The Importance of Fact-Checking

https://lithub.com/on-the-episode-that-changed-ira-glasss-this-american-life-forever/

by NaOH • 1 year ago

186 129 1 year ago

gcp123• 1 year ago

What makes this fascinating isn't just what it says about storytelling, but what it reveals about our relationship with truth in media. I worked in public radio for 7 years, and TAL's influence was impossible to overstate - every producer wanted to craft stories with that perfect narrative arc.

The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes, sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution that makes you feel something.

Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful or not.

The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication. But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio beat.

jfengel2• 1 year ago

And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller, not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program.

The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass.

TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.

glenstein9• 1 year ago

The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the story:

Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.

This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.

makomk• 1 year ago

It's certainly not the only evidence of problems at NPR. For example, they managed to basically accuse Trump Jr of lying to Congress in a story that should not have survived basic fact checking: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after...

That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.

cratermoon• 1 year ago

The funny thing is, Daisey was not the first time narrative journalism – aka documentary media – has waltzed down the path to fiction. Famously, we have the film Nanook of the North and the book Wisconsin Death Trip, case studies I covered when I was in journalism program, before TAL. Today, we might call these works docudrama, but the blurring of the line between drama and journalism remains.

tpmoney• 1 year ago

There was also that Der Spiegel journalist that wrote effectively a completely made up fiction about an American town called "Fergus Falls. The followup investigation of which discovered a number of additional stories that ranged from highly exaggerated to completely made up.

The danger of trying to tell a narrative with journalism is the tendency to decide on the narrative you want to tell, and gather facts (or I guess make them up) to fit that narrative, rather than finding a narrative in the fact that lets you tell their story.

rayiner• 1 year ago

How has the story about the Duke Lacrosse players been processed in the journalism schools?

grandempire2• 1 year ago

Arranging facts into a narrative with mass appeal is the craft of journalism.

lazyeye4• 1 year ago

Or cherry-picking facts to support a narrative? This seems far more common in the mainstream media.

kjellsbells• 1 year ago

Another excellent example of the TAL format gone wrong: the Caliphate podcast series by the New York Times. Conpelling narrative, hot topic, built on quicksand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=...

You can still find it on Spotify, with a mea culpa attached.

https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5...

pards• 1 year ago

The title refers to the January 6, 2012 episode, beginning about halfway through the article:

“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.

On March 16, 2012, This American Life, aired the “Retraction” covering Rob Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies).

“Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass.

pstuart4• 1 year ago

That they were horrified by the mistake and set out to address it publicly and work to prevent future mistakes is telling.

This American Life is a treasure.

testing22321• 1 year ago

This American Life is a treasure

In the running for best podcast of all time.

As Canadians though, we just can’t listen anymore, it is too depressing and dystopian.

There was the episode about the nice folks who got new neighbours who started some nut job paramilitary thing with automatic weapons. The nice folks live everyday in fear.

There are the episodes of regular women unable to get basic medical treatment because Roe v Wade.

The list is endless, sadly.

We don’t want to live in that world, and we don’t want it taking over our thoughts either.

cudgy• 1 year ago

Reminiscent of the dramatic release of a Syrian prisoner reported on CNN that was determined to be fake.

“CNN is acknowledging that a gripping story it aired last week depicting a Syrian man being let free from a Damascus prison after the fall of dictator Bashar Assad’s regime was not what it seemed.”

https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake...

sneak2• 1 year ago

Humans are addicted to narrative. Deep, deep down. It’s the single best tool for making compelling propaganda.

billfruit2• 1 year ago

Certainly more and more people are now suspecting of something odd, when they see a narrative, especially when the bare facts are scarce or obscured.

sneak2• 1 year ago

I don’t think this is true at all.

Look at the rise of Qanon, for example, or antivax, or any other popular narrative-based fiction that is gaining traction.

The news still uncritically reports what the police claim happened.

The power of narrative is becoming greater in our connected world, not less. It has less requirement now to be rooted in any sort of facts.

otterley• 1 year ago

Everyone gets things wrong sometimes. As important as getting things right is, nobody is perfect. Then, how you react when you make a mistake matters. You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest and apply the lessons learned in the future.

