this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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What, in your opinion, would determine if someone is qualified to fact check a news article? Do you have criteria?
I think you might have missed the subtle point @mudman was making about marginal probabilities. Its not about their thresholds; any reasonable threshold would exclude the vast majority of people, mostly because the vast majority of people aren't journalists / don't have that training.
Do you own a dog house?
Perhaps I should clarify that I don't agree with @MudMan@fedia.io's opinion, which was stated in my comment. By their use of the term "unqualified", it made me think that they had qualifications in mind which would be required to be met, in their opinion, before someone could be a journalist — I was simply curious what those qualifications were.
Classic Norm MacDonald. Never gets old.
Like I said, we should get research methods taught in school from very early on. For one thing, understanding what even counts as a source is not a trivial problem, let alone an independent source, let alone a credible independent source.
There's the mechanics of sourcing things (from home and on a computer, I presume we don't want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media), a basic understanding of archival and how to get access to it and either a light understanding of the subject matter or how to get access to somebody who has it.
There's a reason it's supposed to be a full time job, but you can definitely teach kids enough of the basics to both assess the quality of what they come across and how to mitigate the worst of it. In all seriousness.
I agree.
I agree.
Can you clarify exactly what you are referring to here?
Well, a journalist would often be expected to get in touch with a source directly, which is not feasible if we're all doing it.
I'll grant you, it very often doesn't happen, but still.
Are you saying that journalism only deals in novel information?
No. Not sure how you get that from the quote.
Let me try to clarify my thinking:
You stated this:
You, then, clarified that:
If you are referring to the original root source (assuming that it's, for example, a conversation with someone), to me, that reads like you are saying that a journalist can't cite the report by another journalist who first interviewed that source (ie novel information), and that each journalist needs to independently interview the source themselves in a novel way.
No, but most original reports would be expected to in fact reach out to a primary source, and fact-checking them would often require the same thing.
That doesn't need to be novel. Verifying a source or a piece of information often just requires reaching out to a primary source to have them confirm the second-hand report that is available elsewhere. Not all journalism is built by aggregating other reports, the process needs to start somewhere. And you can't just take the fact that a source is mentioned as a guarantee of accuracy, you have to verify information.
This is, as I said, a full time job for a reason. Many corners are cut in the modern day of endless news cycles, but that doesn't mean it doesn't require work to do properly.
I mean, I would say only if one wants to do it continuously — I suppose it depends on how you are defining "full time job" in this context.
Think about it this way, the effort to process the information is some multiplier of the effort it takes to consume the finished piece of information.
Some info comes in, a journalist of some description processes it into finished, verified news ready for consumption. That effort is some magnitude bigger than just reading the unverified news, and that work is enough to keep a lot of people working full time for the volume of information we all consume each day.
It's kind of absurd to break down that statement to this level of detail, but that doesn't mean it's not accurate.
I feel we may be going around in circles with this; I think I'm not describing my interpretation well enough, but I think I understand what you are meaning when you say that journalism is full time — it's not exactly how I would use the term, but I understand what you are saying. I completely agree with you that the work of a journalist is non-trivial. I also agree with you that a professional journalist deals with large volumes of information, and, to be able to process those large volumes of information, it would generally require one to work full time.
I agree.
I feel like this could be self-limiting — once enough independent verifications have been completed and released, the collection of them should reach a point where its deemed unnecessary to further prove its veracity. I think it would be akin to meta-analysis.
You need far less info to reach a bar for journalistic veracity than you do for a meta analysis paper. The question is where in the process the effort is being aggregated.
If a journalist phones a couple of sources, hears from them the same thing they are seeing somewhere and publishes that information, then the fact-checking has been done once and reaches thousands or millions of people.
If the way the information is disseminated requires those thousands or millions to do the fact-check themselves using the same process, then that is entirely impractical, which was my original point. Crowdsourced fact-checking is always going to be less reliable and exponentially more work than properly verified broadcast news sources. Even if many of them share their fact check, we have plenty of data to suggest the reach of that correction will be much smaller and it will still require a lot of private effort to correct the original info.
That's the point of the entire "it's a real job" argument. Journalists are doing a lot of legwork once and we're all relying on that job to acquire a lot of our information instead of all of us doing the same legwork again. The two problems we're facing are 1) that this trust opens us up to propaganda from activist or opinionated journalism, and 2) that we're no longer just getting neatly processed info that has gone through a journalistic process, we're also getting a firehose of misinformation from many individual content generators over the Internet.
Those are both hard problems to manage.
Sure, but would it not be better if they had also just cited the transcript of their contact with those sources? I understand that the news outlet can just fabricate a source, but at least a source will give readers an official starting point for investigation rather than just blind continuous skepticism. I'm of the opinion that a sketchy source is better than no source at all.
Well, no, a sketchy source should not be published in the first place. That's the job he journalist is supposed to be doing during the verification stage.
The process we're discussing isn't about verifying the final article, it's about verifying the source itself.
I agree that they may be hard problems to manage perfectly, but I don't agree that citing sources won't put a dent in the issue. Take your first problem:
Say you have an article that says "A young man stole a car.". Just as a very basic example, language like "young" is an opinion — it's not an exact definition of age and is left to the reader for how they interpret it. Such interpretations open the door for emotional bias. I think it would be a different story if the article actually cited the age, or simply stated the age with a citation for where they know it from.
