You did no fact checking, and I must scream

I've done a fair amount of data-intensive fact checking for journalism articles and have had fact checking done on my own data-intensive reporting.

Couple things:

1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least.

2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.

It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.

> The media have comprehensively failed us.

Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.

I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.

Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.

While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.

So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.

Good reading for the ever-dwindling group of people who like facts.

I remember there was a friend of mine who was of the opposite political persuasion, generally, than myself. He posted something that was demonstrably wrong to Facebook. And I was embarrassed for him just as much as I be embarrassed for myself having posted something so inaccurate. So I offered a friendly correction, but he replied in an unexpected way. He said that the sentiment of the post was accurate, even if the post itself was not. And he left it up!

The facts of the case were absolutely irrelevant.

That was a decade ago. Since then, that attitude has clearly become more prevalent not just with your average Facebook poster, but also within the government and media themselves. For none of these groups does does "truth" support their goals; fact checking is a complete waste of time, and might even be detrimental.

Validating a public person's birthday using Wikipedia?

*laughs in Taylor Lorenz*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age

Also, in case you're wondering when it is, here's Taylor Lorenz's own Flickr page, which she can delete any time she wants, but hasn't: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/

The average journalist has to churn enough stories that they don't have time to be looking up anything.

There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.

The BBC pulled that article/episode - which is the main difference between different media spheres today.

We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content.

High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce.

The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content.

With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap.

That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off.

The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer.

We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.

There's a chapter in John McPhee's "Draft No. 4" (which is quite a time capsure of how writing was done in the last century) about the fact checking topic, and how much effort went into it for stories posted in The New Yorker.

The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.

10 years ago there was a famous article in the German Bild about the 10 craziest laws in America. Something like that it's illegal for woman to wear pants in some parts of Arizona etc. A lot of other big publications started to feature the same laws in their trivia sections until a journalist actually checked if they still exist. It turned out that none of the laws existed or were still enforced. It would have been so simple to check their facts but nope over 10 publications reprinted it and nobody bothered.

It has been said that Italy is extremely vulnerable to fake news. I am not sure that we are more vulnerable than others, but it is a fact that local media provide news that is sloppy at best if not even willfully deceitful.

A couple of examples found in a book I read recently about the Fukushima incident:

- “Tokyo, a capital in agony. «We will never live here again.»”, from La Repubblica (March 20th, 2011) [1] The lead paragraph of the article reads, “Fear and nightmare of radiations: four million have already fled what was perceived as a model city”. At the time, Tokyo had 13 million people; a loss of 4 million would have meant a catastrophic collapse of the city and would have been recorded by the local media. None of this happened.

- “Fukushima, ten years after the tsunami and nuclear disaster. A return to normalcy amid abandoned lands and fears of radiation”, from Il Fatto Quotidiano (March 11th, 2021, ten years later) [2]. The lead paragraph says, “It was the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Twenty thousand people died.” The number 20,000 refers to the victims of the tsunami, but there is only one (disputed) victim caused by the nuclear accident.

[1] https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2011/03/20/news/tokyo_capit...

[2] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/03/11/fukushima-dieci-...

It is exceptionally rare for a human to care about the epistemological roots of any claim

I would go so far as to say that the median human with a 100IQ doesn’t even understand the concept of what constitutes a “fact” or how you would dicriminate fact from opinion or has even heard the word “epistemology”

Expecting anything close to that in the context of celebrity gossip… well at that point the author needs to manage his own expectations of humanity

The root problem is that the media's business model has failed. We need a new business model before the situation improves. What might that business model look like?

My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack.

But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there.

Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe.

Of course, that's how it used to work!

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.

For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.

Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.

Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.

Fact checking is becoming extremely poor these days, even among reputable/resourceful organizations.

I'll skip NYTimes here. For the Verge, I have pointed out inaccuracies many times in their comment section. Most often, nothing happened. Sometimes, they quietly fixes something, delete my comment and pretend nothing happened.

(And it is laughable they published this piece https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinform.... When I pointed out their own rich history of inaccuracies and retracted reporting, they deleted my comments and flagged my account.)

Guess what's worse? Vergecast. Turns out you don't do fact checking in podcasts! The hosts just ramble whatever they believe is true. And they absolutely do NOT publish corrections after the fact.

I stopped reading Engadget partly for this reason. And I cancelled my Verge subscription for this as well.

Yuval Noah Harari has a great quote (paraphrased) about slop/fake news etc:

   People always ask how we will deal with AI generated fake images and news etc. My answer is the way we have always done it: by creating institutions to deliver accurate information

I like this quote for two reasons:

1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals.

2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.

I have got into a long habit of noting the writer of articles I like (that are accurate after checking). I try to follow well written, honest, as unbiased as you can get (or at least consistent if biased - very important) journalists. So the organisations, corporations, stations where they journalise is of lesser consequence.

