[cdrini]

The more I think about the state of news, the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism. Something similar to a health inspection score. With considerations like:

- News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources.

- News need to have history of modifications to their article.

- Factual errors will cause dings to their score.

- Revenue sources/tax forms need to be public to find conflicts of interest.

If a news site wants to sell it's soul to make ad money, that's fine, but I want to see some sort of "F" rating on that site. There's no incentive for news sites to make good news right now.

Edit: Or, linking to this article: a sort of "nutrition facts" label for news

[kranke155]

I think you're going about this in a way that won't make sense to anyone but individuals like yourself.

People watching Fox News all day can't possibly think that it's a picture of reality, unless they use their intuition and rational systems in exactly the opposite sense that you are doing here (and this system of ratings would serve). People are not interested in more information, they are interested in the right information. Information that's belief affirming.

These individuals are using their "survival mode" default setting of understanding reality, not the scientific, rational, system 2 type thinking you're using here.

They feel like they're constantly under attack, so they join a system-world where constantly being under attack is validated for them.

There's no overlap between "let's give people more information" and fixing the actual problem. The actual problem isn't lack of information, but the overwhelming lack of emotional balancing and maturity to take in information you don't like.

[cdrini]

I can't say for certain but I'm not so sure the people you're describing are a sizeable majority. I think most people are just watching news and doing their best. If a news site has a "C" rating on it -- which would require some sort of government regulation to enforce which would be a whole other thing -- which is then clickable and let's you see "exactly" what it has that rating ( eg "17 inaccuracies in last month [links] > 10" ), it could help (a) incentivise the news site to have better standards, (b) incentivise the watcher that they might have to be more diligent. The main thing is: provide any incentive to news to be more reputable.

[kranke155]

If they weren’t a sizeable majority, I don’t think we’d be having the same kind of leaders we’re getting in the west tbh.

[marcosdumay]

I large part of it is that the leader selection is highly oligopolized, and you are partially in denial about how undesirable the other candidates are. (Probably because you see the need to pick them, as they are the rational choice, but you can't feel aligned with their actual values, because they are horrible.)

[kranke155]

It's all connected. The oligopoly of leader selection is highly influenced by the owners of media, which usually are aiming to influence national policy to their preference.

The destruction of the newspaper and the "liberty of information" of the internet is now compressed through information warfare, or as Steve Bannon puts it "flooding the zone with shit".

You flood the main channels (social media now) with disinformation and misinformation, or even information calculated to create as much anger as possible (Cambridge Analytica knew that making people angry was the easiest way to make them change their minds). You use bot networks and sockpuppets to spread it.

Through that you get the same overall effects as when newspapers were a thing - even with "unlimited" channels, they're all showing what you want them to show. You flooded the zone with what you want people to see, and you made it so that it follows the response that the algorithm will propagate it even more (sharing, liking).

Overall the effect is the same. And for the same reason. Those controlling the information want to control leadership, leadership choices, and leadership selection. That's the target.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is why Bob Mercer bought Cambridge Analytica (an information warfare firm that was doing counter terrorism work for NATO) and put Steve Bannon in charge. Influencing elections.

[marcosdumay]

Yes, it's a complex self-reinforcing system.

But blaming the consequences on the capacity of random people to decide for themselves is a completely wicked and wrong conclusion to take from it.

[JeremyNT]

I suspect part of this is that "news junkies" are also more inclined to be "likely voters" and vice-versa, so you have some selection bias towards these people in the electorate.

[mistermann]

Our "good" leaders are only good because they are "measured" (perceived) on an absolute scale. This is due to our heavily ingrained cultural norms and beliefs.

[standardUser]

Yeah, and lots of people eat junk food despite the nutritional labels. But no one in their right mind would suggest scrapping the those labels. We should always push for more information for consumers.

[kranke155]

Junk food makes people fat.

It has a noticeable, immediate effect.

Accuracy ratings for news would just make people say your rating is biased, I think.

