Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of Hoax News
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reporter Luke O'Neil writes that 2013 was journalism's year of bungles: the New Jersey waitress who received a homophobic comment on the receipt from a party she had served; Samsung paying Apple $1 billion in nickels; former NSA chief Michael Hayden's assassination; #CutForBieber; Nelson Mandela's death pic; that eagle snatching a child off the ground on YouTube; Jimmy Kimmel's 'twerk fail' video; and Sarah Palin taking a job with Al-Jazeera America (an obviously satirical story that even suckered in The Washington Post). All these stories had one thing in common: They seemed too tidily packaged, too neat, 'too good to check,' as they used to say, to actually be true. 'Any number of reporters or editors at any of the hundreds of sites that posted these Platonic ideals of shareability could've told you that they smelled, but in the ongoing decimation of the publishing industry, fact-checking has been outsourced to the readers,' writes O'Neil. 'This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Readers are gullible, the media is feckless, garbage is circulated around, and everyone goes to bed happy and fed.' O'Neil says that the stories he's written this year that took the least amount of time and effort usually did the most traffic while his more in-depth, reported pieces didn't stand a chance against riffs on things predestined to go viral. That's the secret that Upworthy, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, Viral Nova, and their dozens of knockoffs have figured out: You don't need to write anymore—just write a good headline and point. 'As Big Viral gets bigger, traditional media organizations are scrambling to keep pace,' concludes O'Neil. 'We the media have betrayed your trust, and the general public has taken our self-sanctioned lowering of standards as tacit permission to lower their own.'"
... and the solution:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73_ds1xQmD4
When are people going to start demanding Authority AND Accountability instead of sound-bite entertainment?
--
Success is not only the destination (end-goal) but also involves the journey (of hard word along the way.)
Did you see the one in the paper the other day about the supposed "Piltdown Man"? I knew it was a hoax right away, but those papers kept hyping it. All this damn modern techno-web stuff is bringing down the integrity of journalism.
-- MyLongNickname
and the cost of publishing fake news is also zero. In the early days of the web people thought that it would allow the truth to be easily discovered and that lies couldn't live long. The problem today is that there is no much information available that determining truth is extremely difficult - the noise is so high that a real signal is often lost. I wonder if in the future the amount of information is large enough that a truth analyzer could be built to assist in calculating a truth likeliness value for any given article.
"That's the secret that Upworthy, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, Viral Nova, and their dozens of knockoffs have figured out: You don't need to write anymore—just write a good headline and point."
So, like Slashdot then?
Honestly, this seems like a natural consequence of the attempt of the news to be more "relevant and entertaining" and the need to compete with other varieties of the media, as well as the dislike of people to follow real, objective news (as opposed to news which satisfies their own cognitive biases). I've heard quite a few people express that the best places to get real news (outside of maybe the weather, and even that is getting goofy, with the Weather Channel naming snowstorms) is the foreign press, where they seem to be able to have more of a dividing line between what is actual news, and what is tabloid journalism.
The old way was that formal news could be trusted to a certain extent. Now we see that this isn't true. It is too late for the old people who can't learn new tricks, just like the passing generation that can't program their VCRs. (Yes, I date myself with that comparison.) The kids will grow up knowing to check things themselves. As a side note, I noticed just yesterday that Facebook sometimes has the Snopes article listed as a 'suggested link' just below someone's repost of a hoax link!
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Correction for TFS: Readers are cheap, the media is understaffed.
All of this just goes to show that you get the news that you pay for. If you're not paying for your news, not only are you not the real customer, but you're not offering any kind of signal to the writer and publisher that rewards them for quality.
Instead you're probably drawing your news from the 24 hour news cycle, which is the epitome of low quality TFA discusses. The 24 hour cycle offers no time for quality, and being entirely advertising based means that it trends towards sensationalism in order to keep viewers watching (and the ad dollars flowing in). Blogs for that matter aren't any better for largely the same reason, as they have the same instant-publishing goals and are equally prone to sensationalism.
Real news takes time and money. Time to do research, and money to pay for staff and travel to go do that research. If the public won't pay for that, then the public won't get real news. It's as simple as that.
Which is why it's all the more important to support newspapers, which are by and large the last bastion of quality reporting and research. They aren't perfect, but they're all that's left. If you care about the news then the single best thing you can do to help quality journalism thrive is to go buy your local paper (yes, buy; not read for free on their website). Only by giving the journalists in your community a paycheck, some time, and a bit of trust, will you get quality journalism. Otherwise if you aren't paying for your news, you're getting the news that you pay for.
storm typers? paid poster pickens might know? just don't call it cleansing
Conan O'Brien had a story that reported a large number of local news stations using the same canned script for reporting.
" It's OK, you can admit it, if you bought an item, or two, or ten for yourself. "
This is not any attempt at being original, or trying to do something distinct for yourself or your station.