Fact checking for the media is one thing, and I know there's financial disincentives for it in many cases. But when it comes to family discussions over politics, I'd be all in favor of a few more family members learning how to do basic Google searches to fact check as well.

Just yesterday, there was a post that made me angry in the same vein: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609942

Not only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.

I'm confused why we are fact checking viral slop. First, you would have to confirm she wrote it. When and where was it published. If you can't confirm that, you shouldn't post it. Stop, go no further.

What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?

Well fact checking will just slow us down. And it is not like audience will do it themselves. Or even have options...

Still. In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

While fact checking seems like a good thing, but the example is bit weird, off by few years errors could easily be explained by errors in memory

When a writer reaches a national platform they see themselves as a taste maker, not a reporter. So they write what they think you should think. That's why so many articles tell you how you are supposed to feel about a thing, rather than tell you about that thing. If that means ignoring facts that disagree what they think, well, too bad. Thus we end up with headlines and paragraphs that use words and concepts that are meant to make you feel something. We get headlines like "ICE Breaks Into A House Where There Is A Baby" and "Trump Illegally Indicts Billy Bob."

maybe move to independent people writing stories will help with that, easier to follow who is legit, and who is not

But...

The alternative facts support my viewpoint!

I hope not to derail, as the core of the author's point is valid and important for people to understand.

Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that".

Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.

no fact checking needed once everything screams Fake

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.

First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.

In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.

Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.

I agree with the author that this is important. I do not agree that it is easy.

In some cases it is relatively easy, but in many cases it requires some subject area expertise.

I do wish it was easier to punish media organizations for slop; however any feedback mechanism would also be (ab)-used for political purposes and reputation laundering.

Modern media is a combat arena.

I mean the Indy is one of Lebvdev's vanity papers and the Express is part of the Reach newspaper group where the authors are incentivised on a per-click basis - you'd go to neither expecting anything other than dross.

Obligatory thread from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45583336

TLDR: HN commenter saying that "Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story." which spawned a whole discussion.

Wait until you realize it’s 100% sloppy rumors.

tl;dr median journalists are no better than LLMs.

Slop out of the Bucket

I've done a fair amount of data-intensive fact checking for journalism articles and have had fact checking done on my own data-intensive reporting.

Couple things:

1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least.

It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.

> Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.

This should be illegal.

If people were able to propose laws and vote on them directly, it would be, be a landslide.

The number of people who benefit from this is tiny compares to the number who are harmed. But it's nearly impossible to pass things like this because people vote for parties and are therefore several levers removed from influencing actual laws.

Factcheckers are QA. If there is anything for them to do, then the publisher has failed by not providing the writer with tooling for establishing unit and integration tests for all information within an article.

How much does it cost to check one fact? If you check just one, and it's wrong, it's probably not worth treating the whole as an accurate piece of reporting. If BBC had checked just one fact in the slop, they could easily decide that it's not worth republishing.

Uhm is it possible to mitigate second point by publishing encrypted article in social network along with is sending it to the agency to assign it timestamp? Or maybe in any blockchain if one does not like social networks.

Then if journalist does not like how mangled was his piece on publishing he can disclose encryption password to show everyone what he actually wrote in the article?

So you're saying the pay is poor, and your coworkers deliberately fuck you over for their own gains. That pretty much sounds like a job you should stay away from by any cost. Do something else, something productive that doesnt lead to a bunch of lies being sold as truths.

> It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.

That sounds like absolutely atrocious living conditions for the journalists employed by such a news room.

Honestly, at that point - look for a different job!

I'm not saying this to be mean, I am just picturing myself in such a working relationship of being employed by an organization working in an industry which is hemorrhaging valuation because of various developments like AI (but even before that it was going downhill).

You will be happier doing something else! At that point, learn a trade or similar. You'll be better paid, have a more stable lifestyle and will feel happier long term, even if you love being a journalist now.

Sorry to be such a downer, but hearing messages like that gives me flashbacks to people getting exploited - and I bet ya that the owner of that newsroom will not be suffering like the journalists. You're sacrificing your own happiness in life for another person's wealth gain - just because you thought it was "worth doing" in your 20s. Because yes, money maybe doesn't buy happiness, but it sure as hell gets you an incredible amount of stress if it's absent.

Wait until you realize it’s 100% sloppy rumors.

Good reading for the ever-dwindling group of people who like facts.

The facts of the case were absolutely irrelevant.

Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore. Reality is whatever you feel it is, or whatever you feel you want it to be, and the internet (the current iteration of it) is perfectly content to feed you that reality, and fake/real is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.

I've also been in similar discussions and have since given up - even if you show incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the response is often "well, this is what I believe." I'm not even talking about topics where there is some existing debate - like, things that cannot possibly be disputed, like that the earth is round (not hyperbole).

Sen. JD Vance stood by his false claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — an unsupported story that former President Donald Trump has also echoed on the debate stage and on social media.

During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113140/vance-false-cla...