Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the in-your-words dept
"This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone responding to the accusation that our coverage of Elon Musk suggests some kind of vendetta:
A rich moron bought a thing he didn’t understand for a price that makes him an even bigger moron. He has since done everything possible to wreck that thing he bought in record time. That includes his decision to let a shitload of the staff running that thing he bought leave him and a relative handful of employees left to run the thing he barely understands.
And you think that isn’t going to be a huge news story for days, if not weeks?
> In second place, it’s Gene Patt with a comment about Facebook’s policy that fact checkers can’t fact check politicians:
That’s not how it works
So, I’m a teacher. If I take the position of refusing to check to see if my students are cheating, and I tell my boss, “I’m simply not taking a position on whether cheating is being committed”, I’m going to get run through the ringer and held out by the MAGAs as an example of why public education is dying.
I think it’s reasonable that we hold candidates to the Presidency to the same basic standard that I expect a 15 year old to follow.
> For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got two more comments about Facebook’s fact checking policy. First, it’s an anonymous response:
Worth noting that Trump made at least 20 false and misleading claims in his announcement speech according to to CNN.
Fact checkers should be free to check anything a politician says or writes even if the politician and their supports are not going to like it. Truth matters and trying to stay “neutral” is not an option. It just lets bullshit, lies and falsehoods propagate.
Next, it’s another comment from Stephen T. Stone, responding to the idea that this policy means being “neutral”:
Let’s say a politician—doesn’t matter which party they belong to—tells a lie. That the statement is a lie can be easily proven by a quick Google search. Is it “neutral” for someone to say that the politician told a lie, or would that be going too far into “editorializing”? What determines whether saying “this statement is a lie” is a statement of fact or a partisan opinion? When, if ever, should a news source state that a politician’s lie is actually, provably, 100% a lie?
> Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment on last week’s winning comments post. I was away for the week and didn’t write the post (or, mercifully, closely follow all the latest Musk happenings) and I haven’t yet caught up, so I’m still parsing the layers of this joke in response to Mike mentioning that a new Techdirt feature must be live in a week:
They are probably ghost anyhow, so they many not care.
> In second place, it’s an anonymous commenter on the Facebook fact checking post, replying to a comment about Facebook “hiding” the Hunter Biden laptop stuff:
Yeah, it’s the same one.
As a matter of fact, they hid it so well that somehow you and every other nut like you knew about it.
> For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Thad about the assertion that Musk’s erratic Twitter decisions might just be in service of shareholder interests:
Just look what a great job he’s doing serving the shareholders at Tesla.
> Finally, it’s hij with one more comment about Facebook ending the fact checking of politicians:
Yuge Announcement
I am officially announcing my candidacy to be President of the United States. Please let the folks at Meta know.
That’s all for this week, folks!"
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Yes, the Truth-O-Meter is a gimmick. But 15 years later, it's still effective. Just don't look for "Barely True."
By Bill Adair – August 22, 2022 | Print this article
Fifteen years ago, I worked with a small group of reporters and editors at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) to start something bold: a fact-checking website that called out politicians for being liars.
That concept was too gutsy for the Times political editor. Sure, he liked the idea, he said at a meeting of editors, “but I want nothing to do with it.”
That was my first lesson that PolitiFact was going to disrupt the status quo, especially for political journalists. Back then, most of them were timid about calling out lies by politicians. They were afraid fact-checking would displease the elected officials they covered. I understood his reluctance because I had been a political reporter for many years. But after watching the lying grow in the early days of the internet, I felt it was time for us to change our approach.
Today, some political reporters have developed more courage, but many still won’t call out the falsehoods they hear. PolitiFact does. So I’m proud it’s going strong.
It’s now owned by the Poynter Institute, and it has evolved with the times. As a proud parent, allow me to brag: PolitiFact has published more than 22,000 fact-checks, won a Pulitzer Prize and sparked a global movement for political fact-checking. Pretty good for a journalism org that’s not even old enough to drive.
On PolitiFact’s 15th birthday, I thought it would be useful to share the lesson about disruption and a few others from my unusual journey through American political journalism. Among them:
Gimmicks are good. . .
Empower the pirates
I was the founding editor, the guy with the initial ideas and some terrible sketches (my first design had an ugly rendering of the meter with “Kinda True” scribbled above). But the editors at the Tampa Bay Times believed in the idea enough to assign other staffers who had actual talent, including a spirited data journalist named Matt Waite and a marvelous designer named Martin Frobisher.
Times Executive Editor Neil Brown, now president of Poynter, gave us freedom. He cut me loose from my duties as Washington bureau chief so I could write sample fact-checks. Waite and Frobisher were allowed to build a website outside the infrastructure of the Times website so we had a fresh look and more flexibility to grow.
We were like a band of pirates, empowered to be creative. We were free of the gravitational pull of the Times, and not bound by its rules and conventions. That gave us a powerful spirit that infused everything we did.
Design is as important as content
We created PolitiFact at a time when political journalism, even on the web, was just words or pictures. But we spent as much energy on the design as on the journalism.
. . .
Twitter is not real life
My occasional bad days as editor always seemed more miserable because of Twitter. If we made an error or just got attacked by a partisan group, it showed up first and worst on Twitter.