I would say it is ok to send a film crew to your local mall, and actually interview people about their holiday plans. This is original reporting. It may be boring, but at least it involves some work.
The existing media outlets just want to take something conviently packaged and report it as news, this lends itself to just reporting something without giving any actual thought.
So really there is no such thing as hoax news - just stories that aren't true. However, since hardly any of the reported news has any effect on the people watching it - and even less of it is something they could do anything about: whether they know about it, or not - it's mostly irrelevant what gets reported.
That appears to be the opinions of the news broadcasters. The object is not so much to inform, but to get the proportion of the population that still believes in "news" (which is diminishing every day as stories become more trivial and inconsequential) to watch the advertisements before, during and after the show. And it is a show.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Nope. There's always been bollocks on the news. That's kind of why a lot of people totally ignore it.
Fact is, if I don't give a shit if celebrity X slept with celebrity Y, or happens to be gay, then it doesn't matter if the story is true or not... I won't read the story. The people who do hardly care if it's true or not.
But this isn't "new". Most of the stuff you learned at school is absolute tripe. History is extremely revisionist. And most of the stuff that's on the news is so much bollocks that it doesn't matter. Those with a brain will be ignoring it *because* it's on the news, those without one will seek it out to consume it even if it's not on the news. Confirmation bias and all that.
Hence why we have one celebrity taking websites and papers to court at the moment because he happens to share a real name with a convicted paedophile. I have had friends say it was him, though. They don't care enough to research even when the websites/papers involved are foreign and the news story in my country is about how he's taking them to court for mis-attributing the crime to himself.
If you're stupid enough to live your life by news, then you're going to fall into this. You've expected them (but don't really care about it) to research their facts. You blindly believe them. It doesn't matter if you read the Sunday Sport (where the items revolve around aliens in the Royal Family and Elvis regenerating) or the The Sunday Times (where the items revolve around what business is expect to make $10bn when it floats next week on the basis of zero profit so far). All that changes is the area, the scale, and the reputation.
In the UK, we have had one paper shut down for hacking into celebrities voicemail. People protested and sales dropped. The next week, that paper shut down and the owners opened a new one with the same staff but a different name. Almost immediately everyone bought into it and it replaced the other paper. Nobody CARES enough to actually bother about them being criminal liars.
People do not watch the news to see the truth. They watch the news to have something to gossip about with other people who also watched the news. For centuries, it's been like that, and yet people still think you can judge a person by what *KIND* of newspaper they read.
Sorry to tell you, but the news is EVEN MORE unreliable that my friend's Facebook posts... and today they include someone who's trying to tell me that because the New Year starts with a New Moon this is a) unusual (last happened 19 years ago! Odd, on a 28-day cycle, that it even happens that often, to be honest...), b) important or c) going to make any difference at all. Another has reposted a fake "lucky money" satirical rip-off of those posts that say if you repost it you will find money (and hasn't even noticed that "fungus shoe" isn't actually feng shui).
Yet others are trying to tell me that having 5 Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays in a month is something that only happens every 823 years (er, actually, no - it happens nearly every year).
And I honestly consider these people more reliable than the news. Hell, I consider the "QI" game show more reliable than many popular science outlets, even when it has admitted to having flaws in its answers (and actually contradicts its own answers).
News has always been bollocks. The fact that professional outlets are falling for OTHER'S crap stories is the news here, rather than the crap they make up themselves.
BBC has just announced that an alien ship has just landed on Sochi winter olympics site.
http://www.bbc.com/
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
It's not. It's the evolution of journalism in the information age, unfortunately. Fox News just seems to embrace it more than most.
30 years ago, people bought newspapers to get their news and opinion in a portable convenient format. Now, people get push notifications of things happening half way around the world, minutes after they happen. You can't open a web browser without getting "opinion."
In the old days, reporters would fact check everything because their editors would bury them in some county bureau if they got taken on a story, especially if getting taken meant other newspapers could report on them getting took. Printing a correction would be ducked at any opportunity. Now, they just take the story off the web site and it vanishes from public consciousness, and they just print the newspaper from what remains on the web after a few hours of vetting by the readership for what is real.
If you fact check, you can't beat your competition to the story. And the news business is all about being first and exclusive to report.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This is evident in more than journalism. It is evident everywhere. Quite simply, we cannot rule ourselves which in this case means throttling back to a point where we can cope with the deluge of stimulus that technology has pressed upon us. As far as I can tell, the quality of goods and services across the board has gone down. Of course I'm looking at it from the bottom of the dung pile, so I expect for the time being, the elites are still getting some pretty good stuff. The WalMart crowd is getting stuff that used to go only to third world countries. Remember this: The only advantage the elites have is that they will be the last to starve.
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
Perhaps our tidy little lives are less likely to experience upset if we only read or listen to what we already agree with.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I tend to think it's just another symptom of the Race To The Bottom.
Cut, cut, cut, then cut some more. And when there's nobody left to do the work you cut yet again.