Kudos to Ira and his team for doing the right thing after realizing they did the wrong thing.

glenstein9• 1 year ago

And to your point, if you are watching this, and trying to cynically use a one-off example to discredit years of reliable journalism, that too is a moment of character, and I think as important as the story itself.

tmoertel3• 1 year ago

It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of those “years of reliable journalism” by fact checking a random sample of the stories told over those years. According to the article we are discussing, TAL started using professional fact checkers only after the discovery of the Daisey incident. We’re assuming that stories aired prior to that event are reliable, but we haven’t verified that belief, have we?

femiagbabiaka4• 1 year ago

Years of reliable journalism

Citation needed.

paulpauper• 1 year ago

I think this is different. Getting something wrong in journalism is not like a mistake practicing an instrument: reputations and careers are at stake. it calls into doubt the integrity of the whole program.

poincaredisk• 1 year ago

You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest

If covering up the truth works, why would you risk telling the truth? At worst, the outcome is the same (minor scandal). At best, in most cases, nobody ever learns about the lie. The rational choice is to never tell the truth until it's completely obvious you lied, they e okay dumb.

(Sorry for cynicism. I don't really think like that)

croes2• 1 year ago

People are attracted by stories, not facts.

If the story is true, good. Facts without a story lose against stories without facts.

That’s why populism is so successful.

If facts would matter Trump would be president.

The facts were all known beforehand and are now, but many don’t care about facts.

People aren’t as rational as myths like the homo economicus try to make us believe.

Just look at ads. They sell emotions not facts.

paulryanrogers3• 1 year ago

This is only true to a point. When facts impact their lives people suddenly care more about them than stories.

roxolotl• 1 year ago

Orwell’s Reflections on the Spanish War[0] has a good quote about this which feels particularly salient in light of the tariffs:

Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.

[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

throwaway_47831• 1 year ago

I once thought this, but it is dangerously incorrect. During the pandemic I observed people up-close deny reality in front of their own eyes. I sat at a dinner table and listened to a man go on about how the hospitals were just making up Covid cases for money, and it wasn't really that widespread - right after his wife related that the Covid ward at the hospital she just got back from was nearly full. Where she worked, as a doctor.

Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history to see that people will care about a story they have accepted long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very feet.

croes2• 1 year ago

But sometimes the impact has to be pretty bad and by pretty I mean ugly

spaceisballer• 1 year ago

Reminds me of a book I just read, The Lifespan of a Fact. Solid read going into fact checking versus telling a story and figuring out where the line should be. Definitely entertaining.

cantalopes• 1 year ago

[flagged]

tomhow• 1 year ago

Please edit swipes out of comments on Hacker News. We're trying for curious conversation here. If you could remind yourself of the guidelines that would be appreciated: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

glenstein9• 1 year ago

Mike Daisey, the fabricator in question, had a completely headspinning excuse:

Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.

It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.

hydrogen7800• 1 year ago

Or the vice president saying "if I have to create stories so the American media actually pays attention, then that's what I'm going to do." https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2

pstuart4• 1 year ago

That could be given a pass if the stories were not complete lies and that the attention brought wasn't deeply damaging to the community it addressed.

It's a pity that it worked. A nation of immigrants is now virulently anti-immigrant.

stickfigure2• 1 year ago

Or Mao's belief that revolutionary zeal alone will nonsense projects like backyard iron furnaces somehow work.

zdragnar• 1 year ago

There was a biography that came out, I believe roughly around 2004, that was revealed to have significant fabrications. The excuse making for it revolved around the notion of "lying to reveal a greater truth".

This is the same mentality some people have for coming up with hate crime hoaxes (if it isn't for attention seeking).

I personally find it to be intellectually bankrupt and counter-productive; people willing to blind themselves to a problem will use such examples as evidence that all such claims are false.

timewizard4• 1 year ago

I read it as "Your journalistic integrity and the time of your audience means nothing to me. As long as my story got out that's all I cared about."

Or "I'm a single minded sociopath."

femiagbabiaka4• 1 year ago

There’s an even more surface-level commonality between these published fabrications: they’re all narratives in service of US State Department approved talking points, it’s like one level above stenography. And mainstream media is just repeating the same pattern today with coverage of Gaza.

glenstein9• 1 year ago

I think I can't really accept that framing on a number of levels, but first and foremost, because it's a very lazy and easy accusation to make. One famous criticism of George W. Bush, as he was increasingly discredited in his second term was that "some things are true, even if George Bush says them."

I personally think The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens is a must-read, and I would also say that what Uncle Sam really wants by Noam Chomsky was truly eye-opening to me in recasting the history of American foreign policy, but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was an intentional part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy. Sometimes these criticisms of labor issues, of human rights issues, of democracy issues, etc are going to speak for themselves not because they conveniently coincide with a preferred state department narrative, but because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.

