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>This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when".

That's only true when the coverage consists of retelling such basic facts, but that's a small part of what journalists do.

Anyone with knowledge of international events and affairs can spot all kinds of errors, omissions, and plain falsehoods when articles cover such topics -- just as well as one does when it comes to say physics or computer science.

>Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies.

Most journalists and press agencies cater to the lowest common denominator. There are press sources that go far deeper [1] but those are not what people usually read for their "news".

For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT.

[1] Even if they introduce a certain delay on the news (which in most cases is irrelevant, it's not like anybody will need to act immediately upon some news regarding foreign affairs for example).

> For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT.

If you have the time, sure. Journalists do this work for you and are trained to do it, but of course there is nothing wrong with going closer to the source. Only few people can afford this luxury, though. I sometimes do this for topics I'm really interested in, but certainly not for every daily news. For the ones who don't have the time, resorting to reputable newspapers is by far the best choice.

Edit: In your reply you were shifting the goalpost. I was talking about news, not "what journalists do". Writing an editorial or opinion piece or broad analysis is not reporting news. Just wanted to make this clear.

I disagree that the parent comment “shifted the goal posts.” The type of news article or segment that involves retelling facts like in the original comment is also where editorial choices of what facts to tell, how to present them, how to stylize a guest commentator, etc., all take place.

There is no isolated part of the news about foreign affairs, say, that is commonly just a complete summary of discrete facts. Every choice about presenting it for consumption is part of an editorial and marketing process.

In this sense, I think the parent comment adequately captures a useful counterpoint to your original comment, and is not “shifting the goalposts” or anything by talking about one (journalists) of the many factors that make reporting even on fact summaries still often full of politically convenient ommissions or focused on politically convenient estimates rather than full disclosure of all estimates, etc. etc.

Fair enough. I still think he shifted the goalpost a little bit but didn't want to make the impression of not accepting the criticism. It's a fair criticism from the perspective of the OP.

Maybe you and the OP have different conceptions of what news are, though, because I have definitely no problem discerning factual statements from opinions or framing and in my book only the former constitute news. That every news source is biased and in fact every person on earth is biased, that is journalism 101 and has been known and accepted since the first newspaper was published. Likewise, you can learn at every photography course that every picture also tells a story about what's not on it.

I really don't get why people make such a big fuzz about these truisms nowadays and suspect that many of the critics have a hidden political agenda themselves. (Not meant as a statements towards you specifically, just as a general remark, as the description of a tendency.)

The issue usually is not whether you or I are skeptical enough of news presentation, but rather what will the pragmatic societal outcome be when you add up the cumulative effect across a big chunk of society, consisting of people with large variations in intellect, critical thinking, etc., but who can influence elections with equal weight or convict people in the court of public opinion.

Or a court of law.

> I have definitely no problem discerning factual statements from opinions or framing and in my book only the former constitute news.

What if the facts you are discerning have been somewhat modified, or some of the facts relevant to a specific story have been excluded from the article entirely?

Then I'm still better informed than anyone who thinks he has "eaten the wisdom with a spoon", to use an old German proverb.

I said that I see no viable alternative (unless you have unlimited spare time and unlimited travel funds to interview witnesses and take photos yourself), not that traditional newspapers are perfect.

Besides, the problem of most people nowadays is that they are overinformed, leading to an overly negative world view. That problem worries me personally much more.

An obvious viable alternative is to avoid consuming the news in cases when you detect that the information has a high likelihood of being manipulative or not containing accurate information.

If you happen to be an expert in a certain topic, you’ll reliably detect this for news items of that topic.

The OP is meant to talk about extending that experience into a general prior belief that such mistakes also occur in areas of the news about which you are not an expert.

Even if you only have one potential modality for consuming news information (i.e. consumer media), you still have the option to try to mentally model the uncertainty within that modality, and either adjust your general skepticism of all news upward, or adjust your consumption of news downward. Either of which could be policies that cause you to become more informed by consuming / believing the news less, depending on your personal parameters for the optimization policy.

> Then I'm still better informed than anyone who thinks he has "eaten the wisdom with a spoon", to use an old German proverb.

Or in other words, the "I have no problem...." part is not quite accurate. Yes, I'm being rather pedantic, but I think it is perfectly fair to point out any flaws in any "no need to worry" explanations of the shortcomings of journalism.

Why would choosing the best option be conceived as a problem? Your reply makes no sense.

Where does "Why would choosing the best option be conceived as a problem?" appear in this conversation?

