Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

Take the coverage of the Covington High School protest, for example. When the available facts seemed to support the narrative that white, male, MAGA-hat-wearing, anti-abortion Catholic students were racially harassing a defenseless Native American elder, the media was shouting "fascism!" from the rooftops.

But when more facts emerged in the form of a longer video showing the high school students being abused, and with no mere smirk, by a group of overtly racist Black Hebrew Israelites no less--and the Native American elder accosting the students rather than the other way around--suddenly that no longer serves a narrative the left wants to tell, and there's been comparatively little coverage of the aftermath of the mob unleashed by the initial reporting, of the death threats to students and the high school's temporary closure.

This is why it is crucial for the media to present the facts from more than one, very specific angle, even when the facts are largely not in dispute.

I see two modes to this. On factual matters (flat Earth, anti-vaxxers, chemtrails), I fully support the "figure it out and print/publish only the truth".

In opinion matters (how much tax should the poor/middle/rich pay, should public higher education be free/cheaper, should we implement UBI, etc), I'm far more interested in hearing from both/all sides, even at risk of some of the fringe viewpoints getting more airtime than currently.

"News" is not the simple reporting of facts, probably never was, and inherent in even the apparent reporting of facts is an interpretation of them (if nothing else by virtue of the facts you select to report upon and then emphasis you give them).

I think the zeitgeist right now is people are afraid to fully own their beliefs AND be open to debate.

Right now there's too much fear of repercussion one way or another. Which is only pushing the extremes further.

There is no one "correct" side amongst people and events, only impressions and accounts, which can vary tremendously.

It's also important not to take a side in the news, but to lay out facts and people issues involved as fairly as possible, rather than what happens these days: hiding datapoints, falsifying statements, taking sides and rarely understanding anything about or relating to the people involved.

Perhaps on stories of grievance or accusation, journalists musy play devil's advocate by asking for a response to opposition and ask the question most people are too afraid to ask.

Taking sides is for the editorial, not news, lest it become merely a TV church espousing gospel and seed faith, while the polarized others are turned off and away. Neither group communicates to the other, and neither challenges the others ideas... a dichotomous, divided-and-conquered, atomized society falls apart.

PS: I've been around the sun a few times, and I note a liability red flag whenever a person espouses black-and-white thinking. It's usually an unreasonableness better kept at a distance.

So, no, we don't need balanced news. But we need critically inclusive news.

For example, I would be interested in listening to a reasonable anti-vaxxer. Not the "vaccines-cause-autism" one, (although this point deserves an honorable mention), but someone with more methodical approach. I know it's hard to find a voice of reason in the choir of conspiracists, but who said making good press should be easy?

I also would be interested in listening to a good flat-earther. I see it as a very good mental exercise for the reader: if I had now knowledge about the shape of our planet, could I actually tell the truth from the false here?

Same goes for climate (non)changers, Russian hackers and so on.

However, it's more subtle that that. It is a fact that so-and-so holds this-or-that position or belief, even if that position is wrong or incorrect. Those kinds of facts should be reported on, especially when they encode the beliefs and position of a major politician or political faction. A reporter also cannot outright contradict such a person, except in very clear cases, without seeming partisan, so they have to juggle with the prominence or try to inject a more authoritative counterpoint.

It's a hard line to walk, even when newsrooms were fully staffed.

If you ignore them altogether because they are a bit crazy in one regard (well, maybe a lot of regards), then you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In fact if you investigate it, you'll find a lot of so-called "climate change denial" is not so much denial as skepticism about the robustness and motives of climate science. There are some remarkably famous climate change skeptics you wouldn't expect, like a former head of Greenpeace who wrote an interesting essay that basically claimed oceanic acidification (due to extra CO2 being absorbed) was junk science. I didn't bother digging in to the merits of that specific debate, but when even the former heads of ecological charities are flagging problematic scientific practices, and when I've witnessed quite a bit in other non-climate fields, it's not a big stretch to believe that academia may have been exaggerating or mis-interpreting things to unlock grant money. Certainly other areas of science have developed a big problem with that (p-hacking etc).

For instance, your climate change (which was called until a few years ago "global warming") test rubbed me the wrong way because you mentioned the "climate scientists". There is no such thing as a climate scientist because there is no climate science. There is climate research or climate studies but not Science. Science means application of Scientific method: (a) making observations -> (b) formulating hypothesis (falsifiable predictions) -> (c) proving or rejecting the hypothesis through experimentation. Climate studies lack the third step and therefore they are not science.

