Again a very enjoyable important read. I wasn’t sure where you were going with it at first. I expected it to look at the way facts can be manipulated by all political parties and that most people are happy to believe and repeat the version that their political party of choose tend to spew!
There's no doubt that's true! But I think we need to look at how we, the media — erstwhile gatekeepers of the truth — try and push back and disincentive that manipulation.
I continue to be amazed that the Wikipedia has found a way to moderate all dissension about their articles, remains at least basically-trusted. The fact that it is one of the few information sites that is not trying to make money should be noted.
Journalism may imagine it has "peer review" in that they all criticize each other, but they might consider going to academic peer-review standards: everybody contributes time to a pool of reviewers, assignments are random, reviews are anonymous.
Media organs participating get a seal of quality of some sort.
I am also fascinated by wikipedia! (And I've been really intrigued by the threat they're facing from AI.)
Early in the online journalism space, there were so many ideas floating around about how to use the power of the crowd to fact check, copy edit, report, etc. Unfortunately I think journalism is just too demanding and decentralized for that to work. Or, at the very least, to make it profitable. I love the idea of a crowd review, but I think the volume, speed, and expertise needed is just too great.
Although, really, we're also just describing reddit. 🤔
A fascinating and thoughtful analysis as always, Justin. You argue convincingly for the media's over-reliance on fact-checking in the Trump era and for your case that public trust in news media is eroding as a result. Let's not beat up on journalists too.much, though. They had not dealt with such a compulsive liar in such a high office before, and fact-checking jn real time seemed like the best response. What may be a better, though admittedly longer-term project, is to teach people from primary grades on how to spot disinformation and misinformation, to separate facts from conjecture and lies, to question the source of the falsehoods and the motivation behind them. To that end, I recommend the work of Dr. John Cook of the Centre for Behavioral Change at the University of Melbourne and his app, Cranky Uncle. See crankyuncle.com. and no, I didn't make this up! However, even if constant fact-checking isn't the way to go, we do need journalists to keep exposing public figures who constantly use cherry-picking and logical fallacies (*cough* Pierre Polievre *cough*) to fire up their base. Don't call it fact-checking, fine. But keep investigative journalism alive. We need it more than ever.
Thank-you for the very enjoyable read, but I can't quite make out the main points. Definitely listing ingredients and their amounts on products we consume and use is incredibly important, and one reason I stay away from the "Big Natural" health industry. But fact-checkers in journalism are essential, no? In spite of Substack etc, I still enjoy reading several journo's from the main-stream media, and would trust their news stories over what I hear on social media any day. I'm sorry but not surprised that Meta and the rest are abandoning a hopeless task, but also hope fact-checking is not given up everywhere, tiresome Trump-hating lie-counters regardless.
It's a bit buried in there, but there's a distinction between fact-checking as a core tenet of journalism — either as a part of, or in addition to, reporting — and "the fact check" we've popularized over the past 10 years or so. (i.e. the baloney meter.) The former is indispensible. The latter, I think, we should dispense with.
Back to academia's methods (eye-rolls circle the room), there are publications that go on and on about the virtues of St. John's Warts or whatever, but the Lancet never cites those journals.
Journalists seem unable to cast-out anyone who even claims to be one, as engineers and doctors absolutely do.
We all get that casting-out individuals from a designation of "registered journalist" is not going to happen, but that strikes me as quite do-able as a voluntary association that the publication can join if it meets standards, like the Better Business Bureau.
I really think that news sites should form such an association. Fox and National Post would both get in, because they have some thin line between their fact and opinion, do walk-back errors.
But the Hydroxychloroquine vendors and 9/11 truthers would at least be designated as "not even trying to be accurate".
A bit of a tangent, I am re reading One River, by Wade Davis. I just finished the part where he out lines how the panic around cocaine in tonics in the USA was twisted into a form of cultural genocide (not a term he uses) against the Indians of South American. How coca was a staple food product for thousands of years before cocaine was isolated from the plant. That coca is one of the most nutrient rich editable plants known to man and the alkaloid cocaine makes up a fraction of a percentage of the overall plant and during the frenzy and following panic the words coca and cocaine were used interchangeably even though they are very different things.
