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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, like Slashdot then?
Look for future headlines like this:
Iowa State AIDS Researcher Admits To Falsifying Findings - What He Did Next Will Blow Your Mind
Dark Reflection
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.
"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?
People don't come to slashdot for news that much, we come for the insightful (and inciteful) comments.
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.
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.
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...
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
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
This is the problem of the left: they think the truth has a political bias.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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
so now parody and sarcasm is just trolling?
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
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.
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.
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.
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.