[caseysoftware]

My wife was a political reporter in DC, covering the Hill, the Pentagon and White House at various times. One time we were watching CNN and they mentioned a briefing at the Pentagon and she noted she was in the same one. Halfway through the coverage, she jumped up and said "that's not what they said!" I was confused.. she went back to her bag and handed me her notebook which contradicted their coverage.

It's not unique to any particular medium, news source, or person. Many, many people have an agenda and/or ignorance and portray things accordingly.. not always malicious but incomplete at best, wrong at worst.

[Natsu]

This is why I assume most political coverage, especially that from partisans of either party, is mostly nonsense. To get the real story you have to find and read primary sources. Any "news" sites that don't give those I assume are lying, at best, until I have sources to corroborate what they said. The "news" these days is mostly made up of opinion pieces and it spends entirely too much time looking to troll us with cheap outrage articles as clickbait.

Random independent coverage from bloggers, e.g. Popehat, tends to be much better informed than people rushing to incite us on a deadline. This goes double for anything the least bit technical, like law.

Sadly, there just aren't enough sources like that to actually dig into most stories.

[chiefalchemist]

It is nonsense. The problem is it's not something most people realize and/accept. They hear "The sky is purple" on the channel they usually watch, said by the pleasant looking and sounding talking head they're so fond of. No need to look up and double ckeck. Yup! The sky is purple. Case closed.

Facebook and Twitter would be ghost towns without this disconnect.

[kbenson]

Well, that's because the only way to get through life in this day and age is to pick some people you accept as authorities on sobjects, and listen to their opinion and use it to form an initial basis for your own if you haven't already got one.

The trick, which people seem to be generally bad at, is:

a) limiting the scope of authority you attribute to someone

b) not immediately discounting contradictory evidence but using it to judge whether you need to pry deeper yourself or to discount some of that authority you've vested in them

c) actually remembering how authoritative the source was when repeating the information or using it as the basis for other assumptions

d) actually looking into issues deeper that you decide to care about and find the truth, not just was some semi-authoritative mouth piece repeated to you

For example, I try to make a habit of prefixing or postfixing statements in conversation with disclaimers ("At least that's what I heard or seem to remember reading, but I'm not sure how that I'm not sure how true it is.") if I'm not fairly certain of the information.

[icelancer]

Or just judge them by their actions, not anything that is said.

Examine their voting record, lobby donations, and primary information and action. Decide from there.

[ithkuil]

At some point you have to trust some sort of authority that provides you with those records, along with the required context.

[chiefalchemist]

Why is that? Why can't you keep an open mind, traverse multiple sources and draw your own conclusions? Think of it as a diversified portfolio. I'm not asking for more time, just that it we spread out.

Without that, we get the barely binary system that we have. The MSM can be lazy and non-journalistic because no one bothers to notice. No one cares.

[icelancer]

Are you insinuating that voting records are faked? Because raw data of voting is what I'm referring to.

[WalterBright]

I also know of a news event first hand, and then watched with shock the news coverage of it later. It wasn't remotely political, it was clearly just sloppy "get it in the can and move on".

The umbrage taken by the mainstream media in the last year being called "fake news" is a bit amusing. I've often wondered what percentage of it all (and what we know of history) is complete nonsense.

[Natsu]

A lot of our news reports are quick summaries written up in a few minutes by a busy person who quickly gathered whatever info was at hand and not so much of the long, in-depth investigations of the past.

So... likely quite a lot. I trust verifiable sources a lot more than I trust any outlet, even the supposedly reputable ones. I mean, just how long did it take for Jayson Blair to get caught fabricating stories in the NYT? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair

[meri_dian]

This conversation has progressed for a while without anyone mentioning that the sentiments expressed are essentially in support of Trump's accusations of fake news. So we can have a conversation on HN in support of Trump's "fake news" and in recognition of severe bias in media that would indicate "fake news" isn't as much a slur as it is a matter of fact statement.

What am I missing?

[Natsu]

A dismissal of something as 'fake news' is a bit too facile, that's mere namecalling without more backing. A better analysis is to note what sources of information were drawn upon, how they can be corroborated (or not), and whether they're sufficient to make the case the author wants. I admit to using a simplistic heuristic of "if I can't see any of your sources, your 'news' is just a rumor" but I use it even on news I would be inclined to agree with. The articles that pass this filter are far fewer than those which fail it for any remotely partizan subject. There's just so much noise of the form "my inside sources say that X will finally put [Trump|Hillary] in jail!"