The Bottom Line looks good – for a while. The CXOs get their bonuses – and leave. Five years from now what'll be left?
Fox News was established to give the Conservative (actually pro-corporate) point of view without fact checking. It's not an accident that this shift started 30 years ago, when the media was deregulated by the Reagan administration. It used to be that TV and radio companies (being totally dependent on the government regulation of their bandwidth via the FCC) would be obligated to provide the news as a public service even if it ran at a loss. It was allowed to become corporatized to turn a profit, at the expense of credibility.
Fox news is no different than the liberal media.
They just get judged by a difference standard.
If you're paying attention you should be disgusted with all of them.
When programming that celebrates anti-intellectualism is the hottest thing on teevee (I'm looking at you, Duck Dynasty fans), it should come as no surprise at all that quality journalism is not something that sponsors are interested in buying. Bread and circuses...
Even if there was such a thing as good, accurate, impartial journalism it would be utterly wasted on 99% of the population.
Even when a big scandal like Snowden/NSA, the IRS hit list, or Fast and Furious do get newsplay, the average person is merely annoyed at having their up to the minute live coverage of NASCAR or the Kardashians interrupted.
People are idiots.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
In the old days, reporters would fact check everything
Did you "fact check" this assertion? I doubt it. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the news in the "good ole' days" was any more accurate than it is today, and plenty of reason to believe that it was not. What has changed, is that today the errors are more likely to be exposed.
slashdot is also a good example of where are things heading
People have so much fun with all the purposeful news pranks on April Fools Day that the major news outlets decided to do it year round. See, the explanation was simple after all.
This phenomenon is not new. The signal to noise ratio has been poor for millennia. I recall an adage: "Believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see." The Internet has merely made this truth more apparent.
If you think about it, the Internet might actually give us an advantage over our ancestors in this regard--fact-checking and cross-referencing are easier now than ever before.
Of course, none of that excuses charlatan media corporations that publish bullshit stories in order to generate hits.
On the other hand, they are only tarnishing their own credibility, and if they continue to do so they will eventually be viewed as sleazy tabloids. And if that's the image they want to project, there isn't much we can do about it. Some people like that stuff.
The stuff from this year is nothing. The media has been running a hoax that Ronald Reagan called someone a "welfare queen" when he never used the term. Even better, Jet did a two page feature on the woman in question two years before Reagan mentioned the welfare fraudster, and they called her a "Welfare Queen!" BTW, the woman was white in the 1930 and 1940 census.
See the Ronald Reagan "welfare queen" post above. To them, "fact check" means truthieness that advances a script.
WHAT "liberal media"? They're ALL pro-corporate. You're the one not paying attention.
Fox news is no different than the liberal media.
They just get judged by a difference standard.
If you're paying attention you should be disgusted with all of them.
"Liberal Media".
Did you fact-check the existence of this so-called "Liberal Media"?
And more rapidly perpetuated. And more easily forgiven.
It was considered scandalous if a newspaper reported something that wasn't factual. Prestige newspapers still won't print anything that wasn't verified, and then work hard to regain their credibility when they find out one of their staff falsified the report. The reputation of the paper is valuable and affect subscriptions. Compare that to blogs that appear and disappear constantly with very little credibility to lose in the first place, or with services like buzzfeed that are geared towards click-bait and not actual news.
You want citations? Look up Jayson Blair, AP fires reporter and editor over McAuliffe, and many other examples are available from a simple Google search
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
As the article states, this sort of ridicule or fear of it used to come primarily from competitors. Some volume of ridicule has likely always came from satire entertainment. As has been eluded to elsewhere in the comments, the news is now basically a memory hole, it's goal is not to spread knowledge and awareness of reality, it's main goal is short term revenue. As a memory hole it no longer has a use for introspection. That leaves satire and other forms of comedy to become the primary source of ridicule. There may be something bigger to this; as news pushes into entertainment it seems appropriate that long-standing lines of entertainment would push back hard.
First my news became entertainment, then opinion masquerading as fact, then didn't even care to hide that it was just opinion, and now it doesn't even care at all.
Why should I even bother with news outfits if I have to do as much work with them as I do with random opinionated news reports online?
It's such a shame that journalism has been buried under this mountain of shit. I doubt it will ever recover its prestige.
For years, traditional news outlets have headed in the direction of airing or printing stories designed solely to elicit a reaction from the audience. The pattern has become, 1) Say something provacative. 2) Invite a reaction (tell us what YOU think). It's all designed to sell more ads. What is happening now is the logical, inevitable conclusion of this pattern. The old saying still appies, however. If something is too good to be true, it probably isn't. And I would extend that to say that if something is too bad to be true, it probably isn't. It will get worse before it gets better. After years of being essentially lied to from every direction we will, out of desperation, start to believe only what we want to believe, and assume that everything else is a lie.
Proverbs 21:19
...you have morons for Facebook friends.
