Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is the scale at play with the Supermicro story.
If the story is that a small handful of motherboards that were destined to be shipped to cloud providers from Supermicro had some remote monitoring / control capabilities (of varying types opportunistically applied) added to them at the behest of the Chinese government that sounds completely plausible and incredibly hard to verify and/or defend against.
I say plausible as we know that US intelligence agencies have conducted similar actions:
What if all extant examples of these boards are in some NSA laboratory? Bloomberg could plausibly have sources that know of the boards but don't have the ability to steal one of the boards for Bloomberg.
(Emphasis on plausibly, which is not the same as probably.)
A hoax implies they made it up. Instead they have multiple sources giving similar stories, in an area that is shrouded in secrecy of both the corporate and national security kind.
It's hard to report in this area: people can't and won't go on the record, motivations can be murky and very technical details are extremely important.
However, the parts that can be verified are easily verifiable, the technical details seem realistic and the motivations align.
It's possible that the story is wrong, but hoax seems to be the wrong way to think about this.
Because the bar is really high if they’re a news outlet. You have to prove that they knew what they were saying was false, and did it with the intent to harm.
Besides, I’m sure SuperMicro just wants it to blow over and be done with it. Being in the news for a lawsuit will bring it up again and possibly harm them financially as people (managers who order) who don’t understand things have knee jerk reactions.
Bingo. Fighting it would just preserve the Streisand effect. There doesn't appear to have been any material impact from where I sit, and there haven't been any further stories along the same lines.
If Super Micro knows they didn’t do it, they should absolutely love the story. Buyback the underpriced shares and make a ton of free money once the market realized the Bloomberg story is false. I don’t know if they actually did that, but that’s what I would have done. I didn’t actually do that because I trusted Bloomberg a lot. But there was substantial profit to be made as an insider. I bet many/most employees made that trade, at the very least.
It could also be the case that it never happened but Super Micro doesn't know for certain that it never happened. They may be pretty sure it never happened but unable to rule out the possibility that some portion of their organization was compromised by an intelligence agency.
Generally, when a company doesn't sue over something like this, it's because they don't have a case. And that always means that enough of the allegations are true that they couldn't win an absolutely massive judgement in court.
Because in the US, truth is an absolute defense to the defamation torts. (The same is not truth in the UK; you can still be liable for defamation even if everything you said is true. See, e.g., the case of the Nazi-fetishist MP.)
The Streisand effect is not a thing companies worry about. Because more brand damage = more monetary damages to collect.
> Vinci SA fell victim to a fake release claiming the French builder had fired its finance chief amid accounting irregularities, prompting the stock to plunge before the company denied the report.
> Bloomberg News was among the few news organizations to report from the false statement.
> “We are a victim of a hoax,” spokesman Paul-Alexis Bouquet said on Tuesday, denying that the Paris-based company had released any statement. Although the company’s website hadn’t been hacked, technically speaking, fake statements had been sent in the company’s name, he said.
> Investors were caught off guard after the publication of a release saying that Vinci had discovered an accounting error and had fired Chief Financial Officer Christian Labeyrie. The shares plunged 18 percent, the most in more than 17 years, before Bouquet said the report was false. Vinci will file a complaint about the incident, the spokesman said.
> “We are a victim of a hoax,”
Vinci was the victim of a hoax, Bloomberg was happy to report it without doing enough fact checking, they were spreading and part of the hoax.
If the Vinci website itself had been hacked, and the faux press release distributed from there, Bloomberg would obviously have a strong case. That doesn't seem to be the situation though, and so I'm curious to what channel this fake press release came through, e.g. a spoof email or Twitter account.
Isn’t Vinci SA the operator of all those French toll highways that were supposed to be free once construction was paid off, but continued to be tolled anyway?
The only problem I've ever encountered was when US pumps demanded a zip code. Of course, I'd just enter the only US zip code I knew of (90210). It usually worked.
I've since learned that you can use 00000 but that's not nearly as fun!
I've also grown accustomed to using 867-5309 (Jenny) when asked for a phone number to get grocery store "member" prices when I don't want to sign up. It works a charm.
Don’t think so. I’ve used Korean, French, and Canadian cards with no issues in the US at gas stations.
Meanwhile, good luck getting gas or paying tolls in France without a French or other EU card.
French companies are also terrible at accepting non-French SEPA zone accounts. By law, they should accept all IBANs but their websites bork when it’s not French. Infuriating.
Exactly pay-at-pump is just not working with European cards most of the time (not always true as I was able to find one working in Phoenix). Paying inside is fine, but a hassle as you have to estimate the amount of gas you need for a rental car you barely know.
By the way, in Florida you don't even have to wonder about a credit card at the toll as it is Sunpass/pay by plate or cash only...
That all changed with chipped cards - they work fine now (at least for my preferred ones).
Of course, that didn't help in 2017 when we had to get one of the tellers to do a on-the-spot conversion of dollars to euros at marginal rate of about 200 USD to 100 EUR (way higher than interbank rate) - we had no choice, and no one to complain to.
I'm not sure the teller enjoyed the transaction either.
The highways are actually privately operated. The privatization of highways was a big public issue back in the days, with most people against it arguing that it will lead to an increase in prices due to the profit-seeking nature of the operators.
Turns out, they were right, and in hindsight, privatization is a failure as far as the highway users are concerned.
On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story, saying that all these big companies were hacked, why didn't anybody sue them? It was a major accusation! It just kinda...disappeared.
This might be the answer to you second question. No one seems to have taken the Bloomberg story to be true. Just went "that's dumb" and dropped it. In fact the only times I've ever seen it resurface is in a context to point out something negative about Bloomberg (like now), not the companies named in the article.
Sort of like the Elon Musk defamation case that just ended. Plaintiff didn't get anything because people didn't turn on him due to the accusation, they turned on Elon.
If it's not believed then you couldn't have suffered harm.
I believe it. Maybe not for that exact story with the lack of proof, but considering how such an attack is within the realm of possibility it seems foolish to not assume the handful of the most powerful and well-funded groups on Earth are doing such a thing. I’m not going to leave my door unlocked at night, for example, until my neighbor gets robbed and proves to me that is possible.
So you don't believe it, you believe another story. Bloomberg didn't say "this is possible" they said "this is happening and here are the exact details".
I believe it is happening, yes. The obvious plausibility and the way I’ve seen other state-sponsored things (any state) hushed up means the only reasonable thing for me to do is assume the story is based on truth even if the picture isn’t 100% complete. To put it another way, I believe the Bloomberg story is the “Room 641A” to a Snowden-level expose we may never get.
As I see it you don't actually believe that particular story, you believe something "like that" is plausible. So in other words Bloomberg wrote some plausible fiction. Nobody is saying something like that isn't possible, just that if we wanted to read fiction Bloomberg wouldn't be the place to look for it.
Given the string of high profile misreporting and failures to substantiate their claims one would have to be very gullible to still take Bloomberg reporting at face value without being presented with some hard proof and 3rd party confirmation.
What exactly would they sue them for? Defamation and libel claims don't just require the defendant to be wrong, they have to have known or ought to have known that the claims were false. If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.
>If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.
I guess that would be up to the courts to decide, wouldn't it? Considering they said Apple and AWS were compromised, that's a lot of firepower.
I'm skeptical that "some anonymous source told us, and we choose to believe it" would pass legal muster, especially when you are publishing something as a major media source. But anything is possible.
> On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't.
If the story were true, under what circumstances could Bloomberg reports have come into possession of a compromised sever to satisfy this requirement?
> On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story
Journalists evaluate and report what they're told by sources. For instance: they don't do scientific experiments themselves, but rather interview scientists about their results and report their statements. Their quality control is to get multiple sources to corroborate each other.
Saying Bloomberg journalists "fabricated" the story is going too far. If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest.
It's kind of not the case here. First, they're not required to take any claims at face value, they can (and would be expected to) verify if they're actually true by looking at the evidence their sources provide - and if there's no evidence, then they'd be expected to note that it's all speculation.
