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posted by on Saturday January 07 2017, @02:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the let's-keep-the-onion dept.

I found an interesting article on fivethirtyeight.com about fake news and how to address it. It's a long article but worth the read. This bit is near the end:

Media outlets keep trying to debunk fake news. This won't work, particularly for readers who have already decided that the traditional press is fake news — and, fair or not, partisan. Research suggests that the more partisan a topic, the more likely people who identify strongly with one side will double down on their argument even if they are presented with facts that counter it.

Maybe, instead, the media should do a better job of distinguishing real news from fake news, to regain readers' trust. Click-based advertising has left us adrift in a sea of inaccurate, sensational headlines, even at legitimate news outlets; this makes it easier for dramatic fake news headlines to survive. Aggregation has us spreading stories with no original research or corroboration, and it makes everyone look bad when outlets fall for fake bait. Over the holidays, a heartwarming story about a Santa Claus who visited a child's deathbed went viral. Three days later, the Knoxville News Sentinel, which originally published the story, retracted it, but not before it had spread to CNN, Fox, USA Today and more.

Maybe the news should stop trying so hard to entertain.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 07 2017, @02:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 07 2017, @02:33AM (#450561)

    Could not said it any better.

    Its the exact analogue to Soviet propaganda. If they spew about trains being safe, you better believe there was a massive train crash somewhere out of your immediate sight.

    If you had a trillion dollars and wanted to keep hold of it, what would you buy and do?

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 07 2017, @04:34AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 07 2017, @04:34AM (#450609) Journal

    If you had a trillion dollars and wanted to keep hold of it, what would you buy and do?

    Depends whether I wanted to do anything else.

    If that was my sole desire, then using the interest on a trillion dollars, design and build a spaceship/coffin that can exceed escape velocity for the galaxy (~500-1000 km/s IIRC). Then have the Federal Government print me a trillion dollar banknote out of pure nickel-62, one of the four most stable isotopes in existence, (given that I would trade a trillion dollars in assets for that, I'm sure they'd go along just for the epic seigniorage) and aim my corpse for a nearby void in the local supercluster of galaxies with the bank note safely encapsulated in my spacecraft.

    Unless I hit something before I manage to clear the galaxy, my trillion dollars is likely to last longer than a trillion years, perhaps by a few orders of magnitude.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 07 2017, @07:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 07 2017, @07:42AM (#450644)

      Dead guy in a projectile at sub-light speed, with a coin? of Nickel, one of the more common metals in the Universe, cruising between Galaxies? Dead people do not own anything, at best they are property of someone else, like Egyptian mummies used for fuel or paper production, back in the day. But can anyone, besides khallow here, be so greedy, so egotistical, so f88king crazed, as to imagine this as a good end? As good as a Viking ship burial, where you set it on fire and sink it so that no one else gets your horde of booty. Because, taxation is theft, and Death taxes are theft from the dead!! This is why I will not live next to Libertarians. Come the apocalypse, you would have to shoot them first, just out of principle.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 07 2017, @01:15PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 07 2017, @01:15PM (#450708) Journal

        Dead guy in a projectile at sub-light speed, with a coin? of Nickel, one of the more common metals in the Universe, cruising between Galaxies? Dead people do not own anything, at best they are property of someone else, like Egyptian mummies used for fuel or paper production, back in the day.

        I get the impression you disagree for some reason. I'm pretty sure with a trillion dollars I could make it legit ownership with laws and everything.

        As good as a Viking ship burial, where you set it on fire and sink it so that no one else gets your horde of booty. Because, taxation is theft, and Death taxes are theft from the dead!! This is why I will not live next to Libertarians. Come the apocalypse, you would have to shoot them first, just out of principle.

        Point is, it works better than anything solution you could come up with. You can only just mouth off about how bad libertarians are while ignoring the US government just got a trillion dollars in assets in exchange for a nice piece of nickel, which is pretty damn good for a supposedly libertarian outcome.

        In reality, I wouldn't try to get a trillion dollars in wealth nor keep it if I did get it. It's just too much bother. Sure, if I somehow came across a trillion dollars, I'd find private causes to give most of the wealth to. I don't respect governments' ability to squander sums of money each year greater than the wealthiest of us will ever see in our lifetimes.