Seriously? Did you just attempt to move the goal posts when my reply was to your assertion that fact checking wasn't being done in the "good ole' days"?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Apparently you missed the chapter in your high school history class on yellow journalism and the rise of it in the late 19th to early 20th century. I'll forgive you for not knowing that Ben Franklin frequently wrote false editorials and gossip pieces to sell his newspapers as well.
I find it kind of hillarious that an article talking about the rise and proliferation of bogus / clickbait headlines is being posted on slashdot of all things. I had sort of assumed that slashdot was where rising clickbait article writers came to cut their chops before venturing off into the blogosphere.
Not fair. You asked for proof that things used to be better, that people used to care more about accuracy, and you were answered. It is *sad* that the examples are from a decade or more ago.
"our self-sanctioned lowering of standards as tacit permission to lower their own"
Yep. We have come quite the ways. A lot of people used to laugh pretty hard at those conspiracy theorists talking about the hidden hand and pulling strings but here it is, summed up as a fairly loud example about how gullible and stupid we really are.
I'm also curous what "Liberal Media" outlets exist. PBS or my super-local news station are the most "liberal" stations I've seen... I think they are closer to Independents (which, actually, I prefer), but it would be nice to get a polar to Faux news on some stories, as opposed to a completely middle of the road story to combat a purely one-party "opinion piece" (since, it really can't be called a journalist news article anymore.. They cite sources of opinion quotes but never of scientific data...)
When Dan Rather replaced a story criticizing the war in Iraq with an even better story criticizing George Bush just two months before the 2004 elections he was so excited with the documents that he overlooked what everyone saw as obvious forgeries. He later stated that even though the documents were clearly fake he was sure that the story based on them was true.
"Yellow journalism" was about politically and socially slanted news with a deliberate intent. OP is talking about people just plain getting things wrong and nobody caring.
The Wall Street Journal is pro-business. Well, yeah, it's *named* for the center of financial business, so it's *honestly* presenting a particular editorial viewpoint. One can accept and work with that. The problem is taking every rumor and first report and rebroadcasting them as "fact". History - like, a few hours later - may well explain why people got things wrong at first impression, and nobody can blame first reporters for having a narrow local perspective on whatever they can see from where they happen to be standing, and those first reports may well be crucial in rousing an alarm; but wrong is wrong, and "alarm reports" are not what news organizations used to mean by "reports from the scene" or "facts on the ground".
This is not at all suggesting we should ignore crowdsourced information. Without dashcams and other random sources, we would have missed video of asteroids and air crashes and all sorts of news. But openness to accepting information from more sources needs *more* editing and selectivity, not less, because of the lowered average quality and reliability.
The decline of traditional journalism using multiple sources and editors is the other side of this coin. Watch the movie All the Presidents Men for how they did it in the classic days of journalism. They could not print a story without a second source, even if it was a secret source like Deep Throat. These days, half of tweeted article turn out wrong, een if they are distributed much faster. Basically I wat to see it in the NY Times or Washington Post before I believe something.
Except that the "Local" paper will never have the budget to tackle big stories. Reporters may be real journalists with the best intentions, they may be able to hit local issues which impact your life, but they can't get to DC to investigate the NSA which has more impact on your life than city council allowing a Hooters to be built.
Large cities used to be able to do this to some degree. New York and Washington DC papers were right there, so there was no need to pump money into travel. For other "Newspapers" the "Big" issues required National support.
Rehashing the obvious here, but to make sure there is no confusion the rehash is not bad in my opinion. What we have seen in the last 10 years is the complete take over of all national media. NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, and all of their variants all work for the same people, and it's not the average citizen. They all produce the same AP stories and FUD. Enough people distrust them that ratings have plummeted and Blog sites have made huge leaps in readership. Sites like Infowars, Mother Jones, Drudge Report, and Natural News have exploded. Sure, some of their articles are biased just as bad as "Main Stream Media" in the opposite direction, but it gives an alternative that "may" be closer to what people see as true. For example, we see the down side of the 2nd amendment on MSM and the upside on alternative sites. Alex Jones appearing on Piers Morgan's show as a blockbuster event for both outlets (more akin to Jerry Springer than "News")
Whistle Blowers from numerous large News Papers have told us that they have been taken over as well, in terms of what they can and can't report about. The same monopolization of media with Broadcast News happened with all the large papers.
In reality, we need to figure out how to get back major stations and break the monopolies. Supporting local is a start of that, as long as you can keep them from being taken over when they get too large. Petitioning for legal action to break the monopolies is another step.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You do realize that journalism matured after spanish-american war and that Pultizer turned around his newspaper to where it was the most respected newspaper at the time of his death in 1911. I'll forgive you for thinking that just because something was prevalent once it still holds true today.
Hoax News isn't all that bad to me. What really grinds my gears are the Troll News sites. Start with The Onion, then make nothing but "news" posts designed to incite the demographic & political leaning of your choice. Most of them try very hard to hide that they are parody sites.