[cdrini]

I think with news we have a benefit that it's generally all online, so we can link to the rating page and further link to the places where they failed. Unlike a nutrition label where you have to like buy a mass spectrometer to verify their accuracy, with news checks you can view the failed checks and links to the articles that caused them to fail and verify it yourself. But that does require the checks being really basic; things that could be open to a lot of interpretation wouldn't work, cause folks could then argue the interpretation is biased.

[outime]

We should start understanding that "independent" rankings won't ever work. Let's not even get started with "fact-checking" places which we can count by dozens per country now, as they all have their own interpretations (or otherwise a single one alone would be enough).

For such a thing to work, it needs to be funded. At the end, it doesn't matter if it comes from public or private hands, it's going to be leaning towards one direction or another, then a group of people will consider it the absolute truth and other group of people will create their own site for "fact-checking".

If humans cannot possibly be objective and independent (yes, that's what I believe after 30+ years in this planet and having met multiple people), then news cannot possibly be. Bearing in mind such a limitation, let's think how this can be possibly improved.

I personally gave up on news being informative and just see it as entertainment - it's a narrative business.

[cdrini]

I think it can work, but will require a very well designed set of rules.

For example, with fact checking, some fact checking is easy. Eg if an article says "the unemployment rate last year was X%". You have to do some research to determine what measure of unemployment they're using, but boom, you can say it is factually incorrect if no measure lists that number. This process is even easier if it's linked to the data source. These are likely the only types of facts that can be checked. This is limiting, but at least it creates some sort of check on what feels like a runaway industry.

Statements like "he was the best president since X" is an unverifiable statement. "best" isn't qualified. An article with a statement like this should immediately be dinged. And it's fine to have a site that makes statements like this! But just not a news site.

Things like bias or swing are not really possible to do as part of this. This is mostly trying to make it matter when news sites drop their standards.

[yunwal]

The unemployment rate is far from straightforward. Things like "who is counted as part of the workforce" and "what is employment" - the definitions change pretty often, and a well-rounded source would also have to look at something like COVID and explain how it might have affected unemployment. In many cases, saying "the unemployment rate was X%" with no context would be journalistic malpractice.

[outime]

But why would you bother with this? If you want to know last year's unemployment rate objectively speaking, then you just head to wherever the statistics are published by your government and see it yourself. Well, if you can trust your government's statistics that is (and this is an extremely important "if").

So I doubt people are coming to a news site to read a one-liner with some statistic, they want more development, perhaps adding some opinions in between, comparing it with previous governments, whatever.

But yeah, there's not much business in a "news site" that'd just copy-paste statistics.

[cdrini]

This is just the bare minimum standards level that a news organisation should meet. And this isn't based on a hypothetical; here's an article from the CBC: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-records-its-...

The graph is entirely incorrect and contradicts the numbers in the paragraph just before it. And good luck finding the source for that statistic I spent half an hour trying to! And all the discussion about this article online was incredibly confused since people were drawing the wrong conclusions from the graph.

I think this journalist and this newspaper should be dinged when errors like this are made. (And also dinged since it hasn't been corrected months after the article was published).

This is just one of many checks that help differentiate lower quality news from higher quality news.

[bsenftner]

Well, step one requires the news receiver to have critical analysis capabilities they apply to the news they receive. That means education which instills critical thinking, which if you've noticed these days is treated like satanic worship by those in control of the entire education vertical.

[mistermann]

> If humans cannot possibly be objective

What if we were to try?

Humans also could not run a 4-minute mile, or build a machine that can fly.

[Levitz]

And in that sense, we can't.

One person doing something and that something being the norm are wildly different asks.

[mistermann]

I agree: if something requires trying, and we are unable to try, then we will surely not succeed. (And I agree we do not try, but perhaps it requires trying to try, or something weird like that.)

But then look at all we've achieved, and sometimes all it takes is one or two people to try and a new movement is catalyzed, gaining steam over time.

Optimism can also be helpful.

[xpe]

I also want news organizations to be more transparent and honest. The incentives are complicated. Perhaps some sort of ratings system could help.

I think I’d be willing to go further. Purely from an economic perspective, there are negative externalities that result from poor quality news organizations. Current market mechanisms seem to reward polarization.

So what do we do?