Second, at least some of the claimed sources were not anonymous and were interviewed later by others (there were a few HN threads back them some weeks after the initial story) and they explicitly disclaimed that they have confirmed the case, but rather that all they have told Bloomberg is essentially "something like this might be theoretically possible, sure, but the current evidence doesn't suggest that this has happened" - so we have some evidence that these Bloomberg journalists "attempted" to corroborate multiple sources which did not confirm the story that they wanted to tell, but they went ahead with the story anyway.
Buy it from a data center sale? We nuked our drives and sold the rest to a liquidation company when we moved to GCP. It's trivial to pick these up.
It's Bloomberg, my dudes. That news source is the lowest quality trusted news source. I like that they can stay in business though. Made a neat 30+% on SMCI easy peasy. And that requires people like you to trust Bloomberg so that's good.
The Big China Chip Hack was never actually debunked.
It was refuted, yes, but every company always does that, right up until they admit in a court settlement that the allegations were true all along. Despite the supposedly slanderous statements, none of the supposedly slandered companies has sued over the article, even though in several cases they suffered material impacts to their stock prices and financial results.
...But nothing.
Despite supposedly defamatory statements, nothing was done by any of the companies mentioned in the article.
Comments here have mention the Streisand effect as the reason for inaction, but the Streisand effect does not apply to defamation. The concept behind the Streisand effect is that efforts to censor information just result in greater dissemination. However, in a defamation lawsuit with potentially billions of dollars of damages at stake, you want greater dissemination of the defamatory statements, because that increases the payout at the end of the road. And because with enough money you can recover from the negative PR (see, e.g, Tylenol, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, BP, etc.).
That seems a vanishingly impossible standard of truth. None of the companies affected want people to know they were affected, and the people within the national security complex are unlikely to hand out physical evidence.
Bloomberg did provide evidence. In the article. You supply refuse to accept it as evidence of their claims. They aren't obligated to provide more evidence, especially since their report has not been debunked in any way.
I don't think there's much of any "evidence" to prove it and a hack like that is pretty.
Then again nobody ... did anything after that either and everyone responded kinda awkwardly about it.
I can't help but wonder if they got it dead wrong, but anyone clarifying or suing to prove otherwise would expose something else and so ... nobody talks?
Wouldn’t Apple or Amazon suing Bloomberg force them to provide details and access to their farms in ways that could expose more info than they are willing to give ?
I think about the kind of info we only get when lawsuits happen, and here the suing party could be losing more in collateral damage for just punishing a petty journal ?
>> I can't help but wonder if they got it dead wrong, but anyone clarifying or suing to prove otherwise would expose something else and so ... nobody talks?
Sure. What if the boards were hacked, but not by the Chinese? What if some company insiders knew? Just wildly speculating, but the response at the time seemed odd to me.
It's win win for everybody. The narrative supports the effort to have less dependency toward China manufacturing and it's in line with the later China-US trade war.
Bad example. All of the allegations in the Bloomberg article were true. Leif Olson actually did all of the things alleged, however the Bloomberg article missed that he supposedly did these things as satire...because Olson didn't actually bother to clarify that his posts were satirical until several days after they were made (and importantly, several days after the article itself was originally written).
Both Olson and Bloomberg had bad judgment here. A political appointee should not have made sarcastically anti-anti-Semitic statements, because he should have had the brainpower to know that in the Trump administration such statements would be taken at face value. And Bloomberg probably should have revised the article to add a paragraph about how a Trump appointee's anti-Semitic statements were actually anti-anti-Semitic in light of additional context that wasn't in the posts at the time they were made.
Interesting, didn't know press releases were vetted. I always figured they are just copied and pasted since there's sites where you can pay to syndicate them but not sure how legit that stuff is since never issued a press release, and with many companies running their own blogs wonder if it's even worth doing them anymore?
Also kinda reminds me of the lawsuit in Ohio against Facebook. A charter school ran ads, and messed up their attendance count, so other school districts are sueing Facebook trying to recover funds they thought should of went to their school districts instead, which seems like an interesting case but no updates on it in like 6 months, so not sure what the progress is on the case.
The headline probably needs qualification that the fine was in Europe, not the U.S. I was shocked that any U.S. regulator would attempt to push against the First Amendment in this way. It's a different story with more context.
I am not familiar enough with US customs but first amendment (free speech) seems irrelevant here. Bloomberg got fined for market manipulation by the AMF, the French organization equivalent to the SEC/FCA in the USA/UK.
Read up on New York Times v. Sullivan. You can be held liable for knowingly publishing false statements, as Elon Musk did, but mistakenly publishing false statements is protected by the First Amendment. The exception (in the case where the target is a public figure) is if you exhibit “reckless disregard” for the statements’ “truth or falsity”, but that standard is much stricter than it sounds; you have to have “serious doubts” about whether they’re true, and publish them anyway.
I'm still confused by what sense Elon Musk's statements were knowingly false. My memory of the situation was that the Saudis offered to buy Tesla, and Musk considered this to constitute funding being secured. Does "funding secured" have a technical definition that a verbal offer doesn't qualify for, and would Musk be expected to know that difference? I'm asking sincerely; I don't know.
>In truth and in fact, Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source.
>When he made these statements, Musk knew that he had never discussed a going-private transaction at $420 per share with any potential funding source, had done nothing to investigate whether it would be possible for all current investors to remain with Tesla as a private company via a “special purpose fund,” and had not confirmed support of Tesla’s investors for a potential going-private transaction.
New York Times v. Sullivan was a defamation case. The 1st Amendment protects your right to show reckless disregard for truth or falsity, unless you're slandering someone.
Do you have a citation for your second sentence? NYT v. Sullivan was a defamation case, but my assumption is that the level of protection the First Amendment provides to any given act of speech isn't affected much by which law is trying to penalize that speech. I could easily be wrong; is there a case where the issue came up? (Also, Elon's tweet may count as commercial speech, which is less protected in general.)
I'm basing the second sentence in the narrowness of the exceptions to freedom of speech in the US.
If the government were to try to impose restrictions on "untrue" speech in areas outside defamation, particularly in politics, I would view that as a major assault on the 1st Amendment.
Bloomberg the company is a legally independent entity to Michael Bloomberg (who I don't think has much of a role in the day-to-day running of the company anyway).
This isn't a freedom of speech issue since obviously they were free to say whatever they wanted, lies and misinformation included. This doesn't imply freedom from consequences.
Causing a company to lose 18% value because they couldn't be bothered to verify is negligence, incompetence, or malice (or a combination) not freedom of speech and it's only fair to receive a fine. Bloomberg is making a habit of such reporting.
It is a freedom of speech issue, at least from a US perspective. Whether newspapers can be held liable for inadvertently publishing false information was the exact issue at hand in New York Times v. Sullivan, a case which is one of the foundations of modern First Amendment jurisprudence. It held that, in almost all circumstances, they cannot.
I hope the fact that this happened in France doesn't throw a wrench in the reasoning. Inadvertent implies no intention, accidental. Bloomberg did zero due diligence with regard to this information, no attempt to validate it or the source was done before publishing. This resulted in market manipulation and that is punishable by law.
Newspapers could always publish anything by just saying "I found it on the internet". Which is obviously not the case. The free speech and free press clauses protect public media as much as individual persons but what you say on social media will still be used against you.
And talking about freedom of press, France doesn't look that bad at all. [0]
> I hope the fact that this happened in France doesn't throw a wrench in the reasoning.
humanrebar wrote that if it had hypothetically occurred in the US, it would "push against the First Amendment". You quoted that phrase and replied that it "isn't a freedom of speech issue", which I interpreted as disputing the claim that it would hypothetically push against the First Amendment. I replied in that context.
Whether it violates freedom of speech in a more abstract sense is, of course, subjective. I think that requiring the press to do some degree of due diligence is not unreasonable, but I also think there are advantages to the US's more deferential approach.
