I've done a fair amount of data-intensive fact checking for journalism articles and have had fact checking done on my own data-intensive reporting.
Couple things:
1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least.
2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
> Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
This should be illegal.
If people were able to propose laws and vote on them directly, it would be, be a landslide.
The number of people who benefit from this is tiny compares to the number who are harmed. But it's nearly impossible to pass things like this because people vote for parties and are therefore several levers removed from influencing actual laws.
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?
I dunno about that analogy, but the fix for this is for editors to be included in the byline, or at least at the bottom where contributors are often found. Some newsrooms have started doing this but it should absolutely be more common. But as things are, we have newsrooms whose editorial boards are completely anonymous so i don't expect anything to change in the industry anytime soon.
So you're saying the pay is poor, and your coworkers deliberately fuck you over for their own gains. That pretty much sounds like a job you should stay away from by any cost. Do something else, something productive that doesnt lead to a bunch of lies being sold as truths.
Yes but many of us also complain about the lack of quality journalism. We can’t encourage good (presumably) people leave the industry and also want the standard of reporting to improve
If the system is broken in way that disempowers the people who are good and apparently getting screwed over, it's kind of selfish to ask them to stick around and shoulder the burden to fix it for our own external benefit.
Eh, it's not entirely that simple. In the same way teachers are, some people are just compelled towards it because it's what feels "right" to them.
And, just, don't forget that a lot of the people who are "sticking around" went to j-school and now have a significant amount of debt. So leaving journalism isn't exactly the cleanest option for them.
If honest journalists are “sticking around” that would mean loaning those shady editors with ulterior motives some of their credibility, thus helping to prop the latter up.
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.
It is economic. Significant amounts of advertising dollars were once spent on ads in local newspapers and TV stations. That is no longer the case. Expecting media content to remain high quality when the revenue stream that once supported investigative journalism has dried up makes no sense.
Any time you read or view a piece of content, follow the money trail that got it in front of your eyeballs, ears or fingertips -- it may well be enlightening.
I once sat on a table nearby of the local investigative newsroom crew having a chat in a cafe. The vibe I got was so evil, I definitely wouldn't give them any of my money. In fact, I have given up on the concept of independent journalism, I just dont believe anymore it is happening. Knowing the onwership structure of the publishers in my country (and many others around me) also adds to the unwillingness to donate. They are all inconservative hands, and are being used to push agendas.
I think a lot of what you're seeing is people being people rather than journalists being journalists. Sometimes gallows humor is the only thing you can do for yourself while you're looking through brutal, terrifying reports of abuse for hours and hours.
It seems like you're suggesting I am not capable of putting things I overheard in context? Please don't. I am well aware of the difference between sarcasm and deliberate manipulation.
To keep things grounded, almost nobody bites the hand that feeds 'em. Whistleblowing or swimming against the stream, while being celebrated whenever it happens, is a very low minority in any profession. If your boss tells you where things are supposed to go, you might grind your teeth, and maybe bitch about it to your friends, but chances are high you will comply. Journalists are no different.
Friend, I'm not suggesting that at all. I could, though: in no way did you describe any of what you considered to be bad from them. You left it conclusory in such a way that leaves the reader (me) to try to fill the gaps in what you mean. Your aggressive tone doesn't leave much room. And personally, I would never feel confident in being sure that I understand the context of a conversation that I'm not invited to.
Everything you described, like I've said about 10 times now, is economically rooted. Donate to your local investigative nonprofit.
Ignoring the fact that I miss the blind trust you seem to have, that all we need is to donate some money and the outcome will magically be good...
I honestly don't know any local investigative nonprofit that is not biased. There are the big conservatively led newspapers, and there are smaller left to extreme left leaning publishers that try to be a counterweight. However, to my knowledge, we dont have any publishers that are really trying to report independent from a political side or agenda.
Friend, I think your cynicism's clouding how you're interpreting my words. What you're interpreting as blind trust is me just saying that people are people and people gonna people, yanno? And lol, nah. The amount of bullshit I've seen from my peer group is laughable and I've had a tendency to be very aggressive in pushing back on bad reporting. Like the Chicago Tribune -- they weren't including all of the facts in their reporting on something and wouldn't share any public records that they received through FOIA. So I FOIA'd for a full year of the Tribune's FOIAs and published them without any expectation of anything in return. That journalist no longer speaks to me and doing that burned bridges with the Tribune forever. I did it again the next year because fuck bad journalists who get in the way of public awareness. We should push them to be better. Lol.
I'm not sure that it's even actually possible to have "unbiased" reporting. You want something unattainable and it's understandable why it'd be frustrating that no such thing exists. We live in a fucked up world, m8.
Thanks for your last paragraph. You apparently have a lot more inside infos then I ever will, and still, you confirm my observation. There is no unbiased reporting. However, I am not willing to compromise on this. If there is no way I can get unbiased infos, I dont want any "journalism" anymore. If it is a lost cause, so be it. And, that is not cynicism, it is plain despair. I just dont want to be lied to, no matter from what side.
I hear you on the despair and hope you can find a way to work through it.
When I felt it more (heh it's definitely not gone) it was out of a feeling of not being able to contribute, or not being able to understand things to the degree that I felt was meaningful and moral. There's so much to do to understand what's going on around us and the lack of available resources is... not great. But so much of it is just a matter of starting to look into something and see where it goes. For me, it was researching parking tickets and towing that got me started after my car was illegally towed. For you, maybe a pot hole destroyed one of your tire and nobody in your area's looked into why pot holes aren't being fixed.
Feel free to email me if you ever want to chat about this more, or if you'd like to brainstorm ways to figure things out. My email isn't hard to find.
There are few things that are unbiased, least of all language. Even when communicating a straight fact, the words and tone chosen to communicate it have an inherent bias. One can report with glee or hope or skepticism or anger or just about any other emotion, with positive or negative or neutral words, all of which have an inherent bias. To a person who's happy about something, a reporter's skepticism of that same thing is an unmistakable bias. The point is, that doesn't make it bad. Accuracy of reported facts seems to be a stronger indicator of the "lack of bias" that people prefer.
I would argue you just reported, in a biased way, about your personal experience overhearing some journalists who were having a casual conversation among themselves, and what this says about all journalism as a result.
There is no biased reporting because there are no unbiased event descriptors. Not video, not photos, not physics papers, not even describing some stuff that happened to you firsthand.
> Journalists who said they were Republicans continued to drop from 18 percent in 2002 and 7.1 percent in 2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022. This figure is notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican party (26 percent according to the poll mentioned earlier) in 2022. About half of all journalists (51.7 percent) said they were Independents, which is about 12 percentage points above the figure for all U.S. adults (40 percent). Overall, U.S. journalists today are much more likely to identify themselves as Independents rather than Democrats or Republicans—a pattern similar to 2013.
They were explicitly referring to their country, which is just as likely not to be the US, so citing US statistics without further comment or contextualization seems rude.
But it's beside the point anyway: They weren't referring to the political affiliation of the people working at the newspaper, they were referring to the leanings of the people who own the newspaper.
> They weren't referring to the political affiliation of the people working at the newspaper, they were referring to the leanings of the people who own the newspaper.
I don't believe self-reported stats are worth anything in this context. Many conservatives have learnt to keep a low profile, since in many circles, right wing association has become a synonym for evil. Besides, I am not a U.S citizen, so your quoted stats are not relevant to my statement above them.
> I don't believe self-reported stats are worth anything in this context. Many conservatives have learnt to keep a low profile, since in many circles, right wing association has become a synonym for evil.
This is a baseless conspiracy theory.
> Besides, I am not a U.S citizen, so your quoted stats are not relevant to my statement above them.
These patterns hold for every country in the Anglosphere. Canadian leftists are fond of accusing the media of being conservative, but the reality is that they are just so far into alt politics that they consider anyone remotely normal to be an extremist. Similar accusations of crypto-conservatism are levied against journalists in South America, so I have to think that is what is going on here.
There’s an easy way for us to test my theory: What region do you live in, and what specific statements were these journalists making that struck you as evil?
Well, I beg to differ. Just reading HN, accusing people of fascism has become a lot more common-place then, say, 10 years ago. Offline, I have had a lot of chats with people that share my sentiment, which I would consider rather centrist. The left has gotten so very aggressive when it comes to disagreements that they started to push anyone away to the right who isn't willing to agree with everything they currently have on their agenda.
> what specific statements were these journalists making that struck you as evil?
