Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

the issue at hand is how they determine reliability and where they draw the line at acceptable vs unacceptable. I'd argue the left-leaning equivalent of the Daily Mail would be BuzzFeed, complete with regularly posting skewed or outright false information (see this example from a couple of days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/business/media/buzzfeed-n...). If they want to be consistent you could argue they should place the same warning on BuzzFeed. But then how much falsity constitutes "unreliable"? And how do we warn about places people go for news that aren't news organisations, like twitter or facebook? There's loads of nonsense on those too and plenty of people rely on them as sources.

View on HN

or outright false information

If we're going to be objective and neutral here, we should point out that there is no evidence that the Buzzfeed article you're referencing is "outright false", and the link you provided certainly doesn't claim that it is. Buzzfeed is still standing behind the story and asking for clarification about exactly what parts of it are being disputed.

It's certainly possible that the story is "outright false", but we're not there yet.

I didn't mean this story specifically when I said "outright false" - obviously this one's still up in the air. But they reported on the Covington Catholic High School debacle, which has since been (as I understand it) shown to be false. That's two high-impact stories - one false and one in contention, in a couple of days.

Everyone is all for things like this when it's their side beating down people they don't like. But then when it is used to attack something they agree with they all suddenly get outraged. Very few these days seem to like ideas like freedom of speech or a "market place of ideas". Seems every one needs a nanny as long as the nanny is one of our guys.

yeah, it's a big concern. Fundamentally I'd describe it as partisanship prevailing over principles. However, I don't know if principles have prevailed historically, or if it's always been this way. It does seem to be getting worse though.

> see this example from a couple of days ago

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”

That could mean anything from "flat out wrong" to "they got a single word wrong in the reported speech but we don't want to tip anyone's hand whilst we're still working on this". It definitely doesn't warrant being described as "skewed or outright false information" until we know more, does it?

It warrants being called skewed, because I doubt the man in charge of investigating the allegations would make a public statement to call out a "single word wrong". At the very minimum there is something incorrect about the statement itself if "Mr No-Comment" is making a comment. Especially so if no other outlet has yet been able to verify the claims, as stated in the NYT article.

> a public statement to call out a "single word wrong"

I can see many scenarios where they would do exactly that to categorise something as "not accurate" if that information being unchallenged lead to problems building a case or enabled someone like Cohen to back out of a deal etc. But we don't know if it's any of them. Or if Buzzfeed were wrong. At some point, I suppose, we will.

> At the very minimum there is something incorrect about the statement itself

Yes but we don't know where it lies on the "Flat Out Bullshit" to "It's Largely Accurate But We're Not Going To Publically Acknowledge That At The Moment" scale.

I think you're being overly generous here. I would argue the scale is from "bullshit" to "some pertinent information is incorrect". You can spin the latter as meaning the same as "largely accurate" if you want, but it is a spin. I'm hoping that other outlets can dig in and shed more light on the issue in the coming days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com