I would say a huge part of the problem is that news is no longer news. It's all commentary. News organizations are not only incentivized to to sensationalize stories to make money but they are also ran by people who have extreme political views and want to essentially mind control the population. They don't want to report the facts of a story. They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts.
A great example is how different news organizations cover the recent executive order on immigration. Depending on where you get your news you were told there was a Muslim ban, a ban from 7 Muslim majority countries, only accepting Christian refugees from the Middle East, 7 countries that harbor terrorists were banned, etc.
Wherever you fall on that issue there is a news org trying to force you into a certain viewpoint one way or the other.
Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them.
It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly objective voice conveying facts. So yes, in a sense, every news org favors a certain interpretation of the facts. But these subtle variations used to be accepted as par for the course.
The root cause of the widespread distrust of media is the turn on the right towards a form of Orwellian doublespeak in their media outlets, beginning in the 90s and ramping up heavily in the Bush years. You see it's most virulent expression in the way Trump speaks: he accuses the interim AG of "betrayal" for acting on her conscious. Or the way he talks about returning government "to the people" while staffing his cabinet with billionaires. It badly subverts the ability of people on the left and the right to meaningfully speak to one another, because our words no longer signify the same thing.
Well, that's actually a pretty interesting example to look at. For one, the dossier concerned contained a lot of accusations to do with members of Trump's team travelling to Eastern Europe to meet with Russian contacts, suspect financial transactions and the like - you yourself are doing it a disservice by describing it only as rumours of a "piss orgy".
But irrespective of that, the dossier had been known about for months. But the media organisations didn't report on it, specifically because they couldn't verify the information contained within it. But then Buzzfeed decided to publish it anyway, and at that point any responsible news organisation is left in a pretty impossible position - either don't report on the thing everyone is talking about, or report unsubstantiated accusations.
Sometimes it feels like the media is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Report unsubstantiated rumour? You're biased! Hold back information because it isn't verified? You're biased!
1000 * 0 is still 0.
If the Trump campaign had ordered a dossier of dirt on Hillary Clinton, and paid a respected former intelligence officer to provide it, would the claims made in it be credible?
Let's take one of the big 'fake news' items from the recent election, the one regarding Hillary's health. What do you make of this article by a former secret service agent on Hillary Clinton's health:
http://ijr.com/opinion/2016/09/260018-protected-hillary-clin...
None of the facts in that article are in disrepute either, and it's also from a respected secret service agent.
So are the questions it poses about Hillary's health more or less credible than the Trump dossier, and is it fake news or not?
The definition of fake news is getting stretched to include controversial news.
"Fake news" is fiction being sold as news on websites that look credible.
Flat out making stuff up, and polluting the media stream with it in order to manipulate people.
This is the easy case to solve. As people actually try to grapple with this, "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition.
A dossier actually compiled but unverified is still not fake news - it's a shady bad practice circa 1990. Unfortunately we're dealing with much worse problems today.
I mean that's the whole sub-prime mortgage problem all over again. Take a shitty product and wrap it in layers of respectability until people don't know any better.
When there is also evidence to suggest much of the contents of the dossier came from a 4-chan prank, it's hard to see where the difference is.
1) fake news: a recent phenomenon where fraudulent/fictional/completely made up literature is peddled as legitimate news. This is then distributed on steroids via social media. It uses unsuspecting people to transmit this.
Bias in news. This is an older problem and involves how news is presented and what spin is put. In the worst case it is deliberate in order to support an agenda.
There was a lot of anti-Trump news that basically matches what you said above:
> "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition
* Trump kicked a mother and baby out of rally
* Trump mocked a reporter's disability
* Trump proposed building database of muslims
And the list goes on.
This goes well beyond the realm of media bias, and in to direct collusion between media and the campaign.
I have no problem calling that 'fake news', which is perhaps a descriptive approach rather than a prescriptive one.
On top of that trump himself courted controversy at a rate and scale never seen before.
That's why this election was faced with drama unlike elections before them.
