Now why do we do that in software? because "agile", cost, "let's ship and risk breaking some things and see what happens? We'll fix things later in some update, on a need-to basis"
Well I think journalism has gone the same road: "let's publish first and risk breaking some truths and see what happens? We'll fix things later in some update, on a need-to basis"
Can't really blame the business entities themselves. I wholeheartedly agree with GP though, there definitely needs to be more regulation and parent's point is one of the most salient target for that — it's disingenuous at best to silently update/remove, not to mention actually false from a documentation standpoint, it skews history basically. Very dystopian. News articles should be versioned exactly like git, we should be able to diff each public update.
From a similar perspective for journalism, I think there's an argument that can be made that it's better to get most of the information out right away, even if some of it is inaccurate, and then correct the inaccuracies later, rather than wait until every piece is confirmed and edited perfectly to release the information. Argument to extremes, think of a hurricane or volcano explosion.
Likewise, I think it's fair to assume the economic competition between news outlets may push some to be too aggressive in shipping fast, too fast.
And you know what, deep down I think it's OK, as long as you don't falsely advertise what you're doing. "We want this <content> (whether code, news) in the hands of our customers asap, so we're releasing it now; but be aware it's not 100% guaranteed until scrutinized by the crowd and corrected accordingly."
I'd love to have a choice between some "fast news shippers" and some "slow, vetted pieces". I think there's room for both and everything in between. Just don't be disingenuous about it, and if it takes regulation to enforce that, then so be it — every legitimately regulated activity pretty much brings it on themselves, give or take some political latency.
But parent's aren't really talking about mistakes, like errors in software. They're talking about lies.
Sure, go ahead and get all the information you have out right away. But qualify their accuracy level. There's a difference between "Foo frobnicated a Baz", vs. "a certain quux told us[0] that Foo frobnicated a Baz" (with [0] leading to details like the top post mentions). The former is stating a possibly inaccurate information as if it was a sure fact. Essentially, it's lying. The latter form lets the reader understand the degree of uncertainty involved, and choose how much they're willing to believe it.
Following the argument to the same extreme, it's a bad idea to get out the information "there is a hurricane or volcano explosion due south of you" immediately, and to wait until the flight north begins to issue the correction "actually, it's due north of you."
"There is a hurricane, and we're hearing initial, unconfirmed reports that it's to the south. We want to stress these are unconfirmed at this time, etc etc"
Which is something that would traditionally be broadcast in an emergency.
Obviously, we're really talking about an extreme hypothetical, but as long as it's clear the information may not be complete or accurate at the time of reading, I see no problem (as long as it is eventually accurate).
No, I wouldn't, but that goes to why not ALL software should be agile, not that it's best to have some journalism be "agile."
I was going to mention space flight regarding software mistakes (https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-dam...), but figured it was more of a digression than it was on-topic.
- there is a spectrum of "importance" to software: a shopping app crashing is generally less critical than medical software crashing during surgery.
- there is a spectrum of "importance" to the news: surely the benefit and damage of reporting on Netflix's latest show is lesser than reporting on an incoming tsunami.
If you are warned upon fast release of a piece of news of "lesser impact" that it's "unverified", "untrusted source", etc., then you get to choose the impact: you either wait for further confirmation or act now, that's on you.
Conversely, for the "important" part of the spectrum, then we all agree that like critical software, it must be vetted and validated before release. There's no question about that.
As for where to draw the line, it's anywhere each particular new outlet feels it should be; but the mention of where we are on that spectrum should be at least industry-wide ethics for the Press, and enforced by regulation if necessary (see other comments for great suggestions about how to indicate trustworthiness of information, extent of research, sources, etc).
Why not? Why is it acceptable that the profit motive trump everything else? These people play a critical role in our society. Obviously they have to stay in business, but I'm not going to give them a pass on foregoing their duty just because they want to make more money.
Just look at the revision history.
But don't ask me what the incentives would have to be for journalistic organisations to adopt the technology.
There are several ways to do it then but a standard would likely emerge, as in: "we <publisher> commit to mirror-publish our content to ThePressChain."
You'd likely store only text (say the raw html) on the blockchain though, so using links for pictures etc; which implies your CDN is archived publicly for later retrieval (I suppose a deal with archive.org or equivalent is in order to bolster such a paradigm).
I’ve been thinking it would have to start with publications that aren’t the massive sources, using this as an advantage, and see the reward of subscribers as big publications get caught for these sorts of practices.
Journalists are people and make mistakes. But overall, respected institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and Bloomberg show good journalistic integrity and print retractions in both print and online.
