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People keep saying "echo chamber" and "people believe what they want to believe" but another factor is simple media literacy. It's just flat out easier now to make news sites that look real but aren't. People that grew up with newspapers or broadcast news kinda didn't come prepared for the wild west internet of news where anyone can write anything.
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Dec 2, 2016 15:14
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 02:06 |
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Shame not everyone got taught about the validity of sources in school when they were doing their first research papers. Also lol at the perfect example of why the problem is so bad showing up in the thread. Everyone got taught something I'm sure, but people don't necessarily have the right toolkit in a changing world.
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Dec 2, 2016 16:11
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FactsAreUseless posted:It's not just about the ability to recognize bias. It's about a basic understanding of the mechanisms of good journalism. There are standards that you can apply regardless of what side you're on, or what side you think the news is on. Is it verifiable? Does the reporter do their own research and cite it to confirm or deny what a source says? Is it even a reported story, or just an unedited interview or live interview? Who is on a panel - and does a panel discussion even add value to the story? This sounds good until it turns out that all these fake news sites DO have sources and the sources have sources and the link has links to very important sounding websites and this has all gone on long enough that it's not as simple as one website acting alone to make fake stuff. It's one fake site siteing another fake site citing a book that maybe discredited but if you don't look that up right you'd not notice. Like want some fake news that climate change is fake? I can point to quotes from the president of united states agreeing with it. I can point to entire scientific journals that sure look real. I can point to hundreds of websites with hundreds of thousands of users. etc. Like fake stuff is pretty deeply embedded. It isn't hard for one site to verify the other side and then that site to be verified by something else. Way back to the point it is hard for people to know if they don't already know.
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Dec 2, 2016 20:32
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FactsAreUseless posted:Except that part of good journalistic practice is understanding the difference between a good or bad source, and one of the ways you can tell is if there's a preponderance of experts in a field saying otherwise. Cherry-picking sources to get a conclusion is bad journalistic practice, which is what lovely and fake news sites do. That's an objective standard you can use to say "this is not good reporting." Reporting that fails to put something into context, for instance by ignoring the overwhelming number of scientists who agree that climate change exists, is bad reporting. People need to be able to recognize it not just through the conclusions a story reaches, but by pointing to specific practices and standards and saying "this failed to do this" or "this used this bad practice" the same as you would in evaluating, say, a peer-reviewed study. And news reports are a lot less complex than peer-reviewed studies. People can be given the knowledge they need to do this. But if your only definition of bad reporting is "it reaches the wrong conclusions," well, people are just going to keep looking for journalism that reinforces their worldview. Not shockingly, places like Breitbart are really bad at basic elements of journalism. They've just turned that into a good thing, by saying "but look, these good standards of journalism produce conclusions you don't agree with, so they must be the evil tools of the mainstream media" They aren't trying to hide behind objective reporting. They're just dismissing it entirely. Yeah, but I mean, it's brain in the jar matrix stuff. If you want to spread a lie just tell the reader the scientists all agree with you. If you want articles to point to specific statistics and practices the article can write they did that just as much as a real one did. The core of an article being fake is that it is fake. It can lie. Historically fake websites lie poorly. But that isn't a rule of nature and we are moving away from fake news that is lovely geocities pages to fake news that is on websites that look as professional as CNN and write as professionally as anything, and make up facts that support their conclusion and then lie and say they didn't make those facts up!
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Dec 2, 2016 20:46
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FactsAreUseless posted:based on objective standards of how they report, Okay, but how do you know how they report? If you ask them they will lie.
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Dec 2, 2016 21:01
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FactsAreUseless posted:Do you actually think it's impossible to look at or listen to a piece of news and analyze it the way you would any other piece of professional work? You don't tell what good reporting is by asking the reporters if it's good. Do you have any idea at all what you're talking about? Like do you actually know anything about journalism? I think it is absolutely possible for fake news to be written in a way that appears to be the highest level of journalistic standards. Well reasoned and well supported with careful cites of every fact and huge number of collaborating information from apparently extremely legitimate sounding sources. I don't think a house of cards like that can stand up to scrutiny by someone that actually knows but for most people if something claims a thing with data and statistics and they go and check out the data and statistics the information came from and that looks good and many other similarly professional seeming outlets have similarly well developed and apparently researched information gathering. it's going to catch a lot of people who aren't going to go to step 4 or 5 or 6 and realize that it's all made up. That the scientific journals cited don't say that or are all only published in vanity journals with convincing seeming names and webpages and all the quotes from experts are made up and collaborated by other sites that also made the stuff up. Like if I wanted to claim 18% of pork shoulder contains hook worm cysts. I could make a dozen very professional news websites, write extremely long and detailed articles that mention that, quote the USDA saying it's true with dozens of websites I also hosted saying the USDA confirmed it said that and all link it to a bunch of scientific journals I also wrote and submitted to poor quality publishing farm fake scientific journals that most people wouldn't know were fake. At that point I could add that fact to wikipedia and a dozen other sites would use that number because they checked wikipedia and wikipedia seemed to have some good sources. And maybe someday CNN would just say in some throw away cooking safety throw away segment, then I got cites from CNN saying it's true. And none of this would ever trick someone who actually knew for even a second, but it's a huge web of apparently good journalism eventually built on the bones of bad journalism because the original was just lies.
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Dec 3, 2016 01:28
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FactsAreUseless posted:
My fake news sites say they contacted the USDA and they said it was true.
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Dec 3, 2016 02:05
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 02:06 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:That's not how it works, I don't know what you aren't getting about this. It's not how what works? It's exactly how anti vaccine and anti global warming stuff works. It's false information so if someone digs enough they can find that the lies are lies, but they are lies that are apparently well supported as other liars say them, including quotes from experts that don't exist and quotes from people that seem like they would be experts but are not.
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Dec 3, 2016 02:17
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