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How can you know what news is real?

by flywithdolp on 11/28/19, 10:25 AM with 126 comments

• by lm28469 on 11/28/19, 12:38 PM

  The real question is why are people following the news anyway? It's pure entertainment at that point. "Hey Karen have you seen that a girl was raped and murdered 1000 miles away from you ? Have you heard what _unknown politician of a third world country you couldn't even place on a map_ said ! that's outrageous. A cop killed an innocent man today #thoughtsAndPrayers".

  The world would be a much better place if everybody only checked what's happening around them instead of the other side of the country / world. 99% of the "news" have 0 impact on you and you have 0 power (direct and indirect) on 99% of what's happening, why even bother ?

• by joaodlf on 11/28/19, 12:15 PM

  I have, sadly, given up. I can't stand watching/reading the news and feeling that I am quite possibly being manipulated, so I have completely given up. Anything I do read, I mistrust.

  I don't want to be ignorant towards what is happening around me, but I feel like I have no choice, I don't want to become bitter and "pick a side", I prefer to remain ignorant.

  Even when friends say "Oh, but try this source, they are soooo much better", it doesn't take long to realise there is ALWAYS an agenda behind it, a political leaning... It's exhausting.

• by marcus_holmes on 11/28/19, 1:32 PM

  Having run a newspaper, I know the problem is the business model. Funding by advertising is a terrible business model for journalism.

  "real" journalism doesn't make any money because it's expensive to make and doesn't generate any more ad revenue than bad journalism.

  Most newspapers lose money, and that's getting worse not better. So billionaires own (and subsidise) newspapers, and get to influence content.

  So either we start paying for our news, or we continue with the current situation. Though it's going to get worse because we're de-training an entire generation of journalists, and the advertising revenue is shrinking.

• by barry-cotter on 11/28/19, 11:46 AM

  Is this really that surprising? Billionaires owning vanity projects isn’t news when they’re football teams, why is it when they’re corporate news organizations?

  Also, if there was ever a time to be concerned about the owners of media organizations controlling the narrative this is not it. The media, and the ruling class more generally, being pissed off that the peasants are daring to speak back and have their own non approved opinions is behind the never ending stream of invective directed at the big tech companies[1].

  Martin Gurri’s book on this loss of control, The Revolt of the Public, is amazing by the way[2].

  [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/19/the-co...

  [2] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-...

  https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/02/book-review-revo...

• by jajag on 11/28/19, 12:15 PM

  I find the idea that there can be an unbiased news source deeply problematic. All reporting of an event has to be from a perspective, and has to make decisions about what to report, what to leave out; what to emphasise, what to play down. An honest news source should be one that is one that is honest about its own biases.

• by k_sze on 11/28/19, 3:55 PM

  I'm an avid reader of Chomsky. He often gets his sources from financial and foreign policy publications. I think I remember him writing something to the effect of: the best source of truthful journalism is in the finance and foreign policy publications, the reason being that those publications help powerful people form their opinions and make decisions, and none of the powerful people would be subscribing to publications that do a shitty job and that compromise the powerful people's decisions. So those publications are necessarily honest, the articles they publish would often be devoid of emotion or moral judgement (e.g. a "member of the communist party" would be just that, not a "commie"), they would even openly admit about, for instance, how some policy protects the interests of certain circles of powerful people.

  I can't remember where exactly I've read that and what the exact wordings were though.

• by rcMgD2BwE72F on 11/28/19, 11:42 AM

  You need to fork this: https://github.com/mdiplo/Medias_francais

  Google Translate:

  >French media: who owns what?

  >Property relations between the French media and their main shareholders

  >The data is organized in two tables:

  >1. 'medias_francais.tsv' contains all shareholders (natural or legal persons) and media represented on the map

  >2. 'relations_medias_francais.tsv' details the capital links between these shareholders and the groups or media they own

  >Last updated November, 2019

  >Technical indication: for those who wish to participate in updating the database by making a pull request, make sure that the file is encoded in UTF-8 with unix line breaks so that we can merge it all without conflict.

  Edit: I wish this was all added to Wikidata so we can chart this for every country but also map the transnational stake-holding.

• by remote_phone on 11/28/19, 12:24 PM

  Overall this post is crap. The whole point about people choosing what they want to read or get reported on only reinforces bubbles. That’s what Facebook did.

