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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.'"
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.