As for the Press Freedom Index, I'm under no illusion that the US is perfect in that regard.
So is a threat to the President a freedom of speech issue? It was just speech. How about if you use such speech to manipulate the market? Or slander? Libel? Obscenity? Telling someone to kill themselves (spoiler alert: you may get convicted for involuntary manslaughter)? [0]
In this case the fine was not for the speech but for the market manipulation. Saying "oh we were the victims of a hoax and just believed what a random site said" is not a defense. Case law obviously has plenty of precedent for consequences of free speech.
Yes the 1st amendment guarantees freedom of speech and this is where all the confusion starts. Everybody has their own definition of freedom of speech. Most are wrong or uninformed [1]. Given that even the Supreme Court has varying opinions on this from time to time just says it's not an easy topic. No, you don't have a blank cheque for saying anything you want without consequences. Speech is still very much regulated, written press and broadcasting are regulated (differently), etc. You have laws that criminalize slander, market manipulation, etc.
Your freedom ends where another person's freedom begins.
> So is a threat to the President a freedom of speech issue? It was just speech. [...] Or slander? Libel?
As I said, the exceptions to freedom of speech are extremely narrowly carved out. What you're discussing is incitement to violence. There is a very high bar to prove incitement, libel or slander. It's almost impossible to libel a public figure, for example. Almost anything you could say about a politician is considered protected political speech.
> How about if you use such speech to manipulate the market? [...] Obscenity?
These are restrictions that apply in very specific circumstances (e.g., representatives of public companies, television/radio hosts on certain regulated spectrum).
> Speech is still very much regulated
In extremely narrowly defined circumstances, which usually have a very high bar of proof. The general trend that I have observed since Trump's election, which I find very worrying, is for many American liberals to begin calling for greater regulation of speech. The 1st Amendment is incredibly expansive, which is one of the most appealing aspects of the American Constitution, in my opinion. In other countries (e.g., the UK and Germany), it is much easier for the government to regulate speech, which I don't think is healthy for democracy. It is easily for those in power to abuse such restrictions on speech.
If your speech negatively impacts another citizen, and your speech turned out to be all lies, you are absolutely liable for the consequences of it. The "government" is simply here to handle the arbitration.
Only under very specific and difficult-to-prove circumstances. These exceptions to freedom of speech are very narrowly carved out, and for good reason. The broader the exception, the easier it is to instrumentalize for political repression - and there will be a huge desire to do so.
+1. In order for this to be punishable in the US, they would have had to have known this press release was fake before publishing it which would be a much different story.
The headline should be updated to say they were fined by France.
In today's world of race to the finish (/ bottom) journalism, I think it should be mandatory for all publications to have an addendum to each article, which contains:
* list of sources of information and original research conducted ( including names of interviewees, only anonymized with a justification, links, etc )
* a sign-off by a journalist (note: not supposed to imply responsibility or liability for accuracy of information, only that the addendum is representative of the research done)
* A hash of a archive file containing all collected information (including interview transcripts/notes, etc) with a responsibility to keep this archive for X years and to provide it to regulators on request; info can be anonymized/redacted as deemed necessary
Combine this with a fine for the publication if they failed to verify information with a reasonable effort, and it could do a lot of good for the world of news.
Of course all regulation comes with pitfalls, and there are many with this idea, especially with the fine aspect. Probably enough to make it undesirable.
But it is the only one I have to improve things.
Edit:
Since this has been mentioned: it's possible to allow anonymous sources, but eg with the rule that anonymization has to be justified and may not be abused.
But this feeds into the biggest problem with the whole idea: a fine can give regulators too much power to punish publications arbitrarily.
I'd be happy just if they were forbidden to change articles after publishing, and not say that.
Because currently, they post some bullshit news and create some random outrage. Then someone points at some bullshit claim in their article, and they just quietly change the article (remove the claim, add "allegedly", etc.), and act as nothing was wrong. Or in worst case scenario, they quietly remove the whole article.
I think it's the same when we ship beta software to users and then expect the first batch to essentially debug it — then comes the proverbial ".1" patch which fixes most glaring issues. (as if they weren't obvious in the first place)
Now why do we do that in software? because "agile", cost, "let's ship and risk breaking some things and see what happens? We'll fix things later in some update, on a need-to basis"
Well I think journalism has gone the same road: "let's publish first and risk breaking some truths and see what happens? We'll fix things later in some update, on a need-to basis"
Can't really blame the business entities themselves. I wholeheartedly agree with GP though, there definitely needs to be more regulation and parent's point is one of the most salient target for that — it's disingenuous at best to silently update/remove, not to mention actually false from a documentation standpoint, it skews history basically. Very dystopian. News articles should be versioned exactly like git, we should be able to diff each public update.
Yes, but you can still find the .0 version in the github. I'd be totally OK if the news were on github and I could easily see how the article looked a while ago (extra credits for git blame feature).
It immediately irks me that I'm defending agile here, but part of the point of agile is that the developer doesn't really know what the end user needs, so it's, in theory, better to get a minimum viable product out that meets the user's need, then refine on subsequent releases, rather than spend years working on releasing something perfect that it turns out doesn't fill the user's need.
From a similar perspective for journalism, I think there's an argument that can be made that it's better to get most of the information out right away, even if some of it is inaccurate, and then correct the inaccuracies later, rather than wait until every piece is confirmed and edited perfectly to release the information. Argument to extremes, think of a hurricane or volcano explosion.
You make great points and I agree with your take on agile — I actually mentioned "cost" to indicate that reality was deviating from the 'ideal' agile approach, when it stops being "the right thing to do" — buggy, etc. — because you're trying to meet some arbitrary deadline or favor marketing, please mgmt, etc.
Likewise, I think it's fair to assume the economic competition between news outlets may push some to be too aggressive in shipping fast, too fast.
And you know what, deep down I think it's OK, as long as you don't falsely advertise what you're doing. "We want this <content> (whether code, news) in the hands of our customers asap, so we're releasing it now; but be aware it's not 100% guaranteed until scrutinized by the crowd and corrected accordingly."
I'd love to have a choice between some "fast news shippers" and some "slow, vetted pieces". I think there's room for both and everything in between. Just don't be disingenuous about it, and if it takes regulation to enforce that, then so be it — every legitimately regulated activity pretty much brings it on themselves, give or take some political latency.
> I think there's an argument that can be made that it's better to get most of the information out right away, even if some of it is inaccurate, and then correct the inaccuracies later
But parent's aren't really talking about mistakes, like errors in software. They're talking about lies.
Sure, go ahead and get all the information you have out right away. But qualify their accuracy level. There's a difference between "Foo frobnicated a Baz", vs. "a certain quux told us[0] that Foo frobnicated a Baz" (with [0] leading to details like the top post mentions). The former is stating a possibly inaccurate information as if it was a sure fact. Essentially, it's lying. The latter form lets the reader understand the degree of uncertainty involved, and choose how much they're willing to believe it.
> From a similar perspective for journalism, I think there's an argument that can be made that it's better to get most of the information out right away, even if some of it is inaccurate, and then correct the inaccuracies later, rather than wait until every piece is confirmed and edited perfectly to release the information. Argument to extremes, think of a hurricane or volcano explosion.
Following the argument to the same extreme, it's a bad idea to get out the information "there is a hurricane or volcano explosion due south of you" immediately, and to wait until the flight north begins to issue the correction "actually, it's due north of you."
But I don't think you would disagree the following is worthwhile:
"There is a hurricane, and we're hearing initial, unconfirmed reports that it's to the south. We want to stress these are unconfirmed at this time, etc etc"
Which is something that would traditionally be broadcast in an emergency.
Obviously, we're really talking about an extreme hypothetical, but as long as it's clear the information may not be complete or accurate at the time of reading, I see no problem (as long as it is eventually accurate).