I have argued that there is no viable alternative and that getting your information from reputable newspapers is the best option. You argued that I have a problem. I suggested that choosing the best option (even if not optimal) ought not be conceived as a problem.

> I have definitely no problem discerning factual statements from opinions or framing ...

The epistemological stance of this statement is troubled at best

Editorial decisions include more than just opinion pieces and editorials. It’s common for “hard news pieces” to try to add context or to put news in perspective. But the extra context or perspective is an editorial decision.

This wouldn’t bother me if journalists were experts on their domains, but there is plenty of reason to think that’s not the case.

There was once a time I considered becoming a journalist. I bought a copy of the then-latest AP Style Guide, which had a chapter on how to handle unfulfilling assignments such as business news. The fact that a media company covers news for a particular topic doesn’t mean they actually have any experts on that topic.

I remember a computer journalist who bought a Linux CD, couldn’t get it to install on PowerPC, and claimed that was proof Linux wasn’t actually portable, and didn’t understand why people asked what architecture the CD was for. I remember when a buffer overflow was reported for Apache, and before Apache had a fix, somebody released a build that doubled the size of that buffer. Several media outlets thought this was an impressive fix for the original problem, and failed to ask what would happen if an attacker doubled the size of the input.

With that kind of track record, I’m very cautious about where I get my computer news, and I fact check every story I can. But what about topics I’m not an expert in? I’ve seen incredibly dumb legal stories even though it would be easy for a news station to find a competent lawyer to review things before they’re published. When I read anything about the military or foreign affairs, I assume that the assigned journalists aren’t any better at their jobs than the people covering technology, lawsuits, local politics, etc.

> Journalists do this work for you and are trained to do it, but of course there is nothing wrong with going closer to the source.

Journalists are trained in journalism, not particular problem domains. Someone writing an article on an event in the middle east may have no education in Middle Eastern history. Without domain specific knowledge, it's impossible to write a coherent article on complex topics like these.

The very premise of general-purpose journalism is obsolete for numerous subjects. For foreign affairs, for example, the underlying facts all come from the same AP wires or press briefings. There is no value-add to having a non-expert massage those into an article. Likewise for politics. Most technology news comes from press releases, etc.

That's not true in the general case, or even really close to true. For downmarket outlets, and for stories in places the Times, Post, and WSJ don't cover, sure. But the major papers have bureaus all over the world, and those offices break major stories that aren't received from wire services.

(And, obviously: what are the wire service reporters if not themselves journalists?)

>For downmarket outlets, and for stories in places the Times, Post, and WSJ don't cover, sure. But the major papers have bureaus all over the world

Increasingly less (regional offices close all the time), and where they still do, increasingly more cheaply (in both personnel costs and quality).

E.g:

The Washington Post has 16 foreign “bureaus,” and 12 of them consist of just a single reporter, according to the newspaper’s website. The four remaining bureaus all consist of two journalists. Is the Post using the word bureau a bit loosely? One Post reporter, Sudarsan Raghavan in Nairobi, is listed as the paper’s “bureau chief in Africa.” Raghavan is the chief of a bureau of one in Kenya. For the continent of Africa.

https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/loneliness_at_the_f...

That's more innuendo than rebuttal.

Even the Times, Post, etc., rely heavily on pre-packaged news (Manufacturing Consent, if a bit dated, gets into this.) And yes, the wire service reporters are journalists, but those reports are extremely barebones. It's the newspapers that try to add color and context, and often completely butcher that task.

Everyone relies on wire services, but it does not follow that all the major foreign stories in the Times are wire stories, and, indeed, they are not. Look at WSJ's China/Asia corruption stories. Or, locally, look at what Carreyrou did with Theranos.

You'd think, on HN, that Carreyrou would just be the immediate nut-hand game-ending argument about the "Gell-Mann (Crichton) amnesia effect", but, no, we all seem to have forgotten about Theranos and the WSJ.

If you have the time, sure. Journalists do this work for you and are trained to do it

There is an unfortunate trend arising from the coincidence of two motivations: 1) Increasing click-bait factor of news in response to economic pressures and 2) The pushing of group agendas by a 4th estate communicating ever more intensely via social media and electronic means.

one of the big things that news papers do is pick through various sources and figure out which are important and which aren't, if you go directly to the source and you aren't careful, you can get stovepiped[1].

More generally who the hell has time to go directly to the wire and read all the raw sources and figure out which are accurate, which are relevant, and which you should care about? Journalists, do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepiping#Stovepiping_pre_an...

