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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> The news has become so bad today so every news source is basically fake news. In my country for example, the national television is so obviously biased it's ridicolous.

"It's all fake news" is cover for propaganda outlets, and while mainstream news gets things wrong occasionally, they get a lot right, and also they course correct and offer corrections when they get things wrong.

There's a huge difference.

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The MSM in the US is almost entirely corrupt. It's proven time and time again that it will push agendas, hide facts, kill stories, make things up...

If you doubt what I say I suggest you spend some time looking into MSM coverage of Epstein and Weinstein. Just recently it was leaked that ABC news killed an Epstein story for political reasons then tracked the whistleblower down at their new job at CBS and got CBS to fire them.

I suggest reading Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill to get an accurate take on the current state of journalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_and_Kill

No one doubts there are serious problems here and there, but "almost entirely corrupt" is hyperbole. Everything is imperfect and can be improved, but that doesn't mean you need to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch, in most cases.

Can you point to something that actually functions better?

Well when the press works in coordination to hide a pedophile ring involving two presidents, a prince, Bill Gates and tons of media and business leaders, then yes I don't think "almost entirely corrupt" is an inaccurate statement.

> Can you point to something that actually functions better?

I think Wikileaks is a good model. Get raw information out there. We don't need filters and narrative in the way of figuring out what's going on. Social media helps too, especially when the long form of highly edited videos becomes available. The whole thing with the Covington teens is a great example.

Raw info dumps are a horrible alternative.

City council meetings where I live regularly run on for 2/3/4 hours. Trying to process the video of that myself, rather than have a reporter there who can synthesize would be a colossal waste of my time. And that's just one source of information. County, state, national, and international news are also important to some degree.

And that's without even going into Wikileaks' connection with Russian intelligence agencies, or whatever the heck went on.

I don't think you should do it yourself. The community will do it and the original source material will be there to reference.

"The community"... is not going to sit through mostly boring evening meetings for free every few weeks and sum things up for you, all for free.

> I think Wikileaks is a good model. Get raw information out there. We don't need filters and narrative in the way of figuring out what's going on.

I don't see how anyone can conflate Wikileaks with "raw information", given their history of timing info dumps to inflict maximum damage in political campaigns.

What’s the difference between that and “swift-boats” and many other critical “explosive” news that have sunk many candidates? The news orgs which have produced those items don’t release the expose of whatever as soon as confirmed —or not in Dan Rather’s case. They release them when they feel they’ll have impact.

Yes to all of that but that is still 100x better than a completely fabricated story about Politician X dying when they are in fact living published on houston-star-ledger-journal.com. That's fake news. The examples you stated are not fake, but examples of yellow journalism and other fourth-estate power grabs.

I'm not sure it is 100X better. The tabloids have always published clear fictions. I think the danger is that people take ABC and the New York Times way more seriously than houston-star-ledger-journal.com.

They're both problems but I think the mainstream media version is much more dangerous and powerful.

Completely fabricated, eh? The big outlets don't do that, eh?

https://twitter.com/JessicaGKwong/status/1200208471599321089

She got fired. What happens to "reporters" at propaganda outlets that post "news" that they know is fake?

And what happened to Dan Rather after “rathergate”?

They could “afford” to fire a little known reporter.

And then there is the phenomenon of entertainment disguised as news which many people take for news which infuse enormous amounts of opinion and bias in their reporting.

The only ones which make a decent attempt at impartiality is PBS with their national news. Their local news tends to have intrusions where news is colored with opinion and bias, unfortunately.

No one on this thread is saying news is perfect. But what some people seem to be saying is that propaganda outlets are just the same as people who at least try and do real news, which is pretty horrible. That's how the propaganda wins.

The news is bipolar. On occasion they “want to seek the truth”. At other times they “want to do what’s right”.

Those two things often diverge. The “what’s right” has a lot of latitude and is open to the interpretation of the reporter and editor it also may hide the truth.

And also there is “agency”. Some reporters want to be “agents of change”. That’s not their job. It’s not their job to make nuclear uncool and put Jane Fonda front and center. If they had looked at the issue critically and scientifically we might not be in the pickle we’re in with regard to energy production.

Well they don't though. They don't correct themselves. At least not in Sweden.

I have seen alternative news sources correct themselves way more often than mainstream media. That could be because I mainly read those news sources but still, it is a fairly new thing.

In the US, they correct themselves in small letters at the end without changing the text, or they equivocate that it essentially doesn't matter that much, or try to memory-hole the article. The original claims supercede the reach of the correction by several orders of magnitude.

That is mostly correct. However, the alternative is...?

