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.
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.
*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 amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.
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.
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.
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-...
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'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.
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)
The alternative facts support my viewpoint!
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.
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.
There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.
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 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
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.
What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?
Not only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.
Still. In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.
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.
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.
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?
> Lorenz's year of birth is disputed by multiple reliable sources.
> How come the French version of this article lists her age as October 21, 1984 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz) but this one hides it? SlapperDapper (talk) 01:21, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
> -- Probably because no one has presented a published, reliable source for that info. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:46, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
> ---- 99.999% of articles on people on Wikipedia have no source for the age/birthday. SlapperDapper (talk) 19:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
Though the article is about Patricia Routledge in this case and not Lorenz.
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.
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).
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.
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...
It is worth paying attention to the significant rise in prominence of non-profit newsrooms, particularly in the USA.
Some notable examples:
The Baltimore Banner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baltimore_Banner Founded: 2022
ProPublica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica Founded: 2007
The Texas Tribune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Tribune Founded: 2009
The Marshall Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marshall_Project Founded: 2014
I'm particularly excited about the Baltimore Banner, who are only a few years old but are earning sizable subscription revenue now (it's healthy for them not to be too dependent on donors).
What's changed is that the profit used to come from advertising. Since everyone read the news, they could charge a lot for ads.
Those days are over, and news now bubble up from social media. That kinda works, but it's far from ideal.
To me the 2019 "Covington kids" incident showed how broken the media had become. All the prestigious media, from NY Times down, reprinted a viral Twitter thread as front page news without any fact check.
The reported "facts" were completely wrong, and even if they had been right, some random kids being rude in a park should never be national news.
Bu that's the news world we live in now.
The problem is that micropayments are expensive. 2.9% and 30 cents is 32.9% on a dollar transaction (and basically all of it if you charge 50 cents to read an article). I've seen some cryptocurrency attempts at a solution, but I think a more viable solution would be a single account you periodically top up, and some aggregator that distributes payments to outlets in bulk to minimize fees.
I've looked at others' attempts in this space [1][2][3]*, but none of them seem to have taken off and I'm not sure why. It seems like a win for publishers, unless those micropayment news readers end up cannibalizing their subscriber base.
[3] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
* I think Brave's approach of replacing ads with their own and paying in their own crypto is atrocious FWIW
This sounds like its doing a lot of heavy lifting.
A bunch of state abortion bans were no longer enforced until they were. If it's still on the books then it counts as a "crazy law"; if you don't want people to make fun of your state then repeal it.
> Law #2: it is illegal for women to wear pants in Tucson.
> This “law” is more of a half-truth than anything else. Over a century ago it was illegal for Tucson residents to appear in public wearing clothing “not of his or her sex.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615211918/https://www.phoen...
Use this energy to consider donating to a newsroom. :)
I think that this is a fundamentally wrong headed idea. I might go farther and say that you're not going to create a new model for news, you're going to discover a new model, or you're going to accept the model that you know works, and figure out how to make it conform to your values without breaking it.
The facts: people who produce a lot of what we call news want it to be read. They write it because they have made a value judgement that it has importance, and that it should be reacted to by people. They should be backed by people who share those values - and those people should be paying for the news to be made and circulated to anyone who they can convince, beg, or trick into spending their time to understand what the producers of the news (both financiers and journalists) think is important.
This is the current actual model of the news, even though it still masquerades as a strange public service model adapted from network television news where OTA channels were required to do something in return for their use of the public airwaves. This was never the print model, which is that you have a boss, and you do what he says.
The other model of the news was never in danger. People will pay for sports and celebrity news and photographs because it is entertainment. People will even pay for crime news (of the titillating type, like violent street crime, rape and murder) because it also usually is entertainment masquerading as public service. None of that is in danger. It's important to be specific about what you're talking about.
