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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: 1) by fyngyrz on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:09PM
Inasmuch as the news is, for the most part, a for-profit business, one has to realize that they are in the business of fetching eyes.
Everything else is in pursuit of this; if they fail at it, they will go away, so it's always very high up on the list of priorities, and I would suggest it's actually first the vast majority of the time.
The publisher usually exercises influence. The advertisers exercise influence, not the least of which is flocking to the places that get the most eyes. The editors exercise influence both in story selection, slant, and wording. Reporters exercise influence in everything from the questions they ask (and the ones they don't), the words they use, and the slant they (usually) employ.
By the time we see the news, it's been heavily filtered, and that's without even getting to the issues of "is this actually true?" and "is this opinion disguised as news?" Usually the answer to the latter is at least somewhat yes, as news is almost always couched within an overweening social narrative. The "drug war" and "human trafficking" are two prominent examples of this, as are subjects characterized as "the national defense" (ask yourself if you've seen any defense of our nation going on lately? Tip: foreign adventurism is not "national defense.") and the entire parlor trick of giving equal time to superstitious nonsense, for instance evolution vs. creationism.
Some outlets – fox "news" for one – are pretty blatant about handing out a narrative that is heavily divorced from reality; some less; but it is a very rare news outlet indeed that isn't filtering everything they present to you through various monetarily- and perspective-driven lenses.
Then there's political bias. And superstitious bias. And gender bias. And social bias. And nationalist / jingoist bias.
In the end, it turns out to be a fair amount of work to actually figure out what's going on, what it might actually mean to one's self and family in both the short and long term, and how much time one might want to invest in discussing it, and with whom.
Or, you know, there's "reality" TV. Squirrel!