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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 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.
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.
Demanding authority and accountability means we need some standard, reliable source of truth to measure them against. Where do we get it from?
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.
Too true. People tune in to news not really for the purpose of getting information but to hear someone confirm that their world view is right. That's a cultural problem. I hate to say it, but the news itself isn't the problem.
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.
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.
This is a different form of it. If you're tuning in to get information on what's going on in the world, that's a moment where the facts theselves shouldn't be related to a personal view. Like looking at a map. You're not looking at the map so that you can feel good about your views on religion, right? That's what the news is supposed to be, and it's not anymore.
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.
WHAT "liberal media"? They're ALL pro-corporate. You're the one not paying attention.
"Accountability"? For what?
Here's the problem: There already is accountability. The problem is that it's not for what you feel it should be. The accountability is for producing entertainment. If the news is entertaining, the publisher will be rewarded. If the news isn't, the publisher will be weakened.
In terms of accountability to inform, that was tossed out the window years ago - if, indeed, it ever existed. These days most people don't, actually, want to be informed. They want something that doesn't challenge them too much, and that makes them feel informed afterwards, while keeping them entertained. The occasional outright lie in such an environment is not merely tolerable, it's desirable.
Entire news networks exist purely to tell people what they want to hear. Do you think that's an accident?
The world shouldn't work like this, but it does anyway.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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.
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