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I agree it wouldn't sell very well.

But postmortems in the tech world do trend sometimes

a news cycle postmortem - someone pitch this in an elevator

It’s a great idea, but I doubt it would succeed. Human nature tends to include not admitting fault. Also, many readers seem to choose their news (at least political news) for confirmation bias (whether intentional or not), so a news site/paper saying they were wrong would defeat that.

Not saying that retractions don’t happen, but they seem to be always buried under the headlines.

They could call out the news sites/papers of the opposite side though.

That is something I considered. Many partisan sites love to point out the errors of the other side. I know Fox News loves to call out CNN all the time. However, if every site did it, I fear that would just lead to more confirmation bias. And why report that the other side was right? That hurts your viewpoint.

What we need is a non-partisan non-profit to do it. But then there’s the problem of funding (which results in conspiracy theories).

Seems like the best way now is for the reader to make notes to themselves and regularly check back to them and see how things changed, compared to where the hive mind was earlier.

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