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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if reporters were required by law to define exactly the numbers behind statements like "95% success rate". Under penalty of being sent to live on an iceberg for violating it.

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I hope to never meet someone who's violated an iceberg.

Thanks, I almost inhaled my keyboard.

Don’t worry. Captain Edward Smith died.

Why hold the reporters to that standard? They are just regurgitating a press briefing that came across their desk or outlining an interview with someone from the project.

I don’t where everyone gets this idealistic reporter archetype. Unless you’re a super famous investigative journalist with the clout to get funding to fuck about for months/years for a story you’re basically a glorified copywriter.

The whole point of journalism is to filter information by relevance or value, validate it for accuracy, and present it to the audience.

"Regurgitating" press releases has sadly become the norm for many outlets, but it trivializes the whole existence of news media.

You have a misunderstanding about "validate it for accuracy". From the point of view of journalism, this validation only means that you're reporting that a statement was really made by someone, or that a fact occurred as the journalist saw it happening. It doesn't mean that the journalist will validate experiments, or investigate statements made by someone else.

We can read press briefings ourselves. The only reason for reporters to exist is to dig at least a little bit deeper for truth. We've all heard about the economics of journalism, we just don't think it's acceptable.

Sorry, but I don't think you're paying enough to deserve someone to spend the time digging for deeper truth. That's the sad reality of modern journalism in a capitalist country.

I think the bigger problem is that it's too easy to copy after somebody has done the digging work, so journalists are not incentivized anymore.

I tried to pay for journalism, but usually I get lower quality material than what I can read in HN comments for free.

> They are just regurgitating a press briefing that came across their desk

I would argue that's one of the problems. It's easy to just regurgitate press briefing, but that's _not_ what their job should be. I'd argue they could at the very least impose some form standards (don't publish "x% success", ask for exact metrics before publishing the press briefing). Asking them to vet that the study methodology was sane is too much - but asking them to use specificity & sensitivity instead of "success percent" isn't too much to ask.

why do your think this the the work of a journalist? If this is important, then we should have some regulation saying how companies need to report experiments.

well, for starters, it's published on france24.com, that's a pretty good hint that it is the work of a journalist.

I believe one shouldn't regulate _all speech_ (e.g. company press releases, or scientific publications); but I think it's fair to regulate reporting, to some extent. And you can even have a somewhat wide definition of "reporting" (e.g. if you collect audience size metrics (e.g. in order to get revenue from advertising), and your audience is greater than X, then you are reporting).

It is the job of the journalist to at least be able to ask "what do you mean by 95% accuracy?" and to publish the answer given or the fact that no satisfactory answer is given because the reader is not in a position to be able to ask that question to the entity whose results are being publicized.

The number is the story.

So reporters are just PR agents? Just cc everyone on the press release and forward misinformation because they can't understand it? Just fill those column-inches? We've got a paper to put out, doesn't matter if it's true. Sell those ads!

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