Should I dismiss the rest of your argument based on my own test of "the person fails to understand the difference between science and ontology"?

So yes, it has been assumed to have happened.

Since then It is extremely difficult to find a neutral news with clear facts. I distrust the NYT as much as I distrust Fox news.

Unfortunately it seems the only way to effectively reduce bias is to go straight to the primary source and judge for yourself, which is time-consuming.

I used to subscribe to the FT. It's pretty balanced in its reporting, with good news coverage. Surprisingly perhaps, without the bias you might expect of a financial paper. For a while I'd be surprised to see well argued pieces making a case for less inequality, higher taxes, or a universal basic income. Then you stop being surprised they're not just a vehicle of the Tory party, like the Telegraph and Times mostly now are.

There was a very famous image of the UK miner's strike, at the battle of Orgreave, 1984. Another photographer captured the same scene that day. They give a very different impression.

Both images compared: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/06/photogr...

The journalistic emphasis in selecting just one ( viewpoint, photo,lede ) is partly why the news is so broken.

If the photo supports the central truth of the piece then run it, otherwise you’re undermining yourself.

It's similar to when people try to claim that journalism without bias in writing is not possible. No, it's very possible. See articles of the New York Times from decades ago. This [1] is the first article on what would become "Watergate" from the NYTimes. The article does nothing but provide a detailed and objective recounting of all information available. There is no speculation, and I certainly can't tell anything about the author's biases, political leanings, etc. And keep in mind that this is a huge event - that is what would eventually lead to the impeachment of Richard Nixon. That tempered and impartial reporting, over decades, is what gave the New York Times the reputation that it's rapidly destroying today. Imagine if that article was written by the New New York Times of today.

The problem of course is that that article is 'boring'. It's not going to drive a million clicks and be shared on social media sites getting those upvotes to get to the top which leads to even more clicks and even more money. Hacker News is definitely higher brow than most social media sites. Regardless, this [2] is a list of all submissions to this site from the New York Times. Go and see what gets upvoted and eventually makes its way to the front page (following are all 30+ point submissions from first page):

- Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing (nytimes.com)

- Opinion: A.I. Could Worsen Health Disparities (nytimes.com)

- Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued (nytimes.com)

- This is Your Brain Off Facebook - study offers glimpse of unplugging (nytimes.com)

- Another Side of MeToo: Male Managers Fearful of Mentoring Women (nytimes.com)

- Foxconn Is Reconsidering Plan for Manufacturing in Wisconsin (nytimes.com)

And so on. It's frequently sensationalized and hyperbolic reporting that often even starts the ball rolling with a fake title. No, AI isn't going to worsen health disparities. No, no company wants to get sued. And no, male managers are not fearful of mentoring women. And it's only downhill from there. Even the articles that seem real, often quickly expose they're just click grabbers. For instance the "Foxconn is reconsidering plan" states. The lead paragraph states,

"It was heralded a year and a half ago as the start of a Midwestern manufacturing renaissance: Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics behemoth, would build a $10 billion Wisconsin plant to make flat-screen televisions, creating 13,000 jobs. President Trump later called the project “the eighth wonder of the world.” Now that prospect looks less certain."

Several paragraphs later you get, "Foxconn said that it remained committed to creating 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin and that it was “moving forward with plans to build an advanced manufacturing facility.”" In other words they are doing what they said they would do. This is not meaningful or good reporting. But it gets those clicks, and that's all that matters now a days.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/22/archives/4-being-hunted-i...

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com

and as far as paying for ads, I find it absurd that anyone pays for cable tv anymore.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/conde-nast-to-put-all-titles-be...

> “The New Yorker, which introduced a metered paywall in late 2014, generated about $115 million in paid-subscription revenue in 2018, up 69% from 2015, people familiar with the matter said. That revenue includes consumers who subscribed to the digital and print editions, although subscribers today no longer have the option of subscribing solely to the print magazine. The New Yorker’s regular renewal price for a print and digital bundle is moving to $149 a year from $119. The magazine will publish 47 issues this year.”

Granted, there’s a big difference between publishing 47 issues of long form writing a year, and 365 issues of a much longer daily-reported newspaper.

