It's really strange that you're unaware of it, because the article you're commenting on goes in to great detail about what happens when other reputable news organisation's fact checking fails.
This is the default state of the world until proven otherwise and is supported by countless examples. The media is not some bastion of truth, it's just as subjective as the rest of us and has progressively gotten worse as all standards are pushed aside for the narrative.
The reality is that not all news sources are equally bad or biased. Some do a better job of fact checking than others.
I'm glad they rate political inclination separately from factuality because I've gotten to the point that I only care about the latter, and not the former, and highly suggest others do too. Nothing rated below "HIGH" in Factual Reporting should be passed along, IMHO.
They always link to the evidence for their ratings.
Subjective language is one way they do it. For example, an organization might have a "culture of abuse". That's not factually wrong but it has no meaning either. When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy". When they want to suggest a person is dishonest, it's "X claims, without evidence, that ...".
Another way is taking advantage of people's inability to distinguish anecdotes from a representative sample. If they want us to believe that crime is increasing, they'll report more on crime so the audience gets the impression that there's more of it. They may even say it's increasing, which it always is if you cherry pick the appropriate time scale.
Then there's using quotes from other people to say whatever the journalist wants to say themselves. A technique for interviewing people is to go fishing for someone to say the right thing, which someone inevitably will if you ask enough people. Or worse, telling their subjects what to say or tricking them into saying they thing they want, perhaps by expressing the same belief themselves and using the human nature of agreeableness to get the subject to say they agree, even if they don't really. Sometimes the quotes are written inline with the rest of the sentence so they feel like facts being asserted by the journalist but aren't subject to the usual standard of accuracy.
I'd say these are more serious problems than factual errors because they're convey high level feelings and overall sense of the state of the world which are being prefabricated and fed to gullible voters so they don't have to think for themselves. With factual errors, you still have to use those facts to conclude something, which is hard mental work.
That white supremacists are expanding their membership and becoming more violent is in fact objectively true and "growing white supremacy" is an objective comment on the political circumstances that led to the Christchurch terrorism attack.
Honestly, and I know this is an ad hominem: you declaring that such a view is "subjective" says a lot more about your politics than it does anything about journalism. So I looked at your HN profile. In fact, looking at your comment from 6 days ago[1]:
> [James Watson] [b]lasphemed against contemporary morality by taking the "wrong" side in the nature-vs-nurture debate. See his Wikipedia page for details.
That is not why James Watson got in trouble. James Watson got in trouble because he said directly that black people were dumber than white people, and that this is due to genetic differences. He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former, and absolutely zero for the latter. His claim is strongly disputed by anthropologists and sociologists, who have considerable evidence that African art, technology, and society is just as sophisticated as the European variety. His claim is also disputed by human geneticists - again due to a total lack of evidence.
The fact that you
a) dishonestly sanitized his actual views with a cowardly euphemism, and
b) apparently agree with him that Africans are dumber than Europeans
makes me suspect you aren't "objectively" concerned about the media reporting on increasing white nationalism.
> He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former
The former is consensus among researchers in the field. The latter is something there's disagreement on and no clear consensus. This is not like claiming the Earth is flat or he achieved cold fusion. It's not clearly incorrect, but is morally wrong by contemporary standards.
> The former is consensus among researchers in the field.
No it isn't. The "consensus among researchers in the field" is that black Americans tend to score more poorly on IQ tests than white Americans. It does not mean black people are actually "dumber" since IQ is not conclusively related to "intelligence" - we don't even know what intelligence is! We also know that you can raise your IQ considerably by practicing IQ tests, that psychological pressures have immense impact on IQ scores, that education increases your IQ score, that being adopted into a richer family can increase your IQ score, and so on. Hence the IQ tests are flawed circumstantial evidence, where the testee's "inherent" and "biological" intelligence is hopelessly entangled with psychological and economic factors that obviously have nothing to do with the individual.
This is like the phrenology arguments of old: it might have been the consensus among researchers in the field that Africans had less cranial CC than Europeans. But there was no evidence that this had anything to do with brainpower, and racists like yourself have always played fast-and-loose with "real fact" versus "evidence-free assertion" to make your point. Now that it's been demonstrated that the 19th century phrenologists were wrong about African/European head size differences, you rarely see people pushing phrenological arguments and they sound self-evidently ridiculous.
No I'm not. But the fact you count me as one, shows that it probably is increasing by way of being redefined to include a broader group of people.
If you want to be pedantic, "dumb" means unable to speak, so obviously we're using the term colloquially here. IQ is our best measure of intelligence and it's reasonable to say "dumber" means "lower IQ". You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because it doesn't support your belief.
Nonetheless sites like Politifact still provide pretty accurate fact-checking more often than not.
The New York Times will be more reliable than the National Enquirer, and will (eventually) admit error or wrong doing.
It’s not very realistic to see it as black and white, that some bad journalism means all journalism is bad.
That’s simply not true.
To be honest, considering the incredible number of lies, mistruths, and deceptions President Trump has been spewing for the last four years I’d say the fact-checking has been okay.
Of course Democrats and liberals lie or deceive too, and of course some media institutions sometimes screw up or have biases there.