I deliberately wrote "vibe" because accidentally overhearing that work meeting is actually a few years ago. It would be extremely dishonest of me to conjure up an exact quote. I simply can't without making up stuff. Sure, that opens all doors to attack me for even mentioning it. And maybe thats right. However, personal experiences are always ancedotal. Still, it is all we, as individuals, have.
> Just reading HN, accusing people of fascism has become a lot more common-place then, say, 10 years ago.
People are far more open about having conservative ideas today than they were 10 years ago.
> The left has gotten so very aggressive when it comes to disagreements that they started to push anyone away to the right who isn't willing to agree with everything they currently have on their agenda.
Right, but was their hegemonic power appreciably greater in 2022 than in 2015? Cancel culture peaked midway through the Trump presidency. These days you get people using their real names and faces commenting: “DEPORT BUTTON” under videos of ethnic minorities. It’s possible that journalists are just claiming to be neutral or left-leaning in the way that campus conservatives used to feel compelled to, but the more likely explanation seems to be that journalists are simply overwhelmingly centrist or left-leaning.
> However, personal experiences are always ancedotal. Still, it is all we, as individuals, have.
We have statistics, we don’t have to rely on anecdotes. You’re deferring to an anecdote and insisting that the data is wrong. It’s possible it doesn’t align with your anecdotal experience because of a selection bias on your part, or because the data doesn’t map from the Anglosphere to whatever country you are from, but the data is there.
How much does it cost to check one fact? If you check just one, and it's wrong, it's probably not worth treating the whole as an accurate piece of reporting. If BBC had checked just one fact in the slop, they could easily decide that it's not worth republishing.
Why do you focus on "one fact"? Reporting, fact checking, editing is a fluid project that changes as the piece progresses. What needs fact checking in one draft is very different from what needs fact checking in another draft. And like I said, editors make changes that the fact checkers never see.
Again, these are economic problems. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
The OP is about a news org basically republishing a viral text its people didn't write. There is no particular need to check every most of the facts like the OP did when a quick glance tells you that it's unreliable.
Sure, but my point wasn't to refute the article in any way. More of a preemption of people saying, "this is why journalism sucks!!" without understanding the dynamics of why things are the way they are.
Everything fuckin' sucks, it's not just journalism.
Uhm is it possible to mitigate second point by publishing encrypted article in social network along with is sending it to the agency to assign it timestamp? Or maybe in any blockchain if one does not like social networks.
Then if journalist does not like how mangled was his piece on publishing he can disclose encryption password to show everyone what he actually wrote in the article?
> It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
That sounds like absolutely atrocious living conditions for the journalists employed by such a news room.
Honestly, at that point - look for a different job!
I'm not saying this to be mean, I am just picturing myself in such a working relationship of being employed by an organization working in an industry which is hemorrhaging valuation because of various developments like AI (but even before that it was going downhill).
You will be happier doing something else! At that point, learn a trade or similar. You'll be better paid, have a more stable lifestyle and will feel happier long term, even if you love being a journalist now.
Sorry to be such a downer, but hearing messages like that gives me flashbacks to people getting exploited - and I bet ya that the owner of that newsroom will not be suffering like the journalists. You're sacrificing your own happiness in life for another person's wealth gain - just because you thought it was "worth doing" in your 20s. Because yes, money maybe doesn't buy happiness, but it sure as hell gets you an incredible amount of stress if it's absent.
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 waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.
While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.
So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.
I'm particularly excited about the Baltimore Banner, who are only a few years old but are earning sizable subscription revenue now (it's healthy for them not to be too dependent on donors).
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 example I'm familiar with, Willamette Week in Portland has a reputation of being halfway decent. Though to be fair, it also has advertising, and does not even have subscriptions since 1984.
"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.
Getting grants is an alternative way and it's how freelancers are able to do reporting for cash-strapped newsrooms. Grants definitely have their own can of worms, though. Things like restrictive reporting requirements, do-not-do requirements, and the dynamics that just come from people giving other people relatively large sums of money.
Yeah, the problem with grants is that even with no strings attached there's still a subtle influence where a publication may not want to harm the interests of the source if that grant since they might not provide more funds in the future.
I don't know if it's possible to ever be completely free of outside influence. If anything, I think standards for publishing have become so low that any incentive model that helps keep a majority of facts straight should be the goal. The loss of traditional publishing gatekeepers has just generated a lot of noise and in that noise non-mainstream viewpoints have thrived.
> Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started
That is a fair point. Maybe where it went off the rails is when we (collectively) were able to tie attention directly to the stories, and optimize for that. An old school newspaper has a much looser connection between subscriber behavior and advertising choices.
> editorial–advertising firewall
This is a mechanism I am not familiar with, thanks for mentioning it. Now I need to go learn something new!
> For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism.
I think we've seen so many useless ads that this is effectively true but it really doesn't need to be.
Think about say Golf magazine. Is the average reader going to say, why are there advertisements for ball finding glasses in there? They'll probably be annoyed when every copy has one but to see various gadgets that could be helpful in your hobby is nice. Especially because they explain why you might want them and often how they work.
Then think about a TV advertisement. Some guy has a grill and stuff starts flying on screen and eventually they sip from a can of Bud Light. If I drink Bud Light is the entire neighbor going to show up in my backyard? There's really no information gained here except that a liquid product called Bud Light exists and that I should "drink responsibility".
The concept of advertising is useful and should be desirable however the current way it's done is often neither. There's a million things out there and the only way to find them out is by being shown them.
Definitely a template. I can’t think of a single major issue I’ve had with anything they’ve put out. I’m sure something exists, I haven’t read literally everything they’ve put out stall, but I have been very impressed with everything I have seen.
Blaming society for the poor state of journalism is tempting but ignores that the root of the problem lies from within. Financial institutions and other journalists demand information dense journalism to do their jobs and have no problem paying for it, so this is what they receive. Most regular people view news as a form of entertainment and have no problem with sacrificing their attention, and this is what they receive.
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.
People conveniently leave this out a lot. Outlets like The Guardian have lost massive amounts of money every year for decades. They are supported by wealthy people who want to see their agendas be influential.
So the quest is for eyeballs, but not for cash. They're totally willing to throw away the pennies* that they could get from that if the alternative is not to get the ideas they want to push into circulation, which often boosts their other business interests.
It's not even possible to make money from journalism. Every outlet is a money sink for someone, you should just wonder if that person has a moral reason for throwing away the cash or another goal.
[*] is there any news outlet that beats alpha other than the NYT? Maybe the WSJ?
Unlike opaquely financed and privately owned media companies, the Guardian is actually relatively clear and open in how it is financed and set up in a way to try to make them as independent as possible (see for example the Scott Trust's annual report https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/The_Scott_Trust_Limite...).
That's not to say that they don't run their fair share of gossip/clickbait... but show me an online medium that does not.
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.
The press has always been for profit, it was never a charity. What I see today is a mix of trying to maximize profits (which is different from merely making a living from it), and it being more difficult nowadays to make money from diligent journalism, mostly due to how the internet works.
> 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 that view. If they preset a supporting view they phrase it in a way to make it sound trusting and authoritative.
To put it more simply, most journalists are trying to change the world to see things their way.
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 revenue streams so that they're not just money down the drain. If the Post loses $100M per year, but Amazon keeps making Bezos $50B per year, that's fine, probably costs him less than the depreciation on his yachts or jets.
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.
Here's an incident from September 2024 where links were blocked to a newsletter containing a hacked document with potentially damaging information about JD Vance - and the journalist who published that newsletter then had their account suspended: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...
Has it? I’ve never actually engaged with twitter. I always thought it was an echo chamber. From the outside looking in though it seems like twitter is the same pre-Elon as post-Elon. The difference is just which views are the blessed ones.
I see people advocating all known political views. Pre Elon, any non progressive opinions were heavily weeded out by moderators.
Of course, most progressives have left now that they encounter opposing views (AKA "fascism"), so you could think of it as an echo chamber. But it's not forced to be one by the site.
> Pre Elon, any non progressive opinions were heavily weeded out by moderators.
This is 100% a lie. Open nazi advocating violence were suppressed, but back then there were people who claimed they are conservatives or right wing who were not nazi.
Funny enough, open communists advocating violence were suppressed too back then. In fact, left was policed more strictly then the right.
No, he never intended that nor done that. He wanted to make it more biased toward right wing then it already was (and it was already biased toward conservatives in its moderation). Twitter did not became more open for all point of view. It became exclusively more far right friendly.
Elon Musk censors and suppresses whatever speech he does not like whole his life.
Good reading for the ever-dwindling group of people who like facts.
