are people following the news anyway? It's pure entertainment at that point. "Hey Karen have you seen that a girl was raped and murdered 1000 miles away from you ? Have you heard what _unknown politician of a third world country you couldn't even place on a map_ said ! that's outrageous. A cop killed an innocent man today #thoughtsAndPrayers". The world would be a much better place if everybo…
Well that's short sighted. It's because of this flawed logic that a lot of Americans think they have the best education/healthcare in the World. Just now that they started to look at what is happening elsewhere that they are starting to understand what they are lacking. Here is the thing, and it works for everything in life: Knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it, even if it is not clear what use…
> Here is the thing, and it works for everything in life: Knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it, even if it is not clear what use to make of it.
Isn't that the problem though, knowing what is true? It is an incredibly hard thing to do, even when everyone is acting in good faith and trying their hardest, which certainly isn't the state of affairs today. I'd say much less than 10% of people would get a passing grade on both of those requirements, and I'm not even sure I'd give myself a passing grade.
"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."
And you provided a perfect example: Americans think they have the best education/healthcare in the World.
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#97The real question is why are people following the news anyway? It's pure entertainment at that point. "Hey Karen have you seen that a girl was raped and murdered 1000 miles away from you ? Have you heard what _unknown politician of a third world country you couldn't even place on a map_ said ! that's outrageous. A cop killed an innocent man today #thoughtsAndPrayers". The world would be a much better place if everybo…
News also includes what laws are passed, what court decisions were made, it's a citizen's responsibility to be an informed citizen.
“it’s a slave’s responsibility to pay attention to his master’s proclamations”
Fixed it for you.
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#98Having run a newspaper, I know the problem is the business model. Funding by advertising is a terrible business model for journalism. "real" journalism doesn't make any money because it's expensive to make and doesn't generate any more ad revenue than bad journalism. Most newspapers lose money, and that's getting worse not better. So billionaires own (and subsidise) newspapers, and get to influence content. So either…
i'd say that tax money should go to newspapers but how do you disentangle tax money from politicians is... a bit of a problem.
Why in the world would you want tax money to fund journalism?
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#99Something which continues to stun me is how much spin and opinion are added to the news and that "just the facts" isn't a thing anymore. I listen to the No Agenda Show podcast (In The Morning!) which can most succinctly be described as news deconstruction and they go to the source material, transcripts, and audio clips with context as often as possible -- and then contrast those against what CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and the…
In the morning!
Re: How can you know what news is real?
#100Is this really that surprising? Billionaires owning vanity projects isn’t news when they’re football teams, why is it when they’re corporate news organizations? Also, if there was ever a time to be concerned about the owners of media organizations controlling the narrative this is not it. The media, and the ruling class more generally, being pissed off that the peasants are daring to speak back and have their own non…
Perhaps "surprising" is the wrong word, but this absolutely is the problem; billionaire-owned "news" organisations able to propagandise with very little opposition. Although the question of who the staff class is also important; people have started to notice that the (publicly owned!) BBC's political presenter Andrew Neil works for all sorts of Conservative party-aligned institutions like the Spectator .
A skeptical mind should immediately ask "wait, that sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory, am I to believe Jeff Bezos is acting as an editor for the newspaper he owns?" Which is a perfectly valid question.
Noam Chomsky explains to a BBC journalist how it can be accomplished much more cleverly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nBx-37c3c8
Reporter: How can you know that I'm self-censoring, how can you know that a journalist is self-censoring?
Chomsky: I'm not saying you're self-censoring, I'm sure you believe everything you say. But what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.