If you really are seeing this problem regularly, i suggest you find better sources for your news. Above all avoid getting it from social media. The actual fake news that is rampant there is a much, much bigger threat to our society than the few bad apples or mistakes behind the problem you are describing.
Here's an example of an articles scrubbed from existence, including from the internet archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170301000000*/http://www.wsj.c...
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/hillary-clinton-vs-foia-144...
It's also unavailable, but searchable via google. Google simply shows a 404 page from the WSJ as the top result. The WSJ has never formally retracted this either.
Now since this is the WSJ, obviously the article was copied wholesale and pasted into blogs and the like regardless, so it can't be completely scrubbed. As a matter of fact, a search for:
"The filing was a response to a FOIA lawsuit brought in March by conservative organization Citizens United" will bring up many blogs with the full text of the article, but that doesn't change the fact that WSJ silently scrubbed the article from the internet archive, their own website, and the google cache.
Aslo, if you search "url:http://www.wsj.com/article_email/" , you won't find any active link at all. It seems they have changed their website structure.
Happy to admit I was wrong about this though. I only remember this article because it came up in a thread about Internet Archive removing content sometimes without any explanation.
I suggest you wake up to the reality of modern 'journalism'.
WaPo just recently messed up completely with the death of Baghdadi (the isis leader). Titling the article about his assassination as "Austere religious scholar dies at 48"
They had to change it 3 more times till they actually mentioned that he was assassinated. And that was just a mistake.
Journalists aren't some deity to be put on a pedestal. They are employees that work for a corporation, usually a really big one. That corporation's business model is dying and they are cutting costs to survive and have been for 20 years.
You might not want to go through the 1h30 rant from Richard Lewis, so feel free to skip to 31:00 and 34:30 for the content of the original article.
I really don't know what to make of this. I just can't imagine what would prompt people to write and then actually publish this.
You can read the comments on the article [2], there is no errata on the article and I haven't seen any official response from the Washington Post.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fay_X1Cu9Uc
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/abu-bakr-al-...
Edit: Actually there is an official response, at 39:20, a tweet (sigh) which might be even more scandalous than that headline
They even got the year of the creation of the site wrong. So, a person teaching journalism didn't even bother running a WHOIS query and spending 2 EUR to run a query against business registry. If that is the level of the teachers, then what can you expect from the people they taught?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/us/politics/bernie-sander...
> Mr. Uygur, a longtime supporter of Mr. Sanders, has also disparaged former President Barack Obama on his show, argued that bestiality should be legal and hosted white supremacist figures, including David Duke. In one clip that circulated on Twitter, Mr. Duke ends an interview by saying, “I am not, what you call a racist,” to which Mr. Uygur replies sarcastically, “No, of course not.”
They added the word 'sarcastically' and also added this after:
> Mr. Uygur called the clip a “complete smear” that had been taken out of context from a combative one-hour interview in which he pushed back on Mr. Duke.
In reality, NYT published a smear about Cenk Uygur, claiming he was supporting and agreeing with this white supremacist David Duke. This was a straight up lie, since Cenk spent the entire interview criticizing and arguing with David Duke, not agreeing with him at all. This caused an outrage among Cenk's supporters, and NYT quietly updated their article so that now it says almost the opposite of the original! Also, note that the smear was published after Cenk decided to run for Congress and the reporter knew that the clip used to support the 'Cenk agrees with David Duke' smear was out of context. [1]
[1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/ny-times-corrects-report-on-ce...
The article is a bit too long to accurately summarise, but essentially WaPo published a story under the following headline: “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.”
>The lead sentence offered “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials” and continued “While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation’s electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability.”
This is at best a deeply misleading intro. The malware was found on a laptop not connected to the grid. The allegation that "Russian hackers penetrated the electrical grid" because they found tools which once may have been developed by Russians is about as accurate as me concluding that a hypothetical murderer was American because the murder weapon was an American-made AR-15.
There are several more concerning parts to the story but alas, I'm on mobile and have slacked off long enough.
I don't buy into the "MSM are knowing purveyors of fake news because profit!" but humans make mistakes and the desire of mainstream newspapers to beat bloggers in timeliness and pageviews can ultimately lead to standards slipping even among writers who would never knowingly publish a false story.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-ne...
You know how absurd and wrong the Russia/powergrid story is specifically because this is your industry. If this wasn't your industry, you would read it, not have the understanding and experience to critique, and therefore probably believe it.. even if it was later retracted. The same applies to us reading about other fields.