It's just evil. They are getting clicks & advertising hits by trolling people, most of whom never catch on. I don't get why making a mockery of Grandma & getting her worked up over fake posts about the pope would be a good idea...
I take it you have never seen MSNBC then. MSNBC is to further to the left (their motto is lean forward for god sake) than even fox does to the right and thats saying something. Everything I see on MSNBC is race baiting or calling out fox for XYZ, there is no actual news being reported its just all attacks on fox for the most part
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
> They seemed too tidily packaged, too neat, 'too good to check,' as they used to say, to actually be true.
I think in some cases, that the editors really wanted the stories to be true plays a part. It's not difficult to create fake news that the major news outlets will carry -- just tell them what they want to hear.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And you're part of the problem.
The obsessive focus of the political establishment on bogeymen like Fox News shows how shallow your objectives are. It's a fact of life that cable news is mostly entertainment. Ignoring the sensationalism and bias that occurs at MSNBC and CNN to focus on Fox News is dishonest and unproductive.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Sad but true. Even the New York Times is getting caught running bogus stories or giving favorable treatment to their side of the political spectrum on a pretty regular basis these days.
This is the problem of the left: they think the truth has a political bias.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You can't believe anything that comes out of the MSM news outlets, be it Faux New, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC etc.. The ONLY news outlets you can half way believe are the alternative news media. The MSM news outlets are ALL controlled by corporate interests and all put either a far right or far left spin on EVERYTHING!!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
No, you are the one who is not. And for the record, liberal is NOT "anti-corporate" nor has it ever been - MPAA comes to mind. . It is mainly big government, but has always had it's hand in the corporate cookie dish.
The mainstream media are quite liberal in that they often suppress stories that might possibly make the left look bad, except when it's so obvious there's no chance of hiding it, like the plethora of Obama scandals or stuff like Anthony Weiner. Or they, like NBC, decide to unethically edit a 9-11 tape to deliberately skew the public's perception to pursue their class division agenda. Fox has never stooped to that kind of tampering. If you can't see that MSNBC (for another example) is screaming liberal, with the likes of Rachel Maddow and Christ Matthews, you're just trolling.
Wow, they just caught on to this? Drew's had time to prove the point, write a book about it, and make a big wad of cash off it!
Rumors that he blew all the money on Heineken, Maker's Mark and hookers should be considered spurious, however.
--Fire up the clue combine and harvest a clue!
--Intrope
OH here go, the obligatory slashdot stab at Fox , while ignoring the gross omissions, incompetencies and even lies of the other news outlets, caught redhanded editing tapes and pushing false information (Dan Rather). Seriously? If you're going to call out Fox, you have to call out NBC, CBS, and MSNBC as well. Or is that they just agree with your biased agenda?
They're ~all~ biased, Sherlock.
I just read the Onion, then I have no worries about whether a story is true or not. On a more serious note, there are people that care about factual news, will they pay for fact checking? It seems like fact checking is becoming its own industry separate from journalism. (e.g. snopes.com). I predict a haves/have not split for factual information coming.
You misspelled Fox News
Thanks for trolling! Saw the headlines, KNEW someone would jump on Fox. I gave up on all "talking heads" version of televised news about 2 years ago. I'm conservative (NOT to be confused with Republicans). I believe everyone should be treated EQUALLY, not one group elevated above another. I do not believe in political correctness, I do have faith, but I do not berate those that don't. I believe the government meddles too much into the lives of people. I believe it is good that government helps those that, for whatever reason, have fallen on hard times, but I believe those that are capable of working, should work. I think it is good that we allow people to immigrate to this country, to broaden our country, but, believe those that sneak across, should be sent back until such time that they come across legally. I believe that the "nation building" started during Korea, Iran, Vietnam, and through Iraq & Afghanistan, should STOP. I believe that that countries should defend themselves. I believe that unless one of our embassies is attacked, if an INTERNAL struggle in a country begins it is NONE of our business. As far as I'm concerned, WW2 should have been the last major war we were involved in, until Kuwait asked for our help in 1991. After it was over, ALL of our troops should have been brought back, as with the ones still stationed in Japan & Germany. I believe all of our elected representatives, including the president should adhere to the Constitution, period! As with any 24/7 so called news operation, Fox, MSNBC has a dedicated news program, with the rest of the time being filled with OPINION shows. THAT is the difference. I might watch a video clip of a NEWS show, but do not watch those opinion shows. They are always biased, and, set up in such a way, to try to force someone into saying something that will make a juicy 30 second sound bite. Both conservative leaning and liberal leading news organizations flood the world with their versions of news. Carefully editing sound bites, carefully wording stories, to drive opinion. As was said many decades ago...it's what they DON'T put in the papers, that speaks volumes.
I wish people would just shut up about those three altogether. We all know they're all three screwy; either post solutions or stfu /rant
30 years from now, who will remember these? Spaghetti Tree (1957) will live on for generations.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...by Lara Logan . But I suppose that would be rude.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
How would you be able to tell?