No, Journalism and Software are not the same. Would you make the same argument that software on the 737 Max should be shipped and then fixed later? Absolutely not. Journalists need to understand that what they write has real-world impact and can actually lead to lot of unnecessary anguish if they publish things that are not true. Truth should always be paramount to speed in journalism. You can't always correct your mistakes as a journalist because most people only see 1 version of your draft and don't wait around for later corrections before jumping to conclusions.
Allow me to reply, I think you've misunderstood parent's point:
- there is a spectrum of "importance" to software: a shopping app crashing is generally less critical than medical software crashing during surgery.
- there is a spectrum of "importance" to the news: surely the benefit and damage of reporting on Netflix's latest show is lesser than reporting on an incoming tsunami.
If you are warned upon fast release of a piece of news of "lesser impact" that it's "unverified", "untrusted source", etc., then you get to choose the impact: you either wait for further confirmation or act now, that's on you.
Conversely, for the "important" part of the spectrum, then we all agree that like critical software, it must be vetted and validated before release. There's no question about that.
As for where to draw the line, it's anywhere each particular new outlet feels it should be; but the mention of where we are on that spectrum should be at least industry-wide ethics for the Press, and enforced by regulation if necessary (see other comments for great suggestions about how to indicate trustworthiness of information, extent of research, sources, etc).
As a journalist, you don't get to determine importance because you don't what people value, who is going to read your stuff, and who they are going to tell about it. A large number of people think Kim Kardashian is the most important news. I think it's you who misunderstands.
>Can't really blame the business entities themselves.
Why not? Why is it acceptable that the profit motive trump everything else? These people play a critical role in our society. Obviously they have to stay in business, but I'm not going to give them a pass on foregoing their duty just because they want to make more money.
First thing would be to de-correlate this 'news blockchain' entirely from any sort of 'coin', 'token', whatever 'currency' thing — a blockchain is a distributed database, period, 'crypto-coins' being just one application for this storage.
There are several ways to do it then but a standard would likely emerge, as in: "we <publisher> commit to mirror-publish our content to ThePressChain."
You'd likely store only text (say the raw html) on the blockchain though, so using links for pictures etc; which implies your CDN is archived publicly for later retrieval (I suppose a deal with archive.org or equivalent is in order to bolster such a paradigm).
What you're describing already exists - just have news groups publish to `github` or some other `git` server (They could even host their own), and then anybody who wants can clone it.
I’ve been thinking it would have to start with publications that aren’t the massive sources, using this as an advantage, and see the reward of subscribers as big publications get caught for these sorts of practices.
I've seen this accusation thrown out there on social media a few times now. When I've asked for examples, no one been able to provide a list showing that this is actually a systemic problem. With resources like the Internet Archive it should be trivial to prove that this really a problem. Can you back up your claims?
Journalists are people and make mistakes. But overall, respected institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and Bloomberg show good journalistic integrity and print retractions in both print and online.
If you really are seeing this problem regularly, i suggest you find better sources for your news. Above all avoid getting it from social media. The actual fake news that is rampant there is a much, much bigger threat to our society than the few bad apples or mistakes behind the problem you are describing.
You cite the Wall Street Journal as a respected institution, but I know I've seen them do this. Part of the problem with this type of thing is that publications often go out of their way to erase the existence of an aritcle if they intend to delete it.
Here's an example of an articles scrubbed from existence, including from the internet archive:
It's also unavailable, but searchable via google. Google simply shows a 404 page from the WSJ as the top result. The WSJ has never formally retracted this either.
Now since this is the WSJ, obviously the article was copied wholesale and pasted into blogs and the like regardless, so it can't be completely scrubbed. As a matter of fact, a search for:
"The filing was a response to a FOIA lawsuit brought in March by conservative organization Citizens United" will bring up many blogs with the full text of the article, but that doesn't change the fact that WSJ silently scrubbed the article from the internet archive, their own website, and the google cache.
Aslo, if you search "url:http://www.wsj.com/article_email/" , you won't find any active link at all. It seems they have changed their website structure.
Strange, the first result for me is the one I linked. Same if I search the name of the article. Google doesn't show me yours at all.
Happy to admit I was wrong about this though. I only remember this article because it came up in a thread about Internet Archive removing content sometimes without any explanation.
Those institutions are not the ones they were 10-20 years ago. And with less and less revenue streams they have resorted to clickbait like the rest.
I suggest you wake up to the reality of modern 'journalism'.
WaPo just recently messed up completely with the death of Baghdadi (the isis leader). Titling the article about his assassination as "Austere religious scholar dies at 48"
They had to change it 3 more times till they actually mentioned that he was assassinated. And that was just a mistake.
This is absolutely correct, it's shitty that people are downvoting you for it. Matt Taibbi even said as much on Joe Rogan.
Journalists aren't some deity to be put on a pedestal. They are employees that work for a corporation, usually a really big one. That corporation's business model is dying and they are cutting costs to survive and have been for 20 years.
Retractions are kind of a bandaid. They should not even be needed if journalists did their due diligence. Worst case I personally saw was a claim by a journalism lecturer that a small news site was alt-right from its inception and wrote a long screed lambasting the site - no, it wasn't, it got sold to a different owner a couple of years after creation because the original owners could not monetize it.
They even got the year of the creation of the site wrong. So, a person teaching journalism didn't even bother running a WHOIS query and spending 2 EUR to run a query against business registry. If that is the level of the teachers, then what can you expect from the people they taught?
> Mr. Uygur, a longtime supporter of Mr. Sanders, has also disparaged former President Barack Obama on his show, argued that bestiality should be legal and hosted white supremacist figures, including David Duke. In one clip that circulated on Twitter, Mr. Duke ends an interview by saying, “I am not, what you call a racist,” to which Mr. Uygur replies sarcastically, “No, of course not.”
They added the word 'sarcastically' and also added this after:
> Mr. Uygur called the clip a “complete smear” that had been taken out of context from a combative one-hour interview in which he pushed back on Mr. Duke.
In reality, NYT published a smear about Cenk Uygur, claiming he was supporting and agreeing with this white supremacist David Duke. This was a straight up lie, since Cenk spent the entire interview criticizing and arguing with David Duke, not agreeing with him at all. This caused an outrage among Cenk's supporters, and NYT quietly updated their article so that now it says almost the opposite of the original! Also, note that the smear was published after Cenk decided to run for Congress and the reporter knew that the clip used to support the 'Cenk agrees with David Duke' smear was out of context. [1]
The Cenk Uygur situation is part of a broader trend I observe where traditional media outlets have a highly negative bias, to the point that it often ventures into the realm of fabrication, towards news and people in new media. News distributed via YouTube and social media and similar are an existential threat to the traditional news publications, and the thus there exists a fundamental conflict of interest when the latter covers the former.
You mentioned WaPo. Here is an article[0] about WaPo publishing a story about "Russian hackers infiltrating a US electrical grid." In addition to the article being inaccurate, WaPo edited the copy several times to correct major errors of fact without adding an editorial note and refused to explain what led them to their incorrect conclusions.
The article is a bit too long to accurately summarise, but essentially WaPo published a story under the following headline: “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.”
>The lead sentence offered “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials” and continued “While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation’s electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability.”
This is at best a deeply misleading intro. The malware was found on a laptop not connected to the grid. The allegation that "Russian hackers penetrated the electrical grid" because they found tools which once may have been developed by Russians is about as accurate as me concluding that a hypothetical murderer was American because the murder weapon was an American-made AR-15.
There are several more concerning parts to the story but alas, I'm on mobile and have slacked off long enough.
I don't buy into the "MSM are knowing purveyors of fake news because profit!" but humans make mistakes and the desire of mainstream newspapers to beat bloggers in timeliness and pageviews can ultimately lead to standards slipping even among writers who would never knowingly publish a false story.
You know how absurd and wrong the Russia/powergrid story is specifically because this is your industry. If this wasn't your industry, you would read it, not have the understanding and experience to critique, and therefore probably believe it.. even if it was later retracted. The same applies to us reading about other fields.
