Attitude toward journalists these days, partly because of more professionalised PR is hugely adversarial rather than co-operative. Anyway /rant.
Most people should make all statements with the assistance of professional PR if they’re in such a situation. Just like how anyone being interrogated by the police should only speak with the advice with a lawyer, no matter how innocent they actually are.
Quick edit due to downmods: dear partisan Americans: I don't particularly care for either side of your politics. I'm not saying Fox is any better, and I think Donald Trump's a nasty and very hypocritical individual. But 1 and 3 are easily proven false on video, and 2 is clearly different from the content of the Damore memo, which you can read online. You're lying to yourself if you refuse to believe evidence about CNN fabricating any of these stories.
As @Notradamus says before, giving a quote to a journalist allows them to shape the story. There is no reason to do that: you can self publish and still reach the masses in your own words, without risking someone else cutting video, lying about you, or denying something happened even when they filmed it themselves.
Claiming systematic bias can also lead to that would have been fine in contrast, maybe even mentioning it has happened vaugely and bringing up your CNN example when challenged.
The down votes are likely because your post could seemingly be summarized as "but Fake News" which has people on edge. Sure that isn't what you said but your phrasing makes that an easy mistake to make as a reader.
Well the general implication in the paresnt discussing fabrication as 'the ill of a single writer' and that a reputable publication should curtail them. You're right in that a 'reputable publication' may also simply deliberately craft lies as an organisation, rather than this happening as the result of the individual journalist.
> The down votes are likely because your post could seemingly be summarized as "but Fake News" which has people on edge.
Hence the edit restating that every single one of those is either well known or provable. Anyone can watch the unedited fish feeding video, read Damore's original memo, or see the CNN interview wherethe Obama admin talks about sepration happening. Something being a popular saying doesn't make it untrue. A more simple an likely explanation is that a US citizen's understanding of reality is now determined on a tribal basis rather than a factual one.
But news organizations lie. All of them do and they do it on a routine basis.
On the topic of your examples:
1. It appears that the article recognizes the normality in its last sentence, so this was corrected 2. I don't see anything in the Damore article (http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/15/technology/culture/james-dam...) that seemed to disagree with his memo unless I am missing a subtly. 3. This seems to be a failure to acknowledge and not a fabrication best I can tell (too difficult to find what disputes the original comment)
These seems to be examples where CNN has corrected the stories quietly instead of issuing a retraction best I can tell which while I agree is annoying at least is ensuring the latest version of the article is as accurate as possible (including in "accuracy" intended tone here). How to best handle such corrections is hard.
In TV all bets are off. I fully understand why people come in the front of TV cameras and spout only canned responses that say noting. Even the most innocent you say can be edited in a way that changes the narrative completely. Joe Nobody should never volunteer to be in the front of cameras if they are the source of bad news. It's completely adversarial setting and editing can change everything.
If I remwmber correctly, there was a case in Florida where one of the big 4 news agencies cut word out of a 911 call to make it more inflammatory.
If you're interested in winning an argument in public debate, then giving your opposition the chance to see your first rebuttal before they've publish their first attack is a huge, huge handicap.
One journalistic technique to get info from an unwilling subject is to make up a dramatic lie, and then record the rebuttal.
"I hear you're going to close your North American factory, laying off 5,000 workers"
"No no, we're not closing the factory, and it's only 400 staff who'll lose their jobs."
Say your friend exits for an undisclosed sum and you want to know how much:
> "What was your exit price?"
> "Dude I can't tell you."
Compare this with:
> "Was the cash part 84 million US?
> "No way man, like half that"
Your friend existed for around 40 million US.
Ethics are up to you.
As they should. Its the duty of the journalist to be correct in what they publish. Not getting an interview is no excuse.
*EDITED for clarification.
> “Now, okay,” Zimbardo corrected himself on the phone with me. He then acknowledged that the informed consent forms which subjects signed had included an explicit safe phrase: “I quit the experiment.” Only that precise phrase would trigger their release.
> “None of them said that,” Zimbardo said. “They said, ‘I want out. I want a doctor. I want my mother,’ etc., etc. Essentially I was saying, ‘You have to say, “I quit the experiment.”’”