I remember there was a friend of mine who was of the opposite political persuasion, generally, than myself. He posted something that was demonstrably wrong to Facebook. And I was embarrassed for him just as much as I be embarrassed for myself having posted something so inaccurate. So I offered a friendly correction, but he replied in an unexpected way. He said that the sentiment of the post was accurate, even if the post itself was not. And he left it up!
The facts of the case were absolutely irrelevant.
That was a decade ago. Since then, that attitude has clearly become more prevalent not just with your average Facebook poster, but also within the government and media themselves. For none of these groups does does "truth" support their goals; fact checking is a complete waste of time, and might even be detrimental.
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 the contrary, the response is often "well, this is what I believe." I'm not even talking about topics where there is some existing debate - like, things that cannot possibly be disputed, like that the earth is round (not hyperbole).
> 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.
I wonder if there's something we can do. A social network that penalizes misinformation and rewards expert analysis. Something like that would never be as big as general social media but maybe it could be developed for a small set of users who care enough about truth to contribute to it and grow it over time
Sen. JD Vance stood by his false claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — an unsupported story that former President Donald Trump has also echoed on the debate stage and on social media.
During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
As someone who lives in a country where pretty much everything is public information, including social security numbers and tax records, I find it very interesting that you can keep such a thing a secret.
> Lorenz's year of birth is disputed by multiple reliable sources.
> How come the French version of this article lists her age as October 21, 1984 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz) but this one hides it? SlapperDapper (talk) 01:21, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
> -- Probably because no one has presented a published, reliable source for that info. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:46, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
> ---- 99.999% of articles on people on Wikipedia have no source for the age/birthday. SlapperDapper (talk) 19:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
Though the article is about Patricia Routledge in this case and not Lorenz.
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 eye towards gaining knowledge (and not following a tribe) will develop the skill to sift through the crap.
[1] Well, OK - those who obsessively follow only the news in their bubble are probably worse.
“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."
In a discussion of an article about encouraging fact-checking in writing, I wish you would have made your quotes informative by replacing "many wise people" with the actual names of who said them.
For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].
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 information, and our economic incentives (namely advertising dollars from websites, YouTube, TikTok and the like) are having an adverse effect on quality.
> 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.
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).
Also, if any news orgs are listening: when you are regurgitating a press release about, say, a report or scientific paper, please make it your house style to hyperlink to the report or paper. That way I can see your sources and judge the claims for myself.
Also, people who write reports or papers and then make press releases: please upload them to your own damn websites, and make them easily findable by the public. Don't just email the press release to your pals in the media, and not put your words anywhere else.
B2B magazines and websites are full of churnalism. They are unreadable.
The issue here is that for every journalist there are 6 to 7 PR people. (There approx. 45,000 journalists but 297,000 PR people in the USA. PR agencies employ 114,000 ppl.)
But there are good newspapers just like they are good <any category of thing>.
Although good newspapers still have bias, but as a reader, you can correct for bias. You can’t correct for sloppy fact checking.
Like in archery, if you always land in the same spot, you can “reverse bias” the result back to bullseye. If you land all over the place, there’s nothing you can do.
The only problem is that good newspapers cost some money.
In this conversation I keep seeing comments about good newspapers. I'd be interested in seeing a more specific discussion that debates which newspapers qualify as good. Everyone has their own opinion, but maybe a consensus would emerge.
Is it as easy as NYT? Or Economist? Or is that still slop and ProPublica is the standard? But even then, something like ProPublica is great for investigative journalism but less useful as a general source of information.
I'm happy to pay for a good source of news. But finding something that doesn't just look good, but is in fact actually good, that's my problem.
A good newspaper to me is one that regularly does their due diligence (fact checking, possibly considering things from several angles, giving background information) and has a consistent but reasonable bias. NYT and The Economist are very good ones.
It’s extremely hard suggesting newspapers to an online audience. People don’t easily separate bias and accuracy — they think they are correlated.
Bias and accuracy are unrelated to each other.
If I suggest The Economist, people think I’m for liberalism (The Economist has a major liberalism slant), but really, they tend to make factual statements and then turn to liberalism as a solution, which a regular reader can be like “okay the facts and your background introduction to the topic are good. I don’t necessarily agree with your solution but I get your viewpoint.”
When people ask for suggestions, they often want a simple news source that is unbiased. And I have nothing to give them because I don’t read unbiased news sources.
I really like the economist for their various data points/graphs and such. Always very useful and quality in my experience. They are very good at displaying the data used to inform their pieces. It’s the analysis that can be all over the place depending on the topic at hand.
As others have mentioned I would consider ProPublica probably the gold standard right now
I think a much smaller percentage of smart high school seniors want to go into journalism at all. And if they do they'll probably just start a TikTok debating people
Perhaps there's also less stringent editing on the "Showbiz & TV" or "Culture" sections of the paper than the "News" section. I mean, papers in general are working leaner than they should. Hopefully, they put the editing focus on what's most important, but still, being lazy even in a lighter section does reflect poorly on the entire publication.
Curious that the Wikipedia article seemingly editorializes the quote. The article displays:
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about economics than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
But in fact Crichton's quote was:
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. [0]
Why they felt the need to edit Palestine out of the quote is unclear.
Because it distracts from the general point, I imagine. The quote isn't about whatever is going on in Palestine at the moment (which is usually something spectacular, terrible, and highly polarizing), but about accuracy in news reporting.
Editing the quote without using "..." or similar indications was, of course, unacceptable.
There's a chapter in John McPhee's "Draft No. 4" (which is quite a time capsure of how writing was done in the last century) about the fact checking topic, and how much effort went into it for stories posted in The New Yorker.
The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.
I have got into a long habit of noting the writer of articles I like (that are accurate after checking). I try to follow well written, honest, as unbiased as you can get (or at least consistent if biased - very important) journalists. So the organisations, corporations, stations where they journalise is of lesser consequence.
Fact checking is becoming extremely poor these days, even among reputable/resourceful organizations.
I'll skip NYTimes here. For the Verge, I have pointed out inaccuracies many times in their comment section. Most often, nothing happened. Sometimes, they quietly fixes something, delete my comment and pretend nothing happened.
Guess what's worse? Vergecast. Turns out you don't do fact checking in podcasts! The hosts just ramble whatever they believe is true. And they absolutely do NOT publish corrections after the fact.
I stopped reading Engadget partly for this reason. And I cancelled my Verge subscription for this as well.
The root problem is that the media's business model has failed. We need a new business model before the situation improves. What might that business model look like?
My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack.
But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there.
Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe.
For me, it seems like the solution is some sort of seamless micropayments solution for individual articles. I don't want to subscribe to 30 different outlets, but I'd pay $1-2 per article for a good piece of journalism from those outlets.
The problem is that micropayments are expensive. 2.9% and 30 cents is 32.9% on a dollar transaction (and basically all of it if you charge 50 cents to read an article). I've seen some cryptocurrency attempts at a solution, but I think a more viable solution would be a single account you periodically top up, and some aggregator that distributes payments to outlets in bulk to minimize fees.
I've looked at others' attempts in this space [1][2][3]*, but none of them seem to have taken off and I'm not sure why. It seems like a win for publishers, unless those micropayment news readers end up cannibalizing their subscriber base.
> My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news.
I think that this is a fundamentally wrong headed idea. I might go farther and say that you're not going to create a new model for news, you're going to discover a new model, or you're going to accept the model that you know works, and figure out how to make it conform to your values without breaking it.
The facts: people who produce a lot of what we call news want it to be read. They write it because they have made a value judgement that it has importance, and that it should be reacted to by people. They should be backed by people who share those values - and those people should be paying for the news to be made and circulated to anyone who they can convince, beg, or trick into spending their time to understand what the producers of the news (both financiers and journalists) think is important.
This is the current actual model of the news, even though it still masquerades as a strange public service model adapted from network television news where OTA channels were required to do something in return for their use of the public airwaves. This was never the print model, which is that you have a boss, and you do what he says.
The other model of the news was never in danger. People will pay for sports and celebrity news and photographs because it is entertainment. People will even pay for crime news (of the titillating type, like violent street crime, rape and murder) because it also usually is entertainment masquerading as public service. None of that is in danger. It's important to be specific about what you're talking about.
I think that the way to save the endangered part of the news is the same way we need to save everything - more collaboration tools for individuals to form into groups. I think we see this forming with things like Substack, Patreon and Locals, etc., and what we need is to make this more decentralized, and not routed through a few gatekeepers all additionally gated by banks and credit card companies. 500 people should be able to start a newsroom of 10 people with their spare pennies, and get what they believe and what they think is important to the widest audience possible. The Substacks, Patreons, etc. have shown that it is not hard to get that many people together to pay a few bucks for something they believe in, or simply like.