I stewed over that. Twitter made it seem like the whole world hated us. The platform doesn’t foster a lot of nuance. You’re loved or hated. I got so caught up in it that when I left the office to go to lunch, I’d look around and have irrational thoughts about whether everyone had been reading the tweets and thought I was an idiot.
But then when I went out with friends or talked with my family, I realized that real people don’t use Twitter. It’s largely a platform for journalists and the most passionate (read: angry) political operatives. My friends and family never saw the attacks on us, nor would they care if they did.
So when the talk on Twitter turned nasty (which was often), I would remind our staff: Twitter is not real life.
People hate referees
My initial sketch of the website was called “The Campaign Referee” because I thought it was a good metaphor for our work: We were calling the fouls in a rough and tumble sport. But Times editors vetoed that name… and I soon saw why.
People hate referees! On many days, it seemed PolitiFact made everyone mad!
That phenomenon became clearer in 2013 when I stepped down as editor and came to Duke as a journalism professor. I became a Duke basketball fan and quickly noticed the shoddy work of the referees in the Atlantic Coast Conference. THEY ARE SO UNFAIR! Their calls always favor the University of North Carolina! What’s the deal? Did all the refs attend UNC.
Seek inspiration in unlikely places
When we expanded PolitiFact to the states (PolitiFact Wisconsin, PolitiFact Florida, etc.), our model was similar to fast-food franchises. We licensed our brand to local newspapers and TV and radio stations and let them do their own fact-checks using our Truth-O-Meter.
That was risky. We were allowing other news organizations to use our name and methods. If they did shoddy work, it would damage our brand. But how could we protect ourselves? . .
Adjust to complaints and dump the duds
We made adjustments. We had envisioned Pants on Fire as a joke rating (the first one was on a Joe Biden claim that President Bush was brain-dead), but readers liked the rating so much that we decided to use it on all claims that were ridiculously false. (There were a lot!)
In the meantime, though, we lost enthusiasm for the animated GIF for Pants on Fire. The burning Truth-O-Meter was amusing the first few times you saw it, but then … it was too much. Pants on Fire is now a static image.
As good as our design was, one section on the home page called the Attack File was too confusing. It showed the person making the attack as well as the individual being attacked. But readers didn’t grasp what we were doing. We 86’d the Attack File.
Initially, the rating between Half True and False was called Barely True, but many people didn’t understand it – and the National Republican Congressional Committee once distorted it. When the NRCC earned a Barely True, the group boasted in a news release, “POLITIFACT OHIO SAYS TRUE.”
Um, no. We changed the rating to Mostly False. We also rated the NRCC’s news release. This time: Pants on Fire!
Efforts to intercept misinformation are expanding in more than 100 countries, but the pace of new fact-checking projects continues to slow.
By Mark Stencel & Erica Ryan – June 17, 2022 | Print this article
The number of fact-checkers around the world doubled over the past six years, with nearly 400 teams of journalists and researchers taking on political lies, hoaxes and other forms of misinformation in 105 countries.
The Duke Reporters’ Lab annual fact-checking census counted 391 fact-checking projects that were active in 2021. Of those, 378 are operating now.
That’s up from a revised count of 186 active sites in 2016 – the year when the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election elevated global concerns about the spread of inaccurate information and rumors, especially in digital media. Misleading posts about ethnic conflicts, wars, the climate and the pandemic only amplified those worries in the years since.
Since last year’s census, we have added 51 sites to our global fact-checking map and database. In that same 12 months, another seven fact-checkers closed down.
While this vital journalism now appears in at least 69
languages on six continents, the pace of growth in the international
fact-checking community has slowed over the past several years. . ."
Fact-Checking – An Effective Weapon Against Misinformation? - Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings
Starting out as a science writer, I fact-checked articles for a popular science magazine. Having pored over the text and checked each name, date and statement, it was satisfying to know that the reader would find facts, not fiction, on the pages. Invisible to the reader, this kind of fact-checking in journalism was used by TIME magazine and the New Yorker as early as the 1920s.
Today, anyone who reads the news is likely to have noticed another kind of fact-check: articles and media coverage examining the accuracy of reported claims or rumours, with politicians a common target. As independent checks, they are a way to tackle misinformation.
Fact-checking activity has increased dramatically within the last decade, long before the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-fact’ began popping up in headlines. In a recent census, there were 149 active projects in 53 countries. They include groups within the traditional media, like the BBC in the UK, and independent charities and NGOs like Germany’s Correct!v’s Echtjetzt. Not surprisingly, politics and economics dominate. A handful of projects, such as SciCheck and Détecteur de Rumeurs, are dedicated to science.
The rise of the fact-check is partly a response to the deluge of misinformation accompanying the internet and social media: never before could dubious claims be shared so easily, widely and quickly.
Fact-checking is also, however, a chance to document issues more
thoroughly than in routine news reporting. An important goal of
journalists is to cover all points of view to maintain impartiality.
However this, along with increasingly under-resourced newsrooms and
tight deadlines, can ironically result in false balance and misleading coverage . . . READ MORE
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