[Air-L] breaking news and fake news - the wash post's russian power grid hackers story

Yosem Companys companys at stanford.edu
Sun Jan 1 14:38:29 PST 2017


Two words: Yellow journalism.

When you are competing in a world where people want sensational news
AND sensational news brings lots of traffic and hence money, print
"baseless claims" and worry about facts later.

To win in this hyper-competitive market, you have to be the first to
report on the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine and accuse the Spaniards for
doing it.

Moreover, as Kalev notes, one person's truth is another person's fake
news. People don't consume information bits that are dichotomously
true or false. They consume stories that come with a context -- who,
why, how, where, when -- and the reader's cultural context and
interpretations (or if you prefer, confirmation bias) determine
whether the stories are deemed true or false at large.

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 12:53 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Robert, that's actually one of the fascinating aspects of all of this - how
> you define "fake news". If you dive back into the history of propaganda
> theory, you'll find some fantastic work on why defining "fake news" is so
> hard - the same set of facts can be used by well-meaning and earnest
> reporters to support wildly different conclusions. Paul Linebarger's
> classic "Psychological Warfare" offers a fantastic primer on this.
>
> If we define "fake news" as solely that news which the person writing it
> knew at the time to be solely and entirely false without any basis in fact
> and start looking at the legal definitions of things like "libel" then
> that's one avenue of approach. But, the discussion that's happening in
> journalism circles right now is really centering on a much broader
> definition of false and misleading news.
>
> Even on this very mailing list people have mentioned the alt-left and
> alt-right as "fake news". Some of that certainly falls into the category of
> outright libel, where the person writing it has posted elsewhere that they
> do solemnly swear that they know what they are writing to be exclusively
> false and devoid of any fact and recognize it to be libel. Yet, much of the
> alt-left and alt-right reporting that is being labeled as "fake news" is
> simply a highly partisan or skewed interpretation of a common set of facts,
> where if you talk with the reporters (and I've talked with several) they
> firmly stand behind what they've written and believe it to be solid
> journalism based on objective empirical fact.
>
> The difference is that when you turn to the Post/NYTimes/etc's journalism,
> there is an expectation of rigorous fact checking and a placement of
> "getting the story right" above "getting the scoop" and being the first to
> print. We all know that isn't always the case and that journalists take
> short cuts and papers make mistakes. But, the focus here is that we need to
> have more transparency on how the media functions.
>
> When papers like the Post and Times no longer treat their online stories as
> "print" and instead treat them as living documents to be edited over time
> and constantly rewritten, that raises all sorts of questions of how we
> trust and understand the information we consume, especially given studies
> on online sharing that show how much of what we share is shared based
> purely on the headline and lede, rather than a full careful reading of the
> entire article.
>
> Setting aside conspiracy theories, the bottom line is that we need much
> greater transparency in the journalism world - we can't just say "trust the
> Post" or any other outlet - we have to start thinking critically about how
> the things we take for granted like the inverted pyramid actually serve to
> enable and power false and misleading news (
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/10/the-inverted-pyramid-and-how-fake-news-weaponized-modern-journalistic-practice/
> ).
>
> Kalev
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Robert Tynes <nativebuddha at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Kalev,
>>
>> Your points about the process of news making are worth considering. But
>> conflating  what the Post did with a discussion of fake news is a bit
>> off-base. The major difference is, despite conspiracy theories about major
>> papers such as the Post, Post reporters do seek out the most empirically
>> evident story possible. They do look for facts.
>>
>> Fake news, on the other hand, seeks to deceive, and to persuade its
>> audience towards more extreme ideological points of view.
>>
>> And motives matter.
>>
>>
>> -Robert
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Jan 1, 2017, at 2:48 PM, kalev leetaru <kalev.leetaru5 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that
>> Russian
>> > hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and
>> > also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.
>> >
>> > What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is
>> > that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media
>> > forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone
>> > follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust
>> > frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact
>> > checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of
>> > transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the
>> Post
>> > declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks
>> > articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how
>> > once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively
>> > changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers.
>> >
>> > I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology
>> > of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback
>> > Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been
>> > rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging
>> the
>> > wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly
>> > rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the
>> > immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over
>> time.
>> >
>> > To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news"
>> > perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major
>> > details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case
>> > the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours
>> after
>> > publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these
>> > initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are
>> > retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general
>> public
>> > - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to
>> the
>> > public.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-
>> news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-
>> russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/
>> >
>> >
>> > Kalev
>> > _______________________________________________
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>>
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