[rm_-rf_slash]

I agree with the parent but I began reading the New York Times every morning at the age of 12, wondering to myself "why is there so much speculation going on around Iraq and WMDs? We haven't found anything so why does everybody want to invade?"

I still like the Times to an extent, but they like many other papers get it wrong from time to time. Doesn't mean I should leave and never look back, but instead I have taken to critically thinking about every story I read from every source to come to a conclusion about an issue.

I don't think fake news or poor journalism is a problem. The problem is people and their lack of critical thinking, often substituted for blind acceptance of a narrative that fits their preferred reality.

[enraged_camel]

The difference is that when NYTimes gets something wrong, it is not out of sheer malice and desire to mislead people. It's because their sources were wrong and the journalists didn't do a good enough job verifying the information.

Fake news on the other hand are literally made up lies. The overwhelming majority of fake news articles have no basis in reality, period. They tend to be written by people who want nothing other than to get page views.

[untog]

You're getting downvoted for this and I don't think you should be. The recent flood of fake news is very different to honest reporting that fails, and even very different to opinion-led reporting that presents a side. It is deliberately factually incorrect news, created and promoted simply to get clicks and profit from advertising. There is absolutely no journalistic merit to it.

[icebraining]

I didn't downvote, but one can agree that the two approaches are very different, without accepting the presumption of the intentions behind the NYT approach. Are they more honest, or do they just happen to serve a different audience?

After all, telling outright lies is just amateurish; the NYT has been shaping society's perspective on facts for over a century.

[imron]

> The difference is that when NYTimes gets something wrong, it is not out of sheer malice and desire to mislead people

That's right, because when Wikileaks revealed high levels of collusion between media outlets and the DNC/Clinton campaign, placing and pulling articles/stories to present a specific narrative, it wasn't out of desire to mislead, rather it was only a desire to 'correct the record'. /s

[intended]

Which is still business as usual and has solutions elsewhere.

America and the world have a situation where advertisers need to prey on the Id and emotions of users in order to sell widgets. The advent of the internet crushed the ability of media firms to stay afloat and replaced the ecosystem with many upstarts who also faced the same pressure.

In short there's an overheating attention grabbing system when it comes to the media, which is its own issue that needs to be solved.

Unfortunately there's a new hitherto unbelievable problem, where people fabricate complete and utter lies/fiction and can sail it down the streams of social media.

This is different from the older issue in that these are not major news agencies, but websites masquerading/camouflaging themselves as a news outlet and fabricating stories designed to directly press emotional buttons without having to deal with facts.

A closer model is conspiracy theories.

[imron]

> fabricating stories designed to directly press emotional buttons without having to deal with facts.

I agree this is a problem. It also happened rather equally on both sides.

[intended]

The sides don't matter.

If you really want to know how it works, please take a look at a recent a paper co-authored by Alessandro Bessi. It came out a week ago. It should be accessible for most people on HN.