If there's a tl;dr: you shouldn't be paying to read journalism; if anything, people should pay you to read their journalism. I wish I could take money from 80% of the garbage I wasted my time reading. We need microdebits, not micropayments.
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.
For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.
Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.
Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
Most people don't, sure. But anyone who calls themselves a journalist or has gone to j-school sure as hell better. That's literally the point. That's what journalism school teaches, or at least should; Not how to repost crap from other crap. It's simply not an excuse for an organization like the bbc.
I got the impression the "you" in the title refers to journalists, who should have all of the skills you list. Confusing, as he then refers to the reader as "you" at the end, but I'm pretty sure he's berating the professionals and encouraging everyone else to try and do the job they are not.
I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I can't imagine that exhortation having much effect.
Both "you"s are aimed at anyone who shared the fabrication. Journalists shouldn't have reported it uncritically, but everyone who hit the share button is culpable.
There's an old proverb - "Who is more foolish; the fool or the fool who follows him?"
On other hand if you are able to compile "facts" to an article. You should as well be able to verify them from second source. And trivially fast in modern world. I mean if you synthesis information from one or more sources. Being able to verify them from one more source should not be huge leap.
Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
Their job is journalism, you would hope they have the skills, but not necessarily. The news business is not making much money, and aren’t paying big salaries. You’re not getting world renowned journalists to do a puff piece on a recently deceased celebrity. And even if they don’t use an LLM, they are still putting in the bare minimum effort for work they likely have no pride in.
If you think this is trivial, I suggest watching the video kurzgesagt just did on the topic. It’s much harder than you appreciate and getting massively worse as the days go by due to ai garbage.
You need to be curious to fact check. Anyone can be curious. This is different from "being tall".
OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.
However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.
Yuval Noah Harari has a great quote (paraphrased) about slop/fake news etc:
People always ask how we will deal with AI generated fake images and news etc. My answer is the way we have always done it: by creating institutions to deliver accurate information
I like this quote for two reasons:
1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals.
2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.
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?
Agreed. It seems like a supposed quote? If my elderly mom wrote that she went to a NY Mets baseball game in 1960, and Wikipedia says the Mets weren't formed until 1962, is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused?
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).
I am not one to jump on the "This is AI" train. But the "author" responding is absolutely AI, I would bet vast sums of money on it. It reads exactly like chatgpt.
Fact checking for the media is one thing, and I know there's financial disincentives for it in many cases. But when it comes to family discussions over politics, I'd be all in favor of a few more family members learning how to do basic Google searches to fact check as well.
The BBC pulled that article/episode - which is the main difference between different media spheres today.
We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content.
High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce.
The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content.
With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap.
That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off.
The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer.
We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.
Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced.
It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to go "oopsie daisies".
How do we think this compares to scientific journals not issuing retractions to articles? Only the absolute most bald-faced misconduct will get a retraction issued...
For scientific publishing, the damage continues and a retraction is a much more helpful response.
10 years ago there was a famous article in the German Bild about the 10 craziest laws in America. Something like that it's illegal for woman to wear pants in some parts of Arizona etc. A lot of other big publications started to feature the same laws in their trivia sections until a journalist actually checked if they still exist. It turned out that none of the laws existed or were still enforced. It would have been so simple to check their facts but nope over 10 publications reprinted it and nobody bothered.
This sounds like its doing a lot of heavy lifting.
A bunch of state abortion bans were no longer enforced until they were. If it's still on the books then it counts as a "crazy law"; if you don't want people to make fun of your state then repeal it.
> Law #2: it is illegal for women to wear pants in Tucson.
> This “law” is more of a half-truth than anything else. Over a century ago it was illegal for Tucson residents to appear in public wearing clothing “not of his or her sex.”
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 manage his own expectations of humanity
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 quote from an older actress talks about her time doing Shakespeare, then it doesn’t really proc any doubt in me; I’m offering a baseline of trust to the publisher that forwarded that information along to me that this information is factual and not someone’s strange fanfiction about her life. I can appreciate that the author doubted it because a quick scroll of the blog shows that he’s got an interest in stagecraft and so it bumped up against his expertise, but I don’t think that I would have seen the quote myself and done the same… maybe I am one of those sub-median ignoramuses you mention. I agree that people uncritically eating up sensational news is a problem, but this is like, pretty straightforward in-memoriam news that I’d hope to not have to doubt.
I hope not to derail, as the core of the author's point is valid and important for people to understand.
Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that".
Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.
The other interesting thing about the article is just that the entire nature of fact checking, references and cross references, especially over time, requires physical documents.
References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes.
It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently.
Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet
I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc.
I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers.
It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked.
I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.
I agree with the author that this is important. I do not agree that it is easy.
In some cases it is relatively easy, but in many cases it requires some subject area expertise.
I do wish it was easier to punish media organizations for slop; however any feedback mechanism would also be (ab)-used for political purposes and reputation laundering.
> 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, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.
Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.
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 company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships?
Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.
> 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.
I mean the Indy is one of Lebvdev's vanity papers and the Express is part of the Reach newspaper group where the authors are incentivised on a per-click basis - you'd go to neither expecting anything other than dross.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
When a writer reaches a national platform they see themselves as a taste maker, not a reporter. So they write what they think you should think. That's why so many articles tell you how you are supposed to feel about a thing, rather than tell you about that thing. If that means ignoring facts that disagree what they think, well, too bad. Thus we end up with headlines and paragraphs that use words and concepts that are meant to make you feel something. We get headlines like "ICE Breaks Into A House Where There Is A Baby" and "Trump Illegally Indicts Billy Bob."
I've done a fair amount of data-intensive fact checking for journalism articles and have had fact checking done on my own data-intensive reporting.
Couple things:
1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least.
2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
> Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
This should be illegal.
If people were able to propose laws and vote on them directly, it would be, be a landslide.
The number of people who benefit from this is tiny compares to the number who are harmed. But it's nearly impossible to pass things like this because people vote for parties and are therefore several levers removed from influencing actual laws.
Isn't it illegal now? That sounds like a cut-and-dry libel case.
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?
I dunno about that analogy, but the fix for this is for editors to be included in the byline, or at least at the bottom where contributors are often found. Some newsrooms have started doing this but it should absolutely be more common. But as things are, we have newsrooms whose editorial boards are completely anonymous so i don't expect anything to change in the industry anytime soon.
So you're saying the pay is poor, and your coworkers deliberately fuck you over for their own gains. That pretty much sounds like a job you should stay away from by any cost. Do something else, something productive that doesnt lead to a bunch of lies being sold as truths.
Yes but many of us also complain about the lack of quality journalism. We can’t encourage good (presumably) people leave the industry and also want the standard of reporting to improve
If the system is broken in way that disempowers the people who are good and apparently getting screwed over, it's kind of selfish to ask them to stick around and shoulder the burden to fix it for our own external benefit.
Eh, it's not entirely that simple. In the same way teachers are, some people are just compelled towards it because it's what feels "right" to them.
And, just, don't forget that a lot of the people who are "sticking around" went to j-school and now have a significant amount of debt. So leaving journalism isn't exactly the cleanest option for them.
Donate to your local investigative nonprofit.
If honest journalists are “sticking around” that would mean loaning those shady editors with ulterior motives some of their credibility, thus helping to prop the latter up.
So it seems like a net negative.
These problems are largely economic. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
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.
It is economic. Significant amounts of advertising dollars were once spent on ads in local newspapers and TV stations. That is no longer the case. Expecting media content to remain high quality when the revenue stream that once supported investigative journalism has dried up makes no sense.
Any time you read or view a piece of content, follow the money trail that got it in front of your eyeballs, ears or fingertips -- it may well be enlightening.
> high quality writing is going other places.
Where is that again?
I once sat on a table nearby of the local investigative newsroom crew having a chat in a cafe. The vibe I got was so evil, I definitely wouldn't give them any of my money. In fact, I have given up on the concept of independent journalism, I just dont believe anymore it is happening. Knowing the onwership structure of the publishers in my country (and many others around me) also adds to the unwillingness to donate. They are all inconservative hands, and are being used to push agendas.
I think a lot of what you're seeing is people being people rather than journalists being journalists. Sometimes gallows humor is the only thing you can do for yourself while you're looking through brutal, terrifying reports of abuse for hours and hours.
It seems like you're suggesting I am not capable of putting things I overheard in context? Please don't. I am well aware of the difference between sarcasm and deliberate manipulation.
