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from the honesty-is-the-absence-of-the-intent-to-deceive dept.
[...] what exactly is "fake news" and what effect is it having globally?
"I think there is a fundamental problem that fake news became a catch-all term to mean anything that we don't particularly like to read," explained Alexios Mantzarlis, who heads the international fact-checking network at the Poynter Institute.
[...] Renate Schroeder, director of the European Federation of Journalists, said countries "should be extremely prudent" and seek to balance freedom of expression and freedom of the press with combating hate speech and fake news.
Any effort to regulate social media should not go too far, either, since it can lead to censorship, she said.
"Our view is [that] to fight such propaganda, to fight such fake news, we need to invest in journalism. We need to invest in media pluralism. We need to invest in media literacy," Schroeder told Al Jazeera.
[...] Only 32 percent of people in the US said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in the media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly" in 2016, according to a Gallup poll. That is the lowest level recorded in Gallup polling history – the question has been asked annually since 1997 – and eight points lower than in 2015.
Trust in media declined overall across all EU countries in 2015, a European Broadcasting Union survey also reported.
Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute said that to fight the fake news phenomenon, journalists should promote greater transparency in their work, and develop a robust corrections policy when mistakes do occur.
That may include "making [corrections] more detailed, explaining why the error was made, who made it within the newsroom, and how exactly the existing procedures failed," he said.
Schroeder added that the focus on fake news could potentially serve as a catalyst to reinvigorate the field of journalism.
Idea #3: Stop helping politicians cheat at debates. Idea #4: Stop reprinting corporate press releases as 'news.' Idea #5: Stop shilling.
Your ideas, Soylent?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:33AM (3 children)
So you have to check the checkers that check checkers? ;-)
Reminds me of..
Monitor monitors [youtube.com] (video)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:35AM
It's checkers all the way down. Now king me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:27AM (1 child)
This exchange really reminds me of a piece at 538 [fivethirtyeight.com] a while back. The basic story: there's a guy out there who claims to study false but well-known debunking stories. His classic example is the idea that spinach contains a lot of iron and is thus a super food (hence Popeye, etc.). The standard debunking is that some nutrition report contained an error that was due to a misplaced decimal point. That debunking story has been told and retold all over the academic literature.
Except it turns out that the debunking story is itself false. For more details, you can read the link. So this guy researches this and finds out where the debunking story apparently came from and how it got things wrong. And he's obsessed with similar stories -- because apparently people who tell debunking stories are (surprise!) generally a bunch of self-righteous jerks who are eager to lord their debunking knowledge over the plebs... Which ironically makes them susceptible to fake or erroneous debunking stories.
The meta-irony of this is of course that this debunker of debunkers turns out to be a self-righteous jerk himself (surprise!) and for the past several years has been on an idiotic crusade to prove that Darwin plagiarized a lot of his theory of evolution and this fact is being written out of the history of science due to some vast conspiracy of science historians.
While Darwin himself acknowledged some similarities, the theory that Darwin plagiarized is pure nonsense and only makes sense to this guy because he doesn't understand statistics and the likelihood of a few words lining up a few times in hundreds of pages of a book. His research has been repeatedly rejected again and against by even barely reputable science journals... Yet he continues to try to wage a war on the internet about all of this.
So, we apparently need debunkers to debunk those who debunk the debunkers... And on and on it goes.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:55PM
Or one can just have some due diligence before accepting information? ;)
I recall when a local paper started with a debunking section. Well they got most right but seemed to lack serious capability to actually pay attention and not be under the influence of vested interests. So they got the *plonk* ;-)