Where one half just doesn’t know anything at all about the other.

July 17, 2016 6:44 PM

Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true. Many newsrooms are in danger of losing what matters most about journalism: the valuable, civic, pounding-the-streets, sifting-the-database, asking-challenging-questions hard graft of uncovering things that someone doesn’t want you to know. Serious, public-interest journalism is demanding, and there is more of a need for it than ever. It helps keep the powerful honest; it helps people make sense of the world and their place in it. Facts and reliable information are essential for the functioning of democracy – and the digital era has made that even more obvious.
posted by bitmage (33 comments total)

Pfft, facts are meaningless—you can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true! Facts schmacts.
posted by entropicamericana at 6:51 PM on July 17, 2016 [7 favorites]

Glad it starts with pointing out there is no evidence for the pig story. That one is a pet peeve of mine. People just so much want to believe it.

“It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

posted by Drinky Die at 6:53 PM on July 17, 2016 [8 favorites]

Odd. Just what kind of company would sponsor a news story like this?
posted by hal9k at 7:17 PM on July 17, 2016 [4 favorites]

isn't this "hot take" essay an expression of the thing it decries?
posted by ennui.bz at 7:28 PM on July 17, 2016

In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same – whether they come from a credible source or not.

Before the advent of the smartphone, all one really needed to think critically about a news story was an appreciation for fine typography and printing!
posted by mubba at 7:40 PM on July 17, 2016 [10 favorites]

"All the news that fits we print."
posted by monospace at 8:16 PM on July 17, 2016 [6 favorites]

I've been thinking lately that most news stories on NPR lack the final sentence, describing what the reality is. Instead, they just report what people say, without fact-checking. "Critics say that Planned Parenthood has been selling baby parts." [No mention that numerous investigations found this false.] "Trump says [whatever godawful thing Trump has just said.]" [No mention that Trump's statement is false.] And that's on NPR, which is generally considered super-leftwing. I get the impression that the journalists think the listener must surely be knowledgeable enough to supply the missing last sentence for themselves, and so that leaving it out of the story is somehow being "objective." But by not providing that information, they don't educate the listener enough to get the listener to the place where they *could* mentally provide the missing final sentence. I think it's really a serious breach of ethics. The story should not be what someone *said*, but whether what someone said is *true*.

I can't speak to how that plays out in Great Britain, but god help the world if that style of "journalism" is getting exported.
posted by lazuli at 8:54 PM on July 17, 2016 [42 favorites]

And that's on NPR, which is generally considered super-leftwing.

[No mention that this stopped being true sometime in the '90s]
posted by indubitable at 9:51 PM on July 17, 2016 [25 favorites]

Regarding NPR, the change would have been one of funding?
posted by Strange_Robinson at 9:54 PM on July 17, 2016

Yup, it's important to think critically about claims, whether they are specific claims made about someone's sex habits, or vaguer ones painting huge heterogeneous subsets of the population as manipulable children (the article itself has shades of this).
posted by pixelrevolt at 10:43 PM on July 17, 2016

Not sure how "new" and social media related the idea of making up numbers for elections is. From the Financial Times in 2014:

For the past generation, the lifeblood of British elections has been warnings of black holes, tax bombshells and savage cuts. Usually, the party of government claims the opposition has plans to change economic policy in some unfunded way by about £35bn. I have no idea why £35bn is the magic number, but it was used by the Conservatives in 1992 and 1997, and Labour in 2005 and 2010. The only exception was in the foregone-conclusion election of 2001, when the number was £20bn.

In 2015 the magic number went back to £20bn though.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:46 PM on July 17, 2016 [3 favorites]

This article-- this strain of criticism-- perplexes me, because... well, journalism's original titans were titanic largely for inventing most of the stuff they reported. Greeley, Bennett, Hearst, Pulitzer, Defoe, Stead... They were not heroes of fact-checking! Fact-checking is kind of a new thing? Like, a very very recent thing, historically? And a lot of them were outright liars and propagandists?

I certainly don't disagree that people don't share a consensus on truth at the moment-- how could I? But maybe someone can explain to me the repeated refrain that we're in a dark age now? It seems like the standard experience of news reception throughout history. Was there really a golden age where people saw something like an actual truth reflected in the papers and on television, and if so, when and where?

(My darkest suspicion is that things are not really more or less fake than they used to be, just... easier for the public to check. But that's just an hypothesis and I've never been super sure how to verify it. Viner sort of suggests this with the Hillsborough point...)
posted by peppercorn at 11:16 PM on July 17, 2016 [9 favorites]

And that's on NPR, which is generally considered super-leftwing.

