Fake news on national public radio

[Zinjanthropos]

Is this story even newsworthy? Two news agencies fighting over a he said/she said? When I ask my SIL the news reporter about this he just rolls his eyes. What have you got here….reporters looking for the sensational scoop or the bottom of the journalism graduate class. I can’t imagine going through college to earn a degree to report on this kind of news every day. Is this what the universities are churning out?

[Yazata]

What interests me is what this says about contemporary journalism.

What we seem to have here is a collection of journalists at npr who already had a narrative going in their heads, that Republicans are evil uncaring people. They somehow came in contact with a "source" (they won't say how or who) that told them a story about the inner workings of the Supreme Court that seemed to fit their narrative. So they ran with it, precisely because it conformed to and seemingly illustrated their preexisting biases.

When the story started to collapse and fall apart, they didnt admit that they had been wrong but instead doubled down. Why? My guess is because their story was linked in their heads with their biases and they felt, purely emotionally, that to abandon the story would be to admit that they were wrong about Gorsuch's fundamental evil and the evil of all Republicans. They weren't willing to admit that.

My own conclusions are

1. It's foolish to think of journalism as a clear and objective window on the world, to naively assume that what journalists tell us actually happened the way they say it did. Journalism presents the world as seen through a lens, events as interpreted (and distorted) by the preexisting biases of the journalists themselves. At its worst, journalism is little better than propaganda.

2. I just viscerally distrust any news story based on anonymous sources. That makes it impossible to know...

a. How did the source get the information that they are supposedly revealing? How many times have we seen new york times stories that begin "according to top secret documents...". Of course, if there really were top secret documents (we just have to trust the paper about that), then the real story would be how did the new york times come to possess them. How are documents like that leaking out of the government? (That would seem to imply the newspaper is a party in a felony.)

In the case of this Supreme Court story, assuming that there really was an anonymous source, who was it that has access to the inner conversations between the Justices inside the Court building? Who would be in a position to know who said what to who and what people's motivations were? How did that happen? (npr's not telling.)

b. Assuming that the information that an anonymous source reveals is actually real, what was a source's motivation in releasing it to journalists? What kind of inner office politics does the actions of an "anonymous source" reveal? What agenda were they trying to advance? Who were they trying to help and who did they want to hurt? Was the information provided the whole story or were important parts left out? What was the larger context?

In the case of "anonymous sources" it's impossible for the public to know any of that. So the whole thing devolves into trust me, I'm a professional journalist! Unfortunately, that's no longer credible. So my own policy is to give little credence to any story based on anonymous sources.

3. I have quite a bit of confidence in some journalism, when it is soundly non-political and is just reporting objective fact as opposed to opinion and "analysis". Just yesterday there was a loud boom at Mojave Air and Space Port followed by a plume of black smoke. This was reported first by regular citizens and not by professional journalists, photos were provided. X happened, a physical event. Some interpretive material was provided, about where on the site the event happened, the rocket engine test area. Then a journalist, from Space news I think, determined whose test it was, spoke to the company and got a statement. I have no reason to doubt that and I have high confidence that it was accurate.

In the California wildfires, I follow CalFire's updates and press briefings which are usually livestreamed. Local Sheriff's departments issue evacuation warnings and orders. Scanner traffic is often the best picture, with police and fire crews on the scene radioing in their situations. This is the raw data and most of it is out there and visible to anyone interested. It's where the journalists are getting their information.

So what value added is there in watching TV or reading the papers about the same event? You just get some journalist's sensationalistic conclusions about the same raw information that you've seen, along with some spin about "climate change" or something like that.

I prefer to keep the journalists' spin out of that news loop.

Same thing with the developments at Starbase. We can watch spaceship construction ourselves on the many livestreams. We can discuss the meaning and significance of the often cryptic things that we see with all kinds of informed people from aerospace engineers and SpaceX insiders, to construction guys and welders, on the discussion boards.

So what does conventional journalism add to that wealth? Attempts to start wars between Elon and people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? Attempts to embed the Starbase events into the biases of pre-existing journalistic narratives?

I prefer to opt out of that. I pay as little attention to conventional journalism as possible. Some people will say that makes me willfully ignorant. But I think that it makes me far more closely aligned with actual events in real life, as opposed to other people's opinions about their significance in their own personal interpretive frameworks.

[Leigha]

Sadly, I think what's going on in many cases, is journalists are instructed to sensationalize their pieces so the news outlets can increase exposure and that equates to advertising dollars and subscribers. It's all about increasing sales, even if that means stretching the truth from a journalist standpoint, or outright lying to get views.

During the Rittenhouse trial, can't recall the news outlet (MSNBC?) but one of their ''reporters'' was caught following the jury bus, and the authorities had to get involved. The reporter shared the name of his boss in NY who instructed him to do this. What was the end game? To leak the jurors' names before the case was over? I don't know all the details, but it's all about views, subscribers, clicks and sales. Even if it compromises the integrity of a trial, or violates the privacy of jurors.

[Syne]

Now NPR is trying to say that journalist should have used the word "suggested" instead of the word "asked," when claiming Justice Roberts, in some form, asked the Justices to wear masks. But they still stand by their reporting. These people are complete clowns.

[Zinjanthropos]

Read a stock market news article tonight and at the bottom of it was a note to the reader that the story was auto- generated. Algorithmic journalism, is it credible? Could it have errored in the topic story and many others? Depends on the data feed. AI machines…..built to appear as a human author? If it does wrong with the data, will news agencies admit a machine wrote the article? I guess in the stock market it’s better to blame the machine than a human just in case it contains mistakes that could influence an investor, and that’s why the disclaimer. Is it more important in conventional news reporting to put a human name to an article that AI generated?

I’m only saying all this because the headline for the article I read did not exactly jive with the information within the story…. close but not quite. Appears as if the data was slightly misinterpreted and as a result, article missed what the headline implied..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_journalism