Well, I’ve heard that our local high school is getting a brand new football stadium. But the HS grad running the register at the grocery store is still confused when I give them $5.25 if the total is $1.25.
So around here, it seems that we are excelling at supporting some local construction company. I couldn’t really say beyond that.
We are excelling in sports!!!
Go team.
What would you suggest people do instead?
Who are these people, then? Maybe older and less educated people, but younger people understand that the information they want is out there, and that fact checking is vitally important now that we’re bombarded by facts and factoids 24/7. If Snopes and others are making a difference in how people think, and are providing an important resource for them, then I’d argue they are important, even if we aren’t seeing the impact immediately.
The media is failing because everyone has an agenda they’re pushing, and outright lies are considered just another viewpoint. Also fake neutrality gives credence to dingbat viewpoints that have no business being put in the same spotlight as actual facts.
No such thing. If you’re saying fake neutrality is being unbiased, then you’re correct. However fake neutrality is heavily biased against the truth
To the credit of Fox News, if you’re really day drunk, 5000 sort of looks like 8000.
As you’ve already been informed free blogs are NOT news sites, and bloggers are NOT journalists.
If you feel so very strongly, why not start your own website and be the change you want to see, instead of complaining uselessly on someone else’s.
Rah Rah Rah! Do the game! Win the sports! Yay!
On a quasi-related tangent, I present Weird Al’s “Sports Song”:
and lest @Falcor should step in to tell me to stay on topic, the song (which is social commentary that ranges wider than what it’s title would suggest, I dare say) captures all the generic filler-type elements to which most of our mainstream news sources are guilty of resorting rather than, you know, actually digging in and reporting on the story at hand.
If I want fluff, I can watch Extra or ET… But when I want real news, dammit, I should be able to get it from the networks. That shouldn’t be so difficult.
Some do not see that to be consistent, to be able to legitimately hold right wing websites responsible for their lies and exaggeration, we need to hold more liberal media to the same standards.
A blog is just a web format, a website organized by date. There is nothing about being organized by date that relieves the site of responsibility to be factual. And, in any case, Boing Boing is no longer a blog, it is not strictly organized by date anymore (though that format remains an option to those who know to seek it out). Boing Boing is a longtime commercial website that features news and opinion about tech, culture and politics. There is no reason for it to be more exempt from being called out on falsehoods than a random person who posts a false meme on Facebook.
Also, being free (ad supported) is not a legitimate excuse for spreading falsehoods. CNN (and every news site I read on the internet) is available free.
And this ignorance is often a point of pride. They see themselves as 'simple, hardworking people, who speak ‘plain’ truth. I know this type well, I was a construction foreman for eight years, this is the norm in that business (and many other working class trades I interacted with). Edit: Just wanted to add there is also a more heart-wrenching kind of political ignorance, and that is the people who are so busy just trying to keep their heads above water that they don’t have the luxury of time or energy to be literate. They are often very good and kind people, but just get caught up in bullshit like Fox news or MSNBC because they don’t know any better. (It scares the shit out of me that an endgame bulletpoint of neoliberalism and global capitalism could be to squash true political awareness by requiring every last bit of time and energy of us working at precarious jobs and just trying to stay ahead. Many of us are already there).
And still mistakenly believe that a tip is a ‘reward’, and not a basic part of the workers compensation for which responsibility has been placed solely in the hands of random strangers.
[quote=“chgoliz, post:34, topic:91941”] and don’t know HOW to figure out what they don’t know so that they can learn to do better. (And get angry and self-righteous if you point it out to them, because that would be admitting they weren’t as exceptional as they think they are in their own minds.)
[/quote]
This times 1000. How in the fuck do you reason with people who believe their country and people are (for reasons they can’t articulate other than ‘freedom’) exalted by God Himself as the greatest people and nation to have every existed in the history of the world?
“People”? I have no control over what “people” do. People absorb the first thing they read, often at face value. I appreciate that Snopes, RationalWiki and the like exist to describe and catalog falsehoods (perhaps the second example is imperfect, but useful.) but they don’t solve any problems.
They exist for a selection of persons who are already disinclined to believe mainstream narratives.
They don’t fix uncritically regurgitating false and unfactual narratives.
Journalists should perform journalism rather than immediately posting every real press release of fake news that comes from BreitTrump.
We agree here.
Fake neutrality is not being “unbiased”, it is necessarily biased towards the liar by presenting falsehoods as equivalent to truth.