So I don't think it's enough to just say that the State Department would agree with criticisms as though that's sufficient to dismiss them. I understand there are corners in the internet where that passes muster, but to me it feels like it skips too many necessary steps in critical thinking.

femiagbabiaka4• 1 year ago

It’s certainly the case that there is overlap with the positions of the State Department and the truth. But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth. That’s how they’re treated, however. In fact, those who approach state narratives with skepticism are not taken seriously, and those who choose to be stenographers become the editors of the New York Times or the Atlantic, etc.

but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was a part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy and sometimes these criticisms are going to speak for themselves simply because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.

After WWII the United States imported many Nazi functionaries to serve as the founders of institutions such as NATO[1], scientists, etc. During the war, American businessmen profited heavily from doing business with the Nazi regime. Of course we weren’t alone in this.

Ending the Holocaust (too late) was obviously moral. But very little of what was done after was in interest of global democracy or the greater good, just as our entry into the war was not really about those things either. There were many in the global Jewish community and even in FDR’s own administration who were ringing the alarm bells long before we entered the war to do something, anything to help get Jews out of Europe to safety, who were denied and obstructed. Ultimately we only entered the war when it served our own best interests.

The focus on WWII is also interesting because it is one of the only times in the last century that the U.S. could have been said to fight a just war. What about all the rest?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger

Isamu3• 1 year ago

Funny because I regard his show as “story time” and not something I would treat as journalism.

In contrast Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox was a part of their “opinion” lineup and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism.

When Carlson and Fox won the defamation lawsuit in 2020 it was because “Mr. Carlson’s statements were not statements of fact and that she failed adequately to allege actual malice.”

The “not statements of fact” included the reassurances that Carlson always made, in this case he said “Remember the facts of the case. These are undisputed” followed by clearly disputed and false claims.

The lawyers argued successfully that it should be clear to the viewer that what Carlson says “cannot reasonably be interpreted as fact” even when he says that these are the facts.

Arguably the bigger factor was proving malice, and Carlson seems very careful not to put anything into an email or text that undermines what he says on air.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...

Aunche• 1 year ago

This was a different case, but Fox News did have to pay almost 800 million to Dominion to settle the lawsuit about rigged voting machines. There Tucker did admit in text that the allegations were ridiculous, but reported them as if they were true anyways.

roenxi2• 1 year ago

That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb.

For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.

gotoeleven• 1 year ago

And here's the same thing for rachel maddow

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...

Isamu3• 1 year ago

I found that case, here’s the actual court decision:

https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Herri...

It’s worthwhile to track down the court proceedings, you will learn things not covered in various spin articles.

timewizard4• 1 year ago

and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism.

Why?

hnbad2• 1 year ago

I guess it depends on your definition of journalism but there is a reasonable expectation that someone hosting a show - even if it's more editorialized and explicitly opinionated than other reporting - on a channel with the word "News" in its name would at least use a reasonably well-researched factual basis when making factual claims or presenting statements as facts in support of his opinion or argument, rather than outright deliberately lying.

After all there are people who think there is factual evidence and undeniable proof for the existence of space aliens on Earth, cryptozoology or supernatural phenomena because "The History Channel" decided to give up on sticking to actual history and started airing whatever nonsense grabbed anyone's attention.

You can argue that a discernable viewer could easily figure this out by reflecting on what they're viewing but there are good reasons you don't find rat poison in the condiments aisle.

dylanmulvaney• 1 year ago

seems very careful not to put anything into an email or text that undermines what he says

Standard business practice when you are past Junior career level. Next.

cle• 1 year ago

Every time I read about fact-checking in journalism, I feel like there's a huge gap that nobody really talks about.

It's very easy to present a story that is 100% factually accurate, but that implies causal links or other claims that are not. Our brains love hasty generalizations, and media outlets rely on that to present near-100% truthful facts to their viewers, such that they jump to completely opposite generalizations. We're further primed for this with thought-terminating cliches like "trust the data" and "look at the facts". Media profits enormously from the subsequent outrage.

The more folks talk about "fact checking" without acknowledging the danger of cherry-picking and Texas sharpshooters and confounding variables, like in this article, the less I trust "fact checking" as a useful mechanism for forming opinions from their reported facts. Fact-checking is definitely a requirement, but still insufficient.

This is also exacerbated by narratives like those presented by TAL that introduce enormous complexity to the task, due to the emotional context.