But if we step back and look at what fact-checking is the most important, the President of the United States continuously lying his ass off clearly tops the list, so if we’re going to discuss fact-checking let’s start there.
The problems with the media "tops the list" for me before they can claim to be fact-checking anyone else.
I disagree. And I think there’s empirical data to back me up.
We can pick one politician, and look them up on Politifact.
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/joe-biden/
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/
Do you really believe Fox News does a better job of fact-checking? Or your media organization of choice.
Politifact is solid. Pro Publica is solid.
Attempting to reduce it to “all are equally bad, or so bad it doesn’t matter” is disingenuous and actually furthers attempts to deceive the public by undermining sources which are actually trustworthy.
Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone.
Of course this doesn’t mean you get to turn off your thinking cap - we always have to exercise our own judgement, even when reading information from sources we believe to be trustworthy.
If you genuinely believe what you are saying then I encourage you to broaden your sources. For example, ‘Ghost Wars’, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and has been broadly acclaimed, covers the CIA and all the stuff it did / has been doing in Afghanistan since 9/11.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Wars
There are plenty of good books on domestic politics too. Books will help broaden your perspective and better evaluate these journalism or media organizations we are talking about.
If you’re not engaging in this discussion with good intention, and your goal is to deceive and generally undermine people’s confidence in reputable sources of information because you believe it furthers your own political beliefs, well, then you should feel ashamed of yourself.
I’m being honest - I don’t know which one is the case.
What you say, however, is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood.
> "Distrust everyone, and you’ll believe anyone."
No. Did you just make this up? I don't believe anyone because I distrust them all. That's what "distrust" literally means.
> "Books will help broaden your perspective"
I know. I'm discussing the state of the media, not worried about my perspective.
> "is demonstrably untrue and a falsehood."
Just say "lie". These are same weasley words that media often uses to create a narrative. However my statement can never be a lie regardless of how you feel about it because it's my personal assessment.
> "people’s confidence in reputable sources"
Politifact isn't a news site. Pro Public might be good but, again, I don't care about site reputation. It no longer matters because this authority has been disaggregated and over-extended, a problem caused by the media itself. I look at every piece as an isolated instance and apply trust based on numerous factors, with the publishing organization very far down that list. I find this approach far superior in uncovering the truth.
I also have no interest or responsibility in other people's confidence in the media, and I'll freely express what I think. If their confidence is shaken so easily then maybe the problem is how little trust they already have in the precarious state of the media today. If you disagree and want to still rely on publisher-based reputation then that's your prerogative, but don't project your insecurities or political beliefs onto me.
President Trump is a serial liar (fact), implicitly condones white supremacy (fact), and actively undermines the important norms of our democracy, like elections (fact).
Fox News, for the most part, has been propaganda which is supporting him in that process. I don't have a bias - rather, I believe in small-d democracy, human rights, and valuing the truth and honest behavior, as much as one can in this world.
Their actions are significantly worse than most other politicans (excepting Trump's political enablers) and news organizations at this time.
No, I don't understand. It doesn't make any specific point other than throwing up a strawman. A strategy used by the media (on all sides).
> "implicitly condones"
This is ignoring the explicit statements and actions to focus on the subjective narrative where anything can be implied. A cheap tactic often used by the media (on all sides).
> "I don't have a bias"
I'm sure you believe this, yet you're the only one vehemently choosing an irrelevant political side in this discussion about the media (of all sides).
> "human rights, and valuing the truth and honest behavior, as much as one can in this world."
Great, me too. Just like the vast majority of people in this world. Are you claiming some kind of moral superiority here? What is this relevant to?
Your comments clearly reveal your bias and the narrative you seek to spread. You use many of the same tactics of the media (again, on all sides) and lack the same introspection. This is my personal assessment by the way, in case you want to argue that it's an "falsehood". I'll end it here since I see nothing more to discuss.
Debunking things before investigating them is not good journalism. Period. As I said in the initial comment, the NY Post is not a reputable paper and the story itself seems strange and fake, but guess what? That doesn't matter. The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible, plausible enough to investigate it. If it's fake, Murdoch and the NY Post will have a massive libel suit to pay for. That's how the legal system works.
The NYP doesn't appear to have investigated them though. And they don't seem keen on providing access for other people to investigate the authenticity - as people have pointed out, it would be trivial to prove the email authenticity given the DKIM headers. Yet they remain stubbornly absent from the story, no?
> The evidence for the story, at this point, seems at least plausible
It doesn't even pass a simple smell test - who drives cross-country to drop off their laptop at a cheap repair shop and then doesn't pick it up? Another smell test - you have a bunch of emails that you could trivially prove are authentic but for some reason you're avoiding doing that.
Even the source article had to go back to the W administration to find examples. In the age of the Internet news writers know to avoid making a statement of fact while busily implying facts, so later when it turns out when they're wrong they're just HACKS and not also FRAUDS.
Instead of slapping a narrative on someone that summarizes all of their ignorance, maybe take a tactic that doesn’t make you stick out as an unlikeable, unpersuasive partisan.
Listen, consider and dispute what someone says.
Your strawman summary of a hypothetical dumb person is only nourishes the narcissist who hit reply.