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Google Launches a News Initiative To Fight False News and Help Publishers Make Money (cnbc.com)
Google is launching the Google News Initiative, a journalism-focused program that will help publishers earn revenue and combat fake news. From a report: The initiative, announced Tuesday, will offer publications another monetization model online called Subscribe with Google, as well as work with established universities and groups to combat misinformation. It will also introduce an open-source tool called Outline, which will make it easier for news organizations to set up secure access to the internet for their journalists. Google said it was committing $300 million over the next three years to the project, though it did not elaborate on how the resources would be spent.
The company said it paid $12.6 billion to news organizations and drove 10 billion clicks a month to their websites for free last year. Subscribe with Google will make it easier for readers to pay for content from news organizations that have agreed to partner with the company. FT.com, The Washington Post, and McClatchy Company publications including the Miami Herald are among the 17 launch partners.
The company said it paid $12.6 billion to news organizations and drove 10 billion clicks a month to their websites for free last year. Subscribe with Google will make it easier for readers to pay for content from news organizations that have agreed to partner with the company. FT.com, The Washington Post, and McClatchy Company publications including the Miami Herald are among the 17 launch partners.
It used to be easy to tell actual news articles from commentary and opinion. But no more.
How many news feeds distinguish between the two? How many news web sites clearly label an article as one or the other? How many readers even know the difference anymore.
Solve the labeling problem first and the rest will be easier. Of course, hard news -- without inflammatory opinion -- garners fewer clicks, so there may be no motivation for proper labeling.
How long will nerds fetishize monster tech corps like Google? It's a big part of the problem.
...killed the News.
As soon as journalists decided that shaping/pushing agendas was their moral duty, opinion and facts are intermixed freely without even an attempt to keep them clearly labeled.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'd give you biased, and occasionally quite dishonest, but they're not going out of their way to invent things that did not happen. Trump has been incredibly successful in watering down the meaning of fake news to the point where it gets applied to anything. You could argue that the news media have made it easy for this to occur because they have such a strong focus on editorializing the news, but during the election fake news was originally applied to stories that were the kind of outright fabrications you might see in a grocery store checkout aisle tabloid.
This. If the publishers don't own the platform, they are not running their own business, they are serving Google's.
This may sound selfish and myopic but this really does not apply to me. There is a sense in which we modern humans are inundated with information so it is wise to have good filter criteria for what you imbibe. For instance, I prefer books to periodicals and websites because the latter are more transitory in worth and sometimes the most latter are garbage due to lax publishing standards or low barrier for entry . So, when I am not reading math, computer science and science books on my Kobo Aura ONE ereader every Sunday I download the news from the Associated Press via Calibre and I also occassionally read academic journal periodicals, online, and Slashdot and the occasional ArsTechnica. The associated press are not going to publish fake news and I only read the politics, technology and science sections. I have also been reading slashdot since like 1998 and it does not carry fake news per se but modern Slashdot sometimes carries click bait. That is how I imbibe information as part of the nerd elite. I understand that Democracy is messy though and lower IQ people have voting power so fake news can affect me somewhat except for the fact that America is actually an Oligarchy with some Democratic features rather than a straight Democracy so it does not really matter what the average Joe and idiots imbibe, anyway !
I get my news directly from the only source I can trust...The Onion.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Yes and no.
Most are not "Fake News" in the Trumpian sense, as in they're not completely fabricated.
However, many (if not the majority) of what one sees today has a nasty habit of taking some facts, emphasizing other (convenient) ones, completely ignoring still other (inconvenient) ones, then subtly weaving a narrative into what is being 'reported'. Then the 'story' gets spiced with enough drama to grab eyeballs (thus advertising dollars).
This is to provide ammunition of opinion-making fellow travelers of a given ideology, to provide 'confirmation' to the existing audience base, and to garner influence (and thus power) along the way. Cable/Sat television news is chock full of it - CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, RT, you-name-it. The Papers are a lost cause in most cases these days, and the Web is even worse. Toss in some satire sites that are too-damned-close-to-reality (enough that it takes a fairly sharp mind to recognize that it's actually satire), and you have the mess we see today.
It's gotten to the point where the only news orgs really worth watching/reading for news on events at large, are the ones which stick to mostly business-oriented content (such as CNBC, WSJ, Fox Business, and suchlike). Why? Because ideological BS tends to be secondary there, and they know that their audience (business folk) don't have much time, adoration, or tolerance for pap or propaganda. For politics, there's always C-SPAN, where you more often than not get it raw and unfiltered (and it's up to you to summarize it all, however you please.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The problem with retraction, is the damage is already done, and companies all have different policies about retractions.
Also to note, even irresponsible news sites sometimes will get the information right, because they are not concerned about where the info comes from, which sometimes gives them a lead in getting real information out.
The real problem isn't accuracy of the information, but being able to trust the information. If a wrong story is posted, the media organization better have good reasons for posting it (sources seemed reliable, data was properly checked... however it was just mistaken information). While if they get it wrong a retraction should be a good first step, a responsible company should make sure they put enough effort to let people know about it, vs. a blurb on the website, or a 5 minute spot of the days retractions.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A MegaCorp to spoon feed us 'news Google deems correct and proper'. Welcome to Prolefeed Beta!
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
I'd give you biased, and occasionally quite dishonest, but they're not going out of their way to invent things that did not happen.
You can try to define "fake" to exclude "biased, and occasionally quite dishonest" but that misses the more important question: Should we allow biased and deceptive stories from news sources that millions of people consider trustworthy journalists, but go ballistic on fringe sites that are untrustworthy?
My own sense is that biased and/or dishonest stories on sites like NYT and WaPo are more influential than blatantly fake stories that someone with an agenda circulates on Facebook. Saying one is fake but the more harmful one is only dishonest but not fake obfuscates the real problem.
The NYT has added corrections and notes to their article:
While Ms. Haspel oversaw the site during the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at the site, she did not supervise the interrogation and waterboarding of the suspected Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.
So saying that Gina Haspel having had a role in torture is "completely false" really just relies on what you define that as, which people naturally gravitate towards defining according to personal preference to get the result ("NYT totally lied" or "Gina Haspel is 100% ok") they want.
"Old man yells at systemd"