YZF• 1 year ago

You can have 100% fact based propaganda by cherry picking. This is not dissimilar to coming with a theory just based on your selected subset of preferred observations. This is the fuel of conspiracy theories.

I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.

praestigiare2• 1 year ago

You are of course correct that fact checking is not sufficient to protect us from all the ways that a journalistic work could mislead. But it does help when they are based on lies. As in the article this discussion is happening under. It helps address that problem, specifically. It seems like a strange reaction to say that this example of a lie being uncovered makes you less trustful of fact checking.

In addition to that, I am not sure if you have ever worked with an independent fact checker, but they very much do make an effort to point out misleading, cherry-picked, and out of context information.

MrMcCall2• 1 year ago

I understand the importance of fact-checking, but the problem is that it loses its value when much of the readership dont care about facts.

We live in a world where many, many people are not only too stupid to know how stupid they are, but don't give a shit that they're stupid AND think they're the smart ones.

Dunning-Kruger is incredibly instructive.

mantas• 1 year ago

On top of that, quite a few fact checkers seem to be cherry pickers too. I’ve seen too many fact-checks where with some knowledge of the topic it was obvious that fact checkers either didn’t do due diligence or pushed a narrative on purpose.

huhkerrf• 1 year ago

Ironically, your comment would be illustrative of Dunning Kruger, if it really showed what you're claiming.

The Dunning Kruger study never said that stupid people believed they were smarter than smart people, or that they outperformed the high performers. All it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance, but they still believed they did worse than the high performers.

You don't have to believe me. It's clearly shown on the Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

MrMcCall2• 1 year ago

it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance

True.

but they still believed they did worse than the high performers.

Fair point, but if they can't understand their own unexcellent performance, how can they understand excellence? They never did.

They thought they were expert enough, which was simply not true.

And they had ZERO understanding of what it takes to be an excellent performer, which was precisely why they thought they were excellent.

I read the study itself. It shows "the overconfidence of fools".

Does DJT think he's a dipshit? Of course not. He believes the exact opposite, because he's a lying fool, just like the underperformers of DK. Whether a person knows they're lying or is just mistaken is not as important as the fact that they're just not capable nor do they even know what it takes to be capable. They are trapped in the fiction of their own capability.

The key takeaway is that honest, humble hard work is the way to achieve expertise, and that many people have chosen to lie to themself and the world instead.

I do concede that they didn't believe they were better than the true experts. Thanks for the correction, but the overconfident fools of the world still think they're smart, and often they think they ARE smarter than intelligent people, even though that's not in DK.

lazyeye4• 1 year ago

It also loses value when the fact-checking suffers from the same biases it is supposedly trying to rectify.

One way a govt can circumvent the first amendment, for example, is to fund a grant for "misinformation" research unit at a prestigious university. Where the entire staff are political fellow travellers who, not surprisingly, find everything the govt disagrees with to be "misinformation" and then applies pressure to get it taken down.

kelipso• 1 year ago

And then people figure out that the supposed fact checkers are politically biased and so don’t believe their “facts” anymore. And then people who believe the supposed fact checkers say that people who don’t believe their “facts” are stupid or don’t care about facts.

It would have been hilarious to have a Department of Truth though. Every change in administration, everyone in the Department gets replaced by a new set of people dictating a new set of “facts”.

incomingpain• 1 year ago

about a week ago I had a weird experience. I had purchased concert tickets for a date night with wifey in april, which got postponed to october. like wtf long.

I brought it up in conversation as i was annoyed. Everyone at the table picks up their phone to fact check me and they brought up the hall's website and said I was wrong. I had the email sent to me about the postponement on my phone, it was real. I didnt care to prove myself right. Checking the website now it's now showing october.

Why even fact check it? Just to prove me wrong? What if your fact check went wrong?

switch0072• 1 year ago

This is so common in my experience, especially when they're 30 or younger, and I'd love to know what it is.

Is it just an excuse to pickup their phone due to addiction?

whoopdedo• 1 year ago

https://xkcd.com/386/

Social media has bred a generation who believe that value comes from being the loudest voice in the room. One-upmanship is one of the sure ways to make your voice stand out.

throwaway81523• 1 year ago

You have to read past 40% of the article (1167 words of fluff) to get to what happened. Thanks for the narrative but better to just say the facts. Here's what should have been the actual lede:

Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet another example of Glass’s artistry. A reworking of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China.