A common response is: let’s educate people to pay more attention to their critical thinking and media diet. This can work if people change habits to align with higher level thinking. With more high-quality aggregation options, the easier this gets for individuals.

An uncommon response (that would attract the ire of many) would be to impose economic penalties on the organizations that correspond to their negative externalities. Perhaps tax them like cigarettes. It is hard to think of targeted policy interventions that don’t have all sorts of loopholes.

In broad strokes, perhaps the best solutions I know about at present are carrots. Spend generously on high-quality news organizations.

(This is just a first draft and could stand a lot of improvement.)

[pjc50]

There's a problem that traditional news gathering regards it as valid to print X if they can find a source saying X and print "X said ...". They consider that to have done their duty. In an era where political figures have neither a sense of honour nor an obligation to the truth, and therefore routinely lie about everything, this leads to the newspaper repeating and amplifying those lies.

(a recent example: a lot of places had to issue apologies and corrections over Imane Khalif due to quoting disreputable sources at face value)

[tiktir]

I love the idea of nutrition facts. AllSides has sort of started doing this. They measure left/right lean for articles and news sources. Newsweek has now included a left/right lean indicator in all of their articles from AllSides.

While the lean of an article is not a measure of factual errors. It at least is a move in the right direction. Maybe one day they will include a nutrition facts.

The other problem I see is who does the fact checking? That cannot be cheap.

[boxed]

You can't have news be a business. Period. It's really that simple. It's like having schools be a business, or healthcare, roads, regulation agencies, etc.

You can't produce a system where the EPA gets its funding from the amount of pollution it stops for example. That's a perverse incentive. These types of organizations are by definition cost centers. And must be treated as such.

[hackandthink]

In Germany, public (öffentlich-rechtlich) media are generously financed with a household tax. Unfortunately, the quality of reporting is still poor. Most of the money is spent on stupid entertainment and sports reporting.

The reduction of direct state/party influence (2014) has also achieved little.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundfunkrat

[boxed]

Yea, Sweden has a similar system and problem. A bit part is that the public broadcasters think they are competing on views. Which is rather wrongheaded I think. They should focus on quality and education, not on just getting views without substance.

[zbentley]

That gets tricky fast. News as nonprofit might work, but would likely have even more severe resourcing issues than smaller newsrooms are having today.

If news sources were publicly funded like schools, that compromises the very important news function of reporting on the government.

[boxed]

> If news sources were publicly funded like schools, that compromises the very important news function of reporting on the government.

Not necessarily. In Sweden the public service system has independent right to basically tax the population. So it's not the government paying the news, it's the news taxing the country directly. I'm not saying that doesn't have its own issue, of course it does, but it's a smart tradeoff I think.

[morning-coffee]

If the news is a cost center, who pays for it? I'm assuming your implied solution is to roll-up news production/curation to be under the federal government? (Assuming U.S. here, since you mentioned EPA.) Aren't the strings of government ultimately pulled by forces leading back to businesses? Isn't lobbying more influential than individual tax payers in how their taxes are spent? Do you really think the end result would be materially better (in the U.S.) if news were only provided by the government?

New has always been a business. The 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution was put in place precisely to prevent government from controlling the press.

I think, like the junk food analogy implies, it's up to the end consumer to decide what to purchase. Yes, there are psychological and neurological factors at play... sugar is addicting, and there is a dopamine hit in anticipating what's behind the click-bait... but if enough individuals realize there are better things to eat and better information to consume, these business peddling junk would go out of business.

Or, another possible solution, while I'm spitballing... ban paid advertising in some ways. Let local community advertising by local business through, by all means, but ban ads to consumers by conglomerates who operate outside of some radius?

(Corrected typo.)

[boxed]

The US has basically removed laws and taboos against theft and bribery for corporations. So yea, I agree while that stands the country will have trouble doing anything useful with government.

[cheeseomlit]

Whoever does the scoring will do so based on whether they agree with the sites bias or not instead of any of those criteria. So you're back to square one but now with a false sense of legitimacy

[xpe]

There is a strong chance that bias will affect rankings, to some degree, but:

1. Bias is not all or nothing.

2. There is a large degree of commonality about baseline ethics and quality of life. Polarization accentuates wedge issues disproportionately.

