[HN Gopher] The Importance of Fact-Checking
___________________________________________________________________
The Importance of Fact-Checking
Author : NaOH
Score : 127 points
Date : 2025-04-01 18:20 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| gcp123 wrote:
| What makes this fascinating isn't just what it says about
| storytelling, but what it reveals about our relationship with
| truth in media. I worked in public radio for 7 years, and TAL's
| influence was impossible to overstate - every producer wanted to
| craft stories with that perfect narrative arc.
|
| The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it
| as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling
| part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those
| lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes,
| sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution
| that makes you feel something.
|
| Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people
| listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your
| format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you
| create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful
| or not.
|
| The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor
| conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication.
| But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad
| for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio
| beat.
| jfengel wrote:
| And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller,
| not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program.
|
| The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and
| the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic
| source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the
| get-go... and so should Glass.
|
| TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in
| which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up
| by people who themselves are being uncritical.
| glenstein wrote:
| The story was true is your takeaway? A key piece of the
| article is that Rob Schmitz of Marketplace listened, thought
| something was off, and after digging found 13 lies in the
| story:
|
| >Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey's
| story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and
| the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical
| poisoning? "No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane." The man with the
| gnarled hand. "No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not
| true.
|
| This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell
| true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional
| impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which
| is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between
| telling true stories and journalism.
|
| Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the
| truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than
| entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you
| connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as
| speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation
| unless you've ascertained their sincerity.
|
| That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold
| to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody
| wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news"
| doesn't even try, but journalists do exist.
|
| TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and
| never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't
| have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more
| leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion,
| etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not
| explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known
| for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over
| the line they obliterated it.
|
| So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did
| screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story
| they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the
| second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the
| first mistake). They should have handed that story off to
| an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported
| it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply
| fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The distinction indeed needs to be drawn carefully,
| because as I understand you, you're not describing an
| "other side" compared to journalism - you're describing a
| thin intermediary layer between journalism and the kind
| of outlets like e.g. Top Gear, that let people treat them
| as a lighthearted but factual source, then occasionally
| do a hit job on something or someone, and when damage
| they did is pointed out, proclaim "but we are an
| entertainment program, not news, so we don't have any
| obligation to be factual and accurate!".
|
| Because of such cases, when I see someone (like you here)
| argue "X is not a journalist, Y is not a news program",
| my mind automatically pattern-matches this to ",
| therefore it has no obligation to tell the truth, despite
| the fact that they let people believe they're
| journalists/news". Which is not what you meant here, but
| common enough that I doubt this is just mine knee-jerk
| reaction.
| ben_w wrote:
| I've experienced making this mistake myself.
|
| The UK has Private Eye magazine. Because of their habit
| of making the front page a picture captioned with a
| joke[0], I assumed that's all they were for the first 15
| years of me knowing the magazine existed.
|
| Despite them also being famous for facing a lot of legal
| threats (and cases) for libel[1], it wasn't until the mid
| 2010s that I realised they're also known for in-depth
| investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and
| cover-ups.
|
| [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=private+eye+front+page&t=os
| x&iar=i...
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-15279371
| IshKebab wrote:
| What are you talking about? It was a complete
| fabrication. There is no true story.
| glenstein wrote:
| >have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake)
| but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first
| mistake). They should have handed that story off to an
| actual journalist
|
| I continue to be completely baffled by this explanation.
| I'm not sure I agree with this distinction you're making,
| which seems retrofitted to the specifics of this
| particular conversation, rather than an organic and clear
| cut conceptual distinction I've encountered in the wild.
| And even if the distinction were true, I don't think it
| has anything to do with the reason why this particular
| story failed. This American Life has been perfectly up to
| the task over and over again of vetting the stories and
| not running into this problem, so I would vehemently
| disagree with the idea that it's something built into the
| nature of their programming that made this happen when
| we're talking about one story out of, I don't know, 700
| and counting.
|
| I'm also not sure where the idea is coming from that a
| TAL story must originate independently from a journalist,
| and that not doing so constitutes a "tell" about the
| reliability of the story. Most of their stories originate
| from what you might typically call a source or what I
| might say as a person, a character, a personality, any of
| the raw material from which all stories are sourced. And
| while I do believe TAL sometimes works with third-party
| reporters, they also use in-house producers because they
| themselves are perfectly capable of being that
| journalistic origination of the story through which we
| understand it to be vetted.