My wife was a Capital Hill reporter in DC. Quite often, she had an hour or two to turn around a story on a hearing that just occurred on a topic she didn't know. Now multiply that by 4, 5, or 10 times each day.
It doesn't take maliciousness, just incompetence and/or ignorance at scale.
Michael Crichton named this:
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them."
I am as journalist-sympathetic as anyone on here, but even I would agree with the previous commenter's sentiment. Minimization of errors is an old and persistent problem in journalism, and the reasons for this can be relatively innocuous – e.g. general incompetence and complacency; not only in making the error, but also not having a system in place to collect and evaluate feedback/complaints from readers, nor to adequately disseminate a correction if one has been made – to outright dishonesty and cowardice (errors are generally a stain on a journalist's professional career).
The best argument that this is a systemic problem is to simply point out the lack of systemic accountability: as people have pointed out, no major news site has a diff/version history (even though most content management systems have some kind of version tracking), which would be the bare minimum (and best return on value) for digital publishers who prioritize accountability.
(The closest thing is newsdiffs.org, but that's an independent site [0])
If you want a real, recent error that illustrates the low importance of media corrections, I can give you one from this past week: when the New York Times erroneously reported that the Trump administration issued an executive order that would "define Judaism as a nationality". Here's a relevant excerpt from the earliest Internet Archive version of the article [1]:
> Mr. Trump’s order will declare that Judaism may be considered a national origin.
To say that this article caused a violent orgasm of Twitter fury and shock would be a vast understatement; you can search for tweets quote-tweeting the original @nytpolitics tweet to see for yourself. [2].
A few hours later, the NYT article had been significantly updated [3], with no correction or comment by the main NYT social media accounts, or by the individual reporters' Twitters (which are both very active). This is how the aforementioned excerpt was changed (and how it currently is as of today):
> Mr. Trump’s order will have the effect of embracing an argument that Jews are a people or a race with a collective national origin in the Middle East, like Italian Americans or Polish Americans
If the significance of the change isn't self-evident, then this tweet thread+article goes into detail about how big of a clusterfuck the original NYT article was [4].
To my knowledge, the NYT has said nothing about the mistake or the silent correction. Neither have the reporters. And as much outrage as the original article caused, it was all quickly forgotten (even faster than usual) because the mass shooting at the kosher market [5] and the UK elections the next day.
To me, this incident is emblematic of how their accountability is systemically lackadaisical. It's undeniable that the NYT does make corrections, but we only know of the errors that were noticed and were officially corrected. By definition, we can't easily know the errors that were never noticed, or were silently fixed.
In this situation, we have an error that is as egregious and infuriating as one can imagine in today's politics (Trump + executive authority + anti-Semitism + Israel v. Palestine). But also, this is a serious error that ultimately had no consequences, because the original report was attributed to anonymous sources (i.e. no reputation damage) and the error involved matters of abstract policy and political grandstanding.
If the error did cause damage, such as defaming a public official, or causing an angry protest that turned into a riot, then I'm certain the NYT would issue a correction, just as it did recently with its misleading report re: Cenk Uygur and David Duke (albeit after 3 days of complaints from Uygur and his supporters) [6]. But regardless of whether there are aggrieved parties, news organizations should be making corrections solely because they value truth and accountability. That the NYT has so completely and brazenly refused to acknowledge its massive, noticeable fuckup (which, besides the error, indicates a real flaw in sourcing) means that their correction policy should be regarded as arbitrary and unserious.
tl;dr: if they didn't make a correction for an error this big and noticeable, imagine how reluctant they are to issue corrections for errors much less noticeable and/or controversial.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act applies to discrimination on the basis of nationality, color, or race.
By using Title VI, the Trump administration defined Jews as a race, color, or nationality. However, as Jews come in many races and colors already, the logical conclusion was that the Trump administration was defining Judaism as a nationality.
Additional support for this comes from the fact the order adopts the IHRA definition of what it means to be anti-Semitic, which includes among other things, criticism of the state of Israel.
I posted the relevant original excerpt and what it was changed to. It is unequivocally different, and such a substantive change almost always necessitates a clarification if not a correction.
That was only one part of the article that was changed. The article's subhed/deck was also completely changed:
> The president’s action will define Judaism as a nationality, not just a religion, and empower the Education Department to withhold money from institutions that tolerate anti-Israel movements.
> The president’s action will protect Judaism under civil rights law and empower the Education Department to withhold money from institutions that tolerate anti-Israel movements.
Well-respected publications have internal checks and balances that do all these things for investigative stories already. You seem not to know enough about how the journalism industry has solved these issues to make a proposal.
The system does work fairly well. Screw-ups of investigations and scoops are big news because they're rare among serious journalistic outfits.
No individual journalist wants to be known for getting a story wrong, so incentives are pretty strong to begin with.
I like how OP commenter is essentially arguing that the government should regulate journalism, which fundamentally misunderstands the role of journalists -- that is, it is a direct check and balance on the government, except that it relies on the free market for competitive regulation. A journalism outlet which consistently gets things wrong SHOULD fail. Trying to regulate journalism massively fails not only in its intent to reduce errors, but also in its implementation.
One avenue that I think hasn't been fully explored/exhausted yet is false advertising regulation. Calling your product "news" carries a an entirely reasonable expectation that the product is free of falsehoods. (I'm not getting into bias, just absence of lies)
What would happen if we made that term (or synonyms like "journalism") protected advertising terms, so that you're required to either live up to it, or call yourself something else?
Another idea under this hypothetical law would be to have retractions/corrections carry the exact same amount of publicization as the original story. In other words, if you spend 10 minutes during primetime talking about something that turned out to be a lie, you get to spend 10 minutes on primetime about how you screwed up. You lie on a front page article that was up for a week? Your correction features in the same place for a week.
As is the press. Outside of libel laws, the press is constitutionally exempt from any type of regulation. As impotent as the press is today, I wouldn't want any political party to be able to decide what it can and can't say.
I'm not advocating that they can't say whatever they want.. only that they can't call it news if outright falsehoods are being passed. The same way you can't market your product as beef unless it meets certain standards, or your Bitcoin company as a bank, and so on.
This is a labeling/marketing law, nothing more. You are not excempt from those by way of being a media organization. Certainly it is not a speech restriction. As a bonus, it would allow competitors to market on that label since now it actually means something.
Especially the online versions of those "well respected publications" publish unverified things all the time. Often they get taken down or completely rewritten within half an hour, and of course are worded in a very speculative way from the start.
There are also countless of "articles" in those (like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ) that are nothing more than a press release with some shallow context sprinkled in, without any independent verification or actual journalistic work.
This doesn't provide a risk of publishing false information ("we are just reporting on the press release"), but is often misleading and of little value to the reader.
At the minimum a list of sources with a link to the press release (and probably nothing/little else) would make it easy to see that a article is nothing more than a shill PR.
Since NYT, WaPo, and WSJ publish unverified info "all the time", perhaps you could prove your point by pulling examples of false info they've published in the last month without a correction?
Since it happens so frequently, it should be easy to find one or two, maybe even for each publication.
> No individual journalist wants to be known for getting a story wrong, so incentives are pretty strong to begin with.
I think in a lot of places this isn't nearly as true as maybe it once was. The top selling newspapers in the UK pretty much habitually print anything that drives sales / their agenda and when they get a slap on the wrist they just print a minimal viable retraction.
When that occasionally lands them in court they treat it basically as a cost of doing business.
Imho it perfectly contradicts the point, because the UK isn't alone with that issue, BILD is also a tabloid, the most circulated one in Germany.
Of course, a lot of that hinges with the definition of "tabloid" [0] and how different Overton windows for these societies. For example, both UK and German tabloids heavily relied on "Page X" girls for their popularity.
While the same in the US was it's very own niche with the Playboy, as selling sexuality that openly in the mainstream was always more controversial in the US compared to Europe.
