In contrast Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox was a part of their “opinion” lineup and I don’t think regular viewers knew not to trust it as journalism.
When Carlson and Fox won the defamation lawsuit in 2020 it was because “Mr. Carlson’s statements were not statements of fact and that she failed adequately to allege actual malice.”
The “not statements of fact” included the reassurances that Carlson always made, in this case he said “Remember the facts of the case. These are undisputed” followed by clearly disputed and false claims.
The lawyers argued successfully that it should be clear to the viewer that what Carlson says “cannot reasonably be interpreted as fact” even when he says that these are the facts.
Arguably the bigger factor was proving malice, and Carlson seems very careful not to put anything into an email or text that undermines what he says on air.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor...
For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
This is a confusion. The Dominion corporation was defamed and brought the suit. The government generally has no standing in these suits and cannot bring them itself.
It sounds like you think undermining confidence in voting is a net good. Do you have a reason for this?
But stirring up an insane unfounded panic about electronic voting security would be one of the most productive things the US cable news have done in the last 20-40 years. It is one of the best aspects of a democratic system to be paranoid about; something goes wrong there and it probably isn't recoverable. And for US corporate news it is much more in character to be up on stage strategically ignoring how every other war turned out terribly while mumbling sweet nothings about how good the next one will turn out and how justified this new one is unlike all the others.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...
https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Herri...
It’s worthwhile to track down the court proceedings, you will learn things not covered in various spin articles.
I find it crazy that a news person can, while reporting the news, qualify their statement with strengtheners like "really literally" and then claim it was an assertion of opinion, not fact.
Why?
After all there are people who think there is factual evidence and undeniable proof for the existence of space aliens on Earth, cryptozoology or supernatural phenomena because "The History Channel" decided to give up on sticking to actual history and started airing whatever nonsense grabbed anyone's attention.
You can argue that a discernable viewer could easily figure this out by reflecting on what they're viewing but there are good reasons you don't find rat poison in the condiments aisle.
I, like most UFO witnesses, can tell you we don’t think they’re human in origin. And disbelieving an entire fleet of military pilots and support officers as they explain under oath UFO videos they were involved with .. because of entertainment shows is, well, kinda funny in this context. Especially since NYT dropped those videos. I doubt any amount of journalism, testimony, or videos would change your mind as you say .. whatever it is you’re saying.
Yeah, sure, good point. I guess there really is no good reason not to put rat poison in the condiments aisle.
Standard business practice when you are past Junior career level. Next.
The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes, sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution that makes you feel something.
Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful or not.
The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication. But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio beat.
The danger of trying to tell a narrative with journalism is the tendency to decide on the narrative you want to tell, and gather facts (or I guess make them up) to fit that narrative, rather than finding a narrative in the fact that lets you tell their story.
The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass.
TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.
>Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.
This American Life abso-fudging-lutely is intending to tell true stories. The fact that the audio medium has an emotional impact does not by itself push the medium into fiction, which is a completely wild extrapolation to be making.
Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity.
That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist.
TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it.
So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
I continue to be completely baffled by this explanation. I'm not sure I agree with this distinction you're making, which seems retrofitted to the specifics of this particular conversation, rather than an organic and clear cut conceptual distinction I've encountered in the wild. And even if the distinction were true, I don't think it has anything to do with the reason why this particular story failed. This American Life has been perfectly up to the task over and over again of vetting the stories and not running into this problem, so I would vehemently disagree with the idea that it's something built into the nature of their programming that made this happen when we're talking about one story out of, I don't know, 700 and counting.
I'm also not sure where the idea is coming from that a TAL story must originate independently from a journalist, and that not doing so constitutes a "tell" about the reliability of the story. Most of their stories originate from what you might typically call a source or what I might say as a person, a character, a personality, any of the raw material from which all stories are sourced. And while I do believe TAL sometimes works with third-party reporters, they also use in-house producers because they themselves are perfectly capable of being that journalistic origination of the story through which we understand it to be vetted.
Also weren't you originally saying that the story was true? I'm not sure what happened to that, but I'm finding no trace of explanation for that in this new volley of distinctions about the meaning of journalism.
Because of such cases, when I see someone (like you here) argue "X is not a journalist, Y is not a news program", my mind automatically pattern-matches this to ", therefore it has no obligation to tell the truth, despite the fact that they let people believe they're journalists/news". Which is not what you meant here, but common enough that I doubt this is just mine knee-jerk reaction.
