[…] Anyone stupid enough to believe obvious rubbish doesn’t care what your source is.
I do understand your point, I think. I've had an ongoing quandary regarding how one should effectively debate irrationality. But I still personally believe that one's allegiance to the truth is a matter of principle rather than a matter of pragmatism. I think sources should be cited not necessarily with the intent of using them as ammunition to prove an argument, but mainly for one to ground themselves in evidence based thinking.
[…] Which is why I’ll also assert that Literature classes as taught in later high school and into college aren’t really designed to be communication proficiency classes but art appreciation classes. […]
I think this is a fair point to make. I agree. Though, I would like to point out that that isn't me downplaying "art appreciation", but I agree that it is different than a subject targeted at improving clear communication.
For the sake of clarity, do you think that journalist should directly cite their sources in their work? Or, perhaps, more specifically, under what circumstances do you think a journalist should directly cite their sources in their work?
Also, imo, regular anti-fraud laws, and regular tort law can take over for the nonexistence of this specific law. For example, if someone is advertising a business, even if it's something of an occult nature, and then they don't deliver what they promise, I'd argue that that's standard false advertisement.
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.
[…] 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.
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:
that this trust opens us up to propaganda from activist or opinionated journalism […]
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.
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.
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.
Kalcifer @ Kalcifer @sh.itjust.works Posts 67Comments 1,020Joined 2 yr. ago
What specific features are you looking for?