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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Thursday June 01 2017, @12:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the can-you-believe-it? dept.

A story in The Conversation may be of interest to Soylentils:

"Fake news" is the buzzword of 2017. Barely a day goes by without a headline about president Donald Trump lambasting media "bias", or the spread of "alternative facts".

Many articles on the subject suggest that social media sites should do more to educate the public about misinformation, or that readers should think more critically about the sources of news stories before sharing them. But there are fundamental problems with this. First, there isn't a clear definition of what "fake news" really is. And second, it overlooks important aspects of people's psychological makeup.

"Fake news" can be classified in a number of ways and represented as a series of concentric circles. First, in the centre of the concentric model, we have actual fake news. These are the stories that we commonly see shared on sites such as News Thump and The Onion. These satirical stories are written for comedic purposes and are put together to entertain.

Next, we have propaganda articles. Typically, these pieces do not actually contain any real news value. They may, for example, detail an individual's past behaviour and suggest that that it reflects something about their current intentions. Alternatively, these pieces may contain some kernel of truth, but this may be twisted in such a way that it totally misleads audiences and misrepresents a story's true news value.

These propaganda articles take numerous forms. The Huffington Post, for example, included a caveat about Donald Trump's alleged bigotry whenever mentioning him in a story before the US election last November, while British readers will likely recall the Daily Mail's much-maligned attacks on former Labour leader Ed Miliband's late father in 2013, calling him a "man who hated Britain".

Finally, and occupying the outermost ring of the model, there are the stories that are technically true, but reflect the subtle editorial biases of the organisation publishing them. This reporting is commonplace within the mainstream media, through selective storytelling and politically-driven editorials. Whether this is reflected in the left-wing bias of The Guardian or the right-wing approach of the Murdoch media empire, this practice is less malicious and more a political interpretation of events.

There once was a precise word for the term "fake news" is trying to describe. Oh yes, it's "propaganda."


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jelizondo on Thursday June 01 2017, @02:35AM (1 child)

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 01 2017, @02:35AM (#518642) Journal

    I believe there are two major forces converging on our times: the for-profit media and moral relativism.

    Let’s take the latter first. In the recent past moral values were the bedrock of families and by extension, communities. Mostly those values were Christian, simply because most people professed that religion but such values can be found in other religions as well, but that is beside the point.

    Non-scientists are very prone to take scientific findings and try to apply them outside the realm of science, to spiritual endeavors. Such happened to magnetism for example in the late 19th century; in the 20th, Einstein’s Relativity was applied to sociology: different cultures have different mores and no one is right, thus cultural relativism was born. (If interested see here [wikipedia.org])

    Then it spread to moral values and we came to accept that there is no absolute truth (outside of mathematics that is!) and everyone had a right to his/her opinion and me came to “live and let die” (1) and “whatever gets you thru the night” (2).

    Second, news reporting went from “It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell" (3) to being a for-profit conglomerate more interested in viewers (or readers, a dwindling kind) and advertisers than in raising hell. As arms of multinational corporations they became de facto propaganda machines, i.e., purveyors of fake news.

    When this two meet we get the current situation: you opinion is as good as mine and the media uses it to advance their corporate interests, which normally clash with the interests of common folk. And we come to every forum hating each other because we have the truth and the others are outright liars, much as Catholics and Protestants killing each other not long ago in the name of God; when we should be listening to each other and trying to learn from each other.

    So we came full circle to religion and religious beliefs even if our “religion” is secular and not about the Creator but about money, the free market, homosexuality or whatever has caught our fancy.

    Being aware of this, I daily peruse many different sources from The Guardian [theguardian.com] to Heat Street [heatst.com], Al Jazeera [aljazeera.com], El País [elpais.es] and many more trying to extract from each the grain of truth each contains and forming my very own opinion about events around me.

    This situation doesn’t bother me at all, I’m a seeker of truth and it has always been a difficult endeavor to find it, even in mathematics!

    1. Paul McCartney
    2. John Lennon
    3. Wilbur F. Storey regarding the aims of the Chicago Times in 1861
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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:02PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday June 01 2017, @06:02PM (#518970) Journal

    Being aware of this, I daily peruse many different sources from The Guardian [theguardian.com] to Heat Street [heatst.com], Al Jazeera [aljazeera.com], El País [elpais.es] and many more trying to extract from each the grain of truth each contains and forming my very own opinion about events around me.

    That's a good practice. There are many biases promulgated in media. To get true bearing on any matter it's helpful to listen to other, even diametrically opposed, voices. You mentioned Al Jazeera, which I'll use as an example of how to get a better picture of the Middle East. In the United States there is a suffocating pro-Israel bias that warps the world view of the entire society toward that region. Al Jazeera provides a decent counterpoint to that narrative. They actually treat Palestinians and Lebanese as humans as equally deserving of humane treatment and respect as anyone else, rather than terrorists-in-waiting. Just that difference in baseline assumptions makes a tremendous difference in being able to understand events there.

    One other example might be general hostility in the American media toward organized labor. Think tanks and pundits and other corporate shills have worked very hard for 50 years to demonise unions, and cast them as an existential threat to capitalism. In continental Europe, however, perceptions are different. Germany has a very strong economy but also very strong unions. The two are obviously not antithetical, but as an American a person wouldn't know that unless they read something outside the narrative sphere constructed by people who are up to no good (tm).

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.