|
| Also weren't you originally saying that the story was
| _true?_ I 'm not sure what happened to that, but I'm
| finding no trace of explanation for that in this new
| volley of distinctions about the meaning of journalism.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The story was true is your takeaway?
|
| I think this was the takeaway of the entire industry.
| Daisey gave an admission that was basically a performance,
| and the message of that performance was "I was dishonest,
| and being dishonest is terribly morally wrong, but being
| dishonest made the story more true, and if therefore I have
| to be morally wrong to deliver the real truth, I'll have to
| take the blame."
|
| Typical middle-class post-mortem after getting caught.
|
| That happened during a time when we expected the mainstream
| news to be literally true, even if told from a particular
| perspective. If Daisey's story were politically valuable to
| someone today, however, every outlet would simply agree not
| to report on it. They'd just refer back to it in articles
| about Foxconn as "allegations spread around right-wing
| twitter about the supposed bias of a journalist who
| reported the story."
| cratermoon wrote:
| The funny thing is, Daisey was not the first time narrative
| journalism - aka documentary media - has waltzed down the path
| to fiction. Famously, we have the film _Nanook of the North_
| and the book _Wisconsin Death Trip_ , case studies I covered
| when I was in journalism program, before TAL. Today, we might
| call these works docudrama, but the blurring of the line
| between drama and journalism remains.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Another excellent example of the TAL format gone wrong: the
| Caliphate podcast series by the New York Times. Conpelling
| narrative, hot topic, built on quicksand.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=...
|
| You can still find it on Spotify, with a mea culpa attached.
|
| https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5...
| pards wrote:
| The title refers to the January 6, 2012 episode, beginning about
| halfway through the article:
|
| > "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" is mesmerizing and
| flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of
| This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every
| salient detail, the story was a fabrication.
|
| On March 16, 2012, This American Life, aired the "Retraction"
| covering Rob Schmitz's deconstruction of Daisey's piece (he
| uncovered at least thirteen lies).
|
| "Immediately after that we started working with professional
| fact-checkers," said Glass.
| pstuart wrote:
| That they were horrified by the mistake and set out to address
| it publicly and work to prevent future mistakes is telling.
|
| This American Life is a treasure.
| cudgy wrote:
| Reminiscent of the dramatic release of a Syrian prisoner reported
| on CNN that was determined to be fake.
|
| "CNN is acknowledging that a gripping story it aired last week
| depicting a Syrian man being let free from a Damascus prison
| after the fall of dictator Bashar Assad's regime was not what it
| seemed."
|
| https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake...
| sneak wrote:
| Humans are addicted to narrative. Deep, deep down. It's the
| single best tool for making compelling propaganda.
| billfruit wrote:
| Certainly more and more people are now suspecting of something
| odd, when they see a narrative, especially when the bare facts
| are scarce or obscured.
| sneak wrote:
| I don't think this is true at all.
|
| Look at the rise of Qanon, for example, or antivax, or any
| other popular narrative-based fiction that is gaining
| traction.
|
| The news still uncritically reports what the police claim
| happened.
|
| The power of narrative is becoming greater in our connected
| world, not less. It has less requirement now to be rooted in
| any sort of facts.
| billfruit wrote:
| Atleast in places like HN. Its not uncommon to see articles
| being called out for indulging in "narrative" where mere
| reporting of facts would have sufficed
| otterley wrote:
| Everyone gets things wrong sometimes. As important as getting
| things right is, nobody is perfect. Then, how you react when you
| make a mistake matters. You can cover up the truth, dissemble,
| point fingers, or--best of all--be humble and honest and apply
| the lessons learned in the future.
|
| Kudos to Ira and his team for doing the right thing after
| realizing they did the wrong thing.
| glenstein wrote:
| And to your point, if you are watching this, and trying to
| cynically use a one-off example to discredit years of reliable
| journalism, that too is a moment of character, and I think as
| important as the story itself.
| tmoertel wrote:
| It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of
| those "years of reliable journalism" by fact checking a
| random sample of the stories told over those years. According
| to the article we are discussing, TAL started using
| professional fact checkers only after the discovery of the
| Daisey incident. We're assuming that stories aired prior to
| that event are reliable, but we haven't verified that belief,
| have we?