On the main topic here, I think what your looking for is a more educated general public. educated in the broader senses has having an ability to critically think about the information we are being fed. where does the media fit into that. Telling us what to think is always going to back fire. giving us things to think about is probably right. The question about who is responsible for teaching us how to think about things is more difficult to answer.
In the words of George Carlin “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
I am skeptical of the idea that we just need more education. We're more education now than we ever have been. Those going through school right now have a digital literacy level far beyond their elders. So there's no doubt there's a bit of a gap between ages.
But I think the more important factor is ideology. The media, for years, has exacerbated that problem — we've been speaking to narrower and narrower subsets of people. I think the rise of the fact check proves exactly that.
Also: The appropriation of Indigenous customs by the patent medicine industry is super interesting! (And sad.) I didn't get into it here, but there's a lot going on there.
Oh, you want fact-check tangents? This one haunts me. Gwynne Dyer's "Future Tense" gave the fact-check to six months of GW Bush propaganda:
"Saddam was a secular dictator, leader of the pan-Arab nationalist and socialist Baath Party, and an accomplished killer and torturer of Islamist radicals, whom he rightly saw as a threat to his regime. Bin Laden was an Islamist zealot who preached the overthrow of secular rulers, the suppression of Arab nationalism and other national identities among Muslims in favour of a single borderless Muslim loyalty, and quite specifically the destruction of the Baath Party and of Saddam Hussein"
I typed that in to get a word-count: 78. If those 78 words had been appended to most of Bush's claims, as a fact-check, in 2002 and 2003, the war would not have happened. It was journalism's job to do that. Gwynne Dyer was doing it at the time, and a whole movie, "Shock and Awe", A-list cast, was made about the Knight-Ridder journalists who got a series of stories out about how the "Iraqi A-bomb program" was just not there.
But larger papers and all the networks (yes, even MSNBC) were just amplifying the Bush messages and not providing the fact-check.
I'm just not worried about lack of fact-checking of minor political figures that are clearly not mainstream, have little following. Fact-checking rants from Tamara Lich accomplishes nothing. It's the lies from those in power that get the least fact-checking.
Again a very enjoyable important read. I wasn’t sure where you were going with it at first. I expected it to look at the way facts can be manipulated by all political parties and that most people are happy to believe and repeat the version that their political party of choose tend to spew!
There's no doubt that's true! But I think we need to look at how we, the media — erstwhile gatekeepers of the truth — try and push back and disincentive that manipulation.
I continue to be amazed that the Wikipedia has found a way to moderate all dissension about their articles, remains at least basically-trusted. The fact that it is one of the few information sites that is not trying to make money should be noted.
Journalism may imagine it has "peer review" in that they all criticize each other, but they might consider going to academic peer-review standards: everybody contributes time to a pool of reviewers, assignments are random, reviews are anonymous.
Media organs participating get a seal of quality of some sort.
I am also fascinated by wikipedia! (And I've been really intrigued by the threat they're facing from AI.)
Early in the online journalism space, there were so many ideas floating around about how to use the power of the crowd to fact check, copy edit, report, etc. Unfortunately I think journalism is just too demanding and decentralized for that to work. Or, at the very least, to make it profitable. I love the idea of a crowd review, but I think the volume, speed, and expertise needed is just too great.
Although, really, we're also just describing reddit. 🤔
A fascinating and thoughtful analysis as always, Justin. You argue convincingly for the media's over-reliance on fact-checking in the Trump era and for your case that public trust in news media is eroding as a result. Let's not beat up on journalists too.much, though. They had not dealt with such a compulsive liar in such a high office before, and fact-checking jn real time seemed like the best response. What may be a better, though admittedly longer-term project, is to teach people from primary grades on how to spot disinformation and misinformation, to separate facts from conjecture and lies, to question the source of the falsehoods and the motivation behind them. To that end, I recommend the work of Dr. John Cook of the Centre for Behavioral Change at the University of Melbourne and his app, Cranky Uncle. See crankyuncle.com. and no, I didn't make this up! However, even if constant fact-checking isn't the way to go, we do need journalists to keep exposing public figures who constantly use cherry-picking and logical fallacies (*cough* Pierre Polievre *cough*) to fire up their base. Don't call it fact-checking, fine. But keep investigative journalism alive. We need it more than ever.
Brilliant, simply brilliant, Justin. Thank you.
