Re:Stop Watching the News (2019)
by TulliusCicero on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @06:04PM
(#23316962)
There's a certain amount of sensationalization to get eyeballs with things like headlines, obviously, but I'd be surprised if you looked at the various news stories that caused public outrage over the course of a year, if more than a small percentage were actually mis-reported/factually incorrect when it came to mainstream news coverage by reputable organizations.
Just as an example, a friend of mine had a fishing video get picked up by a few different news outlets. He gave a small writeup explaining the video to each of them. Not one of them reported the correct information. None of them got the location correct, only one got the kind of fish correct and one of them might as well have been talking about a totally different video, they literally contradicted what you could see in the video.
The way I see it, of something as trivial as a fishing video can be reported on so completely and utterly incorrectly, without the slightest regard for even the tiny amount of facts provided alongside the video, then why should i assume anything else is reported correctly?
Re:Stop Watching the News (2019)
by NikolaNovak on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @07:43PM
(#23317773)
Possibly. I don't think either one of us has immediate access to a solid survey or report/analysis - so it's an interesting point of its own that we have a wildly different initial estimate/assumption ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Commercial news by definition is looking to shock/sensationalize/rile up. It may not be on a conscious level but it's a race to gather & keep attention - boring stuff won't cut it.
I'm not supporting author's point mind you, I believe education/informedness is the only thing we have approaching a silver bullet. But the amount of internet justice and vigilanteism we have today, a lot of it inspired by various kinds of news - from local cable TV news indicating our suburbian neighbourhoods are a pithole of violence, to politically charged national news, to hilarious reporting on science and medicine... it all outrages and most of it is at best numbing, at worst utterly wrong.