[No mention that this stopped being true sometime in the '90s]

Wait was it ever really true? Serious question.
posted by atoxyl at 11:40 PM on July 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wait was it ever really true? Serious question.

Well according to Fox News it is, so it must be true.
posted by happyroach at 12:32 AM on July 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can't speak to how that plays out in Great Britain

Well, as a British reader I don't think the idea that the last sentence of a piece should tell you the fact-checked truth of the matter is one I've come across before.
posted by Segundus at 2:12 AM on July 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

lazuli: I've been thinking lately that most news stories on NPR lack the final sentence, describing what the reality is. Instead, they just report what people say, without fact-checking. "Critics say that Planned Parenthood has been selling baby parts." [No mention that numerous investigations found this false.] "Trump says [whatever godawful thing Trump has just said.]" [No mention that Trump's statement is false.]

This is exactly what fucking infuriates me when listening to US-based reporting on basically anything. I listen a lot of NPR to get my US politics info and its rampant there, but this same phenomenon happens on other US-based long-form journalism as well.

A related annoyance is the implied "maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle" that for example This American Life likes to do every time they do some actual reporting. "Hillary Clinton says that she does not eat babies or worship Satan. ProPublica investigated ten million documents and did not find any evidence about baby-eating or Satan-worshipping. Critics, however, claim that Clinton is a known baby-eater and Satan-worshipper. [Soundbite of a Clinton critic talking about Clinton eating babies] Maybe we'll never know. I'm Ira Glass."
posted by Soi-hah at 3:15 AM on July 18, 2016 [21 favorites]

Also from the Guardian: Lyin' Trump: a weekly fact-check.
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:35 AM on July 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

or vaguer ones painting huge heterogeneous subsets of the population as manipulable children

We all need to get over our pride and recognize all of us human beings are just animals, and like any animals, yes, we are ALL absolutely subject to manipulation through behavioral conditioning and other tricks. Then we should make one of our social priorities helping each other avoid being manipulated. I don't consider honest communication and persuasion manipulation, but evidently, some pomo types do. That sucks because then we're left without any more honest alternatives to more coercive forms of deceptive manipulation. But either way, it's a huge blind spot that people feel it's condescending to be reminded of an obvious fact that's only becoming more and more relevant.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:57 AM on July 18, 2016 [9 favorites]

I blame Al Gore for inventing the internet.
posted by MtDewd at 5:30 AM on July 18, 2016

"...most news stories on NPR lack the final sentence,..."

That sentence was always lacking. From all outlets. That's why this Doonesbury strip that showed what that last sentence might look like was so controversial.
posted by klarck at 5:32 AM on July 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

Wait was it ever really true? Serious question.

I'm not sure it was left-wing, so much as "had stories about places that weren't the US even if we weren't planning a war with them."
posted by Foosnark at 5:34 AM on July 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

I get the impression that the journalists think the listener must surely be knowledgeable enough to supply the missing last sentence for themselves, and so that leaving it out of the story is somehow being "objective."

Except that "objective" has a meaning, and "striking a false balance" isn't it. Certain things are objectively true; there is evidence to support them. One doesn't need to soften language or create a false impression of uncertainty by saying, for example, "Democrats say the deficit has decreased since Obama took office;" the evidence shows that it's (at least mostly) true. Therefore, Republican claims that Obama has been increasing the deficit are false. NPR does its listeners no service by giving politicians of any party a megaphone to broadcast objective falsehoods, without comment or question, and hope that the listener is informed enough to figure it out. How is the listener supposed to be informed -- by listening to NPR?
posted by Gelatin at 5:54 AM on July 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

How an angry national mood is reflected in pop culture:* "Our predilections both in popular culture and politics have increasingly turned tribal, as if a once-common language has broken into coded dialects that separate us from the other."

How the GOP Grows by Shrinking the Middle Class:* "The emerging Republican Party is a self-sustaining machine of perpetual rage, suppressing the prospects of working-class men while being powered by their growing frustration."

I blame Al Gore for inventing the internet.