Tldr: a bunch of the allegations in the episode were false and got past TAL's production approach at the time, but they are more careful now.

ripe2• 1 year ago

Thank you for summarizing. Many of the comments here seem to be focusing on obscure portions of the article, so it's easy for a lurker on HN to be misled.

didgetmaster2• 1 year ago

Almost every contentious issue has a set of facts that support one side of the argument, while also having a set of facts that support the other side.

More often than not, a biased story is one that focuses exclusively on one set of facts while completely ignoring the other set. Fact checkers may catch falsehoods that are reported as facts, but they rarely point out obvious ommissions.

Joel_Mckay• 1 year ago

In many ways, a half-truth is worse than a simple lie, and there is no guarantee all parties are wrong in their own way:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax...

Media tends to interview the most outrageous looking imbecile they can find at any event... regardless of political affiliation. The Sinclair Broadcast Group helps local news maintain consistent messaging, and thus any mistakes intentional or not are less noticeable.

Fact-checking is only as good as the data sources people find. There are groups that ran entire fake scientific journals to sell the public outright nonsense.

Verifiable facts are difficult to validate. "AI"/LLM slop content just made it worse =3

didgetmaster2• 1 year ago

Those who do not understand how AI works might think that it might correct all the falsehoods that come along. But if an LLM is trained on data full of errors and falsehoods, then the resulting model will only reenforce them rather than correct them.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 1 year ago

I guess. I'm not convinced by the facts on the other side of LGBTQ discourse. Is it really true I could be arrested in Florida because my driver's license says I'm female? It doesn't protect anyone. It doesn't make anyone's life better.

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

Not sure what discourse or side you're talking about, but... no the Florida police are not arresting everyone whose driving license says they are female. Obviously.

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

Yeah but sometimes the facts are entirely fabricated, as is the case here.

enaaem• 1 year ago

I follow a forum of my favourite sports team and people get into very heated debates who is good and who is not. By selectively pulling out stats and incidents you can really argue for any side. Note that they are fans of the same team, so it's all pride and ego.

g42gregory• 1 year ago

I believe it is very important to do fact-checking yourself. For me, this means reading original documents, court reports, etc… Certainly not checking the current NYT/WSJ/FT takes, as they themselves have to be fact-checked.

submeta• 1 year ago

NYT/WSJ/FT are more propagandistic then we are aware of. Just observe the developments in the Middle East, watch the language used, the euphemisms, compare that to their language when it comes to Russian aggression. It is very clear that our western media is manufacturing more consent then writing in an objective neutral language.

pstuart4• 1 year ago

True, but confirmation bias is a bitch. Without the willingness to change one's mind when presented with compelling evidence, such fact-checking borders on harmful.

paulryanrogers3• 1 year ago

In some religious circles they literally teach confirmation bias as a virtue, by another name of course.

To paraphrase, if your prayer was answered or you were unexpectedly spared/saved/rewarded then it was god; and if not then he works in mysterious ways/you lacked faith/were unworthy/etc.

blindriver• 1 year ago

No one cares about facts anymore. They care about vibes and whether what is saying matches their vibes.

That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Google news headline.

I don't know how we get past this, but I'm teaching my kids to believe NOTHING they read online or on youtube. NOTHING. I'm teaching them to get information from first hand sources, not even "reliable" sources like newspapers because they have their own agendas too. There's a hierarchy of believability, and the higher you go, the less you put your faith into that information.

It's a sad way to grow up but when almost everything is faked for engagement, it's a reality that you can't trust anything.

theoreticalmal• 1 year ago

How do you intend on handling situations where the first hand information is too complex or too technical or in a not-understood language? Such that your kids can’t directly interact with the primary source?

I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can’t trust anything in reality anymore

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 1 year ago

It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites actually want to be read by readers

Professor Legasov would be disappointed

iambateman• 1 year ago

You seem to care about the truth and I do. That makes two…

I’m optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about that a lot.

rhdunn• 1 year ago

Part of the problem is that it is difficult/impossible to go through the original sources and verify the claims. Another part of the problem is knowing what biases an outlet/reporter has and what parts of a story/the thing they are reporting on is missing out.

It's known that a few research papers (e.g. [1], [2]) have been fabricated on various topics. So when you read the news about those, do you read the papers? If you do, can you verify the claims in those papers? It's not possible to do at scale, so you have to trust the reporting on those stories.

A lot of reporting on things like that, or releases from major companies, tend to be based on press releases. You also have papers and websites that use others as their source of the information, so any inaccuracies or biases in that initial reporting gets magnified. It also depends on the knowledge of the person reporting -- if they are not an expert in the field they can easily get some of the details wrong.