| glenstein wrote:
| So that's exactly the kind of over correction in the wrong
| direction that I'm talking about. I don't think I agree
| that that's the pertinent extrapolation here. We absolutely
| would benefit from that spot checking. But I don't think
| the implication should be that 100% or something near it of
| the previous articles are fabricated, or under the cloud of
| deep suspicion until proven otherwise. The same things that
| led to this particular story unraveling, are
| vulnerabilities that could have led to other stories
| unraveling.
|
| If we get a second and a third, I think you might be right
| to have that cloud of suspicion. That would be like a
| Shattered Glass scenario and we're not there yet.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Glass_(film)
| II2II wrote:
| Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same
| as saying that it is consistently fabricated. As they
| say, a broken clock is still correct twice a day. To
| choose something less extreme: an unreliable employee may
| still show up for work 80% of the time.
|
| When their methodology prior to a particular point of
| time was shown to be weak, and the programs from that
| time are still available (the archives go back 30 years),
| I think that asking for spot checking of those old
| episodes is legitimate. The key thing here are the
| archives. If the archives weren't available it would be
| much easier to shrug and say, "live and learn."
| stickfigure wrote:
| There's reason to be more optimistic than this. There is,
| to some extent, an automatic post-hoc fact checking
| process built in to being such a high profile
| publication. For example, the Daisy narrative was
| challenged because someone with some personal knowledge
| of the subject heard the show.
|
| It's much better and less embarrassing to get the fact
| checking right _before_ publication, but the truth
| generally comes out one way or another. So I 'm willing
| to give historic TAL... not certainty, but at least the
| benefit of the doubt.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same
| as saying that it is consistently fabricated.
|
| I generally understand that to be true, but that was not
| the upshot of the point being made by the other
| commenter. Their extrapolation was a much more along the
| lines of treating it like an open question whether the
| other stories were fabricated at a level of elevated
| suspicion that calls for spot checking.
|
| All the other stories were vulnerable to being upended
| just like this one and seem to have withstood the test of
| time. I also think that despite this particular story
| falling apart, TAL has a track record of credibility and
| vetting that is more legitimate than is being implied by
| casting doubt over the history of theirs, and I did
| contrast it to the case of Stephen Glass, which model
| conditions where that degree of skepticism is more
| appropriately warranted.
| systemstops wrote:
| Perhaps instead of fact checking, we could compare the
| previous narratives with known public knowledge of the
| events, to determine if the narratives provided an
| accurate view of reality. It is easy to distort the truth
| and still tell no lies.
| tmoertel wrote:
| I made no extrapolation. I said that we haven't measured
| the reliability of the earlier stories. Instead of having
| a reliable measurement, we're going with our much-less-
| reliable assumptions (prior beliefs).
|
| The interesting thing, I think, is those prior beliefs.
| Your prior beliefs, it would seem, include the belief
| TAL's stories are generally reliable. You believe it
| strongly enough that you write that doubting the
| reliability of earlier TAL stories is an "over correction
| in the wrong direction."
|
| I don't think it's an overcorrection. When we find
| evidence of one fabrication from a trusted source, that
| source ought to lose trust. If we want to know _how much_
| trust it should lose, we have to measure. When we don 't
| measure, when we don't take seriously the responsibility
| to ground our beliefs, that's how we end up with things
| like the replication crisis in psychology.
| glenstein wrote:
| You're extrapolating from the Daisy incident to doubt of
| their previous reporting. And believe that the Daisy
| incident merits responding by holding TAL to a newly
| escalated standard for verification. From this most
| recent comment of yours, you seem comfortable with
| "doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories" as a
| position you view to be not an over correction. I think
| you're underestimating how an extreme a position that is,
| and kind of equivocating between ordinary skepticism and
| _doubting_ the veracity of their previous stories.
|
| You're right that I believe TAL's stories are generally
| reliable, that I believe doubting them is an over-
| correction in the wrong direction.
|
| I also don't think I agree that it's simply a matter of
| checking or not checking because I believe the vast body
| of work that's been free from error, although exposed to
| the same conditions of public scrutiny that could have
| revealed error in just the same way as with the Daisy
| story, is part of the body of evidence that actively
| testifies in favor of TAL. And I do think if there was
| more of a rocky track record, or if there proves to be
| more of one in the future, it absolutely could merit spot
| checking. And as I've said twice now already, I've given
| the example of Stephen Glass as a case where that
| skepticism was warranted.