30 years ago, I was quoted in a newspaper. The words in quotes were not mine, despite me talking directly to the author while she was holding a pen and pad. The substance wasn't far off, but lost all the nuance in my words.
Go grab a paper from 30 years ago. Find a topic you are well-versed in. Read an article about it. You'll find they are way-off and more often than not, simply wrong. Now apply that accuracy to the rest of the paper.
The real reason it's a problem now, is that people hear about it. I'd never heard of the NJ waitress with the anti-gay receipt until this article. In the old days, nobody would have. The hoaxes existed, but were all local, and the majors didn't bother to pickup up the smaller stories that are so great for hoaxes today.
Learn to love Alaska
Fox news was established to cater to a market that wasn't being met by a person willing to meet it. The cable news at the time came in two flavors, CNN and CNN headline news both of which were owned by Ted Turner. Ted Turner is a billionaire corporate mongrel by the way, but he is a very liberal corporate mongrel (he was married to Jane Fonda for years). The result was that CNN reflected his political views and had a great number of disenfranchised viewers.
Murdoch had already built up a media empire in other parts of the world and saw the bias in the reporting and gladly exploited it by catering to a conservative viewpoint. You'll want to do some research on your basics, because conservative is not the same thing as pro-corporate or republican. Many very large corporations (e.g. Apple) publicly espouse views that are very much not in line with conservative dogma.
Not a conservative or republican or a Fox news fan, but this revisionist history stuff is as bad as the stuff that Fox is accused of at times.
because a lot of people give the mass media way too much credibility.
No, you are the one who is not. And for the record, liberal is NOT "anti-corporate" nor has it ever been - MPAA comes to mind. . It is mainly big government, but has always had it's hand in the corporate cookie dish.
The mainstream media are quite liberal in that they often suppress stories that might possibly make the left look bad, except when it's so obvious there's no chance of hiding it, like the plethora of Obama scandals or stuff like Anthony Weiner. Or they, like NBC, decide to unethically edit a 9-11 tape to deliberately skew the public's perception to pursue their class division agenda. Fox has never stooped to that kind of tampering.
If you can't see that MSNBC (for another example) is screaming liberal, with the likes of Rachel Maddow and Christ Matthews, you're just trolling.
You mean like Fox showing the videos on Acorn over and over which, it turns out, were heavily doctored to create an absolutely false picture? Seriously, you cannot watch Fox News for more than 5 minutes without spotting, if not an outright lie, then a severe twisting and misrepresenting of the facts in order to pursue their own right wing agenda. Read the banner at the bottom, you'll spot treasures like "20,000 U.S. Marines in Afghanistan fighting 200,000 terrorists" (one I particularly remember from the Bush years) and such. Not to mention such nonsense as the "War on Christmas".
Yellow journalism is sensationalist journalism. It is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-yellow-journalism.htm
As I remember hearing in a journalism conference once upon a time: Noteworthy-Entertainment-With-Substance
This has now apparently morphed into: Narcissistic-Enterprise-With-Sarcasm
Sad, as journalism used to be a fun endeavor. You had to juggle 3 things, your sponsors, your subscribers, and your conscience to produce the best product you can. Now there are no subscribers and the advertising revenue are supplied by 3rd parties in bulk (e.g., adwords, and similar platforms) so you are left with only the conscience of the publisher which is the most susceptible to human failing...
Note that in the news there was never objective truth (or so journalism professors tell us). The point of news was always entertainment. The goal of a journalist is to produce information of substance. Of course if the facts are wrong, that isn't substance, so fact checking is always important, but it's important to remember that news being limited in time and duration is always a lie-by-omission.
When people talk about News they often confuse it with Features. Features are the heavily researched reporting that is done in a longer time cycle. News has always been on a short cycle.
Could you point to documentation of this "liberal media", as opposed to right-wing opinion?
In the late nineties, and I have the newspaper clipping somewhere around my desk at home, a reporter did an actual survey: they excluded overtly political media like Mother Jones and US News and World Report, but counted the columnists in the mainstream media. Of what I think was 62, 3 were self-proclaimed "liberal", one or two self-procaimed "moderate", and 57 were self-proclaimed "conservative".
As an exercise for the student, I suggest you go through all the self-proclaimed "news" shows (excluding, for example, Jon Stewart and Colbert), and report on the numbers. Oh, and do mention which stations - you'll need to also exclude public access channels.
For extra credit, name one self-proclaimed socialist on the air, anywhere, as a regular.
mark
Pravda on the Hudson (the New York Times) has been around since before the Civil War. Now, admittedly, they only been into hoaxing for the last 80 or so years, but that's hardly a "Rise".