EDIT: not to mention that the Times and other big newspapers probably see themselves as informing the public discourse. It probably wouldn’t fly to put general newspapers behind a paywall, though the FT has greatly increased profitability with this strategy.

Advertorials are an even worse solution than ads.

And then when I couldn't take it anymore and went to cancel, their retention department had the gall to suggest the message was not from them and maybe was from my browser.

Fuck you, New York Times. Paying subscribers should not see ads or be hassled to be tracked by the ad industrial complex. Raise your prices if you have to.

If we shift toward paying for content, is there not going to be a market for subscriptions to fake news as well as subscriptions to real news? Paying for content alone doesn't solve the problem of fake news. How does Joe Average even know which subscriptions are the right subscriptions? Please don't let an algorithm decide for them.

In terms of payment itself, I feel the going rate is a big issue. Checking the NY Times just now, they're asking $5 per week of me for a basic subscription. Let's make the math easy and call that $250 per year, and assume four subscriptions are needed to be sure we have a well rounded intake, giving a $1000 per year news budget. For a person with a net income of $100k+ per year, maybe this is not a big spend. But for people on lower incomes - who I would argue are likely the people most susceptible to fake news - this becomes a much greater expense and will discourage them from subscribing to anything. Compared to freely available news, it would be putting disadvantaged people at a even greater disadvantage, and let's face it - in a democratic society, I'd rather everybody have access to the same information, than know half the population is making decisions based on garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.

In terms of what the new model should be, I don't think I have any answers. I just know that I have a budget for news and it is not in the order of a thousand dollars a year for a well rounded intake, however I also want everybody to have access to the same news, so I don't think paywalls are a good idea.

The internet makes it that they don't need to fill pages and pages every day just to be tossed into the trash bin. A year old article can still be valuable, and it can be augmented with additional sides and updates. It just takes diligence and work, not to mention setting up publishing and formatting abilities way beyond the average cookie cutter CMS. Investing in their own production processes and technology, in other words.

But nobody's doing that. They're just making the churn more efficient. At most they'll link to some previous articles, forcing you to do the sifting yourself, and only linking one way.

By the time a newsworthy event reaches mainstream level, it's already been going for a while. That's the point at which I'd want to read a brief one pager of backstory, before diving into current events, surrounded by more context. Take the conflict in Syria: it might just be me not paying attention and being too busy with other stuff, but I genuinely missed when that started. When it did enter my radar, everyone was talking about it like we all knew how it happened. Well, if you take a random person on the street, someone who was upset at the (staged?) pictures of a dead kid... How many can tell you what that conflict is about and get close to the truth? I bet it's incredibly low, the only difference is I'm being honest about my ignorance instead of doing the stupid primate thing of pretending to be in the know in fear of looking foolish (and, I guess, western propaganda being just that when it comes to these subjects).

There's your hole in the market. That's what people want to pay for: not being the person who can't join in on interesting conversations. Well, are our current journalists up to that task? I very much doubt it, cos most have no ability beyond being a newsperson, jacks of no trade at all. Instead of letting experts do the talking, we're letting self important pretenders do it, and then, mostly to push an agenda.

The Quillette expose linked here about the geneticist bullied into suicide should lead us all to ask: why are we letting these morons tell us anything? They just want to enter industries and scenes they don't know, mine them for brief moments of relevance, and leave behind a wreck of human dignity. All over a ten minute talk they couldn't be bothered to understand, because bullying a sperg was more useful to them.

I am not in the news business. Nor am I am in the diesel motor business. It is not my task to suggest solutions to a changing business environment. The NYC can now, thanks to the internet, deliver its content to a world wide audience. A paywall can be easily established. I pay for good news (e.g. "The Economist"). For institutions like the NYT or "The Economist" it would take quite some skill to screw this up. The market may move into "the winners take it all" direction.

I agree that free news is a problem to many newspapers. Fake news are another problem. But solutions like screaming for government subsidiaries (e.g. in Germany) or getting fees from google or facebook are not solutions. Taxing eCars to pay employees that produced diesel engines to save jobs is not a solution either.