|
| You seem to be implying that I have a categorical
| opposition to spot checking which couldn't be further
| from the truth. I just don't think it's warranted in this
| instance, because it's not a reasonable extrapolation
| from what happened with the Daisy story.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You never had a reason to trust TAL's reporting _before_
| the Daisey incident. You maybe trusted it because it is
| on the radio, and you trust people who can afford a radio
| station; or because it was on an NPR station, and you
| trust NPR.
|
| This is pragmatic as long as you have no evidence either
| way and you're not basing any serious decisions on this
| "trust." But the fact that they didn't bother to fact
| check Daisey, and in fact had never fact-checked before
| that: this is actually the first information you have
| about TAL's internal processes. It should vastly outweigh
| _it being on the radio._
|
| This comes off like fandom. You seem to have an interest
| in this incident not affecting people's perception of the
| quality of TAL, but I have no idea what that interest
| would be. It shouldn't bother you that people see the
| show as a place whose facts should be checked if one is
| considering spreading them.
| tmoertel wrote:
| You're inferring a lot that I didn't write or even imply.
| I'll be clear about my beliefs:
|
| 1. I just learned from the article about the fabricated
| Daisey episode and that TAL started using professional
| fact checkers only afterward. I was surprised on both
| counts.
|
| 2. I saw your comment that it would be in poor character
| to discredit TAL's prior reporting on the basis of this
| one failure.
|
| 3. I responded that it would be telling to actually
| estimate the reliability of earlier episodes because,
| right now, we're just going off our personal beliefs (and
| these probably vary widely from person to person).
|
| 4. You and I had a back and forth, mainly talking past
| one another.
|
| 5. I think that if we did actually measure the
| reliability of prior episodes, it would be less than a
| lot of TAL defenders expect and greater than a lot of TAL
| doubters expect.
|
| 6. As for what's reasonable vs. over correction to take
| away from the article, that depends largely on your prior
| beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general.
|
| Note that point 5, being a product of my prior beliefs
| about TAL and how the world functions in general, is
| actually an example of point 6 in action.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I think this is different. Getting something wrong in
| journalism is not like a mistake practicing an instrument:
| reputations and careers are at stake. it calls into doubt the
| integrity of the whole program.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or--best
| of all--be humble and honest
|
| If covering up the truth works, why would you risk telling the
| truth? At worst, the outcome is the same (minor scandal). At
| best, in most cases, nobody ever learns about the lie. The
| rational choice is to never tell the truth until it's
| completely obvious you lied, they e okay dumb.
|
| (Sorry for cynicism. I don't really think like that)
| croes wrote:
| People are attracted by stories, not facts.
|
| If the story is true, good. Facts without a story lose against
| stories without facts.
|
| That's why populism is so successful.
|
| If facts would matter Trump would be president.
|
| The facts were all known beforehand and are now, but many don't
| care about facts.
|
| People aren't as rational as myths like the homo economicus try
| to make us believe.
|
| Just look at ads. They sell emotions not facts.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| This is only true to a point. When facts impact their lives
| people suddenly care more about them than stories.
| roxolotl wrote:
| Orwell's Reflections on the Spanish War[0] has a good quote
| about this which feels particularly salient in light of the
| tariffs:
|
| > Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black
| may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed
| by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is
| that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on
| existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently
| can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The
| other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain
| unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.
|
| [0]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
| foundation/orwel...
| throwaway_47831 wrote:
| I once thought this, but it is dangerously incorrect. During
| the pandemic I observed people up-close deny reality in front
| of their own eyes. I sat at a dinner table and listened to a
| man go on about how the hospitals were just making up Covid
| cases for money, and it wasn't really that widespread - right
| after his wife related that the Covid ward at the hospital
| she just got back from was nearly full. Where she worked, as
| a doctor.
|
| Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured
| humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe
| today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a
| difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for
| days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history
| to see that people will care about a story they have accepted
| long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They
| will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very
| feet.
| croes wrote:
| But sometimes the impact has to be pretty bad and by pretty I
| mean ugly
| spaceisballer wrote:
| Reminds me of a book I just read, The Lifespan of a Fact. Solid
| read going into fact checking versus telling a story and figuring
| out where the line should be. Definitely entertaining.
| cantalopes wrote:
| This article has been written by an edgelord that is trying to
| sound very eloquent and smug
| glenstein wrote:
| Mike Daisey, the fabricator in question, had a completely
| headspinning excuse:
|
| >Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has
| been to make people care. I'm not going to say I didn't take a
| few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the
| work. It's theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its
| dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud,
| because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want
| to delve.
