SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:03PM (2 children)
You just basically described the academic publishing process. Swamp them in hundreds of supporting info points/citations while leaving out the one or two crucial points that would lead to totally different conclusions. For example:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02389 [arxiv.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:23PM (1 child)
The real trick is going to be find a way to do that, almost certainly involving members of the public as well as involved parties and other journalists, without it deteriorating into something akin to the edit-war flamefests that crop up on Wikipedia from time to time. That is going to mean a lot more curation and moderation of evolving stories than MSM currently engages in with discussion threads, but if the payback from that expense is increased trust in the MSM outlet leading to larger readership and ad revenues, then maybe that's perhaps worth the cost and effort. As an additional bonus, it might even help create some more skeptical members of the public who are better equipped to tell credible information from agendas and hearsay.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:08PM
Science and the news have a lot in common -- they present a vague possibly-factual statement based on a few statistics and spend the rest of the time presenting political opinions about it.
The recent "marches for science," for example, were just another anti-Trump circle-jerk -- albeit a more thinly-veiled one. Hopefully Trump sending people to Mars in 3 years will shut 'em the fuck up.