To keep things grounded, almost nobody bites the hand that feeds 'em. Whistleblowing or swimming against the stream, while being celebrated whenever it happens, is a very low minority in any profession. If your boss tells you where things are supposed to go, you might grind your teeth, and maybe bitch about it to your friends, but chances are high you will comply. Journalists are no different.
Friend, I'm not suggesting that at all. I could, though: in no way did you describe any of what you considered to be bad from them. You left it conclusory in such a way that leaves the reader (me) to try to fill the gaps in what you mean. Your aggressive tone doesn't leave much room. And personally, I would never feel confident in being sure that I understand the context of a conversation that I'm not invited to.
Everything you described, like I've said about 10 times now, is economically rooted. Donate to your local investigative nonprofit.
Ignoring the fact that I miss the blind trust you seem to have, that all we need is to donate some money and the outcome will magically be good...
I honestly don't know any local investigative nonprofit that is not biased. There are the big conservatively led newspapers, and there are smaller left to extreme left leaning publishers that try to be a counterweight. However, to my knowledge, we dont have any publishers that are really trying to report independent from a political side or agenda.
Friend, I think your cynicism's clouding how you're interpreting my words. What you're interpreting as blind trust is me just saying that people are people and people gonna people, yanno? And lol, nah. The amount of bullshit I've seen from my peer group is laughable and I've had a tendency to be very aggressive in pushing back on bad reporting. Like the Chicago Tribune -- they weren't including all of the facts in their reporting on something and wouldn't share any public records that they received through FOIA. So I FOIA'd for a full year of the Tribune's FOIAs and published them without any expectation of anything in return. That journalist no longer speaks to me and doing that burned bridges with the Tribune forever. I did it again the next year because fuck bad journalists who get in the way of public awareness. We should push them to be better. Lol.
I'm not sure that it's even actually possible to have "unbiased" reporting. You want something unattainable and it's understandable why it'd be frustrating that no such thing exists. We live in a fucked up world, m8.
Thanks for your last paragraph. You apparently have a lot more inside infos then I ever will, and still, you confirm my observation. There is no unbiased reporting. However, I am not willing to compromise on this. If there is no way I can get unbiased infos, I dont want any "journalism" anymore. If it is a lost cause, so be it. And, that is not cynicism, it is plain despair. I just dont want to be lied to, no matter from what side.
I hear you on the despair and hope you can find a way to work through it.
When I felt it more (heh it's definitely not gone) it was out of a feeling of not being able to contribute, or not being able to understand things to the degree that I felt was meaningful and moral. There's so much to do to understand what's going on around us and the lack of available resources is... not great. But so much of it is just a matter of starting to look into something and see where it goes. For me, it was researching parking tickets and towing that got me started after my car was illegally towed. For you, maybe a pot hole destroyed one of your tire and nobody in your area's looked into why pot holes aren't being fixed.
Feel free to email me if you ever want to chat about this more, or if you'd like to brainstorm ways to figure things out. My email isn't hard to find.
> There is no unbiased reporting.
There are few things that are unbiased, least of all language. Even when communicating a straight fact, the words and tone chosen to communicate it have an inherent bias. One can report with glee or hope or skepticism or anger or just about any other emotion, with positive or negative or neutral words, all of which have an inherent bias. To a person who's happy about something, a reporter's skepticism of that same thing is an unmistakable bias. The point is, that doesn't make it bad. Accuracy of reported facts seems to be a stronger indicator of the "lack of bias" that people prefer.
I would argue you just reported, in a biased way, about your personal experience overhearing some journalists who were having a casual conversation among themselves, and what this says about all journalism as a result.
There is no biased reporting because there are no unbiased event descriptors. Not video, not photos, not physics papers, not even describing some stuff that happened to you firsthand.
> They are all inconservative hands
> Journalists who said they were Republicans continued to drop from 18 percent in 2002 and 7.1 percent in 2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022. This figure is notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican party (26 percent according to the poll mentioned earlier) in 2022. About half of all journalists (51.7 percent) said they were Independents, which is about 12 percentage points above the figure for all U.S. adults (40 percent). Overall, U.S. journalists today are much more likely to identify themselves as Independents rather than Democrats or Republicans—a pattern similar to 2013.
https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/post/american-journali...
They were explicitly referring to their country, which is just as likely not to be the US, so citing US statistics without further comment or contextualization seems rude.
But it's beside the point anyway: They weren't referring to the political affiliation of the people working at the newspaper, they were referring to the leanings of the people who own the newspaper.
> They weren't referring to the political affiliation of the people working at the newspaper, they were referring to the leanings of the people who own the newspaper.
Is Jeff Bezos a conservative?
I don't believe self-reported stats are worth anything in this context. Many conservatives have learnt to keep a low profile, since in many circles, right wing association has become a synonym for evil. Besides, I am not a U.S citizen, so your quoted stats are not relevant to my statement above them.
> I don't believe self-reported stats are worth anything in this context. Many conservatives have learnt to keep a low profile, since in many circles, right wing association has become a synonym for evil.
This is a baseless conspiracy theory.
> Besides, I am not a U.S citizen, so your quoted stats are not relevant to my statement above them.
These patterns hold for every country in the Anglosphere. Canadian leftists are fond of accusing the media of being conservative, but the reality is that they are just so far into alt politics that they consider anyone remotely normal to be an extremist. Similar accusations of crypto-conservatism are levied against journalists in South America, so I have to think that is what is going on here.
There’s an easy way for us to test my theory: What region do you live in, and what specific statements were these journalists making that struck you as evil?
> This is a baseless conspiracy theory.
Well, I beg to differ. Just reading HN, accusing people of fascism has become a lot more common-place then, say, 10 years ago. Offline, I have had a lot of chats with people that share my sentiment, which I would consider rather centrist. The left has gotten so very aggressive when it comes to disagreements that they started to push anyone away to the right who isn't willing to agree with everything they currently have on their agenda.
> what specific statements were these journalists making that struck you as evil?
I deliberately wrote "vibe" because accidentally overhearing that work meeting is actually a few years ago. It would be extremely dishonest of me to conjure up an exact quote. I simply can't without making up stuff. Sure, that opens all doors to attack me for even mentioning it. And maybe thats right. However, personal experiences are always ancedotal. Still, it is all we, as individuals, have.
> Just reading HN, accusing people of fascism has become a lot more common-place then, say, 10 years ago.
People are far more open about having conservative ideas today than they were 10 years ago.
> The left has gotten so very aggressive when it comes to disagreements that they started to push anyone away to the right who isn't willing to agree with everything they currently have on their agenda.
Right, but was their hegemonic power appreciably greater in 2022 than in 2015? Cancel culture peaked midway through the Trump presidency. These days you get people using their real names and faces commenting: “DEPORT BUTTON” under videos of ethnic minorities. It’s possible that journalists are just claiming to be neutral or left-leaning in the way that campus conservatives used to feel compelled to, but the more likely explanation seems to be that journalists are simply overwhelmingly centrist or left-leaning.
> However, personal experiences are always ancedotal. Still, it is all we, as individuals, have.
We have statistics, we don’t have to rely on anecdotes. You’re deferring to an anecdote and insisting that the data is wrong. It’s possible it doesn’t align with your anecdotal experience because of a selection bias on your part, or because the data doesn’t map from the Anglosphere to whatever country you are from, but the data is there.
How much does it cost to check one fact? If you check just one, and it's wrong, it's probably not worth treating the whole as an accurate piece of reporting. If BBC had checked just one fact in the slop, they could easily decide that it's not worth republishing.
Why do you focus on "one fact"? Reporting, fact checking, editing is a fluid project that changes as the piece progresses. What needs fact checking in one draft is very different from what needs fact checking in another draft. And like I said, editors make changes that the fact checkers never see.
Again, these are economic problems. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
The OP is about a news org basically republishing a viral text its people didn't write. There is no particular need to check every most of the facts like the OP did when a quick glance tells you that it's unreliable.
Sure, but my point wasn't to refute the article in any way. More of a preemption of people saying, "this is why journalism sucks!!" without understanding the dynamics of why things are the way they are.
Everything fuckin' sucks, it's not just journalism.
Uhm is it possible to mitigate second point by publishing encrypted article in social network along with is sending it to the agency to assign it timestamp? Or maybe in any blockchain if one does not like social networks.
Then if journalist does not like how mangled was his piece on publishing he can disclose encryption password to show everyone what he actually wrote in the article?
> It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
That sounds like absolutely atrocious living conditions for the journalists employed by such a news room.
Honestly, at that point - look for a different job!
