I can only speak for myself, but as a relatively low-tier journalist, I can confidently say I've never fabricated anything in my reporting. I may have made errors (misspelling names/titles/etc), or ill-informed judgments (thinking someone was a better expert/source than they were). But making something up requires crossing a clear line beyond incompetence. And I would never trust the journalistic output of anyone who was found to have made up anything. Because the process of journalism is ultimately about complete trust -- no matter how many editors/fact-checkers you have, it all comes down to what the reporters themselves say they have witnessed/heard. It's already common enough to misobserve something, it's just as easy to lie about something that only you were "there" to see/her -- thus, the need to make fabrication (and plagiarism, which can be seen as a subset of fabrication) so taboo. And any reporter who justifies breaking this taboo has most certainly justified breaking rules in grayer situations -- e.g. I've never known of a fabricator to have fabricated just once. Once they get away with it the first time, what's the reason to ever stop?
It's not about the "damage" to the end user, i.e. the reader. It's about the complete betrayal of professional ethics. To use a tech analogy, consider a user whose credit card number has been compromised. To the user, the damage is the same whether the info was compromised by the sysadmin's failure to prevent a trivial SQL injection attack, or if the sysadmin decided to use their admin privileges to access and share the info of that user to fuck with them. The former sysadmin can learn their lesson and be redeemed -- the latter case is someone I would most likely never trust with admin privileges.
Fabricating events, people, or facts is pretty much the worst thing a journalist can be accused of, but sadly it's all to tempting for some.
Journalism is hyper competitive, but the reality is proper reporting is an often boring, greulling grind. The remarkable, career-defining stories are so rare most could never dream to break them. Sources almost never provide coherent quotes, and facts sometimes contradict each other. It's an extremely unfulfilling pursuit most of the time.
So it's not too difficult to understand why some reporters might embellish a quote or something small, trying to better illustrate a larger narrative, or perhaps make their piece more appealing to their audience or their colleagues.
Once that line is crossed, they can soon find themselves inventing entire people or scenarios. History is littered with examples, but the reality is we probably only know of the most prominent cases, i.e. those who were caught.
I look at it the same as steroids in professional athletes or white collar crime. Those in the lower echelons are constantly looking for a way to climb the ranks of esteem and further their careers, but the tangible opportunities to make their mark don't often materialize.
In journalism school, I think most programs have at least one ethics course effectively dedicated to studying rather famous instances of journalists disgraced for one reason of another, most often fabrication.
Huge cultural strides have been taken since the days of yellow journalism and so facts are usually vetted by a small team. I think it's usually a matter of one small untruth spawning a network of supporting lies. The coverup is often worse than the crime, as it were.
In a role and industry where credibility is the only currency, it's extremely serious to make any factual error, even mistakenly.
I left the industry more than a decade ago, but can offer the following real-life annecdote. I was almost fired for mistaking one mountain for another on one of my first pieces. It was a weeks-long ordeal of meetings, "trainings," and reprimands both official and casual, and that was a dumb mistake my editor made and I mindlessly agreed with, not even something I introduced surreptitiously, or even with any intent.
There are professional journalists out there who in most organizations will get into hot water or lose their jobs if they fabricate news or sources.
They will have biases, they will make mistakes, but most of them will do at least some due diligence, and together with fact checkers - this is the best we have.
Accept that and move on - or sit there and tell yourself that "nothing is true, nothing is real". Get your news from @HotJerseyGirl1998.
> outright lying and fabricating stories to try and discredit news organizations seems like it can come back on your no matter what happens.
Why? News organizations should never accept fabricated stories. If they do, then something is wrong with their vetting process, and it means that non "pen-testing" fake stories can get through as well, where the intent is to have some effect in the world(say, getting a person out of an election) as opposed to just making the newspaper blush.
This is a pretty cavalier comment for a brand new poster. Welcome to Hacker News, where deep discussion is welcome.
The issue with trust in journalism is a real one, and as "deepfakes" and the current problems with the perceptions of "fake news" and "anything I don't like to hear is probably made up", the question of faith/trust in journalism and reporting is huge.
I don't think trust in journalism should go down. I think that when journalists and publications are caught with misleading or inaccurate stories, it should be in their interest to catch the problems and self-correct. The name of an institution is its integrity: It is built over time, and can lose its value quicker than it gains it.
Could you provide some examples to bolster your claim about this person's journalistic integrity?
There are some technical details that may be abstracted or analogized in less-than-accurate fashion, but I don't recall reading an article or post and thinking "gosh, that's just _wrong_"
Fair enough. I wasn't implying that a falsehood being "charismatic" makes it OK for a journalist to print it. Sadly, it seems less likely to be checked when it's (a) reflective of a genuine truth (such as privileged frat bros getting away with sexual assault; UVa aside, it is a real problem) and (b) something that people want to believe ("we've finally caught one!") That doesn't make it right.
One of the problems with the tech press (and, increasingly, the mainstream press) is that it refuses to rise to the higher standard expected of a journalist. For private individuals to inflate their histories and reputations (using charismatic lies) is ethically OK, because one has to do it (paradoxically, and perhaps disturbingly) to gain credibility and trust in a world like Silicon Valley. Journalists, on the other hand, are supposed to cut that shit away and get to the facts. The problem is, with the tech press, that they value access (into a morally bankrupt sub-tract of the private sector, that will shut them out for any coverage other than effusive praise) more than doing their jobs.
