This article is a perfect example of why that doesn't work. All the journalists are working from the same source, and copying from eachother, so they all make the same fundamental mistakes.
It helps filtering for intentional spin, but not much with reporters just being flat out wrong.
The problem is when the details are incorrect it indicates that the information has been filtered through people who don't understand it. I suspect that the original sources actually revealed a lot more specific information, but since the journalist didn't understand it they didn't preserve it when they reworded everything. It's a common and frustrating problem with journalism.
Welcome to journalism, by definition journalists aren't experts in what they report. So, sometimes they'll just say stuff that's obviously wrong to anyone with any knowledge of the field they're reporting on. This isn't helped at all by the fact that even the best journalists are forced to put together stories in hours.
Even if they research a given topic, they're extremely susceptible to being swayed by biased sources. At best, they won't have time to truly understand what they're reading.
Try reading an article in any general-topic news outlet on any topic you are familiar with, or a narrow-topic news outlet for a topic you're an expert on. It will be bad 99% of the time.
The issue with journalism isn't people outright lying. It's quite rarely a failure to understand the problem space either. It's framing the discussion in a certain way and picking and choosing which facts to prevent. Having multiple AIs which pick out different things to tell their readers doesn't solve that problem at all.
Journalism doesn't work like people seem to think it does, and hasn't for a long, long time - if it ever did. Journalists don't research. Most media outlets just get press releases in, or articles from AP, Reuters and other aggregators, and they paraphrase.
This is why you see the same errors across the grid. It's not that they've all done the same poor research - it's that they have done no research, and have simply rehashed for their audience. They outsource their thinking too.
Then of course you have outlets eating each others' messes, and regurgitating "facts" that copy-editors ("journalists") put in to garner appeal to their audience, and the feedback cycle distorts as it goes.
What is with people categorically denouncing any journalism source there is on the basis that they're not outputting the truth or their version of the truth on this or that particular day?
This is why I read multiple sources of news and summarize it in my own words for a broad view of the world.
Can you list some journalistic outlets that don't do this? Because I can probably find articles by whatever that outlet is that mangle stories to fit business, political, ideological, and other interests. Even when unintentional, stories that depend on complex information are often dumbed-down and result in incomplete, inaccurate narrative. Not to mention the benefit of hindsight, and important sources whose additions or subtractions substantially change the result.
Let's say contemporary journalists are considering three separate stories that could tie together the facts, with each story tying together a random subset, about half of the facts each. If the journalists decide on one story, and ignore the half that it doesn't tie together as irrelevant, a large number of things that could actually be important would go unrecorded - if they were wrong to focus on that one story out of the ones they were considering, which may not even have included the real trend driving it all.
It's also worth nothing that false claims made by important people are historically significant, but a paper that's trying to build a cohesive narrative but lacked the ability to outright quote something and call it false (for cultural reasons, stating the author's position on a quote is considered too aggressively opinionated for something published in the news section of a paper), would probably choose not to report the quotes.
Part of this is not the journalists fault, though. Or it is, but only in the sense that they should be more adversarial.
Very often when I read bad journalism, it's based on a bad academic paper in which the university press or even the paper's abstract has lied about what's actually inside it. To fix this would require journalists to both read and understand the contents of every paper they base a report on. Arguably they need to do that, but, I don't believe that's ever been the standard used before. They generally don't expect "respectable" people like academics, institutional spokespeople etc to flat out lie to them even though it keeps happening.
You are probably correct that few journalists seek to mislead, but you skim over the real problem by saying it's "certainly commendable" to want to read primary sources...and then just drop the subject. Why is it so damn hard to read the publicly available source material behind an article, if it's so commendable to do so?
You argued for five paragraphs that it's not nefarious, but never gave your own answer; yes, some journalists are bad at summarising, but that doesn't tell us why none of them provide sources, or are expected to.
I'd guess the answer is some combination of deadlines and editors and market demand and it just not being critical to summarising the news, but it's a bit milquetoast to complain about other explanations without giving one yourself.
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