It took a long time, combined effort, and a lot of resources for the Leela Zero team to replicate the results of Alpha Zero [3]. And that's with papers that don't have the source code, or exact details on the training methodology. I've seen quite a lot of papers on things like arXiv that amount to a summary of "we did a thing, here's a table of results" -- this makes it hard to replicate the results. And a lot of papers build on work of others, so quite often you'll need to read and understand hundreds of papers.

Then you have reporting from trials. They will not cover everything in the trial, but provide summaries of the results. See both the Lucy Letby case and the Johnny Depp vs Amber Herd trails for how those are reflected in the relevant media, both during and after the trials. You can't go to all the trials and even when there are recodings of them there will be multiple weeks of video to go through, which is impossible for all trials. So you have to rely on reporting or reports from the people who have done that, and are reliant on the witnesses and evidence given during the trial to be accurate and in support of the outcome of that trial.

Then there's reporting of things like campaign events and rallies during elections. Media will only show soundbites that can remove the context from the original -- see also the countless "out of context" videos on YouTube. You can't always get the original sources, an you can't always go through the entire context. So you have to rely on the media reporting. That gives wildly different perspectives from the different groups on a given topic -- see e.g. the left and right reporting/coverage on things like Donald Trump doing the stint at a McDonalds.

I don't have any answers on how best to solve this other than:

1. listing (and preserving) sources reported on that are not anonymous and can be verified -- including linking back to any press releases, research papers, trail transcripts, videos, or other relevant sources;

2. having a mechanism for replicating results from research papers, and having a way to find if/how that was done for a given research paper;

3. consuming reports from different sources, ideally ones that have different perspectives.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret...

[2] https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amy...

[3] https://lczero.org/blog/

dimal• 1 year ago

I agree, but I think news was always unreliable, but the difference was that there were only a few news networks and newspapers, and they all basically said the same thing. Everyone believed the same lies, so the system worked. But thanks to the internet, we gave people the ability to create highly individualized bullshit at scale.

timewizard4• 1 year ago

TV news in the early era was concentrated. There were only three national networks. When CNN first when on the air in 1980 it signaled the beginning of this change.

During this entire time; however, print journalism was still widely distributed and you could find an absolutely huge range of off beat reporting even from fairly large publications.

The internet era was initially great for this model but once all the advertising effectively got monopolized and search giants started walling off and cherry picking content to place under their own banner it finally killed the rich set of options available in print.

xpe• 1 year ago

No one cares about facts anymore.

There is no need to exaggerate. But I'm not only calling out a poor choice of words...

A lot of people (not as many as we would hope, I grant) care about the truth about facts. Even in this group, however, we have a problem: by the time these people are "looking for facts" their brains have already been shaped in various ways that bias how they look for facts, as explained in articles about motivated reasoning.

matthewdgreen2• 1 year ago

This is dumb. Primary sources aren't available for most of the information types that will affect your life. Surviving in the world requires you to have the ability to judge the reliability of various sources, and enough critical thinking ability to detect both falsehood and likely truths.

Telling your kids to "Believe NOTHING" is as dangerous as teaching them to believe everything. You're just handing them over, defenseless, to a different monster.

amriksohata• 1 year ago

Fact checking can have bias too

ctrlp2• 1 year ago

So, basically, regarding journalism: they had learned nothing and forgot nothing. Something died in me when I realized TAL and NPR were largely just bullshit factories. Glass isn't even coy about his motives being to tell/sell stories. He admits that truth is secondary to theater, and he's pretty unapologetic about dressing up performance as journalism. So unconcerned about it, in fact, that he's proudly teaching such ethics to students at prestigious journalism programs when he should be teaching at the performing arts school.

paulryanrogers3• 1 year ago

Is it fair to lump all of NPR in with TAL? They have quite a few different shows run by different people.

ripe2• 1 year ago

It's quite a leap from "TAL discovered their mistaken story and added fact checking" to "TAL and NPR are largely bullshit factories".

You need to present evidence for your extreme claim.

ctrlp2• 1 year ago

The producer of the show is admitting he is going to subvert facts to fiction if it helps tell a good story and you're demanding evidence?

neonate• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/gIjim

carschno• 1 year ago

There are remarkable parallels to the Relotius scandal that took place at the German magazine Der Spiegel a few years ago (although in a bigger and more systematic way): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_o...

The Importance of Fact-Checking

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