Headline. Massive block letters at the top of the article. Front-page notice. Put retractions and changes front and center. Make it clear that that's part and parcel of the process of reporting and journalism - that not all mistakes, intentional or otherwise, can be prevented, but that they can at least be corrected transparently. Without that, there is even less reason to trust that their intentions will lead to accurate reporting.

And do you think you're more likely to get that from, say, the Washington Post, or Breitbart?

Neither, from what I've seen. Big retractions made quietly is the pattern across the board, from mainstream outlets to 'alternative media'.

The latter is a propaganda outlet. Places like WP may not print retractions quite like you'd like, but they do print them, people do get fired for ginning up stories, and there is a sense of accountability.

Only for the egregious, easily-checked lies.

In the US, they correct themselves in small letters at the end without changing the text

There is no such thing as "In the US..." as if there is an established standard, or a requirement that you describe. It sounds like you're just gushing hyperbole.

For example, in print, the New York Times publishes its corrections on page two in the same type as the regular stories.

Online, it changes the actual text of the story and then explains at the end what was changed and why. There is no difference in font size.

Online, people do not go back and re-read the article to see it changed. The misinformation sticks by anchor bias and lack of ability to correct. This is, I believe, a critical failing in the electronic vs. physical distribution method as it stands, though I'm certain models could be developed for distribution of corrections as first-order material if these organizations truly wished.

Lots of silent downvotes. Can anyone tell me where I'm mistaken? Let me know if I'm spreading misinformation myself.

> they course correct and offer corrections when they get things wrong.

I have yet to see this actually happen with any topic of international relevance. To this day most US media consider themselves completely innocent in peddling Iraq WMDs and "Saddam involved with 9/11!" lies.

They just repeat what "anonymous government sources" supposedly "leak" to them and then act like it must be truth manifest.

This is also in their own interest: Being too critical of these "anonymous government sources" can result in being locked out of this special access, which is something no journalist or news agency can afford.

For a more concrete, and relevant, example just take a look at the Bloomberg "The Big Hack" story [0].

One year later and still nobody could produce an actual sample of such a chip, and even national security agencies, like the DHS, could not confirm the story and had no reason to doubt the involved companies' statements [1].

Yet to this day Bloomberg stands by that story [2], no correction, no admission of having gotten anything wrong.

But it did a good enough job of further spreading the "China spying on everybody even worse than FiveEyes!" FUD.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/10/06/statement-dhs-press-secr...

[2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...

Actually the (egregiously aweful) WMD stories were retracted

For example:

> Daniel Okrent, then-public editor of the The New York Times, went further in his column on the paper's mea culpa. His summary could have applied to many other media outlets: "Some of the Times coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines; and several fine articles ... that challenged information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby."

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/part1/wmd.h...

Mainstream news is still far from accurate enough to gain a real understanding of the topic. At best it's a way of seeing what powerful people or groups are talking about but that's still far from actually being informative which is what the general public assumes the media to be. It's hard to see how useless news is more helpful than fake news.

All ad supported journalism is by definition propaganda, as is state run news like the BBC or RT.

Being 'mainstream' has little to do with it.

Edit: Taking ad dollars constrains your ability to say things that your advetisers don't like. You can claim 'separation of church and state' and say that the ad department isn't telling the journalists what they can and can't say, but journalists don't work in a vacuum and editors and executives won't run pieces that they know will cause them to lose sponsors.

State run media is obviously not going to report on embarassments to the country in an open an honest manner. Look how hard the BBC tried to kill off the Jimmy Savile and Prince Andrew/Epstein angles.

This is true, and further it has ALWAYS been true. Media is always unwilling to publish things that will upset the cohorts their advertisers are trying to reach. We frame this discussion entirely wrong in this way: for-profit media platforms exist to give advertisers access to consumer attention, and they get mad when the media platforms burn the groups they're trying to sell to.

You can claim 'separation of church and state' and say that the ad department isn't telling the journalists what they can and can't say, but journalists don't work in a vacuum and editors and executives won't run pieces that they know will cause them to lose sponsors.

Citation needed.

Primarily because I've worked in a number of newsrooms, and there was most certainly a separation between editorial and advertising. Sales people weren't even allowed in the same wing or on the same floors as the reporters.

Contrary to your tinfoil hat suppositions, the reporting and advertising departments aren't all buddy-buddy. In all the years I worked in newsrooms with 15-200 people, I never once knew, spoke to, or could even name someone in the advertising department.

I will admit that's not true for very small outlets under 15 reporters, but that simply happens because you share a bathroom, lunchroom, hallway, parking lot, etc... with everyone on staff.

I don't really agree with the parent poster, but you don't really need someone to tell journalists what they can and can't write to get them to push your agenda. What you can do instead is to hire people who share the ideas you want to push. This way they'll write what you want them to write without you having to tell them.

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