News Media Skepticism

Lately I've begun to doubt every source of information that could possibly be shared because of financial, political, or misplaced altruistic motivations. So I've been ignoring as much as possible.This is what the people sewing misinformation in the first place want. You can act their pawn and ignore the world around you, leading to making underinformed choices at the polls, at the newsstand or wherever, or you can trust your own bullshit detector.It's hard to have th

This is a hard job, I respect anyone who has to do this.I've seen so many wrong or questionable answers on Snopes where I wouldn't trust it as a blind yes/somewhat/no answer anymore, without closely reading the explanation. Which is very worrying considering some people have been pushing these services as a solution to "fake news". Consumers should aways have the option of reading the paragraphs, maybe via inline warnings instead of silencing it by scrubbing it f

Please read news articles with a healthy dose of skepticism regarding fact checking. It should be assumed that most news reporters do very little if any fact checking, paraphrase or make up quotes, take things out of context, and are pushing a point of view that fits a current meme or will increase clicks. Then the editor adds a headline that compounds the problem. Things have only gotten worse with the internet with competition and time pressure. If you doubt me, wait until you are in a news ev

I think it depends on which "we" you're talking about! In many cases, "we" do value accurate information. I'm thinking not just of high-quality news organizations, but fact-checking sites like Snopes or Politifact -- both real treasures, in my opinion. However, if you cite either On The Internet, you'll often receive the response: "Pshh please. [Fact-checking site] is totally biased." This response is, in my opinion, (a) wrong, and (b) very often offe

We don't all have the time or the resources or the curiosity to connect all the raw data making up the news.Sure the newspapers can have a bias or conflicts of interest but the journalism industry at least attempts to mitigate these, there is a code of ethics.You can only do so much on your own, and through one on one interactions.Some people find it valuable to have others do this for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Sure it's imperfect, because there is always bias, but t's a lo

Sadly I have not found any trustworthy 'fact checkers' that are not in and of themselves also inherently biased.But once you realize that every major news org seems perfectly willing to gaslight you fundamentally, you start to doubt basically everything you read.If this one 'fact' about trump condemning nazis is so obviously a false story, how many other false stories are there?The problem with this understanding is that it doesn't help you learn the truth, it j

Thank you for readying the actual study. News outlets are political and have their narratives. If there is no hard boiled source, it impossible to tell from one source what the actual facts are. Almost no one will compare different sources to filter the truth, most just stick with the outlets they used to.

Fact-checked news is different than unedited "content"

>I prefer to assess the accuracy of news stories myself (usually considering the original source and how aligned their interests are with the published information)There's your problem.It's one thing to want the raw data out there if you want it, and more importantly, for others who are smarter than you to analyze it. Same principle with publishing methods and analysis of a scientific paper, or publishing source code you'll never look at to github: The fact that others ca

So much "news" today is opinion masquerading as fact. While news media companies often do get the facts wrong, even when the facts are right, those facts are heavily colored by commentary and slant, often leaving out other facts that don't adhere to the narrative. I'm highly skeptical when the author's conclusion is that readers can't discern fake news on their own, when even educated people disagree on what is fake news, when the author thinks that people doing the