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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

In my view, this is a problem if each side is making claims without any attempt at quantifying or disclosing the relative magnitude of effects. That's a case where a reporter could do a little digging and fill in those details. For instance, how much dust? How is it stirred up? And so forth. You can still make of it what you will, but with better information.

I encounter the same thing dealing with engineers. They will list a variety of objections to an idea, or "risks," without any attempt at quantifying the issues involved. Managers do this too. If I ask for details, it becomes my job to research it.

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This seems to be one of the most common logical fallacies, especially in politics. I dont know if it has a name, but I call it "qualification without quantification".

It creates a logic chain that could happen, without any discussion of actual probabilities or costs.

For example banning of assault rifles, discusses how it could save lives. People are surprised to learn that there are less than 200 deaths per year from any type of rifle.

The same goes for universal background checks.

John McCarthy had a slogan for that: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scient...

Exactly. Can the dust be mitigated? Maybe via replanting afterwards? Or maybe the panels need to be farther apart to encourage regrowth of plants? Is a square field of panels more destructive than a longer line of panels? Are there construction vehicles that can cause less damage to the existing plant life?

If journalism can't be bothered to do research maybe the rise of AI created factuals is well deserved.

The article reports on the conflict between and claims of two parties. Doing research into claim validity has its place (investigative journalism) but not in an article that is just reporting on a conflict, in fact including such research would very likely be unethical.

You're going to have to explain how a journalist doing fact checking is unethical.

In a court of law, the judge isn’t allowed to do independent research unlike what you might have seen in the movies, they are simply allowed to listen to arguments on both sides and make a decision based on law.

A news article is like that in a court of public opinion where the public is the judge and the reporter is merely there to report on both sides of the argument, not supposed to be doing research on their own, it is up to the other side to fact check and add that to their argument, it isn’t the reporter’s job or even their place ethically.

There is definitely room for reporters doing fact checking and more involved investigative journalism, just not in that kind of article.

Like come other commenters here, I don't think it's a journalist's job to _do_ the research. However, the journalist can quite accurately report "X claims Y but says they haven't performed any research to quantify this claim".

The key is to ask the question.

> I don't think it's a journalist's job to _do_ the research.

Then who's job is it?

A suitable domain expert with a vested interest or funding from someone with a vested interest.

If there isn't such a person, then the research doesn't get done. I think this is fine, because by definition nobody cares. It's possible that only poor people care and they can't provide the funding, but then their political representatives should be able to find the funding. I accept that's not perfect, but it's generally how things work unfortunately.

Already you're assuming that the dust problem is truthful to begin with.

An investigative piece should actually look in to that claim rather than just repeat it. How can solar farms cause more dust than agriculture?

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