I'm not saying this to be mean, I am just picturing myself in such a working relationship of being employed by an organization working in an industry which is hemorrhaging valuation because of various developments like AI (but even before that it was going downhill).
You will be happier doing something else! At that point, learn a trade or similar. You'll be better paid, have a more stable lifestyle and will feel happier long term, even if you love being a journalist now.
Sorry to be such a downer, but hearing messages like that gives me flashbacks to people getting exploited - and I bet ya that the owner of that newsroom will not be suffering like the journalists. You're sacrificing your own happiness in life for another person's wealth gain - just because you thought it was "worth doing" in your 20s. Because yes, money maybe doesn't buy happiness, but it sure as hell gets you an incredible amount of stress if it's absent.
I'm no longer doing journalism as my main gig and I'm much healthier these days thankfully.
Use this energy to consider donating to a newsroom. :)
> 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 waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.
While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.
So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.
"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: 2009
The Marshall Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marshall_Project Founded: 2014
I'm particularly excited about the Baltimore Banner, who are only a few years old but are earning sizable subscription revenue now (it's healthy for them not to be too dependent on donors).
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 example I'm familiar with, Willamette Week in Portland has a reputation of being halfway decent. Though to be fair, it also has advertising, and does not even have subscriptions since 1984.
"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.
Getting grants is an alternative way and it's how freelancers are able to do reporting for cash-strapped newsrooms. Grants definitely have their own can of worms, though. Things like restrictive reporting requirements, do-not-do requirements, and the dynamics that just come from people giving other people relatively large sums of money.
Yeah, the problem with grants is that even with no strings attached there's still a subtle influence where a publication may not want to harm the interests of the source if that grant since they might not provide more funds in the future.
I don't know if it's possible to ever be completely free of outside influence. If anything, I think standards for publishing have become so low that any incentive model that helps keep a majority of facts straight should be the goal. The loss of traditional publishing gatekeepers has just generated a lot of noise and in that noise non-mainstream viewpoints have thrived.
> Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started
That is a fair point. Maybe where it went off the rails is when we (collectively) were able to tie attention directly to the stories, and optimize for that. An old school newspaper has a much looser connection between subscriber behavior and advertising choices.
> editorial–advertising firewall
This is a mechanism I am not familiar with, thanks for mentioning it. Now I need to go learn something new!
> For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism.
I think we've seen so many useless ads that this is effectively true but it really doesn't need to be.
Think about say Golf magazine. Is the average reader going to say, why are there advertisements for ball finding glasses in there? They'll probably be annoyed when every copy has one but to see various gadgets that could be helpful in your hobby is nice. Especially because they explain why you might want them and often how they work.
Then think about a TV advertisement. Some guy has a grill and stuff starts flying on screen and eventually they sip from a can of Bud Light. If I drink Bud Light is the entire neighbor going to show up in my backyard? There's really no information gained here except that a liquid product called Bud Light exists and that I should "drink responsibility".
The concept of advertising is useful and should be desirable however the current way it's done is often neither. There's a million things out there and the only way to find them out is by being shown them.
I didn't realize Pro Publica is that "new". I've been following them for almost as long. They are fantastic.
Definitely a template. I can’t think of a single major issue I’ve had with anything they’ve put out. I’m sure something exists, I haven’t read literally everything they’ve put out stall, but I have been very impressed with everything I have seen.
Blaming society for the poor state of journalism is tempting but ignores that the root of the problem lies from within. Financial institutions and other journalists demand information dense journalism to do their jobs and have no problem paying for it, so this is what they receive. Most regular people view news as a form of entertainment and have no problem with sacrificing their attention, and this is what they receive.
Worth noting this is far from a modern problem. Google "yellow journalism".
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.
Speaking of Twitter, I couldn't help but notice the lack of a Twitter/X icon on the author's blog page. Lots of other social media links are present.
Author here.
Elon directly screwed over some of my friends. He turned Twitter from an imperfect mess into a shit filled pit of despair.
I don't want to encourage anyone to use his services.
Hope that clarifies things!
> to grab and keep eyeballs
yes, but also to manufacture consent for the priorities of the rich and powerful
Its first and foremost purpose
People conveniently leave this out a lot. Outlets like The Guardian have lost massive amounts of money every year for decades. They are supported by wealthy people who want to see their agendas be influential.
So the quest is for eyeballs, but not for cash. They're totally willing to throw away the pennies* that they could get from that if the alternative is not to get the ideas they want to push into circulation, which often boosts their other business interests.
It's not even possible to make money from journalism. Every outlet is a money sink for someone, you should just wonder if that person has a moral reason for throwing away the cash or another goal.
[*] is there any news outlet that beats alpha other than the NYT? Maybe the WSJ?
Unlike opaquely financed and privately owned media companies, the Guardian is actually relatively clear and open in how it is financed and set up in a way to try to make them as independent as possible (see for example the Scott Trust's annual report https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/The_Scott_Trust_Limite...).
That's not to say that they don't run their fair share of gossip/clickbait... but show me an online medium that does not.
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.
People do forget that there are only three known models for funding new/press and they are all susceptible to bias and error.
1. State
2. Profit driven
3. Charity (includes volunteers, billionaire patrons, crowdfunding)
The press has always been for profit, it was never a charity. What I see today is a mix of trying to maximize profits (which is different from merely making a living from it), and it being more difficult nowadays to make money from diligent journalism, mostly due to how the internet works.
> 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 that view. If they preset a supporting view they phrase it in a way to make it sound trusting and authoritative.
To put it more simply, most journalists are trying to change the world to see things their way.
> 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 more "facts", I need useful information I can take action on.
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 revenue streams so that they're not just money down the drain. If the Post loses $100M per year, but Amazon keeps making Bezos $50B per year, that's fine, probably costs him less than the depreciation on his yachts or jets.
Elon bought Twitter because his mouth got ahead of him.
Recall His brazen offer
Their initial refusal
Him suing to buy
Them relenting
Him trying to back out
Them suing to force the purchase
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.
Aww, that’s sweet.
Only time I’ve been kicked off Twitter (permanently, no comebacks) was under Elon’s rule.
Do you want to share for what?
Are you going to judge whether or not he was using the right kind of speech?
Just curious. I'm even open to change my mind a bit about 2025 Twitter.
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.
Here's an incident from September 2024 where links were blocked to a newsletter containing a hacked document with potentially damaging information about JD Vance - and the journalist who published that newsletter then had their account suspended: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...
> And that's what it's become.
Hilariously incorrect.
Has it? I’ve never actually engaged with twitter. I always thought it was an echo chamber. From the outside looking in though it seems like twitter is the same pre-Elon as post-Elon. The difference is just which views are the blessed ones.
I see people advocating all known political views. Pre Elon, any non progressive opinions were heavily weeded out by moderators.
Of course, most progressives have left now that they encounter opposing views (AKA "fascism"), so you could think of it as an echo chamber. But it's not forced to be one by the site.
> Pre Elon, any non progressive opinions were heavily weeded out by moderators.
This is 100% a lie. Open nazi advocating violence were suppressed, but back then there were people who claimed they are conservatives or right wing who were not nazi.
Funny enough, open communists advocating violence were suppressed too back then. In fact, left was policed more strictly then the right.
Except if you post "cisgender" or if you track Elon Musk's jet.
Edit: oh, and if you want to block his account from your feed, you can't
No, he never intended that nor done that. He wanted to make it more biased toward right wing then it already was (and it was already biased toward conservatives in its moderation). Twitter did not became more open for all point of view. It became exclusively more far right friendly.
Elon Musk censors and suppresses whatever speech he does not like whole his life.
"Non-establishment" is a funny way to spell "Nazi".
Good reading for the ever-dwindling group of people who like facts.
I remember there was a friend of mine who was of the opposite political persuasion, generally, than myself. He posted something that was demonstrably wrong to Facebook. And I was embarrassed for him just as much as I be embarrassed for myself having posted something so inaccurate. So I offered a friendly correction, but he replied in an unexpected way. He said that the sentiment of the post was accurate, even if the post itself was not. And he left it up!
The facts of the case were absolutely irrelevant.
That was a decade ago. Since then, that attitude has clearly become more prevalent not just with your average Facebook poster, but also within the government and media themselves. For none of these groups does does "truth" support their goals; fact checking is a complete waste of time, and might even be detrimental.
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 the contrary, the response is often "well, this is what I believe." I'm not even talking about topics where there is some existing debate - like, things that cannot possibly be disputed, like that the earth is round (not hyperbole).
> 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.