But US outlets also ain't above sensationalized headlines and leaving out a bit of context to justify them, some would argue that's something the US actually championeered with the marketing industry.
It's the same with the public shaming and privacy of people; In Europe, that's considered a very tabloid thing to do, meanwhile, in the US it's often standard to show uncensored pictures of people with their full names.
Does that really help to surface the truth? Or is it merely just another manifestation of the flaws of the "free market" at work? If the market only wants what sells best, and not what's actually true, what's the most likely outcome?
smt88's point was that the industry has solved this problem, which is clearly wrong. He/she didn't say anything about "well-respected publications", whatever that even means these days.
New publications that pop up would benefit from better citing the sources of their articles, because then when an article they write is shared and someone says "I have never heard of that publication, I don't trust it", the person that shared the item could refer the other person to the sources that were being cited instead of arguing about the trustworthiness of the publication itself.
As for established publications; from their point of view they can probably manage fine because they have a good reputation already, but I think it would benefit society at large if they too got better at citing sources so that we can rely less on reputation alone.
Reputation is a proxy for trustworthiness, but greater source transparency allows for the trustworthiness of individual articles to be judged with less work and thus less time needed, which means that deliberately misleading articles, factually wrong information and honest mistakes can all be caught sooner.
I'm having trouble reconciling how woefully out of touch your comment is with the state of journalism as an industry. Claiming that it "has solved theses issues" is pretty tone-deaf given the article these comments are on.
>No individual journalist wants to be known for getting a story wrong, so incentives are pretty strong to begin with.
For some altruistic ones sure. However, for each one of those, there are 10 writing click-bait articles to generate traffic to questionable orgs and they don't care at all about being wrong.
Even if that is true, there is clearly a trust problem with journalism, and the list of "well-respected" publications is dwindling, and there's no real way to audit whether they are trustworthy. I don't support the type of government regulation the OP proposes, but I do like the transparency ideas.
I wish I could find a link but wasn't there a guy who went round editing wikipedia articles for elderly "famous" people, and then when they died he waited to see which publications' obituaries for said individual matched his wikipedia falsehoods?
It just proved that "journalists" weren't doing any research and were just scraping wikipedia. And getting paid to do it.
I remember when Michael Jackson died and channel Five here in the UK had a hastily arranged "Michael Jackson Special" with library shots telling his life story. The narration was word-for-word the Wikipedia article. Disgusting.
Failing to verify a celebrity birthdate is not the same as failing to vet a source for an impactful investigative piece. There are people paid to write fluff who don't do much research, but the stakes are low.
You still haven't refuted anything I wrote. Clickbait and low-effort articles are pervasive. Everyone knows that. But you can generally trust publications with known journalistic standards and a good record.
Well-respected publications should have internal checks and balances. They don't. My favourite spectacular failure was when NPR, of all organisations, falsely claimed that Michael Cohen's guilty plea showed Donald Trump Jr. had lied to Congress. It was a very convincing article which rapidly went viral - Cohen had said that specific negotations were ongoing in 2016, and they had a quote from Trump Jr's testimony which seemed to say they weren't. Except that quote was from his reply to a question specifically about negotations other than those ones, which he had already told Congress about. Even the slightest scrutiny of the key quote the entire accusation revolved around would've given the error away. They didn't give it that scrutiny.
Only because there doesn't seem any way to fuck this up right now, doesn't mean there, in fact, isn't. The ongoing pattern is that "at the time it seemed like the right thing to publish", when in fact it's just about spinning the spin. You can't prove how certain the publishers were about their spin at the time of publishing, not even with your suggested solution, that I guess, would only get more journalists fired, and last time I checked there's already plenty of that.
Like how Snopes' fact checker seemed like a good idea, before they started getting things wrong too now and then. I mean, of course, it's not likely there's a holy grail solution and we're stuck in having to evaluate every day anew, which sources we trust and which we don't.
Regarding the part where spinning the spin is at least followed up by corrections and apologies - which few people read, anyway, after the damage is done, but there's NewsGuard, which does fairly technical editorial rating, which i find a very good idea.
> The ongoing pattern is that "at the time it seemed like the right thing to publish", when in fact it's just about spinning the spin.
This reminds me something I read recently: The Court concluded that "because the articles in their entirety were substantially true at the time they were published—even though the investigators' suspicions were ultimately deemed unfounded—they cannot form the basis of a defamation action.
I very much respect journalists and some of them are really brave, on par with ambulance crews, firefighters and police officers who put their lives on the line to rescue others.
Sadly, like how a very few police officers abuse their positions to punish random teenagers etc certain journalists are extremely harmful.
I've seen cases were journalists have done untold damage to individuals and communities because they couldn't be bothered to verify their sources before going out, guns blazing, to tell that someone is an abuser/fraud/racist etc.
This can go on for weeks and months but when the evidence finally piles up they publish one small retraction notice :-/
I'm not sure. While it's true that some reporters/journalists do a respectable job, I feel that the the field is overall lacking in respect for their job, care, etc. The amount of directly false or misleading information that piles up every day is staggering, and by very well known newspapers an TV channels.
If your job, or something you have direct experience of have been affected by the news cycle then you know how much BS reach eyeballs.
But not only that. Try to read the twitter profile of the journalist you found writing a poor piece. This exercise didn't help me appreciate the field, quite the contrary.
Such experience made me laugh when spanish media panicked about fake news and social media a while ago. They are the primary source. And I guess such behavior can be translated to other languages. I can see the pattern in the US newscycle for example.
I was once told (and I've long since forgotten where I heard this) that the three most important aspects to include in any news story are (1) what do we know, (2) how do we know it, and (3) what do we not know. I'm not sure I've ever read any news story that has hit all of these.
Journalism in a large part is just propaganda tool of different factions. Regulation is applied by humans and humans are biased by their investment in different interests. Citizens should realize that every piece of news that they read are biased and need to do their own home work carefully. If they cannot or are not willing to do proper homework the next best idea is to trust no oneone and only care about local issues.
As you already mentioned, there are many pitfalls. I think the biggest one is that the journalism source protection would not work if sources have to be public and all the information available to regulators on demand.
I'd love to see this for politicians. Lie and you're automatically removed from office and fined/jailed.
Also, I never understood why a vote is a one way street, why can't I recall my vote if the politicians that gained my vote with their programs and promises then end up breaking those promises and not implementing their programs.
Term limits. Or vote them out next time. Part of the reason the Constitution writers made 2 and 6 year terms, to try to force the House to be responsive to public opinion and the Senate resistant to GIGO cycling of proposed bills.
Of course that's all moot with the current 'ideology above sanity', but that's the game today.
Term limits is one of those ideas that sound good, but is actually bad.
Think about it: why would you want to have lawmakers automatically removed from office after they have gained significant experience in writing and lobbying for legislation and serving in various committees? Terminating someone when they are at the height of their productivity doesn't make any sense, either for business or for government.
Furthermore, the only thing term limits would do is further encourage the "revolving doors" pattern. Every politician would optimize their legislative careers for their post-term private sector gigs, rather than try their hardest to continue doing a good job so as to get re-elected.
>why would you want to have lawmakers automatically removed from office after they have gained significant experience in writing and lobbying for legislation and serving in various committees?
Because passed laws should be about the will of the people. Not how deep the tentacles of a particular politician go. The only reason it takes so long for politicians to climb those ranks and gain power is due to the long line of lifers in front of them. 8 years is more than enough for Presidents to significantly impact the country. There is no reason a senator or a representative needs more than that.
>Every politician would optimize their legislative careers for their post-term private sector gigs
They do this already. The lack of term limits just allows them to continue amassing power and favors to make it more lucrative.
>rather than try their hardest to continue doing a good job so as to get re-elected.
You fundamentally misunderstand what the point of a member of congress. They aren't supposed to be professional politicians. They are supposed to be normal people from each state doing their duty representing that state. It's why congress isn't a full-time position.