|
| It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such
| a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going
| to set off nuclear-level alerts.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| Or the vice president saying "if I have to create stories so
| the American media actually pays attention, then that's what
| I'm going to do."
| https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2
| pstuart wrote:
| That could be given a pass if the stories were not complete
| lies and that the attention brought wasn't deeply damaging to
| the community it addressed.
|
| It's a pity that it worked. A nation of immigrants is now
| virulently anti-immigrant.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Or Mao's belief that revolutionary zeal alone will nonsense
| projects like backyard iron furnaces somehow work.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| There's an even more surface-level commonality between these
| published fabrications: they're all narratives in service of US
| State Department approved talking points, it's like one level
| above stenography. And mainstream media is just repeating the
| same pattern today with coverage of Gaza.
| glenstein wrote:
| I think I can't really accept that framing on a number of
| levels, but first and foremost, because it's a very lazy and
| easy accusation to make. One famous criticism of George W.
| Bush, as he was increasingly discredited in his second term was
| that "some things are true, even if George Bush says them."
|
| I personally think The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher
| Hitchens is a must-read, and I would also say that what Uncle
| Sam really wants by Noam Chomsky was truly eye-opening to me in
| recasting the history of American foreign policy, but that co-
| exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that
| having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the
| project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was an
| intentional part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy.
| Sometimes these criticisms of labor issues, of human rights
| issues, of democracy issues, etc are going to speak for
| themselves not because they conveniently coincide with a
| preferred state department narrative, but because they do map
| onto legitimate moral issues.
|
| So I don't think it's enough to just say that the State
| Department would agree with criticisms as though that's
| sufficient to dismiss them. I understand there are corners in
| the internet where that passes muster, but to me it feels like
| it skips too many necessary steps in critical thinking.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| It's certainly the case that there is overlap with the
| positions of the State Department and the truth. But the
| positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are
| not defacto truth. That's how they're treated, however. In
| fact, those who approach state narratives with skepticism are
| not taken seriously, and those who choose to be stenographers
| become the editors of the New York Times or the Atlantic,
| etc.
|
| > but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable
| to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning
| ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War
| II absolutely was a part of Roosevelt's post-World War II
| strategy and sometimes these criticisms are going to speak
| for themselves simply because they do map onto legitimate
| moral issues.
|
| After WWII the United States imported many Nazi functionaries
| to serve as the founders of institutions such as NATO[1],
| scientists, etc. During the war, American businessmen
| profited heavily from doing business with the Nazi regime. Of
| course we weren't alone in this.
|
| Ending the Holocaust (too late) was obviously moral. But very
| little of what was done after was in interest of global
| democracy or the greater good, just as our entry into the war
| was not really about those things either. There were many in
| the global Jewish community and even in FDR's own
| administration who were ringing the alarm bells long before
| we entered the war to do something, anything to help get Jews
| out of Europe to safety, who were denied and obstructed.
| Ultimately we only entered the war when it served our own
| best interests.
|
| The focus on WWII is also interesting because it is one of
| the only times in the last century that the U.S. could have
| been said to fight a just war. What about all the rest?
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger
| glenstein wrote:
| This feels largely like a gish gallop away from the parts
| of topic that would be pertinent to the article. The
| article in question here is about This American life and I
| don't think the reason it got past people's critical
| filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe
| state department narratives. I think it had a lot more to
| do with the credibility of this American life, the
| motivations of the person being interviewed as the primary
| source for the story, and the narrative beats that this
| American life was interested in representing to its
| audience.
|
| >But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal
| states are not defacto truth.
|
| I don't know that anyone here is making that argument, so
| I'm not sure it's a prudent use of time to be engaging with
| it, and I think engaging would take us further away from
| the article with increasingly diminishing returns.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| > I don't think the reason it got past people's critical
| filters was because of a reflexive instinct to believe
| state department narratives.
|
| It's valid to think that. But what actually happened was
| that a series of pieces that sound like the fever dreams
| of a State Department neocon got repackaged into a format
| palatable to liberals and disseminated, despite the fact
| that they lacked factual basis. The only substantive
| difference between that, and say, Fox News, is that Ira
| and NPR had the shame to apologize after the hoaxes were
| uncovered. If Ira had stuck to pieces about interesting
| bits of Americana that he and his team could validate
| independently, or brought in credible journalists well
| versed in the topics he was covering, he could've avoided
| this. But he didn't. Why didn't he feel that he needed to
| adequately vet his stories? Because he believed them to
| be true.