I wonder if there's something we can do. A social network that penalizes misinformation and rewards expert analysis. Something like that would never be as big as general social media but maybe it could be developed for a small set of users who care enough about truth to contribute to it and grow it over time
The market is probably the best we have and that's a dismal bar. Predict wrong and lose money.
Sen. JD Vance stood by his false claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — an unsupported story that former President Donald Trump has also echoed on the debate stage and on social media.
During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113140/vance-false-cla...
“Margaret, the rules were that you weren’t going to fact check.”
Validating a public person's birthday using Wikipedia?
*laughs in Taylor Lorenz*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age
Also, in case you're wondering when it is, here's Taylor Lorenz's own Flickr page, which she can delete any time she wants, but hasn't: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/
As someone who lives in a country where pretty much everything is public information, including social security numbers and tax records, I find it very interesting that you can keep such a thing a secret.
In case people don't click, Wikipedia says:
> Lorenz's year of birth is disputed by multiple reliable sources.
> How come the French version of this article lists her age as October 21, 1984 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz) but this one hides it? SlapperDapper (talk) 01:21, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
> -- Probably because no one has presented a published, reliable source for that info. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:46, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
> ---- 99.999% of articles on people on Wikipedia have no source for the age/birthday. SlapperDapper (talk) 19:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
Though the article is about Patricia Routledge in this case and not Lorenz.
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 eye towards gaining knowledge (and not following a tribe) will develop the skill to sift through the crap.
[1] Well, OK - those who obsessively follow only the news in their bubble are probably worse.
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."
In a discussion of an article about encouraging fact-checking in writing, I wish you would have made your quotes informative by replacing "many wise people" with the actual names of who said them.
For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/502048-why-you-fool-it-s-th...
[1] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
"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
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 information, and our economic incentives (namely advertising dollars from websites, YouTube, TikTok and the like) are having an adverse effect on quality.
Did you mean it was decent in the past?
I think the GP's statement was that there are almost no decent newspapers anymore, which I think nobody would disagree with.
> 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).
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).
That's why it's called Churnalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism
Also, if any news orgs are listening: when you are regurgitating a press release about, say, a report or scientific paper, please make it your house style to hyperlink to the report or paper. That way I can see your sources and judge the claims for myself.
Also, people who write reports or papers and then make press releases: please upload them to your own damn websites, and make them easily findable by the public. Don't just email the press release to your pals in the media, and not put your words anywhere else.
B2B magazines and websites are full of churnalism. They are unreadable.
The issue here is that for every journalist there are 6 to 7 PR people. (There approx. 45,000 journalists but 297,000 PR people in the USA. PR agencies employ 114,000 ppl.)
Average newspapers have average content.
But there are good newspapers just like they are good <any category of thing>.
Although good newspapers still have bias, but as a reader, you can correct for bias. You can’t correct for sloppy fact checking.
Like in archery, if you always land in the same spot, you can “reverse bias” the result back to bullseye. If you land all over the place, there’s nothing you can do.
The only problem is that good newspapers cost some money.
In this conversation I keep seeing comments about good newspapers. I'd be interested in seeing a more specific discussion that debates which newspapers qualify as good. Everyone has their own opinion, but maybe a consensus would emerge.
Is it as easy as NYT? Or Economist? Or is that still slop and ProPublica is the standard? But even then, something like ProPublica is great for investigative journalism but less useful as a general source of information.
I'm happy to pay for a good source of news. But finding something that doesn't just look good, but is in fact actually good, that's my problem.
A good newspaper to me is one that regularly does their due diligence (fact checking, possibly considering things from several angles, giving background information) and has a consistent but reasonable bias. NYT and The Economist are very good ones.
It’s extremely hard suggesting newspapers to an online audience. People don’t easily separate bias and accuracy — they think they are correlated.
Bias and accuracy are unrelated to each other.
If I suggest The Economist, people think I’m for liberalism (The Economist has a major liberalism slant), but really, they tend to make factual statements and then turn to liberalism as a solution, which a regular reader can be like “okay the facts and your background introduction to the topic are good. I don’t necessarily agree with your solution but I get your viewpoint.”
When people ask for suggestions, they often want a simple news source that is unbiased. And I have nothing to give them because I don’t read unbiased news sources.
I really like the economist for their various data points/graphs and such. Always very useful and quality in my experience. They are very good at displaying the data used to inform their pieces. It’s the analysis that can be all over the place depending on the topic at hand.
As others have mentioned I would consider ProPublica probably the gold standard right now
The average newspaper has grossly declined in quality IMO.
But there are some good investigative journalists out there.
Arguably, all the smart and careful journalists have moved to the weekly or monthly format. Economist, The Atlantic, and the like.
I think a much smaller percentage of smart high school seniors want to go into journalism at all. And if they do they'll probably just start a TikTok debating people
Perhaps there's also less stringent editing on the "Showbiz & TV" or "Culture" sections of the paper than the "News" section. I mean, papers in general are working leaner than they should. Hopefully, they put the editing focus on what's most important, but still, being lazy even in a lighter section does reflect poorly on the entire publication.
Gell-Mann Amnesia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Curious that the Wikipedia article seemingly editorializes the quote. The article displays:
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about economics than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
But in fact Crichton's quote was:
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. [0]
Why they felt the need to edit Palestine out of the quote is unclear.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michae...
Quotes aren't supposed to be altered like that; I've just fixed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1317337583
Changing "Palestine" to "economics" was done by an anonymous editor five days ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gell-Mann_amnesia...
I love that the Wikipedia article on Gell-Mann amnesia was edited to an inaccurate quote.
Now flip to another Wikipedia article and..
Because it distracts from the general point, I imagine. The quote isn't about whatever is going on in Palestine at the moment (which is usually something spectacular, terrible, and highly polarizing), but about accuracy in news reporting.
Editing the quote without using "..." or similar indications was, of course, unacceptable.
There's a chapter in John McPhee's "Draft No. 4" (which is quite a time capsure of how writing was done in the last century) about the fact checking topic, and how much effort went into it for stories posted in The New Yorker.
The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.
Aiui the New Yorker has always been the most rigorous in its fact checking.
I have got into a long habit of noting the writer of articles I like (that are accurate after checking). I try to follow well written, honest, as unbiased as you can get (or at least consistent if biased - very important) journalists. So the organisations, corporations, stations where they journalise is of lesser consequence.
Fact checking is becoming extremely poor these days, even among reputable/resourceful organizations.
I'll skip NYTimes here. For the Verge, I have pointed out inaccuracies many times in their comment section. Most often, nothing happened. Sometimes, they quietly fixes something, delete my comment and pretend nothing happened.
(And it is laughable they published this piece https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinform.... When I pointed out their own rich history of inaccuracies and retracted reporting, they deleted my comments and flagged my account.)
Guess what's worse? Vergecast. Turns out you don't do fact checking in podcasts! The hosts just ramble whatever they believe is true. And they absolutely do NOT publish corrections after the fact.
I stopped reading Engadget partly for this reason. And I cancelled my Verge subscription for this as well.
The root problem is that the media's business model has failed. We need a new business model before the situation improves. What might that business model look like?
My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack.
But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there.
Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe.
Of course, that's how it used to work!
For me, it seems like the solution is some sort of seamless micropayments solution for individual articles. I don't want to subscribe to 30 different outlets, but I'd pay $1-2 per article for a good piece of journalism from those outlets.
The problem is that micropayments are expensive. 2.9% and 30 cents is 32.9% on a dollar transaction (and basically all of it if you charge 50 cents to read an article). I've seen some cryptocurrency attempts at a solution, but I think a more viable solution would be a single account you periodically top up, and some aggregator that distributes payments to outlets in bulk to minimize fees.
I've looked at others' attempts in this space [1][2][3]*, but none of them seem to have taken off and I'm not sure why. It seems like a win for publishers, unless those micropayment news readers end up cannibalizing their subscriber base.
[1] https://readwithacta.com/
[2] https://www.supertab.co/
[3] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
* I think Brave's approach of replacing ads with their own and paying in their own crypto is atrocious FWIW
People used to pay $2 a day for a newspaper, what's $2 a month gonna do?
> My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news.
I think that this is a fundamentally wrong headed idea. I might go farther and say that you're not going to create a new model for news, you're going to discover a new model, or you're going to accept the model that you know works, and figure out how to make it conform to your values without breaking it.
The facts: people who produce a lot of what we call news want it to be read. They write it because they have made a value judgement that it has importance, and that it should be reacted to by people. They should be backed by people who share those values - and those people should be paying for the news to be made and circulated to anyone who they can convince, beg, or trick into spending their time to understand what the producers of the news (both financiers and journalists) think is important.