While Ted Turner is indeed liberal, CNN when he owned it wasn't an outright liberal viewpoint news outlet like Fox News is to conservative biased news today. CNN, especially during the time period of the first Iraq War, was doing an outstanding job when compared to the major three networks at the time. Where are these disenfranchised CNN viewers from then? I know there are plenty of them now as CNN has turned into a sensationalized shitstorm not worth watching, but to compare the CNN of Ted Turner days versus Murdoch's Fox News of today isn't fair at all. The fact that Turner is liberal is irrelevant. He did not exploit political fundamentalism and fanaticism like Murdoch did, and perfect to an art.
According to conservatives, anything that isn't Fox News or the 90% of AM talk radio is "liberal media" :-) It's also called "mainstream media", despite Fox having the highest watched news network.
I suggest anyone go through Slashdot comments and discover how often some idiot cites Stewart or Colbert when making an argument.
You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.
- Randolf Hearst
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Have you ever been on the site of a news story, and then gone home and watched the reports? Perhaps "Fox News" is worse than ABC, NBC, CBS, etc., or your local paper. I don't know. I stopped watching all of them after I learned to what extent the "news" portrayed was fictional. I'd rather trust YouTube (which I also don't trust, but which I haven't actually caught lying to me, possibly *because* I don't watch it).
Mind you, I'm not even talking about "news" processed for political purposes. I'm sure that happens, but I'm talking about things like the coverage of a fire. The times I could check it wais severely processed to increase it's entertainment value. This was done to the extent that what actually happened basically got lost in the presentation. (In the particular cases that I observed, I can't really say the images were doctored rather than carefully selected, but the effect was the same.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
When either colbert or stewart shows video of (generally) politicians contradicting themselves, i would say it is fair game for quoting. They are really good at digging up footage like that.
Quoting the monologues, yeah, that is a stretch.
We can add all Global Warming and Climate Change stories to the hoax news. We can also add "If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor" to the list of hoax news stories. And it's a long list.
I keep hearing people bitching about this Benghazi thing. It's been a while, but I still have no idea what all the controversy is about. My understanding is that our embassy got attacked, and the administration came out with one explanation for why it happened, but it turns out that there was another, better explanation in hindsight. Assuming that's correct, what's the cause for all the outrage? Why are people still muttering about impeaching Obama over this issue?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Sounds like a Portlandia Skit.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
A portion of the problem is that the quantity of news which is reported by "outlets" has dramatically increased in our modern era. We are flooded with a perpetual onslaught of new information from every corner of creation. And honestly, most of it isn't worth checking. What is worth checking? Stories that will ruin your reputation. Stories that might go viral and cripple your ability to report further. Know what's not? "5 Things you Need to Know about Cheese Curd" "How men need to step up their role in feminism" "The top 10 bimbos of 2013" That is 90% of the "news" we now get (and what % of stats are made up?)
Are we (those of us who are older than the internet) guilty of "rose coloured glass"ing it when we remember that the news used to be better?
Maybe it never was, and we were just blind to the problems back then...
Not fair. You asked for proof that things used to be better, that people used to care more about accuracy, and you were answered. It is *sad* that the examples are from a decade or more ago.
Oops. Sorry, I misunderstood. Jayson Blair authored article after article of fabricated nonsense for a decade, while receiving regular promotions and awards. I foolishly thought the GPP was using him as a negative example, of the system failing, not as a shining example of good-old-fact-checking journalism during its glory days. What could I have been thinking!
" The cable news at the time came in two flavors, CNN and CNN"
you are seriously equating fox with cnn and comparing them as two "news" outlets with opposing slants? Nice try but 15 hours of fox programming is not even news, it's editorial/opinion by fox's own addmission.
"In an interview, Mr. Clemente suggested that there was an element of âoeshoot the messengerâ in the back and forth. âoeSometimes itâ(TM)s actually helpful to have an organization or a person that you can go up against for whatever reason,â he said.
Related
Media Decoder: Axelrod and Ailes Meet, but Details Are Few
The Media Equation: The Battle Between the White House and Fox News (October 18, 2009)
Times Topics: News Corporation
Fox argues that its news hours â" 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays â" are objective. The channel has taken pains recently to highlight its news programs, including the two hours led by Shepard Smith, its chief news anchor. And its daytime newscasts draw more viewers than CNN or MSNBCâ(TM)s prime-time programs.
âoeThe average consumer certainly knows the difference between the A section of the newspaper and the editorial page,â Mr. Clemente said."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/business/media/12fox.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=2&adxnnlx=1388448032-OBHzGQcDWN2cqwKwhPltIA
One would have to wonder why the false reporting on the Zimmerman V's Marten trial is not listed in this article.
It's not revisionist history if there are primary sources and first hand accounts stating the pro-corporate anti-fact checking was the goal of Fox News founder Roger Ailes. It's not an accident that the average Fox News fan is less informed than people that don't watch any news at all, it is on purpose. Fox news may be the worst, but most media outlets have the pro-corporate bias, since that is who owns them and pays the bills.