| Isamu wrote:
| Funny because I regard his show as "story time" and not something
| I would treat as journalism.
|
| In contrast Tucker Carlson's former show on Fox was a part of
| their "opinion" lineup and I don't think regular viewers knew not
| to trust it as journalism.
|
| When Carlson and Fox won the defamation lawsuit in 2020 it was
| because "Mr. Carlson's statements were not statements of fact and
| that she failed adequately to allege actual malice."
|
| The "not statements of fact" included the reassurances that
| Carlson always made, in this case he said "Remember the facts of
| the case. These are undisputed" followed by clearly disputed and
| false claims.
|
| The lawyers argued successfully that it should be clear to the
| viewer that what Carlson says "cannot reasonably be interpreted
| as fact" even when he says that these are the facts.
|
| Arguably the bigger factor was proving malice, and Carlson seems
| very careful not to put anything into an email or text that
| undermines what he says on air.
|
| https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
| Aunche wrote:
| This was a different case, but Fox News did have to pay almost
| 800 million to Dominion to settle the lawsuit about rigged
| voting machines. There Tucker did admit in text that the
| allegations were ridiculous, but reported them as if they were
| true anyways.
| cle wrote:
| Every time I read about fact-checking in journalism, I feel like
| there's a huge gap that nobody really talks about.
|
| It's very easy to present a story that is 100% factually
| accurate, but that implies causal links or other claims that are
| not. Our brains love hasty generalizations, and media outlets
| rely on that to present near-100% truthful facts to their
| viewers, such that they jump to completely opposite
| generalizations. We're further primed for this with thought-
| terminating cliches like "trust the data" and "look at the
| facts". Media profits enormously from the subsequent outrage.
|
| The more folks talk about "fact checking" without acknowledging
| the danger of cherry-picking and Texas sharpshooters and
| confounding variables, like in this article, the less I trust
| "fact checking" as a useful mechanism for forming opinions from
| their reported facts. Fact-checking is definitely a requirement,
| but still _insufficient_.
|
| This is also exacerbated by narratives like those presented by
| TAL that introduce enormous complexity to the task, due to the
| emotional context.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| I understand the importance of fact-checking, but the problem is
| that it loses its value when much of the readership dont care
| about facts.
|
| We live in a world where many, many people are not only too
| stupid to know how stupid they are, but don't give a shit that
| they're stupid _AND_ think they 're the smart ones.
|
| Dunning-Kruger is incredibly instructive.
| mantas wrote:
| On top of that, quite a few fact checkers seem to be cherry
| pickers too. I've seen too many fact-checks where with some
| knowledge of the topic it was obvious that fact checkers either
| didn't do due diligence or pushed a narrative on purpose.
| incomingpain wrote:
| about a week ago I had a weird experience. I had purchased
| concert tickets for a date night with wifey in april, which got
| postponed to october. like wtf long.
|
| I brought it up in conversation as i was annoyed. Everyone at the
| table picks up their phone to fact check me and they brought up
| the hall's website and said I was wrong. I had the email sent to
| me about the postponement on my phone, it was real. I didnt care
| to prove myself right. Checking the website now it's now showing
| october.
|
| Why even fact check it? Just to prove me wrong? What if your fact
| check went wrong?
| switch007 wrote:
| This is so common in my experience, especially when they're 30
| or younger, and I'd love to know what it is.
|
| Is it just an excuse to pickup their phone due to addiction?
| whoopdedo wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/386/
|
| Social media has bred a generation who believe that value
| comes from being the loudest voice in the room. One-upmanship
| is one of the sure ways to make your voice stand out.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| You have to read past 40% of the article (1167 words of fluff) to
| get to what happened. Thanks for the narrative but better to just
| say the facts. Here's what should have been the actual lede:
|
| > Since its debut, Glass's brand of journalistic storytelling has
| resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life.
| It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the
| TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, "Mr. Daisey and the
| Apple Factory." When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet
| another example of Glass's artistry. A reworking of The Agony and
| the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist
| Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the
| country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal
| for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that
| these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers
| toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in
| Shenzhen, China.