• Hypothesis:* The death of mass media has caused non-elites to just *completely ignore* elites, and start fighting each other instead.
• Since the decline of mass media, most non-elites get their information from social media, talk radio, cable TV, and word of mouth.
• Trump = the white working class lashing out at the nonwhite working class, with elites on the sidelines wringing our hands to each other.

posted by kliuless at 5:55 AM on July 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

also btw! :P
"Hilary Putnam is wrong. The fact/value dichotomy is not a perfect model, but it is a very useful one."*
posted by kliuless at 6:09 AM on July 18, 2016

I've been thinking lately that most news stories on NPR lack the final sentence, describing what the reality is. Instead, they just report what people say, without fact-checking. "Critics say that Planned Parenthood has been selling baby parts."

So I tried to do some fact-checking on this. NPR has a convenient tag for Planned Parenthood for easy browsing of related stories. I have looked at a few, e.g. this, this and this.

Most stories don't have the particular template you describe. The last link is probably closest to what you may have meant. What actual fact checking would you have liked to see in that particular story, keeping in mind that the story is dated September 18, 2015?
posted by shala at 8:48 AM on July 18, 2016

I was talking more about their hourly (or half-hourly?) news updates, the ones that get presented as "The News."
posted by lazuli at 9:15 AM on July 18, 2016

But those are literally 3-4 minutes, in which they have to squeeze in 5-7 stories.
posted by shala at 10:00 AM on July 18, 2016

Yes. And they repeat, every hour, that Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts, or Clinton is responsible for Benghazi, or whatever else someone is saying, without saying that that person is wrong. Which is why it annoys me so much. Saying "so and so made this claim" without inserting a sentence, or even a clause, about the veracity of the claim, and then repeating the claim over and over again in their serious newscaster voices, gives life to outrageous claims. And Trump and the FoxNews machine has basically used that to their advantage, because they know that they can make outrageous claims and those claims will get reported as if they are news. And apparently we're exporting that:

A few days after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
posted by lazuli at 10:09 AM on July 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

In the spirit of fact-checking and veracity, it would probably help to analyze real examples, if you have any.

From my memory, the news they report on the half-hour are just that -- news. No more than a few hours old. Sometimes minutes old, as I distinctly remember last week of Turkish coup attempt, when driving home from work. These are not meant to be in-depth investigative stories, with weeks/months of lead time to prepare all the fact checking.
posted by shala at 10:17 AM on July 18, 2016

A lot of them are ongoing stories (Planned Parenthood, Clinton's email server, Clinton's involvement in Benghazi, etc.) where there are plenty of facts in evidence and have been for months. But I fear we are getting to the point of a derail, so I'm going to drop it.
posted by lazuli at 10:27 AM on July 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

shala: In the spirit of fact-checking and veracity, it would probably help to analyze real examples

I agree - there are different kinds of reporting. The linked article starts out with this:

One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an “obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail.

Two things: this is the Daily Mail, a sensationalist paper, just above being a tabloid, which doesn't make for a great starting point, and then there's the source of the story: "the authors of the story claimed their source was an MP, who said he had seen photographic evidence." Then the piece notes that the author of the pig piece said on TV she hadn't seen the picture in question.

So how is this "technology [disrupting] the truth"? The fact that people talked about it on Twitter?

The next part is more on point: Brexit, in which the "Leave" side was saying things that didn't seem to be true but got more coverage and discussion, compared to the "Stay" side and their dull facts, plus the perennial problem of agencies trying to be "balanced" by presenting one authoritative advocate and one contrary detractor, even when the detractor is in a tiny minority compared to the advocates. See: the problem with the Climate Change Debate (Last Week Tonight clip).

Controversy and hype gets more attention, not facts and figures. And still, this isn't a problem of technology (which means internet media), but the race for attention in all formats. With 24 hour news coverage and the general competition to cover the newest thing, we get the harrowing story of Balloon Boy eating up coverage seconds and bandwidth, instead of facts.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:37 AM on July 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Controversy and hype gets more attention, not facts and figures.

Completely agree, and this thread is a perfect example.
posted by shala at 12:23 PM on July 18, 2016

The piece makes a lot good points, although it begins on a rather odd one, but ultimately just seems more shades of "too much democracy" to me. It's a collection of all that's wrong with publishing in the digital age without adding anything much new.It cleverly tries, while acknowledging various criticisms on all sides, to at the end suggest, if subtly, that without the old gatekeepers, we just won't know whom to trust. It's correct certainly about the extremely serious danger a lack or true journalism poses, but the real purpose of this grab bag is to suggest that the common people are too dumb on their own and have to told by the reliable old guard what to believe.
posted by blue shadows at 12:05 AM on July 19, 2016