If you don't want to get indexed by google because you are afraid they "steal" your content, then this can be solved by one line in your robots.txt file

And it is really hard to ask for redistribution of common news without any further added value.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19051866

One of the things that irks me is the rhetoric that Trump-era distrust of the media is somehow undermining democracy or whatever. If you aren't distrustful of the media you are a naive and dangerous fool. I remember the overwhelming majority of US mainstream media pushing the Iraq war with stories that relied on bias and bogus sources. Interviews with officals & experts that had skin in the game. Blind faith in the media is even more dangerous than the also dangerous posture of not paying any heed to what they have to say.

Parents were not charged with neglect until after the article was written saying they neglected their daughter. There was no neglect just dirty laundry.

I imagine you could get a pay scale based on page views, and a model where if you don't use the subscription you get ads.

It'd be interesting to see built.

I was also thinking it'd be nice to see recommendations separated from the hosting. I guess there just aren't enough people interested in it.

I was thinking about this last night and I think it'd be interesting to see authors actually have to cite another post that has a good strong counter argument to theirs and point out places where they disagree. It probably wouldn't work on a systemic approach but might work if an individual with this sort of temperament did it.

I find there are some journalists I'd like to block and never read their trash again from each paper and some I would like to go back to over and over again. (Chris Wallace is a good one)

The fact that I can't get consistency from any one of the above is frustrating and I'm not paying 10 bucks a month per newspaper, the most I'll do is turn my ad blocker off.

I want to give journalists my money, but I don't want to give a newspaper with a single agenda my money.

https://www.adfontesmedia.com/

Extra care and attention to detail isn't going to just happen unless there's enough money flowing in solid journalism to allow for it.

It's quite possible that the cost cutting is connected to the editorial failures, and is a consequence of falling revenues. And the NYT as a whole is in a position to see how those things relate.

This isn't to place the NYT above criticism. They could stand to up their game. The profession at large could when it comes to painting accurate pictures of the world and the NYT is better than lots of sources. But it isn't going to happen unless people can get paid to do it.

And unless we pay for it, it's another place we'll be the product. Because the other models for journalism are (a) selling our attention to advertisers or (b) propagandists selling our pre-decided opinion.

The decline of integrity in mainstream media is actually what has gotten us into this mess. If the quality of mainstream news reporting did not decline so widely there would not be a vacuum for sites like JoeBlowKnowsTheTruth.com to draw an audience.

News organisations and their journalists are completely responsible for the scenario and trying to blame anyone else is just a scapegoat for their own bad work, the consequences (decline in readers/revenue, journalist layoffs) are theirs to face.

In other words you are looking for journalists who are good at winning prizes from their peers. But this risks becoming a self-contained system where journalists are "reputable" because they parrot what other "reputable" journalists think.

If IronWolve pays for journalism from sites that strike him as being thorough and trustworthy, then IronWolve's own judgement is as (small) exogenous contribution to the system.

Of course it is also possible that IronWolve is a fool who pays for foolish journalism. But if so, then that's his problem.

Some of these alt-media sites are political and put a spin on stories as well.

The big MSM companies know they have the power to spread fake news and have a good amount of people blindly believe.

The NYT itself felt it's reporting was bad enough it warranted an apology: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/weekinreview/the-public-e...

If you think it isn't, I can only suggest you have a bizarre concept of reality.

It's like raising a sev-1 ticket against a team/project you hate or escalating far and wide every single mistake a coworker makes - it tarnishes the reputation even while being completely truthful with respect to the statement made.

I think there might be a solution where state funds support a local-news system, where the funds are institutionally separated from influence - maybe similar to how the Fed is supported by the State yet remains politically separate from it (ideally).

There are institutional structures beyond the state and market that can produce public goods.

A lot of people used to say Open Source wasn't sustainable. Red Hat, one of the most prominent and influential Open Source companies, has over 10k employees (many of them engineers who take the salary of 2-3 journalists) just got bought for $34 billion.

You're gonna have to back up your claim that free news at a high quality level isn't sustainable.

I agree with your other points but be careful what you wish for because you just might get something worse.

What I would like is for the journalist to report the fact and let us reader chose if it is negative or positive.

The facts can include the views of external people giving their views on it (as long as it is clearly documented in the sources that it is the views of someone external). But if the journalist himself takes a side, then all bets are lost.

I don't pretend to have an actual answer to how we'd build such a mechanism or what it'd look like, but there's a need for it nonetheless. Maybe some trusted-to-be-accurate-and-confidential third party that can say "Yes, this unnamed source is legitimate"?