And a more facile analysis obscures the fact that there is yet a bit of fact-based reporting getting lost in the noise. Authors who normally link to actual primary sources and do real analysis instead of only cheap opinion, albeit sometimes imperfectly. So more Glenn Grenwald, Popehat or Groklaw and less Fox/Buzzfeed/CNN.

There are real problems here, but political partisans tend to make more fake news instead of doing anything useful to solve it.

[aero142]

Trump uses this to promote a worldview that facts are whatever you want them to be. As with most things Trump, any kernel of truth is immediately ruined by some even more false, stupid and incompetent idea he wants to promote.

[intended]

Becuase trump attacks facts which people know are true from multiple corroborated sources.

But even that is wrong.

Firstly fake news is exactly that - actually fabricated websites designed to look like “the Sacramento beast” or what have you, filled with content that will sound legitimate to an American conservative and trick them into clicking on ads.

That’s fake news and it’s actually not even news, it’s more like surprise literature/acting to con people.

Trump on the other hand argues for example that he has the biggest crowds, when he doesn’t by every device that recorded images of the subject.

Fake news is in this case is just a term that relies on the audience to impute meaning to it.

[burfog]

Crowd images don't tell the whole story.

There is grass on the National Mall. During the Obama inauguration, people walked on it as you would expect. The damage cost several $million to fix. In photos of the Trump inauguration crowd, notice that the sparsely-occupied area is white. It was covered in translucent boxes to protect the grass. (the boxes were borrowed from stadiums that use them for events like concerts) The boxes can be walked on, but people would hesitate. They are not inviting like grass. This kept many people out of the photos.

Another issue is that the central area of the photo was blocked off into different security sectors. Due to violence, entry was often blocked. Many people showed up for the inauguration but were unable to get to where they could see it, which would be the empty areas of the photos.

In the usual pair of photos, the Trump photo is cropped relative to the Obama photo. The physical area seems to differ by roughly a factor of two.

There is also the question of time when the photos were taken.

[michaelmrose]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media/white-hou...

The physical area is virtually the same. They merely appear to be taken from slightly different vantage points. Both show the area where you might reasonably expect people to observe from. They are taken at the same time of day differing by a matter of 5-20 minutes.

You aren't even nitpicking your statement about the area differing by a factor of 2 is a clear lie designed to sow doubt. Please don't bring your alternative facts here.

[burfog]

"In the usual pair of photos"

Those are not the usual pair of photos.

[michaelmrose]

Its a pair of photos taken at the height of each event. Its also the ones I saw in the news at the time. If you are familiar with some that look like its fudged to show trump in a bad light its probably from stuff conservatives shared on facebook where they picked 2 dissimilar pics, made up a story surrounding them about how the news is out to disrespect trump, and yelled about fake news.

[intended]

You seem to focus on the pictures, but completely ignore the fact that Trumps use of the term "fake news" is in itself, "fake news" by his updated definition.

[caseysoftware]

Fascinating, isn't it?

Almost like people believe the same thing said very much the same way but from a completely different source. Thanks, I'm here all weekend. ;)

[RyanZAG]

It's not the same way though, is it? Trump has the whole 'average American' speech pattern down. Headline grabbing, 'high energy', and a call to action.

> FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

He doesn't use the intellectual tone when he talks about it.

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows.

For a certain type of person -- the type that reads HN -- this scholarly style is what we expect. It lays out the biases and beliefs we hold in a manner we expect. It backs it up with some seemingly solid logic that we can relate to. We've all seen at least one badly written scientific article where we know the facts better. So we take it as fact and agree with it.

Is there any difference between them? Of course not, they're saying the same thing, but in a different linguistic style. It does take a bit of work to recognize that as most people have fairly deep biases towards linguistic style that are difficult to suppress. As an exercise to prove this to yourself, try sum up the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in a way that would appeal to a non-academic.

Here's the interesting part: Trump picked up this linguistic style only in the last few years. While we don't like it, his voter base probably wouldn't have voted for him if he started his sentences "briefly stated". Know your audience, often the presentation of your argument is far more important than the argument itself.