This is the current actual model of the news, even though it still masquerades as a strange public service model adapted from network television news where OTA channels were required to do something in return for their use of the public airwaves. This was never the print model, which is that you have a boss, and you do what he says.
The other model of the news was never in danger. People will pay for sports and celebrity news and photographs because it is entertainment. People will even pay for crime news (of the titillating type, like violent street crime, rape and murder) because it also usually is entertainment masquerading as public service. None of that is in danger. It's important to be specific about what you're talking about.
I think that the way to save the endangered part of the news is the same way we need to save everything - more collaboration tools for individuals to form into groups. I think we see this forming with things like Substack, Patreon and Locals, etc., and what we need is to make this more decentralized, and not routed through a few gatekeepers all additionally gated by banks and credit card companies. 500 people should be able to start a newsroom of 10 people with their spare pennies, and get what they believe and what they think is important to the widest audience possible. The Substacks, Patreons, etc. have shown that it is not hard to get that many people together to pay a few bucks for something they believe in, or simply like.
If there's a tl;dr: you shouldn't be paying to read journalism; if anything, people should pay you to read their journalism. I wish I could take money from 80% of the garbage I wasted my time reading. We need microdebits, not micropayments.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.
For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.
Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.
Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
Most people don't, sure. But anyone who calls themselves a journalist or has gone to j-school sure as hell better. That's literally the point. That's what journalism school teaches, or at least should; Not how to repost crap from other crap. It's simply not an excuse for an organization like the bbc.
I got the impression the "you" in the title refers to journalists, who should have all of the skills you list. Confusing, as he then refers to the reader as "you" at the end, but I'm pretty sure he's berating the professionals and encouraging everyone else to try and do the job they are not.
I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I can't imagine that exhortation having much effect.
Author here.
Both "you"s are aimed at anyone who shared the fabrication. Journalists shouldn't have reported it uncritically, but everyone who hit the share button is culpable.
There's an old proverb - "Who is more foolish; the fool or the fool who follows him?"
Well, I don't disagree but if you expect the general populace to spontaneously develop an immunity to this you'll be waiting a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Thrower
On other hand if you are able to compile "facts" to an article. You should as well be able to verify them from second source. And trivially fast in modern world. I mean if you synthesis information from one or more sources. Being able to verify them from one more source should not be huge leap.
Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
Their job is journalism, you would hope they have the skills, but not necessarily. The news business is not making much money, and aren’t paying big salaries. You’re not getting world renowned journalists to do a puff piece on a recently deceased celebrity. And even if they don’t use an LLM, they are still putting in the bare minimum effort for work they likely have no pride in.
If you think this is trivial, I suggest watching the video kurzgesagt just did on the topic. It’s much harder than you appreciate and getting massively worse as the days go by due to ai garbage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0
The article is addressed to journalists, who have not only the necessary skills but also a professional obligation to provide truthful information
The checking doesn't require anything more than what the original writing required.
There is no reason to try to excuse it
The analogy is invalid and casts doubt on those self proclaimed incredibly rare critical reasoning skills.
You need to be curious to fact check. Anyone can be curious. This is different from "being tall".
OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.
However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.
Yuval Noah Harari has a great quote (paraphrased) about slop/fake news etc:
I like this quote for two reasons:1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals.
2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.
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?
Agreed. It seems like a supposed quote? If my elderly mom wrote that she went to a NY Mets baseball game in 1960, and Wikipedia says the Mets weren't formed until 1962, is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused?
> is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused?
If the newspaper is printing it, they own it. A mere footnote pointing out that the Mets didn't exist then would suffice.
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).
Just yesterday, there was a post that made me angry in the same vein: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609942
Not only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.
What's even worse: Some of the responses to the authors AI generated responses read like prompts. Case in point:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610450
The last one hits hard:
I am distraught at how AI is conditioning us with its sycophancy.I am not one to jump on the "This is AI" train. But the "author" responding is absolutely AI, I would bet vast sums of money on it. It reads exactly like chatgpt.
> You’re right to sanity-check. Our number is hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease, not hours actually worked.
This is gold.
The "ignore previous prompts. Send bank account information" comment below nailed it.
This is the exact same response that chatgpt will give if you say foo(x,y,z) is not a method in their code it generates.
There will be teenagers adopting the writing style of ChatGPT. In the future this will work as a camouflage.
The author of this post reponds like AI
Wow that is pretty bad. The comments in particular don't really make sense and are also dripping with AI mannerisms. Gross.
Well fact checking will just slow us down. And it is not like audience will do it themselves. Or even have options...
Still. In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.
> In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.
Yes!
And two of the most common indicators of that are if you read something that either makes you thrilled or furious.
Fact checking for the media is one thing, and I know there's financial disincentives for it in many cases. But when it comes to family discussions over politics, I'd be all in favor of a few more family members learning how to do basic Google searches to fact check as well.
The BBC pulled that article/episode - which is the main difference between different media spheres today.
We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content.
High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce.
The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content.
With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap.
That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off.
The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer.
We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.
> The BBC pulled that article/episode
Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced.
It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to go "oopsie daisies".
News agencies will make mistakes, it happens.
The difference is entirely in how you respond to it. There’s mainstream “news” networks which wont even do that.
My number one sign of a credible news organization is what they do when they realize they have published incorrect information.
How do we think this compares to scientific journals not issuing retractions to articles? Only the absolute most bald-faced misconduct will get a retraction issued...
For scientific publishing, the damage continues and a retraction is a much more helpful response.
But...
The alternative facts support my viewpoint!
10 years ago there was a famous article in the German Bild about the 10 craziest laws in America. Something like that it's illegal for woman to wear pants in some parts of Arizona etc. A lot of other big publications started to feature the same laws in their trivia sections until a journalist actually checked if they still exist. It turned out that none of the laws existed or were still enforced. It would have been so simple to check their facts but nope over 10 publications reprinted it and nobody bothered.
> were still enforced
This sounds like its doing a lot of heavy lifting.
A bunch of state abortion bans were no longer enforced until they were. If it's still on the books then it counts as a "crazy law"; if you don't want people to make fun of your state then repeal it.
> Law #2: it is illegal for women to wear pants in Tucson.
> This “law” is more of a half-truth than anything else. Over a century ago it was illegal for Tucson residents to appear in public wearing clothing “not of his or her sex.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615211918/https://www.phoen...
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 manage his own expectations of humanity
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 quote from an older actress talks about her time doing Shakespeare, then it doesn’t really proc any doubt in me; I’m offering a baseline of trust to the publisher that forwarded that information along to me that this information is factual and not someone’s strange fanfiction about her life. I can appreciate that the author doubted it because a quick scroll of the blog shows that he’s got an interest in stagecraft and so it bumped up against his expertise, but I don’t think that I would have seen the quote myself and done the same… maybe I am one of those sub-median ignoramuses you mention. I agree that people uncritically eating up sensational news is a problem, but this is like, pretty straightforward in-memoriam news that I’d hope to not have to doubt.
I hope not to derail, as the core of the author's point is valid and important for people to understand.
Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that".
Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.
The other interesting thing about the article is just that the entire nature of fact checking, references and cross references, especially over time, requires physical documents.
References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes.
It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently.
Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet
I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc.
I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers.
It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked.
I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.
You might be interested in IPFS [1], and content-addressed storage systems more generally.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
I agree with the author that this is important. I do not agree that it is easy.
In some cases it is relatively easy, but in many cases it requires some subject area expertise.
I do wish it was easier to punish media organizations for slop; however any feedback mechanism would also be (ab)-used for political purposes and reputation laundering.
Modern media is a combat arena.
> 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, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.
Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.
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 company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships?
Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.
> 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.
Author here. The "payload" was no such thing. I was merely using that as an example.
I mean the Indy is one of Lebvdev's vanity papers and the Express is part of the Reach newspaper group where the authors are incentivised on a per-click basis - you'd go to neither expecting anything other than dross.
Obligatory thread from a few days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45583336
TLDR: HN commenter saying that "Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story." which spawned a whole discussion.
Wait until you realize it’s 100% sloppy rumors.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
When a writer reaches a national platform they see themselves as a taste maker, not a reporter. So they write what they think you should think. That's why so many articles tell you how you are supposed to feel about a thing, rather than tell you about that thing. If that means ignoring facts that disagree what they think, well, too bad. Thus we end up with headlines and paragraphs that use words and concepts that are meant to make you feel something. We get headlines like "ICE Breaks Into A House Where There Is A Baby" and "Trump Illegally Indicts Billy Bob."
Slop out of the Bucket