See, your point is exactly why the way you are thinking about this doesn't work. You're almost there, just coming at it from the wrong direction.
Yes, basic language choices indeed create an emotional framing to a story.
Basic language choices create a framing to a story EVERY TIME. You can't avoid it. Any mediocre professional can alter the framing of a story under any style guide, with any requirements for information sourcing.
Editorial guidance for neutrality can be enforced. By an editor. A human person that reviews a piece of writing and assesses its skew and its style to correct it if it doesn't fit the requirements.
But as a rule? Using citations? If the average journalist wanted to present a specific framing the guidelines you are suggesting would barely slow them down.
"A young man stole a car" "Man, 28 (link), steals car" "Man, 28 (link), of latino descent (link) commits crime in our town (link)"
Which of these is complying with your guidelines closest and which one is creating a more biased narrative?
For clarity, by "it" are you referring to journalism?
I'm assuming you're in a microblogging flavor of federation and that's why this is broken down into a bunch of posts?
Yes, I'm referring to journalism.
No, I'm not on a microblogging platform. I personally prefer to post atomic comments. I believe that threads should be restricted in scope so that they are clearer and easier to follow. I think that it also helps prevent miscommunications.
Okay, well I don't exactly follow the relevance of your claim that journalism can be practiced full-time. I also don't exactly follow the usage of your language "supposed to". Imo, one needn't be a full-time journalist to practice journalism.
You can do journalism without working as a journalist, but there is a lot of work involved in doing good journalism, which I presume would be the goal.
If you think the workload is trivial, consider the posibility you may not have a full view of everything that is involved. I'm saying everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated, but it's not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.
I think you might be misunderstanding me — I'm not of the opinion that the workload for journalism is trivial. All I'm saying is that I don't think it's necessary to work full-time as a journalist (ie in a career capacity) to do the work of a journalist. I think there may be a miscommunication of definitions for things like "journalism", "full-time".
No, you can do those tasks at any point. I'm not concerned with who is doing the work, I'm concerned with the amount of work involved and how practical it is for every one of us to do it as a matter of course every time we access information online.
This is why this choice you made of quote-replying to individual statements is not a great way to have a conversation online, by the way. Now we're breaking down the details behind individual words with no context on the arguments that contain them. This is all borderline illegible and quite far from the original argument, IMO.
The only impracticality that I can currently see is the example that you gave earlier ^[1]^
But just because it may not be practical for an average person to verify a source in all cases doesn't feel like a valid argument for why sources (that the news outlet has already verified) shouldn't be provided. Say a news article is reporting on a claim that an interviewee made in an interview that they conducted. Say that the interview interview footage is posted on its own. If the news article is commenting on a claim being made by the interviewee, is there any reason why the interview shouldn't simply be directly cited? It would remove a lot of burden from the reader if all they have to do is click on the link to the video and scrub to the timestamp to hear the claim for themselves. Yes it would be impractical for each reader to contact the interviewee for themselves to verify that the interviewee did actually say that; however, I think that it sometimes is less about a skepticism of reality, but more a skepticism of reporting bias.
References
The tool for that purpose is normally the use of quotation marks. Large news outlets rarely make up quotes out of whole cloth. That is not just bad praxis, but entirely unnecessary to skew coverage, if they are enforcing a particular perspective for whatever reason.
Look, I do think that large journalistic outlets are a bit stuck on old newpaper composition practices and hyperlinking and multimedia tools are underused. Specifically, news sites tend to be very reluctant to use external links for a number of reasons, including the fact that they want to keep you inside their publication to serve you ads, so external links are not a beneficial business practice.
That said, you are very fixated on a problem that either doesn't exist or doesn't make up the bulk of the issue you're trying to fix. There are plenty of instances where a quote that sounds bad is used out of context, and in most cases the in-context quote is widely available. The outrage machine is fed in opinion pieces, live TV debate and online chatter. There is no need to misquote in an article for that, and there is no evidence of the mitigating value of having a link to a different article. Which, incidentally, may not even be available for free distribution in the first place.
It's a wip 😜 I think it's still a good idea, but it depends on how it's done. I agree that I may be fragmenting a bit too much. I need to work on maintaining context. I think it's also important to never fork the conversation if one branch depends on the other branch. That's the issue that's happened here, I think.
I agree, but I don't think that that's a valid argument in defense of a journalist not citing their claims.
No, it's an argument against some of the proposed remedies.
The step you're skipping over is that citing a claim by itself doesn't do much to guarantee its veracity if the reader of the citation isn't willing to get in touch with the source of the citation and verify its content. Citations aren't magical. As you're using them in this conversation they are merely a tool for a peer review to be able to verify a bunch of precedent information without having to include it all in the same place every time.
The difference between journalistic information and peer review in science is that news are supposed to have gone through a journalistic verification process first, which the reader trusts based on the previous operation of the news outlet. A paper is presented to go through peer review and published after it has gone through that process.
I agree.
Err, could you clarify this? By definition doesn't the action of doing journalism make one a journalist? For example, Merriam-Webster defines the noun "journalist" as "a person engaged in journalism" ^[1]^. This would follow logically ^[2]^: If one is engaged in journalism, then they are a journalist; one is engaged in journalism; therefore, they are a journalist.
References
Working as in "being paid to do the work".
I'll spare you the dictionary definition. As we've established, you can source that yourself.