> But the informed consent forms that Zimbardo’s subjects signed, which are available online from Zimbardo’s own website, contain no mention of the phrase “I quit the experiment.”
If the transcript of that phone discussion is thruthful and accurate, then Zimbardo lied with regards to that issue.
I believe this is a huge issue. The original article makes the accusation that this was probably criminal action ("false imprisonment"). Yet it is not listed in the "Contentious Issues" section of the rebuttal. I didn't read the entire piece, but searching for certain keywords didn't turn up anything new, either.
(Edit: just to be clear, claiming to be contractually entitled to hold people against their will unless they use an "explicit safe phrase" is nonsense to begin with, which is why I was hoping the rebuttal would address that argument.)
I agree, but at the same time safe-words exist for a reason. To allow people "playing the game" to tell what is a real out of character comment, and what is just part of the role. I honestly have no idea what the law says with respect to that. I think it's a tough area to play around in, and things can get real murky real quick.
(I'm talking quite generally wrt the concept around consent with safe words etc)
However, the original article claimed that the consent form had no such agreement -- Zimbardo merely claimed so in a phone interview.
Furthermore, given that Zimbardo's rebuttal is 18 pages long, you'd think that he'd at least briefly comment on the accusation of potentially criminal behavior.
The entire point of a safe word is that it is SHORT and MEMORABLE, not long and generic. "I quit the experiment" is a highly generic phrase, easily forgotten. Calling that phrase a "safe word" is absolutely absurd.
Also, even if I accepted your argument that "I quit the experiment" Is somehow a "safe word"-- it still wouldn't be technically correct to say, because it's not a word, it's a phrase / sequence of words. Have you ever heard of a "Safe phrase?" Me neither. That's because making a "safe word" a phrase completely defeats the concept of a safe word. It needs to be short enough to be said and understood in as little time as possible. Making a "safe word" a phrase instead of a short and easily-communicable SINGLE WORD is so deceptive and intellectually dishonest that it's clearly a willful and intentional misunderstanding of the safe-word concept. It's trickery, pure and simple.
Good safe word: "Banana."
Bad safe word: "Stop."
Terrible to the point of being unusable safe word: "I quit the experiment."
Zimbardo's lack of addressing this issue in his so-called "rebuttal": pathetic.
And especially for technical articles, it's fairly common to send maybe a bullet list of all the points you're using from what they told you.
The reason sending drafts around is considered bad journalistic practice comes from political and commercial interests. People will object to minutiae in your article not because it's wrong, but because it's inconvenient for them, including blocking publication etc. (Again, less relevant for science, but the most important pieces of journalism can be a battle to get published.)
(A further point is that there do exist wiki-style summaries, more full and precise discussions, etc. But it's the pop media-style articles that have so much more reach, partly because of the often-erring attempts to simplify and make readable.)
Because what you're describing is generally what is done, what has been done for decades. This is why you often see a sentence near the end of an article stating that the subject declined to comment or did not respond when reached for comment.
The assumption seems to be that people are interested in truthful reporting. In fact, most subjects do not want truthful reporting. They want favorable reporting, which is often not the same thing.
There seems to be very clear evidence that Zimbardo lied, at least, and possibly acted extremely unethically, possibly even illegally. Why would he be interested in providing comments on a story stating so? What would be his motivation? By withholding his rebuttal until after original publication, he can base his response on which parts of the story are gaining traction, if any. In this case, he's doing just that, and ignoring several elements for which he has no good answer.
It would be very nice if life were documented in a series of objective wiki pages, but so long as humans are involved, that will never be practical.
We have stop stop calling anything with four legs a cat whem it's a dog.
I have no strong opinions either way, but one meta-point I personally find interesting is: why don't journalists send a final draft of an article to the people involved and get a final round of comments? That just seems fair. Zimbardo claims some facts in the article are simply wrong, and either 1) those errors would be corrected, or 2) Zimbardo's response to those claims could stand side-by-side, instead of this bifurcated situation of articles and response articles.
I think it would be even better if these arguments were in a wiki (or git) style instead of a series of articles.