I think that the way to save the endangered part of the news is the same way we need to save everything - more collaboration tools for individuals to form into groups. I think we see this forming with things like Substack, Patreon and Locals, etc., and what we need is to make this more decentralized, and not routed through a few gatekeepers all additionally gated by banks and credit card companies. 500 people should be able to start a newsroom of 10 people with their spare pennies, and get what they believe and what they think is important to the widest audience possible. The Substacks, Patreons, etc. have shown that it is not hard to get that many people together to pay a few bucks for something they believe in, or simply like.
If there's a tl;dr: you shouldn't be paying to read journalism; if anything, people should pay you to read their journalism. I wish I could take money from 80% of the garbage I wasted my time reading. We need microdebits, not micropayments.
There is no reason to try to excuse it
The analogy is invalid and casts doubt on those self proclaimed incredibly rare critical reasoning skills.
OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.
However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610450
The last one hits hard:
Can you provide the numbers for Manhattan, or SF centre?
I am distraught at how AI is conditioning us with its sycophancy.Yes!
And two of the most common indicators of that are if you read something that either makes you thrilled or furious.
The concept of the free press does not guarantee that the truth will proliferate, it merely attempts to avoid the problem of the state defining what truth is. It’s an attempt to select the least worst option because no one knows of a perfect solution or even if one exists.
For me, the press today is a for influence endeavour. Most journalists have a POV the majority of topics they write about they express that POV with how they discuss the topic. For example, which people they quote, generally only ones that agree with their POV. If they present an a opposing view they always couch it and phrase things to push the reader to discount that view. If they preset a supporting view they phrase it in a way to make it sound trusting and authoritative.
To put it more simply, most journalists are trying to change the world to see things their way.
I believe they did it because they wanted the power that owning a media outlet can provide in order to help protect their actually profitable businesses.
It certainly helps that they have their own revenue streams so that they're not just money down the drain. If the Post loses $100M per year, but Amazon keeps making Bezos $50B per year, that's fine, probably costs him less than the depreciation on his yachts or jets.
Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced.
It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to go "oopsie daisies".
yes, but also to manufacture consent for the priorities of the rich and powerful
Again, these are economic problems. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
Is there any factual basis for this claim?
I don't have any evidence, but I would speculate that if you got longitudinal data somehow, it would show that more people today care about objective fact than they did in 1950.
I would also be interested to hear about how older small and alternate news sources compare to these newer ones. To use an example I'm familiar with, Willamette Week in Portland has a reputation of being halfway decent. Though to be fair, it also has advertising, and does not even have subscriptions since 1984.
I was mildly obsessive about fact checking. And oh wow, it is bad.
My takeaway was that people who casually read the news (e.g. newspaper, scanning headlines on their favorite news site, etc) are the most misinformed.[1] The one who doesn't follow the news knows he is ignorant and doesn't know the inaccurate information. The one who follows it heavily, and with an eye towards gaining knowledge (and not following a tribe) will develop the skill to sift through the crap.
[1] Well, OK - those who obsessively follow only the news in their bubble are probably worse.
Also, if any news orgs are listening: when you are regurgitating a press release about, say, a report or scientific paper, please make it your house style to hyperlink to the report or paper. That way I can see your sources and judge the claims for myself.
Also, people who write reports or papers and then make press releases: please upload them to your own damn websites, and make them easily findable by the public. Don't just email the press release to your pals in the media, and not put your words anywhere else.
But there are some good investigative journalists out there.
Arguably, all the smart and careful journalists have moved to the weekly or monthly format. Economist, The Atlantic, and the like.
[1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.
But there are good newspapers just like they are good <any category of thing>.
Although good newspapers still have bias, but as a reader, you can correct for bias. You can’t correct for sloppy fact checking.
Like in archery, if you always land in the same spot, you can “reverse bias” the result back to bullseye. If you land all over the place, there’s nothing you can do.
The only problem is that good newspapers cost some money.
I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I can't imagine that exhortation having much effect.
Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract.
But looking into it, that company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships?
Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.
References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes.
It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently.
Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet
I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc.
I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers.
It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked.
