Are they really though? NYT for example must write thousands of articles a year and they're human. What's the alternative?
yeah IMHO that's one of the reasons why this problem exists to start with. Back in the print days, "thousands of articles" was not the main incentive. In the "click count" days, it is. I don't have a solution, I'm just suggesting that this is part of the problem.
I'm not sure what the solution is, or if there even is one, but it's become very difficult to trust "anonymous sources" over the last 10+ years or so.
I disagree that this is merely a technological issue. What passes for journalism in this country took a nosedive in 90s, after a handful of corporate conglomerates took over all broadcast news. I am not sure how old you are, but I remember news in 80s. CNN owned by Ted Turner, and the current manifestation are night and day.
p.s. And it wasn't just CNN. ABC's Nightline, for example, was also solid and that only happened because of Turner's CNN. And of course, MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour was outstanding.
It's not a perfect system obviously but yet to see an alternative.
It's obvious from US political coverage, especially since the 2016 election, that the answer to this is: Yes, journalists have incentives to publish sensationalist stories fortified with "anonymous sources" that may be falsified and have little to do with reality for the sake of ratings, clicks and the ilk, as well as pushing either their own or their employers' political agenda(s).
I'll say this clearly: this is true of all media, left, right & everything else.
The media has repeatedly demonstrated that they are just as corrupt as the politicians that they are supposedly holding accountable. The difference is: no journalists have gone to jail for their corruption. And no, I'm not calling for an end to a free press. We, their audience, need to hold them accountable by depriving them of the funds to keep their corruption active. We should demand our journalists hold the same level of integrity we wish of our politicians.
If you want to stay informed and intellectual, a lot of maybes will have to compete for space in your brain.
when's the last time you successfully maintained something resembling internal undecided neutrality on a given topic, instead of resolving your views into a concrete position? it seems to be human nature to know that [something] is [true/false/some other quality], instead of maintaining an ambiguous perspective—even for complex issues, we seem to want to boil them down into something like a polarizing binary choice of belief—rather than allowing ourselves to remain uncertain, as soon as possible—to avoid the mental burden of not having come to a decision yet.
always-online smartphones in everyone's pockets and social media have made the world increasingly polarizing. fence-sitters are not tolerated: pick a side, you're either with me, or against me, and everything I stand for! which is to say, you're emotionally compelled to choose one end of the binary spectrum over the other—when the reality of the situation might not even be a binary choice to begin with!
if human beings were better at remaining "undecided until further evidence" on issues, and if it was more societally-permitted, the world would undoubtedly be a better place.
(is this phrasing less "overbaked"? I still don't see what's wrong with the wavefunction collapse analogy.)
> Every single person in the world knows how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources: The weatherman says it won't rain [...]
I completely and wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. everyone knows that weather prediction is uncertain, and takes such predictions with a grain of salt accordingly. this is not the case for news media. historically it has been mostly trusted implicitly, and this is largely still the case, but now there's people who don't trust any news media at all (or perhaps only their preferred, alternative sources). regardless, "every single person in the world" does NOT "know how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources" in the smartphone/social media age. it is delusional to believe otherwise.
NYT in this case which seems to have one of the best processes.
However, the Times also employed Judith Miller, which goes to show how little such processes are worth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...
"In the buildup to the 2003 war, the New York Times published a number of stories claiming to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. One story in particular, written by Judith Miller, helped persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD: in September 2002 she wrote about an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes which the NYT said were to be used to develop nuclear material."
If it's a valid, public source, well, even if you don't know the source, if someone is willing to put their name to the news, maybe it's more valid.
Today this deception of journalists being generally competent is just not viable anymore, since people have way too many sources to fact check, and way too many bubbled to blop in.
No it isn't. People lie and cheat all the time for all kinds of reasons. If there's no source cited it's effectively an opinion piece. Letting someone write articles from home all day long with the option to use an anonymous source is working out about as well as anyone with half a brain would expect. Journalists are not some pure beacons of morality and honesty and they shouldn't be trusted at all. They're strangers on the internet.
Managing/selecting a few dozen foreign editors at mainstream outlets, conveniently co-located around DC/NYC, is absolutely within the capabilities of a powerful NatSec apparatus.
You simply made accusations and statements about "good journalists".