A lot of stuff listed above is sadly the regular calumny inflicted upon candidates. Iirc someone got kicked out of the race because of a bad photo op.
But These are all things that are problematic- without being fake news.
> * Trump mocked a reporter's disability
Do you deny that these things happened?
Has any other candidate - of any party - ever done anything like this?
Is the media supposed to pretend that it didn't happen?
This is where the "the facts have a well known liberal bias" joke comes from
For the first one, the mother who was supposedly 'kicked out' denies it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/...
For the second one, he was not mocking the reporter's disability. He was mocking the reporter for pulling a story and the impersonation he did is Trump's standard impersonation for a flustered, bumbling person. There is multiple video of him doing the exact same action to able bodied people - from Ted Cruz to military generals, and all sorts of others.
Not only that, but the reporter's disability is nothing like the action Trump did. The reporter actually has frozen/locked up joints e.g. almost the exact opposite of what Trump did.
So, either Trump knew of the reporter's disability and wasn't mocking it (completely different actions), or he didn't know of the reporter's disability (and therefore couldn't have been mocking it).
In either situation, Trump wasn't mocking the reporter's disability.
Unfortunately a freeze frame from the video of Trump's movement matches a still photo of the journalist, hence the belief that he was mocking the reporter's disability.
And this is why people say the media has a well known Trump bias.
I agree with you broadly, though. To me, fake news has absolutely no mooring in reality whatsoever and is pure clickbait - usually without political motive beyond getting angry people to click.
And that (apparently) can trace its origins to a 4-chan prank?
Personally, I do not.
http://gizmodo.com/4chan-idiots-claim-they-invented-the-trum...
You mean the ones contained in a dossier which accurately predicted several Trump related events that were not publicly known to be in planning at the time it was written, but were verifiable to have occurred as predicted before it was published?
Seems to me that it was plenty newsworthy.
BTW, it also reported that part of the carrot side of the carrot-and-stick blackmail and bribery by Russia was that Trump was promised a bribe of a share of Rosneft coincidentally the same size that was just sold off, on credit, to buyers concealed by various cutouts.
Gonna need more hard evidence before being concerned about this.
Occam's razor, but I'm guessing that was autocorrect.
Anyway, no, because there is no incentive for him to do what you are suggesting.
If however you believe his goal is to destabilise U.S. politics, then there is large incentive and zero downside for him to fake a sale of 19% of the company.
When did the people pushing the N Clinton conspiracies every say "this may or not be true..."???
So, your statement is disingenuous, at best.
Fallacy of gray. Just because you can't ask for perfect doesn't mean you can't ask for better.
I've addressed this elsewhere, but there is definitely cases where this can be done.
No, Tom Cruise is not moving to Buffalo, Missouri[1].
No, there is no attempt by lawmakers to legislate the disposal of unused semen[2].
Etc, etc. Some of these are satire, but some are just complete deliberate fakes.
This is a different class of problem to "OMG Hillary is a Nazi/OMG Trump bought Pizza" opinion spam.
"The White House has announced today at 7h30, through speaker ..., a piece of legislation that, quote: ~first paragraph summary of the legislation~.
You can read the full text here.
On the opinion of Bla bla, this legislation is innefective etc etc.
Disclaimer: Bla bla is not related to any of the mentioned organizations, though he declares he tends to agree with the opinion of former president Obama on most issues. You can read more about this commenter here."
According to Rudy Giuliani, when Trump first announced it, he called it a Muslim ban, so...
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/30/headlines/trump_favor...
So you admit you are only reading from sources with a similar bias/narrative on this issue?
How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? Or elderly people who become vulnerable and fall prey to exploitation (because they believe phone scams, or sob stories from strangers, etc) ? (Edit: or young people who think they're going to grow up and be an astronaut or NBA star). There will always be a sizable proportion of the population who believes wacky stories.
