Show your work: The new terms for trust in journalism

A lot of articles with suggestions posted here (HN) for making “things” better often focus on the mechanics of the thing and technical or procedural changes but a lot of the time ignore the reality of human behaviour and motivations. I think that relates to engineering/programming culture and focus on STEM with a lot less value placed on humanities which is then reflected in products and opinion pieces and people being frustrated that things can’t just be “fixed” through clever changes to objective mechanics and approach.

That’s drifting into other bigger topics but it’s a frustrating trend.

But I can't verify anything in journalism. If two reporters watched something happen and their accounts differ, who is right? No one knows, and both will be accused of bias.

When it comes to propaganda it is always better to deceive people with truth than with lies because lies can be disproven. The art lies in framing snippets of truth in the correct way, leaving larger truths out, to achieve your desired goal of perception manipulation.

Objective journalism can be just as powerful as a tool of deception as it is as a tool of enlightenment.

"Plane goes down" is to some extent objectively true (disregarding philosophy for a while here) but reporting on it becomes highly subjective as the journalist in order to add more than the basic observation will be biased on what they choose to describe the event.

Some scientific fields, math and physics, are pretty objective , but those that have been wide political interests or have fallen to post-modernism do not.

I didn't write it was just gossip. Read again.

"This sounds to me like "Truth is hard! Let's give up." Failing at quality journalism is better than succeeding at cynical, schlock journalism. The former harms society."

You aren't harming society any less if you treat perspectives as if it's objective truth.

Not with the example you've given. Investigative journalism is one form of journalism. I won't attempt to define journalism except to say the forms its stories take do not include posting a tweet in reference to someone's sentence fragment from a Facebook status. That may be a part of the "raw material" of a story that covers how conspiracy theories begin and spread. But neither that raw material nor the journalistic stories which essentially just tracked the effect of a wild conspiracy theory on a national election are examples of investigative journalism. (There may be pieces of actual investigative journalism wrt Pizzagate, but I haven't read them.)

But let's say we compare Seymour Hersh's story on the killing of Bin Laden and some random Facebook fake news story pretending to be a piece of investigative journalism. At least at present we're not at a point where a fake news artist can do a good enough job mimicking a piece of serious investigative journalism. But disregarding that, the main difference there would be reputation.

But that isn't a small difference. "Reputation" covers a lot of ground-- it includes the publication and the journalist. It also includes the age of the publication, its intended audience, its business model, and even whether the name of the publication appears to have been chosen to be similar to the name of a more reputable publication.

That certainly doesn't mean I reflexively accept all of Hersh's claims-- I do like other non-experts on the subject and withhold judgment until other experts begin to assess the veracity of his story over time. But it does mean that I can reject out of hand the viral Facebook link to some url that looks like "cbsnews.com" if you squint. I can save time and not read it at all based on reputation alone.

> And when trust in the press is lost what separates the curds and the whey is evidence which a fabricated story cannot provide.

It depends on why the trust was lost. If it was because a critical mass of journalists' track records got worse over time, then you're right.

On the other hand, if it is because a critical mass of readers can't tell the difference between a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation of media corruption and a click-bait website on Facebook, asking them to "weigh the evidence we're showing you for yourselves" isn't going to solve anything.

However, there's no excuse for stories based on public sources not to link to or provide a reference for those sources. If your source is another news site, blog, wiki page, forum post, video, etc... then you should damn well be linking to the original. Doing otherwise is like taking ownership of someone else's work, especially if you do what some sleazy sites do and rehost the original work as well.

This is one of the key problems facing journalism: if journalists started taking measures to improve the reliability of their output they'd take a short term hit to profitability which they cannot afford.

I recently did a bit of investigative journalism myself on this very topic:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

Briefly, mainstream media (Times of London, NY Times, Economist etc) started claiming that there were hundreds of thousands of Russian controlled bots posting pro-Brexit tweets in the runup to the UK/EU referendum. It was outright stated that the vote was manipulated and this claim was picked up and repeated by the British Prime Minister.

The story was based on an academic study that was not linked to or even named anywhere. However the academics in question did interviews for the media where they bigged up their results. It took some digging but I was able to find an early draft of their paper online (the only copy anywhere) which immediately raised huge red flags: the paper appeared to be deliberately obfuscated, it made claims that weren't backed by its own data and the claims it did make were patently absurd e.g. they defined a "bot" as including anyone who sometimes posted after midnight. The low quality of the paper would have been detected by comment posters immediately if it'd been more easily discoverable. Indeed it became clear that the story's foundations were weak to the point of collapse.

Interestingly after I published this one of the journalists at the Economist reached out to me to ask some questions about it. He'd done a story based on that paper which came across as very biased and I told him that. He agreed with me, at least to some extent, and told me the story had originally been much more equivocal but it'd been taken out in editing. Still, we had a decent conversation about it. I also sent it to the author of the relevant article at The Times of London and got a response indicating he'd read it, but of course, nothing ever happened there.

There are of course many other examples from pop psychological, miracle cures and so on where primary sources are either abused or are actually weak/bogus to begin with, and where demanding a higher standard of accuracy would mean the stories never got published at all.