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0 pointsTechBro86153y ago0 comments

This is a good insight. When you see people complain about "misinformation," and especially if they complain about "needing to do something about it," your follow-up question should be: do you want your news to be censored, or do you want other people's news to be censored?

I suspect when most people reference "protecting from misinformation," they actually mean protecting you from misinformation, not themselves. After all, anyone sophisticated enough to recognize the problem is surely capable of filtering their own information stream, right?

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captainbland3y ago

At least here in Britain I recognise a lot of the news outlets I prefer often print total crap. I wouldn't say there's much of an answer in censorship (for instance the existing limits on what can legally be called 'corrupt' already go too far). But I'd call into question incentives for sure, because some journalists seem to act without self respect in the levels of barrel scraping they go to when clearly trying to contrive a story to conform with some particular direction.

I could elaborate but the short version for me is: If we could decouple editorial direction from funding sources I think we'd end up much better off.

TechBro8615OP3y ago

I think a lot of problems would become non-problems if people would admit they read the news primarily for entertainment. This expectation that "the news must supply me with reliable facts" is an intellectually-dishonest complaint from an unreliable narrator. It's nobody's job to tell you what to think, and even if it were, it's not also their job to tell you what's important to think about. An objective press is definitionally impossible as long as "the news" can't include a story about every time a tree falls in the forest. Selection bias is unavoidable, and any expectation of a publisher to avoid it is one borne from intellectual dishonesty, because you can only shift the bias, not remove it.

The most objective way to read the news is to read all of it. Unfortunately that's not usually possible. So the next best thing you can do (short of ignoring it) is to read the most divergent sources, and fill in the blanks yourself. I've seen this referred to as "triangulating the truth" - is there a story on Fox but not CNN? That editorial selection bias is itself additional information that you can use to infer the motives of the publishers, and over time, based on observed bias, the motives of the subjects in the article. And then you can think from there about why they have those motives and what their agenda might be.

...but that's all a lot of work, which is why I'm also an advocate for deliberately ignoring the news for weeks at a time. Don't fall for the "informed citizen" trap - that's how they keep you hooked to the propaganda.