I know you weren't implying this, but NYT and WaPo's hands aren't clean either. I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. That's predatory on the same level: take advantage of the nebulous word "hacking" and misapply it to something that doesn't even rely on computers, do some hand-waiving, and voila, there's some "fake news" to dish up to the masses [which is ironic when your other stories are about the spread of "fake news"].
I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point.
> I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative.
I never got the impression that those news orgs were saying that actual voting counts were being hacked. But the emails were hacked and leaked.
They jumped the gun on blaming Russia, but that wasn't fake news (provided you believe prominent members of US intelligence).
Even Trump seemed to think it was plausible... At least plausible enough to publicly ask Russia to hack Hilary's emails [1].
The NYT and WaPo (among others) are incredibly biased, and much of the problem is that their support base is too sheltered to understand how. I've said more on this in previous comments.
I followed the election from a variety of sources (WaPo and NYT included) and never got that impression. But I agree that it was a circus from all angles.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/am...
Do you think it's mostly from misleading mainstream news stories? Or from smaller outlets (social media, celebrities, memes, etc)?
my point is that there have always legions of people who believe ridiculous things. They've been around for every single previous election. So we shouldn't be surprised when the scientific community says "civilization has changed the climate" but people still don't believe it (even when the claim is supported by evidence).
I'm sure one of these anti science boogeymen you've created would think you are equally brainwashed and they are equally correct in their views...
I still like the Times to an extent, but they like many other papers get it wrong from time to time. Doesn't mean I should leave and never look back, but instead I have taken to critically thinking about every story I read from every source to come to a conclusion about an issue.
I don't think fake news or poor journalism is a problem. The problem is people and their lack of critical thinking, often substituted for blind acceptance of a narrative that fits their preferred reality.
Fake news on the other hand are literally made up lies. The overwhelming majority of fake news articles have no basis in reality, period. They tend to be written by people who want nothing other than to get page views.
After all, telling outright lies is just amateurish; the NYT has been shaping society's perspective on facts for over a century.
That's right, because when Wikileaks revealed high levels of collusion between media outlets and the DNC/Clinton campaign, placing and pulling articles/stories to present a specific narrative, it wasn't out of desire to mislead, rather it was only a desire to 'correct the record'. /s
America and the world have a situation where advertisers need to prey on the Id and emotions of users in order to sell widgets. The advent of the internet crushed the ability of media firms to stay afloat and replaced the ecosystem with many upstarts who also faced the same pressure.
In short there's an overheating attention grabbing system when it comes to the media, which is its own issue that needs to be solved.
Unfortunately there's a new hitherto unbelievable problem, where people fabricate complete and utter lies/fiction and can sail it down the streams of social media.
This is different from the older issue in that these are not major news agencies, but websites masquerading/camouflaging themselves as a news outlet and fabricating stories designed to directly press emotional buttons without having to deal with facts.
A closer model is conspiracy theories.
I agree this is a problem. It also happened rather equally on both sides.
If you really want to know how it works, please take a look at a recent a paper co-authored by Alessandro Bessi. It came out a week ago. It should be accessible for most people on HN.
I think if we compare today's new to a decade ago's, the change is not more capitalism (ie, for-profit, corporate, quarterly-report focused...). The change is more choice, more information, more volume and the chaotic, many-to-many distribution systems of the social internet.
The clickbait imperative has got a quasi-capitalist single mindedness to it, but I think we'll be chasing down the wrong culprit by characterising the problem as a capitalist one.
In fact, I think it's best if we try not to jump to conclusions at all. We're hitting some problems with the way our democracies work and I haven't really heard a narrative yet that feels satisfying. Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it.
Is a great justification for doing nothing, ever.
It feels like we are entering a very much unprecedented era in America, where the President freezes out news organisations that do not report on him favorably, and is actively attacking the media with the aim of establishing the official government narrative as the only one voters should listen to.
This is extremely dangerous. I'm not saying that we should rush to judgement, but we shouldn't just sit back and wait to see how it all unfolds either. This is an issue to be investigated and worked on, urgently.