3. There are classes of statements which can be factually assessed.

4. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A step in the right direction combined with other forces can make a positive difference.

[cheeseomlit]

My objection isn't that its good but not perfect, I don't think itd be good at all. So far everyone who's tried to be a neutral arbiter of truth has been a political hack, like politifact and groups like that. Training the public to trust things just because they got a good score from some agency is not going to improve their ability to think critically and be informed, the false sense of legitimacy (and the ability to apply the rules unevenly to make your enemies look illegitimate) would make the problem even more odious

[mistermann]

What if the agency included a detailed description of the high quality thinking process (assuming they had one, no current sites do) that led to the conclusion, in turn teaching people how to think?

This comment section, in this smarter than usual community, is chock full of lazy, heuristic thinking. We can't even try to not make errors on certain/most subjects, it is our nature, suggesting we do not is socially punished.

[cheeseomlit]

That would help, laying out the process used to reach the conclusion in a clear methodical way would be essential. But in general it feels like a technical solution to a social problem- so much of what goes on in the world isn't clear or methodical, so many events that cant possibly be quantified or verified 100% by a third party- and setting the expectation that they can is IMO placing too much trust in the journalistic process. The reader should always have a seed of doubt, always question the motives of the messenger, and I just don't want that doubt to be assuaged while its still warranted.

This approach may work well for reporting that deals with data and science, things that can be incontrovertibly proven, which counts for a lot. But I think that same approach might fall apart when applied to reporting on complex social and political issues.

Then again, the camera has been a technical solution to the same social problem to some extent. Vietnam was a culture shock for a lot of Americans because they could see real firsthand footage of the events for a change, and that increase in awareness through reporting caused a social reckoning. So maybe its just a question of visibility, seeing is believing

[mistermann]

> But in general it feels like a technical solution to a social problem- so much of what goes on in the world isn't clear or methodical, so many events that cant possibly be quantified or verified 100% by a third party- and setting the expectation that they can is IMO placing too much trust in the journalistic process. The reader should always have a seed of doubt, always question the motives of the messenger, and I just don't want that doubt to be assuaged while its still warranted.

I think it would be a good thing if people were introduced to the concept of the unknown, and learned for the first time in their life to be able to reliably identify it.

And it wouldn't be journalists doing this work, this would have to be an entirely new job role, blending skills from several disciplines (philosophy, psychology, geopolitics, etc).

[xpe]

If a rater has a clear set of evaluation criteria and a moderation log, does that do enough to change your view on the value add?

[cheeseomlit]

Maybe- there are just so many variables, and the trust has been so eroded already. It'd have to be super strict for me to be on board, to the point where it's less journalism and more technical writing. "Just the facts ma'am" to the extreme, every sentence is a statement of verifiable fact- no conjecture or interpretation, all that is left to the reader. You won't get many clicks that way, though.

[cdrini]

That's why the key is verifiability. The org doing this should have a fixed list of checks they do, and every violation will be linked. This will limit the types of checks it can do, eg "bias" is a hard check that might not be possible. _but_ something like "every statistic most be supported by direct links to data sources" is, and raised the quality level. Checks like "misleading headlines" would help curb things like clickbait as well.

[cheeseomlit]

I just don't think there's a clean systematic answer to the problem, its a trust issue. Even if links to data sources are required you can find a data source with statistics to support almost anything. Especially when it comes to non-rigorous survey statistics that can be gamed to death or interpreted in a million ways, and that type of junk data is the bread and butter of political hacks

[carlosjobim]

> the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism.

How much do you personally spend subscribing to independent journalism? There are great outlets and journalists closing down and moving on every day, because when push comes to shove, people don't want to pay a dollar to read important news that they care about, even in their own communities.

[freeone3000]

I pay $150 a year for my local paper, but really I only pay $75 because it’s tax-deductible where I live.

[cdrini]

The hope is these ratings could more systematically help support good journalists, since news orgs will keep those journalists employed in order to keep their ranking up.

[qbxk]

Oh so news should work like science? Citations, references, peer reviews! I approve

[gosub100]

Yeah cause no peer reviewed publications have ever committed fraud.