this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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I feel like this could be self-limiting — once enough independent verifications have been completed and released, the collection of them should reach a point where its deemed unnecessary to further prove its veracity. I think it would be akin to meta-analysis.
You need far less info to reach a bar for journalistic veracity than you do for a meta analysis paper. The question is where in the process the effort is being aggregated.
If a journalist phones a couple of sources, hears from them the same thing they are seeing somewhere and publishes that information, then the fact-checking has been done once and reaches thousands or millions of people.
If the way the information is disseminated requires those thousands or millions to do the fact-check themselves using the same process, then that is entirely impractical, which was my original point. Crowdsourced fact-checking is always going to be less reliable and exponentially more work than properly verified broadcast news sources. Even if many of them share their fact check, we have plenty of data to suggest the reach of that correction will be much smaller and it will still require a lot of private effort to correct the original info.
That's the point of the entire "it's a real job" argument. Journalists are doing a lot of legwork once and we're all relying on that job to acquire a lot of our information instead of all of us doing the same legwork again. The two problems we're facing are 1) that this trust opens us up to propaganda from activist or opinionated journalism, and 2) that we're no longer just getting neatly processed info that has gone through a journalistic process, we're also getting a firehose of misinformation from many individual content generators over the Internet.
Those are both hard problems to manage.
Sure, but would it not be better if they had also just cited the transcript of their contact with those sources? I understand that the news outlet can just fabricate a source, but at least a source will give readers an official starting point for investigation rather than just blind continuous skepticism. I'm of the opinion that a sketchy source is better than no source at all.
Well, no, a sketchy source should not be published in the first place. That's the job he journalist is supposed to be doing during the verification stage.
The process we're discussing isn't about verifying the final article, it's about verifying the source itself.
I agree that they may be hard problems to manage perfectly, but I don't agree that citing sources won't put a dent in the issue. Take your first problem:
Say you have an article that says "A young man stole a car.". Just as a very basic example, language like "young" is an opinion — it's not an exact definition of age and is left to the reader for how they interpret it. Such interpretations open the door for emotional bias. I think it would be a different story if the article actually cited the age, or simply stated the age with a citation for where they know it from.
See, your point is exactly why the way you are thinking about this doesn't work. You're almost there, just coming at it from the wrong direction.
Yes, basic language choices indeed create an emotional framing to a story.
Basic language choices create a framing to a story EVERY TIME. You can't avoid it. Any mediocre professional can alter the framing of a story under any style guide, with any requirements for information sourcing.
Editorial guidance for neutrality can be enforced. By an editor. A human person that reviews a piece of writing and assesses its skew and its style to correct it if it doesn't fit the requirements.
But as a rule? Using citations? If the average journalist wanted to present a specific framing the guidelines you are suggesting would barely slow them down.
"A young man stole a car" "Man, 28 (link), steals car" "Man, 28 (link), of latino descent (link) commits crime in our town (link)"
Which of these is complying with your guidelines closest and which one is creating a more biased narrative?