>one of the big things that news papers do is pick through various sources and figure out which are important and which aren't

That's the thing you want to avoid if you want to form your own opinion on something. You shouldn't let anyone else do that for you.

That's obviously not true, because for virtually everybody, there are plenty of subjects where we're simply not qualified to do that sorting, and will only mislead ourselves by trying.

The virtue of good reporting is that they can cultivate expert sources and analysis that you don't have access to.

That's not practical in most cases. Nor is it even necessary if you're simply trying to grasp larger socio-political developments.

All you really need is (1) healthy skepticism that is prepared to tentatively accept facts and narratives as presented, and (2) sufficient interest to remember the highlights and contours of previous reporting. Bad journalism invariably becomes inconsistent and contradictory journalism.

You don't need to be an expert in the Ukrainian armed conflict to have realized that popular Russian news outlets propound falsehoods; over the years they've published contradictory facts while reporting by other outlets has remained steadily consistent. The consistency of lies and misleading narratives is drastically more difficult to maintain than of objective statements of substantive facts and narratives rooted in those facts.[1]

Knowing the truth and identifying falsehoods are two different but related processes. As you filter out the lies and biases the truth comes into focus, albeit an incomplete truth.[2] But in most cases that's more than enough to stay usefully informed on matters of general import.

TL;DR: News literacy simply requires tentative acceptance of substantive facts and narratives firmly supported by substantive facts while keeping a long-term memory of the highlights of previous reporting. The latter has been made infinitely easier with the advent of the internet because locating previous news stories has become trivial; questions about consistency can in most cases be quickly resolved with brief Google sleuthing.

[1] Of course, as the Iraq War proved it's not impossible, at least not over the course of a year or less, but even then the narrative was transparently based on a single fact--the curveball informant--that was sufficient alone to cast the narrative into doubt. The American public (including myself) was overly credulous of the narrative because we shared the same biases as the reporters. But as practical matter this case is the exception, not the rule, unless you want to get really philosophical about things.

[2] In general that's another indicator of good reporting: not claiming more than the facts support. Suffice it to say that this is different than FUD, but I'd rather not get into it. My point is simply that there are tools (heuristics or algorithms, if you like) that promote literacy of major issues without requiring one to become a subject-matter expert.

> it's not like anybody will need to act immediately upon some news regarding foreign affairs for example

Well, that's not quite true: there are organisations which need to act immediately upon news of foreign affairs. Those organisations are nation-states, and they tend to have well-funded and -staffed intelligence operations for precisely that reason.

> There are press sources that go far deeper

I wonder if "deeper" isn't the critical dimension for the facepalms of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Perhaps instead it's "cluefullness"? Channeling consensus expertise from a robust professional community. Much long-form journalism is just as cluelessly facepalm-intensive as TV news. Random-person-in-the-field handwaving (Foreign Affairs, or Atlantic), or "cocktail-party consensus" (Economist, or often NYT), seem no less G-M-ish. And in contrast, a brief and "shallow" one-liner might still reflect the correctness and insight of deep and robust community expertise.

You can experience G-M facepalms without your own expertise, by finding forums where some professional community hangs out. So when US Navy ships are colliding, you contrast press coverage with discussion on a professional maritime forum. When a SpaceX-launched satellite fails, you contrast press coverage with a private spaceflight forum, or even /r/spacex. The magnitude of the facepalm signal is very not small.

Some of the more clueful journalists, are embedded in such professional communities. Which suggests a metaphor. As the old press shut down its foreign desks, something was lost. Coverage became less insightful, less nuanced. A reality-check was removed, so facepalms increased. For myself, most journalism, about most topics, about science and technology, economics, governance, and much else... feels like the foreign desk has been closed.

There's still "in-country" trade press, and newsletters. So perhaps there's a market opportunity here? Channeling expertise to a broader audience, without the focus on transient "news" and investigative journalism. Instead of hanging small bits of broken insight upon the "hook" of current events, perhaps make insight the focus?

> "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when"

Quite a lot of news reporting does this, but it's extremely hard not to accidentally let "a spokesperson said X" implant the belief "X is true" in your mind unless you're very vigilant. So reporting these kind of official statements without fact-checking the underlying statement can be surprisingly misleading.

But then there's also the ability of media to just make or dig up a scandal out of whole cloth by finding people willing to make the statements they want. Today's fiasco is the Times trying to resurrect the idea that Michael Foot was a Soviet agent, a claim which they lost a libel lawsuit over decades ago. https://inews.co.uk/news/ex-sunday-times-ed-andrew-neil-lead...

> Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. I've never heard of any reasonable and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a good substitute. Neither are copy&paste news aggregators or bloggers.

This is true, but why does this mean we should assign trust to newspapers? I think the reality is that a reliable source of information is not possible due to the Principal-Agent problem [0]: any information-providing body is going to have incentives to distort the information provided. Misleading headlines or "clickbait" to draw in more readers are one such incentive, and the inherent difficulty of verifying one's facts is another. The notion that there has to be something we can trust is a foolish one, and we should be skeptical of everything we read.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

> This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when".

I disagree very strongly with this statement. The "facts" may be simpler in that it doesn't take research to uncover them, but the "reporting" is far more complex because there are so many and contradicting facts. Take any international conflict and you have multiple truths about which gov't decided what. Additionally the actors are motivated to create confusion.

>This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when".

People often divide news content into two spheres: Facts and opinion (e.g. editorial). News articles are believed to be facts, and then they separately have opinions and editorials. The common advice is to be wary of the latter.

In my experience, though, the news is really divided into three spheres: Facts, opinions, and context. You'll find that almost every news article contains both facts and context. The context portion of the article is there to tell you why all this matters. Contextual statements are also facts, but they do not involve the immediate events. It is in the choice of which contextual facts are included in the article that bias creeps in.

As a simple exam, in 2003 Michael Jackson was charged with child molesting. I recall almost all the articles I read mentioned in the end that he had been similarly accused in 1991. Yet none of those articles mentioned the details and outcome of that investigation.

With international affairs, once you've studied a topic for long enough, you'll quickly become aware of the contextual biases, and you'll want to scream at the authors for omitting what you think are very relevant contextual facts.

> a trained expert will find a lot of inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs

Are you an expert of international events and affairs? Have you spoken to one about whether this is true? I'm not and haven't, but I would bet they have plenty of examples of terrible coverage.

(I imagine many examples would be of the form "they focused on irrelevant detail X when what matters is Y" or "they said X implies Y but it's actually unknown what the consequences of X will be" or "they only quoted people with opinion X" or "they oversimplified X to the point of caricature" or of course "that's just factually wrong, I was there and X never happened".)

I think he was talking about the news content, not about analysis.

I was once elected to public office. Nearly every article that involved me was wrong. Several times the article even insinuated that the situation was the opposite of reality. This wan't a partisan elected position either.

> I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for newspapers.

I notice the effect all the time reading any coverage of legal or regulatory issues in mainstream newspapers. I pretty much just flip past any such article these days--it's too painful. As to the alternatives, they're domain specific. For legal stuff, there are specialized legal journals. Blogs are top notch too--anything you read on PopeHat is 10x better than the NYT.

It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right

I don’t disagree with this simple statement per se but I disagree with its implications.

You can still paint a false picture by choosing which facts to report and which to ignore. I see it every day in the gym with one television that plays CNN next to one that plays Fox News. Watching the TV on the left gives me the impression Trump is a hooligan constantly on the verge of being impeached. The TV on the right tells me the economy is roaring and everything is great.

> It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right,

Even a cursory skimming of Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky will dispel you forever of such a notion. The motivations for inaccuracies of political journalist are different from that of a science journalist but the result is the same.

It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway

In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way.

In the case of "worldly facts" news, the really significant part is often the emotional impression of the text. The way this plays out in physics/science, world news, and politics are all going to be somewhat different. It results in factual errors more often in science news, which often amounts to making people feel like they're informed, but the emotional games played in more political news are different. (The exceptions are climate science and evolution, where the topics are more politicized and the emotional games are more political.)

I doubt even in the case of international affairs things are any better in the manner traditional media is covering it. Eg: See the coverage of Syria, there seems to be hardly any first hand reporting appearing, most reports read like analysis written from afar.

Political reporting is 10% facts and 90% narrative. In fact, the facts themselves are reported very selectively, largely based on what fits into the desired narrative.

You can round up 100 protestors anywhere, for any issue. Why does the media cover some protests but not others? Why does the media never report on public suicides and bank robberies (to avoid encouraging copycats) but they report every mass shooting, complete with a gory scoreboard? Why was the bloodiest war since World War II virtually unreported on in the US? Why were Donald Trump’s bizarre antics more comprehensively reported than the policy proposals of any of the Presidential candidates?

Iraq has WMDs.

That’s closer to manufactured consent. No evidence, vague justification and mainstream parroting to reinforce the narrative.