He Said, She Said Journalism (2009) | Hacker News Reader

He Said, She Said Journalism (2009)

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The truth is that controversy sells, truth does not. Truth is the first casualty.

The use of propaganda has increased significantly as a substitute for research and robust argument. Today, it's rare to find a media source that is unbiased and honest (I'm struggling to think of one). What concerns me more is that the propaganda is getting worse. Maybe, it's a side effect of free news on the Internet as there's no money in journalism anymore.

I agree with most of the sites that have been criticised in this thread. However, I'd rather see a list of media sources that people respect. I used to love ArsTechnica until about 18-24 months ago. Something happened in their management because they started with prejudice and politics in their articles (read Casey Johnson, San Mechkovich and Megan Guess articles as an example) and by dumming their content (someone used a camera/drone rubbish that appears almost daily).

These days, HN is one of the better (not really media) resources around for openly challenging propaganda. I think it struggles with Political Correctness but it's significantly better than most other outlets.

Wikipedia has gotten like this. As long as you can cite it, you can include it. Articles have become just a list of citable blurbs with very little overall thought or coherence.

It's actually their official policy: "Verifiability, not truth"

Wherever mainstream journalism or authoritative sources fail, Wikipedia is right there to amplify that failure, primary sources be damned.

It's always amusing to watch editors debate whether an individual's high school can be included without a citation whilst leaving alone a massive "controversy" list of every piece of adverse information ever published about an individual, and figuring it's balanced if there's a few counter arguments in there as well.

Plus not all citations are born equal. You can use Gawker Media as a citation, but they're no more than a series of gossip sites. Or the Daily Mail or often re-print stories taken directly from anonymous internet comments.

> You can use Gawker Media as a citation, but they're no more than a series of gossip sites

This isn't true anymore; Gawker sites have done valuable reporting in a number of areas. As have Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, two other sites that HNers tend to dismiss automatically. (IIRC, HN's software will silently reject any submission of a Gawker URL at all, which is kind of ridiculous.)

For what it's worth, that doesn't look like it's true. There's this[0] link on the front page to Kotaku.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697939

And that's not counting with all the references that turned into 404 after a few years.

The sinister thing about this is it allows people to divine their own truths and meanings from seemingly "objective" fact, more often then not just reinforcing previous biases and predispositions. This can also be used to explain away a problem with a position or argument that a journalist favors.

if the title of a piece contains a quote and an opinion, it's not news.

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