Comment by NineStarPoint
5 years ago
The problem I see personally is less parts where the media gets easily verifiable things wrong (Generally for any field where experts occur, there are better sources you can personally find.)
The issue is where they report on things that I can’t easily verify. A company I haven’t worked at, how things are going internally in the white house, what X or Y nation-state was caught doing. These are areas where I have no choice but to trust the media, because none of these entities are open enough for me to personally look at them and fact check what is happening. If some entity wants to say the media is treating them unfairly, that’s unfortunate, but unless they’re willing to open up their inner workings to the public I have to default to believing what the media digs up.
That the media otherwise does have a spotty record is troublesome to me. Generally, I think the right course is to find news sources that at least are right more often than not on the things you can verify. But on many things, the media is the only source we have on what they’re doing besides themselves. And while the media is troublesome, trusting that an entity is doing nothing wrong off their own word is even worse.
To combat this, I try to keep reading multiple, disparate sources until enough facts agree, and the coverage converges, to paint a relatively clear picture of the actual facts. What's been interesting to me, since starting to do this, is that some very, very popular stories -- upon which people will hang their entire political self-identification -- never actually converge, at least to my satisfaction.
> The issue is where they report on things that I can’t easily verify. [...]. These are areas where I have no choice but to trust the media,
Why? What's wrong with just not really knowing?
When it comes to governments, how they act impacts my voting preferences. When it comes to companies, how they act impacts who I choose to purchase from and work for. There are certainly wide swaths of information that aren’t relevant to my decision making process, but some things are hard to personally find out but worth knowing.
Well if the issue is something you have to act on then you should know.
Let's say there's talk about a new vaccine - should you take it or not. Or about candidates for some political office. Or about global warming.
I guess you can ignore everything, but if everybody does it's not going to end well.
I think solution for tough to verify info would be for journalists to include something like a methodology section in their reporting.
Due to the vagaries of journalism compared to e.g. chemistry or physics I'm not sure what this would look like in every situation.
Here is an article I came across recently that is a good example of the concept I am trying to explain. I don't think there's any information presented that you have to take the writer's word for: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/05/17/hendricks-not-paying-p...
> These are areas where I have no choice but to trust the media, because none of these entities are open enough for me to personally look at them and fact check what is happening.
Your trust mechanism seems to be fail-open. A very dangerous default config.