Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:14AM   Printer-friendly
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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:23PM (1 child)

    by zocalo (302) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:23PM (#499245)
    Science and the news have a lot in common - in their purest forms they are essentially about applying the available data to get as close as possible to the facts, then evolving those facts as further data becomes available. In that light, it's perhaps inevitable that they would share similar processes and pitfalls, and could do well to learn from each other's attempts to correct the errors that inevitably creep into the process. Science at least has a concept of peer review, which while not without its flaws [arstechnica.com], at least tries to provide a means of correction. For MSM you usually won't have the luxury of sitting on a story while waiting for a peer review, but it should still be possible to make it an on-going and open process from the moment a story breaks.

    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!
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Interesting=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:08PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:08PM (#499496) Homepage

    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.