You make it sound like Snopes is a website for some weird combination of tinfoil hat weirdos and trustafarians. This is not true. The narratives don’t have to be mainstream, and usually they aren’t. They are simply legends that get passed around from God knows where, and fact checking these is not the same as being disinclined to believe. Blind skepticism is the other side of the gullibility coin, so I don’t encourage that either. Snopes breaks down everything into pieces and evaluates the veracity of each piece, and patiently explains the provenance of each. It’s about the reader developing a working bullshit detector rather than the website acting as an oracle and saying THIS IS FALSE or THIS IS TRUE.
Maybe Bob and Betty Silent Generation, who literally needed to be told that the clean young man in the clean white coat wasn’t a doctor but played one on TV, are beyond the help of fact checking websites. On the other hand, the late GenXers and later are bombarded by so much bullshit that they need to fact check it, and they need to develop a working bullshit detector as well. Even if there is no immediate impact song the older folks, I consider it a victory if the younger generations are more adept at both fact checking and in sniffing out bullshit because of sites like Snopes.
Not sure what you’re trying to say here, because we agree. If you’re not talking about fake neutrality, how are you defining bias where something totally factual and unemotional can still be biased?
Headline news is whatever gets the most clicks/ratings.
‘Laundering’ implies legitimizing something illicit; what these ratings whores are doing is simple regurgitation.
Maybe if the disclaimer comes weeks or months later, but on the same day, I have to wonder what message gets across. But let’s take a practical example, and let me ask you something.
Remember a few weeks ago, when Trump claimed he saved a bunch of jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana. How many did he save? When you think back on it, do you remember only that he saved 1,100, like he claimed? Or do you remember that a bunch of people came along and said that he didn’t save nearly that many? That maybe he only saved half that many. And that there were extenuating circumstances that showed that a bunch of people were actually going to get fired anyway.
Now I’ll admit, you’re probably not a Trump supporter, and you may not even be familiar with the story because you’re not from the US, but I’m willing to bet that many people in the US who heard the story as Trump first put it out also heard that it wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up, and remember it that way.
First impressions make the most impression. Especially when multiple sites all post the same false news, multiple impressions that re-enforce the message. Corrections get less press, form a much smaller impression. It’s it is harder to unlearn something you thought was true. So, yeah, corrections are a good thing, but its even more important to get it right in the first place.
I don’t think it’s so cut-and-dried. I think that if you’re inclined to believe the lie in the first place – like if you voted for Trump and think he’s great – then you’re going to believe everything he says. I think that if you look at him with a jaundiced eye in the first place, no matter how many news outlets say that he did something, you’re still inclined to think it’s bullshit, and when news comes along to validate your initial impression, you’ll remember that instead.
I’d like to think that is true, but human psychology makes us subject to a lot of biases, including the availability heuristic - that is, the tendency to think the thing we’ve heard the most must be true (this also means the effectiveness of Hitler’s Big Lie method of deception is supported by science).
This is always easy for the grifters to handle.
Tell the lie again, and again, and again. After a while people simply believe it - as you say, taking the media message for truth.
It is, one might say, mildly problematic in terms of society’s wellbeing.
I guess I’m assuming that everyone has access to the news sources I have access to. In my example of the Carrier plant in Indiana, where after he came out saying he saved 1100 jobs, there were a bunch of people who came along and debunked it and said that the number he saved was a lot fewer and the way he saved them was unsustainable, and all that. I know these things because the sources I get my news from are more liberal in bias. If all I got my news from were right wing outlets, like Fox, I probably wouldn’t have ever heard the other angles.
I see people struggling with basic math like that all the time. I’ve seen people breaking out calculators (like car salesmen) for math I thought everyone could do in their heads. On the flip side I worked as a cashier for many years. Sometimes what people were trying to do was obvious. “Oh it’s $11.15 – here’s $21.25” Other times … not so much. Total is $7.72 and I’ve been handed $19.42. Dude I don’t know what you’re up to but I’m just going to plug it in and see what the machine tells me to give you back.
I’ve had the same experience with cashiers not knowing how to make change if their tech fails, and I’ve had to help them out verbally; “That’s 11 dollars and 70 cents I have coming back.”
It always amazes me how mentally lazy our society is actively encouraged to be.
O_O
I’m no mathematical genius, but I’ve always grokked the concept when it comes to money, even as a little kid… especially when it comes to getting my correct change back.
I’ve confused many a cashier when I’ve given them dollars and change meant to insure I’ll get only quarters back 
And I’ve noticed that many cashiers can’t chunk but instead have to individually tally each coin, rather than notice the piles of 5 each.
But, having cashiered a bit using the machine to to the calculations, it is really easy to get out of the habit of doing the math in your head - my mind doesn’t multi-task that way, it’s one or the other.