Thank-you for the very enjoyable read, but I can't quite make out the main points. Definitely listing ingredients and their amounts on products we consume and use is incredibly important, and one reason I stay away from the "Big Natural" health industry. But fact-checkers in journalism are essential, no? In spite of Substack etc, I still enjoy reading several journo's from the main-stream media, and would trust their news stories over what I hear on social media any day. I'm sorry but not surprised that Meta and the rest are abandoning a hopeless task, but also hope fact-checking is not given up everywhere, tiresome Trump-hating lie-counters regardless.
It's a bit buried in there, but there's a distinction between fact-checking as a core tenet of journalism — either as a part of, or in addition to, reporting — and "the fact check" we've popularized over the past 10 years or so. (i.e. the baloney meter.) The former is indispensible. The latter, I think, we should dispense with.
Back to academia's methods (eye-rolls circle the room), there are publications that go on and on about the virtues of St. John's Warts or whatever, but the Lancet never cites those journals.
Journalists seem unable to cast-out anyone who even claims to be one, as engineers and doctors absolutely do.
We all get that casting-out individuals from a designation of "registered journalist" is not going to happen, but that strikes me as quite do-able as a voluntary association that the publication can join if it meets standards, like the Better Business Bureau.
I really think that news sites should form such an association. Fox and National Post would both get in, because they have some thin line between their fact and opinion, do walk-back errors.
But the Hydroxychloroquine vendors and 9/11 truthers would at least be designated as "not even trying to be accurate".
Ah, I understand.
If I wasn't a mature, sober adult I *might* say something like ... But, but, Trump started it! It's all his fault! Haha...
A bit of a tangent, I am re reading One River, by Wade Davis. I just finished the part where he out lines how the panic around cocaine in tonics in the USA was twisted into a form of cultural genocide (not a term he uses) against the Indians of South American. How coca was a staple food product for thousands of years before cocaine was isolated from the plant. That coca is one of the most nutrient rich editable plants known to man and the alkaloid cocaine makes up a fraction of a percentage of the overall plant and during the frenzy and following panic the words coca and cocaine were used interchangeably even though they are very different things.
On the main topic here, I think what your looking for is a more educated general public. educated in the broader senses has having an ability to critically think about the information we are being fed. where does the media fit into that. Telling us what to think is always going to back fire. giving us things to think about is probably right. The question about who is responsible for teaching us how to think about things is more difficult to answer.
In the words of George Carlin “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
I am skeptical of the idea that we just need more education. We're more education now than we ever have been. Those going through school right now have a digital literacy level far beyond their elders. So there's no doubt there's a bit of a gap between ages.
But I think the more important factor is ideology. The media, for years, has exacerbated that problem — we've been speaking to narrower and narrower subsets of people. I think the rise of the fact check proves exactly that.
Also: The appropriation of Indigenous customs by the patent medicine industry is super interesting! (And sad.) I didn't get into it here, but there's a lot going on there.
Oh, you want fact-check tangents? This one haunts me. Gwynne Dyer's "Future Tense" gave the fact-check to six months of GW Bush propaganda:
"Saddam was a secular dictator, leader of the pan-Arab nationalist and socialist Baath Party, and an accomplished killer and torturer of Islamist radicals, whom he rightly saw as a threat to his regime. Bin Laden was an Islamist zealot who preached the overthrow of secular rulers, the suppression of Arab nationalism and other national identities among Muslims in favour of a single borderless Muslim loyalty, and quite specifically the destruction of the Baath Party and of Saddam Hussein"
I typed that in to get a word-count: 78. If those 78 words had been appended to most of Bush's claims, as a fact-check, in 2002 and 2003, the war would not have happened. It was journalism's job to do that. Gwynne Dyer was doing it at the time, and a whole movie, "Shock and Awe", A-list cast, was made about the Knight-Ridder journalists who got a series of stories out about how the "Iraqi A-bomb program" was just not there.
But larger papers and all the networks (yes, even MSNBC) were just amplifying the Bush messages and not providing the fact-check.
I'm just not worried about lack of fact-checking of minor political figures that are clearly not mainstream, have little following. Fact-checking rants from Tamara Lich accomplishes nothing. It's the lies from those in power that get the least fact-checking.