You are talking about one story. I'm talking about news in general. I don't think most journalists are deliberately lying most of the time, but it's much more likely they suffer from confirmation bias - that's something we are all subject to, by the way. But journalists should go the extra mile, it'S their job after all: they are not supposed to be activists.
Your analogy would apply to someone posting a fake article on one of the news sites. The correct analogy would be the council shutting down a street based on any plan with no checking of credentials repeatedly for decades, and then someone pointing it out by submitting a provably wrong plan.
p-hacking and journalists publishing junk science or downright lies is a very well known problem. People have been pointing it out for years. Publicly shaming them via a story that will sell well is just using the systamic flaw to patch itself. It won't change the net number of sham stories these journalists publish and if anything slightly increases the quality by marginally diluting the harmful stuff being pushed by snake oil salesmen with something comparatively harmless.
In the last years there have been quite a few cases of journalists resigning from very prestigious publications (NYT, ...) because they were caught fabricating news.
Even with the "not universally" half-caveat, you are still implying journalists lie and fabricate more often than not.
It would be an extraordinary claim to suggest that's not the case. Journalists are basically people who would rather be writing fiction, but who haven't figured out a way to get paid for it.
It's a terrible-sounding generalization to make, but I will stand by it.
Well, also as a journalist you can not get away with making up stories. There was a recent case of a high class journalist, who did that and was caught.
But he did so very brutal so to say. The problem with journalism is mostly not straight lying, but missleading and bending the truth until it fits the agenda. So a classic journalist should not have another agenda than the truth. But this type seems to be very rare today.
Yeah but we are not journalists. Of course everyone should make an effort to verify the things they read, but journalists are held to a higher standard because verifying information like this and then making it available to us in an easily consumed format is literally their job.
The journalists who published this failed at their jobs. We non-journalists who read and believed them just made a trivial and unimportant mistake.
I suspect you don't have a strong understanding of how journalism works. A journalist fact-checking a story is more often a giveaway they are a conscientious journalist working for a legitimate organization. Getting the story right is a sacred thing for real journalists who know that not doing so opens them up to being called out in the public sphere for spreading untruth. Extensive fact-checking is not only critical to maintaining a reputation, it probably provides some kind of legal cover.
I'm always confused by arguments like that. The only way it works is if you assume bad faith (c.f. your six uses of the word "lie") on the part of everyone involved.
Isn't the much (!) simpler answer that the journalist had what he thought was a juicy scoop, the editors wanted to run it for clicks and eyeballs, and the system of checking and verification broke down. But that's just a mistake, and it happens everywhere in journalism. And it was corrected rapidly, by everyone involved.
You want this to be somehow morally different because of the "ZOMG WW3" situation, I guess? But I don't see how that works logically. People are going to make mistakes even in wartime, the question is if we trust folks in power to handle those mistakes correctly.
And, to repeat: people in power absolutely handled this responsibly. That's a good thing, not a bad thing, and I think we're much better off by rewarding that responsible use of power vs. screaming hyperbole.
Hmm, if they were truly experts at that then there'd be far fewer mistakes that people notice. And they'd have widely discussed, mature, sophisticated systems for catching errors, sort of like how the software industry invests so much into type systems and other quality techniques.
I think it's more likely you just remember that incident because it was so directly relevant to your life, so it gets magnified. I can add my voice to the chorus of people who have noticed a vast gulf between what gets reported and reality, especially when op-eds get involved.
This doesn't happen all the time. I've been involved in some stories which were pretty accurately reported. But it's completely dependent on (a) the skill of the individual journalist and much more importantly (b) if the story is relevant to something the journalist cares about. It's relatively easy for journalists to cover 3D printing or blockchain "reliably" (by the standards of the press) because they don't actually care about these topics. When the issue you know about starts to intersect social worldviews or power games within the political/journalistic sphere itself, things get crazy really fast.
And there's no consistency between journalists. The entire press industry is set up to consider journalism to be the act of a heroic and noble individual rather than the outcome of a process, a system. The "Jim Lehrer's Rules of Journalism" story that was discussed here recently is a good example of that. It wasn't actually a set of rules in the sense an engineer would understand it (i.e. something checked and enforced), it was a personal honour code. Journalism will never be able to increase its reliability whilst it treats the output as the product primarily of a writer + editor.
Naturally, on any occasion when it is actually possible to check a journalistic report against reality, the journalist will turn out to be lying. This is not absolutely universally true, but it is impossible to appreciate just how often it is true until you have been reported-on in a case where you know the facts yourself.
tl;dr of course they're lying, it's easier to make stuff up then investigate so why wouldn't a reporter always just lie?
It's not about the "damage" to the end user, i.e. the reader. It's about the complete betrayal of professional ethics. To use a tech analogy, consider a user whose credit card number has been compromised. To the user, the damage is the same whether the info was compromised by the sysadmin's failure to prevent a trivial SQL injection attack, or if the sysadmin decided to use their admin privileges to access and share the info of that user to fuck with them. The former sysadmin can learn their lesson and be redeemed -- the latter case is someone I would most likely never trust with admin privileges.
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