|
| Tldr: a bunch of the allegations in the episode were false and
| got past TAL's production approach at the time, but they are more
| careful now.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Almost every contentious issue has a set of facts that support
| one side of the argument, while also having a set of facts that
| support the other side.
|
| More often than not, a biased story is one that focuses
| exclusively on one set of facts while completely ignoring the
| other set. Fact checkers may catch falsehoods that are reported
| as facts, but they rarely point out obvious ommissions.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| In many ways, a half-truth is worse than a simple lie, and
| there is no guarantee all parties are wrong in their own way:
|
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax...
|
| Media tends to interview the most outrageous looking imbecile
| they can find at any event... regardless of political
| affiliation. The Sinclair Broadcast Group helps local news
| maintain consistent messaging, and thus any mistakes
| intentional or not are less noticeable.
|
| Fact-checking is only as good as the data sources people find.
| There are groups that ran entire fake scientific journals to
| sell the public outright nonsense.
|
| Verifiable facts are difficult to validate. "AI"/LLM slop
| content just made it worse =3
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Those who do not understand how AI works might think that it
| might correct all the falsehoods that come along. But if an
| LLM is trained on data full of errors and falsehoods, then
| the resulting model will only reenforce them rather than
| correct them.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I guess. I'm not convinced by the facts on the other side of
| LGBTQ discourse. Is it really true I could be arrested in
| Florida because my driver's license says I'm female? It doesn't
| protect anyone. It doesn't make anyone's life better.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Not sure what discourse or side you're talking about, but...
| no the Florida police are not arresting everyone whose
| driving license says they are female. Obviously.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah but sometimes the facts are entirely fabricated, as is the
| case here.
| bitwize wrote:
| Except the right have been shown, time and again, to outright
| lie.
| g42gregory wrote:
| I believe it is very important to do fact-checking yourself. For
| me, this means reading original documents, court reports, etc...
| Certainly not checking the current NYT/WSJ/FT takes, as they
| themselves have to be fact-checked.
| submeta wrote:
| NYT/WSJ/FT are more propagandistic then we are aware of. Just
| observe the developments in the Middle East, watch the language
| used, the euphemisms, compare that to their language when it
| comes to Russian aggression. It is very clear that our western
| media is manufacturing more consent then writing in an
| objective neutral language.
| pstuart wrote:
| True, but confirmation bias is a bitch. Without the willingness
| to change one's mind when presented with compelling evidence,
| such fact-checking borders on harmful.
| blindriver wrote:
| No one cares about facts anymore. They care about vibes and
| whether what is saying matches their vibes.
|
| That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Google news
| headline.
|
| I don't know how we get past this, but I'm teaching my kids to
| believe NOTHING they read online or on youtube. NOTHING. I'm
| teaching them to get information from first hand sources, not
| even "reliable" sources like newspapers because they have their
| own agendas too. There's a hierarchy of believability, and the
| higher you go, the less you put your faith into that information.
|
| It's a sad way to grow up but when almost everything is faked for
| engagement, it's a reality that you can't trust anything.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| How do you intend on handling situations where the first hand
| information is too complex or too technical or in a not-
| understood language? Such that your kids can't directly
| interact with the primary source?
|
| I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can't
| trust anything in reality anymore
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It's not even the complexity of articles, it's the fact that
| they're usually fluff and clickbait with pop-ups and auto-
| playing videos and nag dialogs everywhere. People read
| headlines on aggregator sites because the aggregator sites
| actually want to be read by readers
|
| Professor Legasov would be disappointed
| iambateman wrote:
| You seem to care about the truth and I do. That makes two...
|
| I'm optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in
| truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about
| that a lot.
| dimal wrote:
| I agree, but I think news was always unreliable, but the
| difference was that there were only a few news networks and
| newspapers, and they all basically said the same thing.
| Everyone believed the same lies, so the system worked. But
| thanks to the internet, we gave people the ability to create
| highly individualized bullshit at scale.
| xpe wrote:
| > No one cares about facts anymore.
|
| There is no need to exaggerate. But I'm not only calling out a
| poor choice of words...
|
| A lot of people (not as many as we would hope, I grant) care
| about the truth about facts. Even in this group, however, we
| have a problem: by the time these people are "looking for
| facts" their brains have already been shaped in various ways
| that bias how they look for facts, as explained in articles
| about motivated reasoning.
| amriksohata wrote:
| Fact checking can have bias too
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-05 23:00 UTC)