  However I agree that the media is biased and it is worse now than ever. I think even more than being biased, it’s what they choose to report on or not report on that matters. Look at the coverage of Andrew Yang on MSNBC. There are over a dozen instances of ignoring him on charts and graphs and putting lower-polling candidates on display other than him. A few times is one thing but it’s literally over 15 times, including ignoring him for the first 30 mins of the November debates and giving him the least amount of talking time of all the candidates for the 4th debate in a row. Things like this show that media is biased to a degree that is undermining our democracy.

• by mikece on 11/28/19, 2:26 PM

  Something which continues to stun me is how much spin and opinion are added to the news and that "just the facts" isn't a thing anymore. I listen to the No Agenda Show podcast (In The Morning!) which can most succinctly be described as news deconstruction and they go to the source material, transcripts, and audio clips with context as often as possible -- and then contrast those against what CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and the rest are saying. In too many cases the news outlets, both (American) conservative and (American) liberal are claiming significance and meaning that is either absent from the source material or COMPLETELY OPPOSITE of what the source material suggests.

  Strangely, this is reassuring to my sanity because looking at the opposite points of view of the media leads the logical person to conclude they can't be talking about the same thing, that they both cannot be true. With news deconstruction like they do on No Agenda it becomes obvious that "mainstream news" in the United States is pretty much a world of make-believe these days.

• by vearwhershuh on 11/28/19, 1:49 PM

  You can't.

  Despite the social shame associated with it, I no longer even believe main stream history around things like the kennedy assassination. I don't know what happened, but I'm skeptical that what they say happened actually happened.

  We live in an epistemological radical age, with mass psychological operations being carried out by multiple state and non-state actors.

  The good news is that the only sane response is to step back and focus on the ones we love around us, which is what we should be doing anyway.

• by BurnGpuBurn on 11/28/19, 12:33 PM

  From the article: "One way to restore trust is to give power back to the people, enabling them to choose what stories matter most to them. By doing this, we can revolutionise the current state of the news media — from an entity that dictates information to an industry that only reports legitimate information that has been requested by the population."

  That's the only solution that's offered, and a bad one at that. Letting "the people decide", e.g. democratizing the news, is a bad idea. How would we know what to choose? How would we know that there's an important issue out there that needs to be reported on, beforehand? Normal people aren't investigative reporters.

  I don't have a solution either, but I know what it is we need. We need good journalists to do good journalism and be able to choose freely what they research and report on. The current for-profit corporate structure of the news media is incompatible with that.

  That's why you get more truth nowadays from independent journalists, researchers and content creators than from the corporate media, which will almost exclusively lie to you to further an agenda. It's very hard to separate the weed from the chaff though, and it requires a lot of critical thinking and observation of the reader.

• by schalab on 11/28/19, 12:42 PM

  I dont think ownership is the main problem.

  The larger problem seems to be global.

  The ability to be expressive comes with it certain biological traits and dispositions. These traits may determine your viewpoints on matters.

  So, if I hire journalists purely based on their writing ability, I may find most of them have very similar political views. If I create an industry of the best actors/musicians, again I may find them to have similar traits and views.

  So, you can have a situation where some view has 50% support in the larger population, but almost no support in the press, academia, entertainment industry etc.

  In a society based on free speech and no violence, the views supported by expressive people have an overwhelming advantage. The problem is just because you are very good at communication, doesnt mean your viewpoint is always correct. That is the reason some brilliant professors dont make it in the private sector, while someone who cant string a sentence together becomes a billionaire.

  But when people see, supposedly neutral organizations have an overwhelming slant to one side of a viewpoint, the organization loses credibility. They are in a bubble.

  When you no longer have institutions of fairness everyone can agree upon, you create the problem of fake news.

• by dna_polymerase on 11/28/19, 11:47 AM

  The info-graphic posted in the article links back originates from titlemax.com [0]. Their article at least list the owners of some outlets. I've got to say I am a bit surprised to see such an blogpost from a lending corp. Their wiki article suggest they faced criticism in the past for predatory lending [1], I wonder if this is their version of getting back at those who reported on them, or what their intention for that topic is?

  [0]: https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/who-owns... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TitleMax

• by golemotron on 11/28/19, 1:01 PM

  > How can you know what news is real

  It's actually easier to tell today whether something is fake because there are more outlets to determine an intersection within.