A fake news detector isn't going to do anything by itself to solve the problem. Fake news consumers are going to guzzle the junk regardless of warning tags, scores, or nutritional labeling.
In the hands of a skilled journalist/activist/thought-leader whose abilities are "augmented" by this tool, however, it could really be a powerful antidote.
> All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories
It goes both ways I think. Consider the possibility that there are more people that believe that other 'stupid' people believe these stories than there are 'stupid' people who actually believe these stories.
You can very easily overwhelm the signal with noise. The plethora of independents means nothing if only a few of them get heard.
Matter of fact, with some pushing, you can have one "independent" dominate a large portion of the channel. At some juncture the network effect takes over and the process becomes self sustaining, you just need to play on people's/your target markets biases well.
This is a people problem, and people are getting way too good and understanding and manipulating the biases of other people.
Really, because not more than a few weeks ago I remember a whole bunch of people believing the "we can't verify, but we're going to press anyway" stories about Trump and golden showers in Russia, not to mention a whole bunch of other similar fake news regarding Trump and Trump supporters.
I think you (and many others) are selectively applying a bias to what is and isn't fake news and the type of people who believe it based on your own political preferences.
And therein lies the real problem.
1) media agencies on all sides had the dossier and didn't publish it since t was unverifiable
2) when buzfeed or whomever linked the dossier, it forced other firms to do so as well or lose out on a critical story.
3) the adaptation to deal with this is to not report the dossier as fact, but as claims. And of course, it spiraled downhill from there,
In this scenario it's important to note that media firms avoided reporting on this issue because it was crap.
For global warming, ah man where do we start.
Firstly, it's unfair to lambast people for believing it's a hoax.
Since the 80s and before, a long, intelligent and concerted effort to spread FUD has been active in America. It is today successful enough to spread around the world.
If people were old enough, they would remember that initially scientists would not give the time of day to global warming conspiracist/deniers.
It was correctly believed that doing so actually gave cranks and loons the patina of credibility, when they should be allowed to die out.
Unfortunately, these cranks and loons were cultivated and nurtured, and given airtime. In particular there is one news network that I recall had a more active role in this and it was not CNN.
Eventually scientists were forced to engage, and by engaging they lost.
Scientists, (and people on HN) are constantly making the error that this is about facts.
It's about entertainment and playing with human emotions.
Scientists walked in expecting a debate, when it was about showmanship, with one side reporting things unevenly.
As a result there are people today who will be anti global warming because they are being manipulated.
Fake news is a new problem
Global warming wasn't part of my argument. That was just me quoting the parent who appears to believe only one side of the political spectrum is susceptible to fake news.
Personally I trust the science, and think that even if you don't there are enough other compelling reasons to move on to renewable energy sources that we'd be stupid not to anyway.
WaitButWhy.com had a good series on Elon Musk that explored many of these issues: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...
> Fake news is a new problem
There was plenty of science going against 'smoking causes cancer'. Fake news has been around for quite some time, just not in its current more virulent form.
The day the printing press was invented was the day print journalism was subverted to push agendas.
News is a product, but it should be noted that fraud is a crime in a free market. Not that it discounts the rest of what you're saying.
However, news as a public service has standards of liability to the public in general, not just to your own customers. It is an obligation to society, not to the buyer.
Capitalism isn't going anywhere obviously and shouldn't. On the other end is state-run media, e.g. North Korea. We wouldn't want things to swing in that direction or even toward RT or many other examples.
I think we should be looking to replicate whatever magic is and has been in PBS, early BBC, ITN, and other earlier UK and French programming.
You can see this right now. The mainstream media falsifies or omits the truth on behalf of their backers or the organizations they fear: major political parties, subsidiaries of their parent companies, major investors, etc. I would argue that they do this because the public is not their customer, it's their target demographic.
I don't see the problem. I don't want to hear lies, therefore I create a demand for true news. I don't need a nanny facebook/google/state telling me what news I like, and neither does the rest of the population.
If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear.
This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations. Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world.
On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"
All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country. A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.