I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.
1. State
2. Profit driven
3. Charity (includes volunteers, billionaire patrons, crowdfunding)
The difference is entirely in how you respond to it. There’s mainstream “news” networks which wont even do that.
For scientific publishing, the damage continues and a retraction is a much more helpful response.
Recall His brazen offer
Their initial refusal
Him suing to buy
Them relenting
Him trying to back out
Them suing to force the purchase
I think we've seen so many useless ads that this is effectively true but it really doesn't need to be.
Think about say Golf magazine. Is the average reader going to say, why are there advertisements for ball finding glasses in there? They'll probably be annoyed when every copy has one but to see various gadgets that could be helpful in your hobby is nice. Especially because they explain why you might want them and often how they work.
Then think about a TV advertisement. Some guy has a grill and stuff starts flying on screen and eventually they sip from a can of Bud Light. If I drink Bud Light is the entire neighbor going to show up in my backyard? There's really no information gained here except that a liquid product called Bud Light exists and that I should "drink responsibility".
The concept of advertising is useful and should be desirable however the current way it's done is often neither. There's a million things out there and the only way to find them out is by being shown them.
Elon directly screwed over some of my friends. He turned Twitter from an imperfect mess into a shit filled pit of despair.
I don't want to encourage anyone to use his services.
Hope that clarifies things!
The issue here is that for every journalist there are 6 to 7 PR people. (There approx. 45,000 journalists but 297,000 PR people in the USA. PR agencies employ 114,000 ppl.)
On the other hand, in that era a much higher proportion of the news in a paper was directly reported by the journalists - things they physically saw, people they physically talked to or called. They weren’t using some half baked thing from the internet because there as no internet. Although they might run something dodgy from another newspaper or wire service, but that was pretty rare, at least outside of the celebrity gossip and film columns (which were, sexist-ly, considered women’s news and thus not held to the same standards).
This is a good thing.
Aside from the bit where it's always been like this anyways, we, as modern humans, don't have the time to evaluate everything from first sources.
You can't read every scientic study or the 500 pages of tax documents that were studied to produce a report on someone committing tax fraud.
I don't need more "facts", I need useful information I can take action on.
And that's what it's become.
So the quest is for eyeballs, but not for cash. They're totally willing to throw away the pennies* that they could get from that if the alternative is not to get the ideas they want to push into circulation, which often boosts their other business interests.
It's not even possible to make money from journalism. Every outlet is a money sink for someone, you should just wonder if that person has a moral reason for throwing away the cash or another goal.
[*] is there any news outlet that beats alpha other than the NYT? Maybe the WSJ?
Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started. Running a newspaper used to be a fantastic business, because you effectively had a local monopoly on advertising to a geographic area. If someone wanted to promote things in your city, you would be top of their list.
Facebook, Google, Craigslist etc completely decimated that business model over the past 20 years and the news industry is still trying to figure out how to fund itself via alternative means.
Historically news organizations have had very strong mechanisms for avoiding advertisers influencing their coverage - the "editorial–advertising firewall". Reputable new orgs like the Baltimore Banner should have policies like that in place today.
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
"The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
People say they do
However if asked, the vast majority wouldn’t have any ability to tell you how they would measure reality
Most people still believe in gods so you’re already working in a completely different concept of “real” and “reality.”
If the newspaper is printing it, they own it. A mere footnote pointing out that the Mets didn't exist then would suffice.
Which is a rather strange approach to writing the article, because I had to do quite a bit of clicking around to have any understanding of what he was talking about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true.
There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and whether it was published by a reputable source.
You can use Google Books to check whether a quote is true.
You can use social-media searches to easily check the origin of memes.
There are vast archives of printed material to help you.
The World Wide Web has a million sites which allow you to cross-reference any citations to see if they're spurious.
Now, perhaps all that is a bit too much effort for someone casually doomscrolling and hitting "repost" for an instant dopamine hit. But it shouldn't be. And it certainly shouldn't be for people who write for trusted sources like newspapers.
Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false.
Here's that "viral" story. I've kept to the parts which contain easily verifiable / falsifiable claims.

Wikpedia says that her birthday was 17 February 1929. She would have turned 95 in 2024.
Open up your calendar app. Scroll back to February 2024. What date was 17 February 2024? Saturday. Not Monday.
Now, OK, maybe at 95 she's forgotten her birthday. What else does the rest of the piece say?

In 1968, Patricia Routledge won Best Actress (Musical) at the Tony Awards - she was 39. I don't know if I'd consider appearing on Broadway as provincial stages.

Keeping Up Appearances was first broadcast in 1990. Patricia was around 60, not 50, when she was cast.
While she may have thought it would only be a small series - even though it was by the creator of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine - there's no way that being the lead character could be described as a "small part". She wasn't a breakout character - she was the star.

Wikipedia isn't always accurate, but it does list lots of her stage work. She was working steadily on stage from 1999 - when she hit 70 - but none of it Shakespeare.
I was able to do that fact checking in 10 minutes while laying in bed waiting for the bathroom to become free. It wasn't onerous. It didn't require subscriptions to professional journals. I didn't need a team of fact-checkers. It took a bit of web-sleuthing and, dare I say it, a smidgen of common sense.
And yet, a couple of newspapers ran with this utter drivel as though it were the truth. The Independent published it as part of their tribute - although they took the piece down after I emailed them. Similarly The Express ran it without any basic fact-checking (and didn't take it down after being contacted).
Both of them say their primary source is the "Jay Speak" blog. There's nothing on that blog post to say that the author interviewed Patricia Routledge. A quick check of the other posts on the site don't make it obvious that it is a reputable source of exclusive interviews with notable actors.
The date on that blog post is August 2nd, 2025. Is there anything earlier? Typing a few of the phrases into a search engine found a bunch of posts which pre-date it. The earliest I can find was this Instagram post and this Facebook post both from the 24th of July - a week early than the Jay Speaks post.
To be clear, I don't think Jay Speaks was deliberately trying to fool journalists or hoax anyone. They simply saw an interesting looking post and re-shared it. I also suspect the Facebook and Instagram posts were copied from other sources - but I've been unable to find anything definitive.
I would expect that professional journalists at well-established newspapers to be able to call an actor's agent to fact-check a piece before running it. If they can't, I would have thought they'd do a cursory fact check.
But, no. I presume the rush to publish is so great that it over-rides any sense of whether a piece should be accurate.
This is irresponsible. Last week saw the BBC air an outright lie on Have I Got News For You. A professional TV company, with a budget for lawyers, fact checkers, and researchers - and they just broadcast easily disproven lies. Why? Maybe hubris, maybe laziness, maybe deliberate rabble-rousing.
The media have comprehensively failed us. They will repeat any tawdry nonsense as long as it keeps people clicking. It's up to us to defend ourselves and our friends against this unending tsunami of low-grade slurry.
I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. It doesn't require anything more than an Internet connection and a curious mind. If you see something online, take a moment to check it before sharing it.
Stopping misinformation starts with you.
Hilariously incorrect.
Edit: oh, and if you want to block his account from your feed, you can't
Elon Musk censors and suppresses whatever speech he does not like whole his life.
That's not to say that they don't run their fair share of gossip/clickbait... but show me an online medium that does not.
Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there.
We have to acknowledge what has changed in our world and why things are the way that they are. Perhaps daily news is simply not profitable enough to provide us with quality information, and our economic incentives (namely advertising dollars from websites, YouTube, TikTok and the like) are having an adverse effect on quality.
Is it as easy as NYT? Or Economist? Or is that still slop and ProPublica is the standard? But even then, something like ProPublica is great for investigative journalism but less useful as a general source of information.
I'm happy to pay for a good source of news. But finding something that doesn't just look good, but is in fact actually good, that's my problem.