  Here's how you do it:

  Read both CNN and Fox. If something is reported on both, it's real. For stories that exist on both, notice the slant of each story. Pay attention to emotive conjugation [1] and ask yourself these three questions:

  1. Why did the editors pick this story?

  2. What is their opinion of it and the actors in it?

  3. What stories are not being reported because the editors are not interested in them.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

• by ra120271 on 11/28/19, 11:50 AM

  I've always felt news organisations should be legally required to be non-for-profit and wages capped at some sensible multiple of the national average wage (e.g 6x)

• by darren0 on 11/28/19, 1:02 PM

  It's somewhat ironic that you can't even trust this article. There's an obvious bias towards a "power struggle" view of the world's problems. The issue with the current state of affairs is essentially assumed to be because of billionaires and corporate consolidation. The solution presented is then to give more power to the people. Neither point is substantiated by fact.

  One could just as easily argue that the state of the media is due to a failure to adapt to the internet in which blogs, Twitter, and social media become peoples primary source of information. So the "power of the people" could have in fact caused this issue. This also being a conjecture.

  The only point in this article that is well substantiated is that trust in media is low and I feel this article is perfectly on trend.

• by insickness on 11/28/19, 12:51 PM

  There was a post going around showing a screenshot of CNN versus Fox after Sonderland's testimony at the impeachment hearings. Each had a wildly different take on what was said, at least in the headline. It was posted as a complaint that one of these sites was fake news and the other reflected reality more accurately.

  I don't see a problem with two wildly different takes on the same incident, particularly when it is political. In fact, I would say this is a sign of a healthy democracy. Compare it to the alternative: a single, typically state-sponsored viewpoint in a totalitarian state.

  This isn't to say there aren't problems with fake news, the corporatisation of media, sensationalism, etc. But competing narratives imposes at least some checks and balances.

• by faissaloo on 11/28/19, 2:10 PM

  You can't. Start asking how the information the news gives you is actually benefiting you.

• by mstrlaw on 11/28/19, 12:36 PM

  First, start by seriously broadening the range of sources you get your news from. Specifically, choose to put in some "contrary" sources to those you are used to. Second, analyse and average out the stances & reporting angle from the articles that are put out about any subject. Finally, be mindful to always look at things critically and don't take things at face value. These are businesses and therefore have agendas. Besides Google News there's nothing out there that is able to cluster news articles from multiple sources into a single topic, so here's my shameless plug: https://thoro.news

• by mc32 on 11/28/19, 12:46 PM

  One attempt could be forming professional associations where members get disbarred for violating principles for reporting.

  It wouldn’t be perfect but could be better than what we have where there is no responsibility or accountability for misrepresenting news events.

• by grumple on 11/28/19, 1:46 PM

  First, don't trust anything that isn't a direct, verifiable quote (basically, on camera). Ignore headlines and anything that is an interpretation of what someone said. Same goes for any other facts - believe what you can verify, or where there's direct testimony from people who were there and know what happened.

  Second, make an effort to understand the context of any actions or quotes. This may require some more research and understanding. You can rarely extract this from a news article and requires some careful language parsing to determine what the facts are vs some reporters opinion or agenda.

• by DanielBMarkham on 11/28/19, 12:54 PM

  If you think about it, this is the same problem faced by any student of history. Some facts are "solid", some are squishy, interpretations are vague and/or self-serving, much is made up to support various narratives the participants are peddling.

  I wonder if we'll start seeing 1) better tools for historians, and 2) tools historians currently used accelerated/improved to do more real-time news.

• by RickJWagner on 11/28/19, 4:19 PM

  I think the biggest problem isn't reporting false statements. It's reporting marginal or true statements, but presenting only one side of the story. Or controlling the narrative-- by selecting which questions to ask/answer, the purveyor totally controls the conversation.

  I think the only defense is to get news from a variety of diverse sources.

• by k_sze on 11/28/19, 2:42 PM

  Completely off-topic.

  Came here to say that I hate that stupid ticker at the top. Utterly unnecessary, gratuitous, overboard animation, even when the price of an item didn't actually change!

  Immediately switched to Reader View in Firefox because the ticker was too annoying.

• by known on 11/28/19, 2:42 PM

  Very difficult due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

• by markus_zhang on 11/28/19, 1:28 PM

  You can't. And to be frank, consuming multiple news sources doesn't move you closer to the truth, especially for political stuffs.

• by vinniejames on 11/28/19, 12:43 PM

  By reading different news sources and forming your own opinion. The truth is out there

• by hos234 on 11/28/19, 11:53 AM

  I get my news from PewDiePie