> Terminating someone when they are at the height of their productivity
Unfortunately for that rosy abstract view, 'gained significant experience' usually means 'entrenched in the party leadership and completely sold to special interests'. When votes wield less influence over a legislator than those who have bought them, they need to go and make room for someone less likely to get bought.
Let the people make examples of the most heavily bought, and there's a snowball's chance we could get back to having representatives again, instead of corporate interest peddlers.
And shorter terms, with less chance to get entrenched in influence peddling, makes that revolving door less enticing for all sides.
Representatives don't write legislation, that's what their staff is for, and experience is a valuable assent in a staffer. The longer a poltician's term lasts, the more they trend towards being the governments representative to the people instead of the people's representative in government.
I sympathize, but the ability to recall your vote, i.e. unelect, at any time would make your attitude towards your initial vote less serious and elections/unelections would cycle too fast to govern. Sometimes a bad government can be better than no government. Burden of citizenship.
> the ability to recall your vote, i.e. unelect, at any time would make your attitude towards your initial vote less serious
How do you know that about me?
> elections/unelections would cycle too fast to govern
Ok, that may be so, but without trying it we'll never know. You could implement this at the municipal level first, see how it works, iron out the kinks if any are found and then scale it up bit by bit. The whole idea that a politician can say anything and only be held accountable many years later is a pretty big flaw, possibly bigger than the flaw of having multiple election cycles until we find people that do keep their word.
Presumably you are human, no? The ability to undo a decision at any time significantly reduces the impact of the decision. How much effort do you spend deciding what to eat for lunch? How much effort would you spend if it's what you're going to eat for lunch every day for the next 4 years?
> Ok, that may be so, but without trying it we'll never know
Of course we can. Take the US dominant two-party system, and look at the approval rating for politicians. Look at how many times it crosses the 50% line. Some would only be in office for a few weeks before being replaced, but then who would replace them? What if the previous candidate has a better job already? Does The Party now get to pick someone? How about when approval ratings move back and forth between 48% and 52% over the course of just a few weeks, multiple times?
You've got that backwards. With the people that voted for them the bulk of the politicians are still happy. A recalled vote would simply deduct one from the result as set and would leave the rest of the results in place until the balance point was reached. That would not be something that would 'go back and forth', you could only do that once and when the withdrawn votes balance out (which typically for both parties would normally happen at roughly the same rate) would you call a new election.
So that would not happen nearly as often as you might think, and would likely require a fairly major turn of opinion before it would have any effect.
The two party system by the way is very much broken, as is the influence of money in American politics but that's a completely different - and local - affair.
What distinguishes involuntary falsehoods (e.g., misquoting someone unintentionally, or basing an argument on data later proved to be false) from lies in this case? How would you go about enacting this? I think this is a pipe dream, and not something that can (or should) be implemented.
And as for "one way street" voting... that's because voting is an ephemeral act, not a sustained one. Your vote happened in the past and had an effect. You can't change your vote later and suddenly someone else is elected.
> What distinguishes involuntary falsehoods (e.g., misquoting someone unintentionally, or basing an argument on data later proved to be false) from lies in this case?
Nothing, so therefore you would have to do some homework. The news cycle might slow down a bit and I'm not sure that would be a bad thing.
> How would you go about enacting this?
A law would be a good start, possibly one with a bunch of criteria that would make 'false positives' a rarity so that at least initially the stick would be reserved for the most offending cases. If that works well then you can adjust to taste.
> I think this is a pipe dream, and not something that can (or should) be implemented.
That's ok, it is perfectly ok for different people to have different attitudes towards such ideas. But it's novel in the sense that it would create a strong incentive for the press to be cautious rather than jumping on every hype wagon that rolled along.
> And as for "one way street" voting... that's because voting is an ephemeral act, not a sustained one.
Yes, and I propose to change that.
> Your vote happened in the past and had an effect. You can't change your vote later and suddenly someone else is elected.
Not right now, but that too is not set in stone and in theory could be changed. A lot of the things we do and find normal are only that because they are how things are done today. That does not mean they can't be changed.
> What distinguishes involuntary falsehoods (e.g., misquoting someone unintentionally, or basing an argument on data later proved to be false) from lies in this case?
For the vast majority of people (even those who consider themselves apolitical), it will be how much they like the politician in question. My side? Definitely just being misquoted, or taken out of context, or an honest mistake. The other side? A crazed partisan intentionally manipulating the system, a terrible excuse for a human being, and should be jailed before being summarily executed.
Seems like this would further accelerate the trend of news outlets being vanity or ideological projects for the most wealthy. Fewer outlets, less local news coverage, less competition in markets. It's not like they're raking in cash as is.
Would your rules only apply to traditional news orgs like Reuters and Bloomberg, or would it also apply to Infowars and influential YouTube channels, Twitter feeds and Facebook groups? Would it apply to comedians who report the news?
If you don't trust it, don't consume it. Eventually trust either wins, or you don't care about it very much. The government, fines and aggressive rules won't fix it. Media is a product, not some kind of right.
I would like the ability of pointing out journalistic bias in other media so customers stop listening to them, and this requires source materials to compare to the way the article is written. Our problem is not how we consume media, but how others do; Enabling a sane discussion to highlight that the article misinterpreted the source is part of the discussion. As long as we live in the same voting space, I want entry points to criticize their articles.
I wonder why journalists don't voluntarily to this? It seems obvious to me that high quality journalism should cite sources and methods, if only to protect themselves from future criticism if their news reporting turns out to be wrong. At least then they can point at the fault publicly, explain how it happened, and what they are changing to make sure it doesn't happen again.
In some cases, they might deliberately not want to give certain sources, but in that case I'd like them to explain their reasons as a footnote of each article.
I suspect citing sources and methods in detail might be considered 'boring' for the average reader if done within the prose of the article.
Perhaps what is needed is a new normal that articles online will have footnotes which are only shown to those who want to see them - that way the body of the article can be short and succinct, with the 'borig' citations in the footnotes.
This assumes the goal of news is to be accurate. It is not. News exists to sell advertising and media advertising is presented in (i.e. TV, Newspaper, Website subscriptions). Funny thing is the news industry gets it right a lot more than state-controlled news agencies. The incentive is there - selling more - to take some huge risks to find big stories and report on the powerful, rich and elites bad behavior.
If you inject personal liability to journalism, the news industry is dead in six months.
Any source on the claim that private news is more accurate than state-controlled ones? Seems like a bold claim if I'm looking at the yellow papers in most countries.
All that sounds well, but it also has some nasty side effects. Anonymous sources and whistle blowers would not be possible anymore while very much needed.
And make journalism a registered profession like doctors, dentists, structural engineers, architects etc with a legally enforced professional code of conduct. Every article should be cryptographically signed by the journalist in a way that links to their professional registration. If a story is found to be inaccurate then this gets noted on the journalists professional reputation page at the 'institute of journalists' or whatever you call it, a whole bunch of stories with major inaccuracies would lead to them being struck off, to be judged by a jury consisting of other journalists, lay representatives and representatives of the legal profession[0]. If you want to use the word 'News' anywhere to describe your newspaper or website, then you must use a registered journalists and their reputation badges would need to be displayed by every article.
[0]This is how it works for Architects, I don't see why journalists should be any different given that they can influence the direction of whole democracies.
Because some bully will decide that his opponents are all liars, revoke their credentials, and ban their speech. This happens all the time around the world.
>And make journalism a registered profession like doctors, dentists, structural engineers, architects etc with a legally enforced professional code of conduct
Here I'm thinking, "If i were a dictator, this would be a really fantastic way to control the narrative".
You don't need all that, you only need legal repercussions for inaccuracy. I understand there are European and Asian countries with laws like this? Is anyone familiar with how often such incursions are prosecuted?