Ummm . . . this is true. I was thinking of the degree of reaction once the fabrications were discovered, as contrasted with the total lack of retraction or correction for total nonsense that happens today. Your point that he *did* get away with it for a long time sort of casts a pall on that.
Nah its just a fact that right wing bullshit makes more money than left wing bullshit. It just sells better.
Fox News was established to give the Conservative (actually pro-corporate) point of view without fact checking. It's not an accident that this shift started 30 years ago, when the media was deregulated by the Reagan administration. It used to be that TV and radio companies (being totally dependent on the government regulation of their bandwidth via the FCC) would be obligated to provide the news as a public service even if it ran at a loss. It was allowed to become corporatized to turn a profit, at the expense of credibility.
That is exactly the problem with the press/media, blogs are becoming like this now, lets report nothing but bullshit, or randomly and idiotically report false facts instead of getting the full story. Blogs, it would be about getting people to the site, were of course there are advertisements, which (little sarcastic) make them money. What cracks me up about people that watch F-ucking Ox-ymoron news and the like, is they're no better then the "liberal" media at reporting anything remotely truthful. The entire media is a hoax, so the Headline of this article is also kind off an oxymoron..
This is the problem with extreme right. They think there is a major left winged media left in existence in modern West.
I was thinking of the degree of reaction once the fabrications were discovered
The reactions are not really comparable, because the incidents were not the same. Jayson Blair was a professional journalist who intentionally fabricated stories. That is not quite the same as getting suckered by a hoaxster. Both result in bad journalism, but even today I would expect a much stronger reaction to intentional deceit rather than to simple laziness.
Coming from an ex-reporter, that Esquire piece is the best, most concise summation of everything wrong with the state of journalism today that I've ever read. The only thing that would make it better is if it had come "from the ouroboros-of-shit dept."
... gets hitched and laid after being a 40 years old virgin. See http://aqfl.net/ for the details. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
... when The Onion becomes more and more believable.
You can begin by resensitize yourself to advertising fallacies. It turns out that the greatest source of deception is business, and that dulls our razor to cut through other forms of bull-shit. The specialized cable news channels with their propaganda are only an outgrowth of the numbing effect of advertising from mass media on the watchdog of the mind.
Yes, and go back to reading books, or wading through detailed print works on-line. The reason is that with print you have time to think and process ideas and there is space to follow details. Mass media is sometimes intended to prevent you from taking the time to think. You must take the time away from the flow of information, whether you trust it or not, to think about it, and then you can begin to find out why you might trust it or not.
People in business have no obligation to help you develop critical thinking skills, in fact that may be what they want to diminish so that you will be subject to subliminal messages and impulsive behavior. They are under no real obligation to respect your dignity and human rights or to promote democratic institutions, either, dispite the confusion of Capitalism with free institutions, the two are not the same. To be a useful citizen in democratic institution you must have the means to critically think and analyse the choices before you, and unless you wish to practice your freedom on a desert island or far away from others in the wilderness, you have some amount of obligation to decide matters with the welfare of others in mind. Selfishness is not a sufficient guiding motive in a democracy or in society in general.
The lack of critical thinking when it comes to the mass media goes far beyond political distinctions. It has to do with what is information an what is propaganda or public relations, the two are really the same, and whereas your antennae might be attuned to the different propaganda in political memes, caught up in the liberal and conservative false dichotomy, you may miss the conflating of news with promotion that is rampet in news media.
One thing social media has done is to increase the confusion, not only is that the obvious problem of a lie that has legs, a hoax, but the fact that journalists are getting lazy and using social media as a source when it has no rights to be a source. This is the larger problem of charity promotions being injected as news items, which is now happening all the time, and with it the cat-video trend of low hanging fruit items getting time on the local and national news coverage because they are easy. They are used as a lead on to promotions as well. I think there is big money behind this and the source is corporate motivated by the 1%ers who want the positive publicity to show that they care about the millions their greed has displaced from the economy. So every firm in Silicon Valley gets to promote its efforts to help the homeless and feed the starving that its technology is creating and to do so for pennies on the dollar of the cost it would reallt take to fix these issues.
All of these would be effectively dealt with by going back and learning how lies are made and why we might forget to notice them, and to rediscover that we have the means to.
It's not an accident that the average Fox News fan is less informed than people that don't watch any news at all, it is on purpose.
According to that linked "study", Fox News viewers are stupid because "91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs" and "72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit" and so forth. Such a high percentage of Fox News viewers believe in these obvious falsehood is a proof that Fox News makes you stupid! or so that article claims.
91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs.
Study: stimulus created 450,000 government sector jobs and destroyed 1,000,000 private sector jobs.
72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit.
GAO report: In rosy scenario, where everything goes perfect, it could decrease deficit by $13.25 trillion!!! or it could increase the deficit by $6.2 trillion.
Apparently not buying into White House's propaganda and disagreeing with liberal's worldview make Fox News viewers stupid. At least they weren't accused of being racist.