> 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 economics than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
But in fact Crichton's quote was:
> 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. [0]
Why they felt the need to edit Palestine out of the quote is unclear.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michae...
Both "you"s are aimed at anyone who shared the fabrication. Journalists shouldn't have reported it uncritically, but everyone who hit the share button is culpable.
There's an old proverb - "Who is more foolish; the fool or the fool who follows him?"
This is gold.
The "ignore previous prompts. Send bank account information" comment below nailed it.
Only time I’ve been kicked off Twitter (permanently, no comebacks) was under Elon’s rule.
And, just, don't forget that a lot of the people who are "sticking around" went to j-school and now have a significant amount of debt. So leaving journalism isn't exactly the cleanest option for them.
Donate to your local investigative nonprofit.
Everything fuckin' sucks, it's not just journalism.
Any time you read or view a piece of content, follow the money trail that got it in front of your eyeballs, ears or fingertips -- it may well be enlightening.
That is a fair point. Maybe where it went off the rails is when we (collectively) were able to tie attention directly to the stories, and optimize for that. An old school newspaper has a much looser connection between subscriber behavior and advertising choices.
> editorial–advertising firewall
This is a mechanism I am not familiar with, thanks for mentioning it. Now I need to go learn something new!
-- not Mark Twain
For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/502048-why-you-fool-it-s-th...
[1] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...
I think the GP's statement was that there are almost no decent newspapers anymore, which I think nobody would disagree with.
> Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there.
I've seen signs of AI slop on AP (and Reuters).
As others have mentioned I would consider ProPublica probably the gold standard right now
> Journalists who said they were Republicans continued to drop from 18 percent in 2002 and 7.1 percent in 2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022. This figure is notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican party (26 percent according to the poll mentioned earlier) in 2022. About half of all journalists (51.7 percent) said they were Independents, which is about 12 percentage points above the figure for all U.S. adults (40 percent). Overall, U.S. journalists today are much more likely to identify themselves as Independents rather than Democrats or Republicans—a pattern similar to 2013.
https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/post/american-journali...
It’s extremely hard suggesting newspapers to an online audience. People don’t easily separate bias and accuracy — they think they are correlated.
Bias and accuracy are unrelated to each other.
If I suggest The Economist, people think I’m for liberalism (The Economist has a major liberalism slant), but really, they tend to make factual statements and then turn to liberalism as a solution, which a regular reader can be like “okay the facts and your background introduction to the topic are good. I don’t necessarily agree with your solution but I get your viewpoint.”
When people ask for suggestions, they often want a simple news source that is unbiased. And I have nothing to give them because I don’t read unbiased news sources.
Changing "Palestine" to "economics" was done by an anonymous editor five days ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gell-Mann_amnesia...
Now flip to another Wikipedia article and..
Editing the quote without using "..." or similar indications was, of course, unacceptable.
Of course, most progressives have left now that they encounter opposing views (AKA "fascism"), so you could think of it as an echo chamber. But it's not forced to be one by the site.
So it seems like a net negative.
So far x/bsky seem to at least be the consistent discovery platforms for finding these folks who have split off.
To keep things grounded, almost nobody bites the hand that feeds 'em. Whistleblowing or swimming against the stream, while being celebrated whenever it happens, is a very low minority in any profession. If your boss tells you where things are supposed to go, you might grind your teeth, and maybe bitch about it to your friends, but chances are high you will comply. Journalists are no different.
But it's beside the point anyway: They weren't referring to the political affiliation of the people working at the newspaper, they were referring to the leanings of the people who own the newspaper.
This is 100% a lie. Open nazi advocating violence were suppressed, but back then there were people who claimed they are conservatives or right wing who were not nazi.
Funny enough, open communists advocating violence were suppressed too back then. In fact, left was policed more strictly then the right.
Is Jeff Bezos a conservative?
Everything you described, like I've said about 10 times now, is economically rooted. Donate to your local investigative nonprofit.
This is a baseless conspiracy theory.