In denmark we have something called Pressenævnet (Danish Press Council), they can not fine companies but they can force them to have a have an article that says that there were an error in their article, they can also send them on to other institutions if they think that it was criminal negliance. They also post all the cases publicly after they are done. What they can do is defined in the "The Media Liability Act", and what they see as pad jounlalism is defined in the "The Press Ethical Rules" both are linked below if you are interested.
> Combine this with a fine for the publication if they failed to verify information with a reasonable effort...
Ain't gonna work, ever.
Who is going to impose and collect "the fine"? Who will judge what is a "reasonable" effort? How?
The only mechanism we have that is even close is libel lawsuits, and that's only when actual damage is done and demonstrable (sort-of, depending on if you can afford to retain an entire wing of lawyers, like Peter Thiel).
> list of sources of information and original research conducted
This is something that is ostensibly already in a typical article. Or are you suggesting that the reporter list everything that was researched, and every one who was talked to, regardless if it made it into the published version of the article?
> This is something that is ostensibly already in a typical article.
It really isn't though. Most sources are not mentioned in a typical article. Prominent interviewees are mentioned by name, but more often then not information comes from a quick Google search, someone not established enough to be mentioned (eg you would mention a professor, but not a young research assistant/secretary), or even Reddit.
Not to mention that a large amount of articles contains no original research at all. Often it's a press release, a rewrite of a press agency release, or just a copy/paste and rewrite of some other website.
> but more often then not information comes from a quick Google search
Sure, and this info should be attributed to the reporter, who gets full blame when it's wrong. Though I do agree it'd be nice (in a world where the First Amendment didn't exist) if there were a rule banning such weasel phrasing such as "Some say that" and "according to several experts [who are never named or specifically referred to]"
As for articles being a rewrite of press releases or other articles; yes, that's obviously an issue, and one that many journalists get irate about. But even in most of those cases, the sourcing is clear: "[Regurgitated rewrite of news lede], as first reported by the New York Times [link to original article]".
But for the archetypical article containing original reporting, here's an example of how a source involved in an article might not get listed:
The reason why the expert wasn't named, even though he was very helpful throughout the reporting process, was because the article's ultimately relied on the content of original documents. The expert helped lead the reporters to those documents, but his expert opinion was not needed and thus not cited for the article's authoritative conclusions.
It's true that reporters often won't credit where they first got a tip or where they saw something. But if they do their own parallel reconstruction – e.g. they first read an anecdote from a viral tweet/Reddit thread, but then they track down the original source themselves – as a reader, I ultimately care who the reporter and their editor explicitly say they vetted/vouch for, when it comes to the published version of the info.
I think providing only the used sources is enough and the journalist should do all what is reasonable possible to find the original source of a news, so avoid speaking about something they read/heard from X and X said he read/seen from Y and Y from Z , the journalist should try to find the original source(if possible). For things that should remain anonymous they should describe how credible is the source and content.
It would be really nice if there was a commit history on all news articles that are published. So many stories these days get silently updated or even rewritten with no acknowledgement.
As an FYI, Vinci is one of the most corrupt companies in France [1], and one of the largest beneficiary of the French equivalent of US pork barrel [2][3][4].
Bloomberg is unique in being somewhat independent of the AP-AFP-Reuters stranglehold that is described with appropriate skepticism here:
https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/
It would be interesting if that independence were regarded as a threat.
Classic case of the carrot and the stick. Freedom of the press radically changed public access to news for the good. Was it too powerful? Back when you had to own a printing press for mass consumption -- No it wasn't.
But it is now.
The demand for updates and net-new information creates markets for information. There are too many pretenders and pranksters now because there are no barriers to posting on the internet.
Until we start breaking down the anonymity of users posting data to indiviuals there will be no one to answer for bad reporting.
Punishment should be doled out via the platform posted, similar to FCC going after radio station DJ's and ultimately the broadcast network itself. This will create an underworld for news. The news underworld will need to have a few well known paragons and pranksters to bring a sense of balance and uncertainty to non-regulated news.
First step would be to introduce small fines for sites that claim their information is accurate. Classifying and identifying the obvious from NYT/WSJ from Reddit and 4chan. Once the extremes are identified, lessons learned can be applied slowly to the middle of the pack.
There's a permanent reminder above 4chan's most notorious board that "only a fool would take anything posted here as a fact." (or something along those lines).
To respond to the entirety of you ludicrous idea: No thanks.
This story is an example of why existing regulation already seems to do the job.
No, they literally don't. In the past reporters got bonuses for the number of market-moving stories they broke, but that was predicated on the stories being accurate. That bonus program is no longer extant.
It seems like that would make it extremely to keep journalistic integrity while working under such a compensation / commission structure.
How are you supposed to trust a Bloomberg article when the writers are designing them specifically in a way to try and purposely move the market? They would have every incentive to exaggerate, embellish, and even go so far as lie as shown in this instance.
They also had an incentive to ignore or deprioritize stale or low impact stories. The bonuses required that the market impact be durable, and the stories still had to be edited to fit house style.
There is no real penalty for publishing fake news as if it was truth. Whole websites and media companies do it as a matter of course (often for political or manipulative purposes). 5.6M to Bloomberg is pocket change. There are of course still journalists with a burning desire to report the truth, but it's far easier and profitable to ignore it today.
When the internet started we all thought that the truth would finally prevail only to find out the non-truth is easier to amplify.
> There is no real penalty for publishing fake news as if it was truth
I'm not sure what you mean here. If you publish fake information about a public company, couldn't that be considered security fraud by the SEC? I'm not an expert at all, and don't know the details of what is or isn't actually considered a security fraud, so I may be completely off here.
@dang - arguably misleading title, please consider renaming to “Bloomberg LP fined €5m for publishing fake press release”. Current title can be read that Michael Bloomberg was personally fined.
We changed the title as part of changing the URL to Reuters. Submitted title was "Bloomberg fined $5.6M for publishing fake press release".
Actually the originally submitted title was "Bloomberg was taught a $5.6M lesson on factchecking", but the submitter edited it a few minutes later, which was good because that one broke the site guidelines badly.
I initially thought Michael Bloomberg had issued a fake press release.
Title should really be "Bloomberg LP fined..." to distinguish the company from the man.
American exceptionalism is a uniquely American thing. Freedom of speech in the constitution is not. Even Cuba has freedom of speech guaranteed by the constitution.
It's ... complicated. France does have a concept of "liberté d'expression" (literally "freedom of speech"), but it isn't equivalent to the US 1st amendment.
That won't help you if you don't read french, but you can see here that while the "Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen" from 1789 has a concept somehow similar to "freedom of speech", a lot of exceptions have been created since then.
In practice you're correct that France doesn't have what US citizen mean by "freedom of speech". Though that becomes messy because the literal translation of the expression actually exists in the law, but with a different meaning.
Which means that freedom of speech is (in some cases) limited because of the religious freedom of others. It doesn't mean that freedom of speech doesn't exist, it means that the "balancing exercise" between certain Rights is performed differently.
Edit: There is no state in the world where there exists some sort of "absolute freedom of speech".
The "freedom of speech" discussed here is a legal concept, known as the 1st amendment of the US constitution. The common definition isn't really relevant. And it's true that France doesn't actually have such a thing guaranteed by the law. The closest you have is "liberté d'expression" which isn't as broad as "freedom of speech" in the US sense, and doesn't guarantee the same level of freedom.
It's not clear to me why "actual freedom of speech" should be equal to what is guaranteed by the US constitution. That would be like me saying "The US doesn't have the 'Right to Life'" because I'm exclusively applying the European definition of that term.
Freedom of expression/freedom of speech is guaranteed in some way in all Western nations, the difference – as you correctly point out – is the degree to which other rights are also taken into account when applying the Right to freedom of speech. But that's an extremely important distinction and it cannot be said that France doesn't have Freedom of speech.
Here's a more in-depth explanation from 2017 (the incident happened in 2016): https://www.complianceweek.com/the-vinci-code-fake-news-pres...