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Comment by chupa-chups | Hacker News Reader

Don't believe anything without verifiable sources (which is scientific standard, but unfortunately doesn't apply to press yet).

If you do only believe in stuff with verifiable sources, simply not reading or believing online available material without links to original research, you'll save yourself from around 95% of propaganda out there, including online hate spreaders on youtube, facebook and even the (more than just a few times appearing) journalist spreading government propaganda out there.

I'm aware that most of the readers here know this, but still it appears to me that a vast majority of readers in the internet do not have the "verify sources yourself" mentality yet. It'd be great it you educate your peers accordingly.

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Not only check for verifiable sources, but actually go and verify them.

For example: story says proposed bill will have horrible effect on thing you care about: bills are public record, go read the text of the bill and see before freaking out.

Part of the problem is that I have no context for most of the the stuff in those bills.

If it's about healthcare spending, I have no idea how much spending is normal, or to be expected, or where it usually comes from. I have general feelings about this stuff (I'd like to see Americans spend less on healthcare and I'm fine with rich people paying more taxes) but while reading the text of a bill I have no idea whether a good looking paragraph is going to be completely invalidated by a 4 word sentence 2 pages down. Bills are public, but they aren't written for a lay audience.

Instead of reading bills myself, I decide to trust folks who are well versed on the topic to provide me with analysis.

A million times this.

I learned the importance of this from working in research labs and seeing how the press reported studies that I had first hand knowledge of. Spoiler: the press pretty uniformly does a bad job of accurately reporting what studies say.

It's not entirely the fault of the press, though. Research papers (and bills) tend to be complex and use language in a very specific way. Translating them into something that is easy to understand, without losing so much important nuance and context as to become deceptive, is extremely hard.

Also, verify whether the facts actually (comprehensively) support the conclusion the author is wanting readers to put into their brains.

This becomes a bit of a recursive problem for me.

I don't have the time to read through every source for everything I read. In practice, I only dig into things I care about, or things that sound fishy based on my own knowledge / experience. This leaves 95+% of information I ingest unverified by me.

This may not be an issue at the time (since these are things I care less about), but the problem is I've now formed an opinion about these things based on what I read but not fact checked. Later on that "truth" becomes part of my knowledge base with which I make judgements with. This then end up influencing other decisions downstream which may be important to me. The nasty thing is I don't even know to what extend I'm influenced in this way.

Are there news organizations that exclusively use verifiable sources?

The BBC when I worked there had a policy of all news had to come from two sources. That has always been the case and not changed AFAIK. Though those second sources could ne reuters or other newswire source, which in the digital days has enabled the initial source can quickly create a second sources based upon the first. Which in some instances can prove hard to connect.

Personally, I prefer to look at some news stories from polar news sites to get both sides interpretation and with that get a balance to see the middle ground - which for politics has become the only way to read between the lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#21st_cent...

Ironically, that section itself contains an extremely misleading statement:

> The data also showed that the Conservative Party received significantly more airtime than the Labour Party. In 2012 Conservative leader David Cameron outnumbered Labour leader Ed Miliband in appearances by a factor of nearly four to one (53 to 15)

No mention that in 2012, Cameron was the Prime Minister, so naturally he'd receive more attention.

Yes, that stood out and by that glaring omission alone and the slant it took, diminished every other word upon that page - as doubt was raised. But that's how we trust sources, once we see them make such mistakes, we question and doubt all from that source.

But then anything political is always going to be full of such bias wordcrafting slants, however `neutral` a source appears due to multiple inputs and volume of input that such things can and as in this instance, do happen.

Fact is yes, the article and statement is true, but as always the context as you say - he was the Prime Minister of the UK, more than explains that and it's omission gives that observation without that context a major slant.

I have the same preference, but I don't like going to more than one place to find the different points of view. It'd be nice if there was an news aggregator that took each piece of news and had all of the different sources reporting it: a news site where each event is like reddit megathread containing the different sources, but not the discussion in a reddit megathread (the discussion could be somewhere else in a subdomain or something).

You are probably looking for an aggregator like AllSides.com . You can get articles from "left" "center" and "right" related to a given topic, like "campaign finance." However, if you are looking for coverage of specific events, you may find that only one or two sides cover that event. Each side basically has selective attention; they will cover an event that interests their primary audience and ignore events that don't interest their audience. For example, you will find many articles on impeachment from left and center sources, but the same developments in impeachment may not even be covered by the sources on the right. That's why I find the "look at articles from all perspectives" approach to be flawed. The sides aren't directly comparable. And there's no guarantee that the two sides will be equally trustworthy or equally verifiable. Instead, I choose to go to a handful of trusted sources that don't express much obvious bias in their news articles, but might have biased opinion sections. Washington Post, AP, NYT, Reuters, WSJ, etc. may all have faults and make some mistakes, but they are more reliable and more likely to employ ethics in their journalism than biased sources further on the left or right. Just make sure whether you are reading a news article or an opinion article.

I understand your concern, but I also consider it telling when a side chooses to not cover the event that is arguably in their domain of coverage. Maybe the news aggregator that I'm envisioning could also record these absences with something like "Source X: did not cover"?

When the news got out that the Der Spiegel top journalist were inventing stuff (and got fired, but not before winning several prices for made up articles), there was a note that fact checking had a major exception. Original work by journalists did not get fact checked. If they claimed they traveled to the moon and ate a rock made of cheese then a story about how the moon is made of cheese got printed without any checks.

Did BBC have similar exceptions?

I honestly could not say exactly, though even the best laid protection can find a new exception and in the digital age and ability to propoergate lies as quickly as facts, it would be hard not to happen. After all nothing is perfect, well, accept nothing itself as can not add or subtract from that in any way to make it better than what it is.

Though even investigating can seem to push events into a fact when they are not by how they are handled. The whole Cliff Richard even in recent years testifies towards that.

Hence no single source can ever be infallible, even about itself. Why multiple sources at a consumer level and personal best judgment still carries merit.

More so in a time when opinioin is often dressed up as facts of the whole when they are facts based upon opinion of a one, however many echo them.

I don't know of such an org. Out of curiosity, would you be willing to pay for such a service? Say $10-40 USD/year?

If it's good and is demonstrably better than the incumbents, then yes.

Not to my knowledge. Not everyone can freely speak about things and have their name attached to it in the press so often for particularly interesting government or corporate news sources can't be named and you have to think about how carefully a source was vetted.

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