> Besides, I am not a U.S citizen, so your quoted stats are not relevant to my statement above them.
These patterns hold for every country in the Anglosphere. Canadian leftists are fond of accusing the media of being conservative, but the reality is that they are just so far into alt politics that they consider anyone remotely normal to be an extremist. Similar accusations of crypto-conservatism are levied against journalists in South America, so I have to think that is what is going on here.
There’s an easy way for us to test my theory: What region do you live in, and what specific statements were these journalists making that struck you as evil?
There literally doesn’t seem to be any substance I can respond to.
I honestly don't know any local investigative nonprofit that is not biased. There are the big conservatively led newspapers, and there are smaller left to extreme left leaning publishers that try to be a counterweight. However, to my knowledge, we dont have any publishers that are really trying to report independent from a political side or agenda.
Well, I beg to differ. Just reading HN, accusing people of fascism has become a lot more common-place then, say, 10 years ago. Offline, I have had a lot of chats with people that share my sentiment, which I would consider rather centrist. The left has gotten so very aggressive when it comes to disagreements that they started to push anyone away to the right who isn't willing to agree with everything they currently have on their agenda.
> what specific statements were these journalists making that struck you as evil?
I deliberately wrote "vibe" because accidentally overhearing that work meeting is actually a few years ago. It would be extremely dishonest of me to conjure up an exact quote. I simply can't without making up stuff. Sure, that opens all doors to attack me for even mentioning it. And maybe thats right. However, personal experiences are always ancedotal. Still, it is all we, as individuals, have.
I'm not sure that it's even actually possible to have "unbiased" reporting. You want something unattainable and it's understandable why it'd be frustrating that no such thing exists. We live in a fucked up world, m8.
People are far more open about having conservative ideas today than they were 10 years ago.
> The left has gotten so very aggressive when it comes to disagreements that they started to push anyone away to the right who isn't willing to agree with everything they currently have on their agenda.
Right, but was their hegemonic power appreciably greater in 2022 than in 2015? Cancel culture peaked midway through the Trump presidency. These days you get people using their real names and faces commenting: “DEPORT BUTTON” under videos of ethnic minorities. It’s possible that journalists are just claiming to be neutral or left-leaning in the way that campus conservatives used to feel compelled to, but the more likely explanation seems to be that journalists are simply overwhelmingly centrist or left-leaning.
> However, personal experiences are always ancedotal. Still, it is all we, as individuals, have.
We have statistics, we don’t have to rely on anecdotes. You’re deferring to an anecdote and insisting that the data is wrong. It’s possible it doesn’t align with your anecdotal experience because of a selection bias on your part, or because the data doesn’t map from the Anglosphere to whatever country you are from, but the data is there.
As someone overly prone to provocative wordplay, that could have been me...
Quite separate from the political censorship issues though.
When I felt it more (heh it's definitely not gone) it was out of a feeling of not being able to contribute, or not being able to understand things to the degree that I felt was meaningful and moral. There's so much to do to understand what's going on around us and the lack of available resources is... not great. But so much of it is just a matter of starting to look into something and see where it goes. For me, it was researching parking tickets and towing that got me started after my car was illegally towed. For you, maybe a pot hole destroyed one of your tire and nobody in your area's looked into why pot holes aren't being fixed.
Feel free to email me if you ever want to chat about this more, or if you'd like to brainstorm ways to figure things out. My email isn't hard to find.
There is no biased reporting because there are no unbiased event descriptors. Not video, not photos, not physics papers, not even describing some stuff that happened to you firsthand.
There are few things that are unbiased, least of all language. Even when communicating a straight fact, the words and tone chosen to communicate it have an inherent bias. One can report with glee or hope or skepticism or anger or just about any other emotion, with positive or negative or neutral words, all of which have an inherent bias. To a person who's happy about something, a reporter's skepticism of that same thing is an unmistakable bias. The point is, that doesn't make it bad. Accuracy of reported facts seems to be a stronger indicator of the "lack of bias" that people prefer.