My wife was a Capital Hill reporter in DC. Quite often, she had an hour or two to turn around a story on a hearing that just occurred on a topic she didn't know. Now multiply that by 4, 5, or 10 times each day.
It doesn't take maliciousness, just incompetence and/or ignorance at scale.
Michael Crichton named this:
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them."
The best argument that this is a systemic problem is to simply point out the lack of systemic accountability: as people have pointed out, no major news site has a diff/version history (even though most content management systems have some kind of version tracking), which would be the bare minimum (and best return on value) for digital publishers who prioritize accountability.
(The closest thing is newsdiffs.org, but that's an independent site [0])
If you want a real, recent error that illustrates the low importance of media corrections, I can give you one from this past week: when the New York Times erroneously reported that the Trump administration issued an executive order that would "define Judaism as a nationality". Here's a relevant excerpt from the earliest Internet Archive version of the article [1]:
> Mr. Trump’s order will declare that Judaism may be considered a national origin.
To say that this article caused a violent orgasm of Twitter fury and shock would be a vast understatement; you can search for tweets quote-tweeting the original @nytpolitics tweet to see for yourself. [2].
A few hours later, the NYT article had been significantly updated [3], with no correction or comment by the main NYT social media accounts, or by the individual reporters' Twitters (which are both very active). This is how the aforementioned excerpt was changed (and how it currently is as of today):
> Mr. Trump’s order will have the effect of embracing an argument that Jews are a people or a race with a collective national origin in the Middle East, like Italian Americans or Polish Americans
If the significance of the change isn't self-evident, then this tweet thread+article goes into detail about how big of a clusterfuck the original NYT article was [4].
To my knowledge, the NYT has said nothing about the mistake or the silent correction. Neither have the reporters. And as much outrage as the original article caused, it was all quickly forgotten (even faster than usual) because the mass shooting at the kosher market [5] and the UK elections the next day.
To me, this incident is emblematic of how their accountability is systemically lackadaisical. It's undeniable that the NYT does make corrections, but we only know of the errors that were noticed and were officially corrected. By definition, we can't easily know the errors that were never noticed, or were silently fixed.
In this situation, we have an error that is as egregious and infuriating as one can imagine in today's politics (Trump + executive authority + anti-Semitism + Israel v. Palestine). But also, this is a serious error that ultimately had no consequences, because the original report was attributed to anonymous sources (i.e. no reputation damage) and the error involved matters of abstract policy and political grandstanding.
If the error did cause damage, such as defaming a public official, or causing an angry protest that turned into a riot, then I'm certain the NYT would issue a correction, just as it did recently with its misleading report re: Cenk Uygur and David Duke (albeit after 3 days of complaints from Uygur and his supporters) [6]. But regardless of whether there are aggrieved parties, news organizations should be making corrections solely because they value truth and accountability. That the NYT has so completely and brazenly refused to acknowledge its massive, noticeable fuckup (which, besides the error, indicates a real flaw in sourcing) means that their correction policy should be regarded as arbitrary and unserious.
tl;dr: if they didn't make a correction for an error this big and noticeable, imagine how reluctant they are to issue corrections for errors much less noticeable and/or controversial.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/article-ch...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191210221006/https://www.nytim...
[2] https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fnyt...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20191211010003/https://www.nytim...
[4] https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/120483406506251468...
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/12/jersey-city...
[6] https://twitter.com/nytpolitics/status/1206722302416687110
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act applies to discrimination on the basis of nationality, color, or race.
By using Title VI, the Trump administration defined Jews as a race, color, or nationality. However, as Jews come in many races and colors already, the logical conclusion was that the Trump administration was defining Judaism as a nationality.
Additional support for this comes from the fact the order adopts the IHRA definition of what it means to be anti-Semitic, which includes among other things, criticism of the state of Israel.
And I again recommend this thread from Yair Rosenberg: https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/120457682761800499...
I posted the relevant original excerpt and what it was changed to. It is unequivocally different, and such a substantive change almost always necessitates a clarification if not a correction.
That was only one part of the article that was changed. The article's subhed/deck was also completely changed:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191210221006/https://www.nytim...
> The president’s action will define Judaism as a nationality, not just a religion, and empower the Education Department to withhold money from institutions that tolerate anti-Israel movements.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191211010003/https://www.nytim...
> The president’s action will protect Judaism under civil rights law and empower the Education Department to withhold money from institutions that tolerate anti-Israel movements.
Because currently, they post some bullshit news and create some random outrage. Then someone points at some bullshit claim in their article, and they just quietly change the article (remove the claim, add "allegedly", etc.), and act as nothing was wrong. Or in worst case scenario, they quietly remove the whole article.