The UK has Private Eye magazine. Because of their habit of making the front page a picture captioned with a joke[0], I assumed that's all they were for the first 15 years of me knowing the magazine existed.
Despite them also being famous for facing a lot of legal threats (and cases) for libel[1], it wasn't until the mid 2010s that I realised they're also known for in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=private+eye+front+page&t=osx&iar=i...
I think this was the takeaway of the entire industry. Daisey gave an admission that was basically a performance, and the message of that performance was "I was dishonest, and being dishonest is terribly morally wrong, but being dishonest made the story more true, and if therefore I have to be morally wrong to deliver the real truth, I'll have to take the blame."
Typical middle-class post-mortem after getting caught.
That happened during a time when we expected the mainstream news to be literally true, even if told from a particular perspective. If Daisey's story were politically valuable to someone today, however, every outlet would simply agree not to report on it. They'd just refer back to it in articles about Foxconn as "allegations spread around right-wing twitter about the supposed bias of a journalist who reported the story."
That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.
Kudos to Ira and his team for doing the right thing after realizing they did the wrong thing.
If we get a second and a third, I think you might be right to have that cloud of suspicion. That would be like a Shattered Glass scenario and we're not there yet.
The interesting thing, I think, is those prior beliefs. Your prior beliefs, it would seem, include the belief TAL's stories are generally reliable. You believe it strongly enough that you write that doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories is an "over correction in the wrong direction."
I don't think it's an overcorrection. When we find evidence of one fabrication from a trusted source, that source ought to lose trust. If we want to know how much trust it should lose, we have to measure. When we don't measure, when we don't take seriously the responsibility to ground our beliefs, that's how we end up with things like the replication crisis in psychology.
You're right that I believe TAL's stories are generally reliable, that I believe doubting them is an over-correction in the wrong direction.
I also don't think I agree that it's simply a matter of checking or not checking because I believe the vast body of work that's been free from error, although exposed to the same conditions of public scrutiny that could have revealed error in just the same way as with the Daisy story, is part of the body of evidence that actively testifies in favor of TAL. And I do think if there was more of a rocky track record, or if there proves to be more of one in the future, it absolutely could merit spot checking. And as I've said twice now already, I've given the example of Stephen Glass as a case where that skepticism was warranted.
You seem to be implying that I have a categorical opposition to spot checking which couldn't be further from the truth. I just don't think it's warranted in this instance, because it's not a reasonable extrapolation from what happened with the Daisy story.
1. I just learned from the article about the fabricated Daisey episode and that TAL started using professional fact checkers only afterward. I was surprised on both counts.
2. I saw your comment that it would be in poor character to discredit TAL's prior reporting on the basis of this one failure.
3. I responded that it would be telling to actually estimate the reliability of earlier episodes because, right now, we're just going off our personal beliefs (and these probably vary widely from person to person).
4. You and I had a back and forth, mainly talking past one another.
5. I think that if we did actually measure the reliability of prior episodes, it would be less than a lot of TAL defenders expect and greater than a lot of TAL doubters expect.
6. As for what's reasonable vs. over correction to take away from the article, that depends largely on your prior beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general.
Note that point 5, being a product of my prior beliefs about TAL and how the world functions in general, is actually an example of point 6 in action.
This is pragmatic as long as you have no evidence either way and you're not basing any serious decisions on this "trust." But the fact that they didn't bother to fact check Daisey, and in fact had never fact-checked before that: this is actually the first information you have about TAL's internal processes. It should vastly outweigh it being on the radio.
This comes off like fandom. You seem to have an interest in this incident not affecting people's perception of the quality of TAL, but I have no idea what that interest would be. It shouldn't bother you that people see the show as a place whose facts should be checked if one is considering spreading them.
When their methodology prior to a particular point of time was shown to be weak, and the programs from that time are still available (the archives go back 30 years), I think that asking for spot checking of those old episodes is legitimate. The key thing here are the archives. If the archives weren't available it would be much easier to shrug and say, "live and learn."
It's much better and less embarrassing to get the fact checking right before publication, but the truth generally comes out one way or another. So I'm willing to give historic TAL... not certainty, but at least the benefit of the doubt.
I generally understand that to be true, but that was not the upshot of the point being made by the other commenter. Their extrapolation was a much more along the lines of treating it like an open question whether the other stories were fabricated at a level of elevated suspicion that calls for spot checking.
All the other stories were vulnerable to being upended just like this one and seem to have withstood the test of time. I also think that despite this particular story falling apart, TAL has a track record of credibility and vetting that is more legitimate than is being implied by casting doubt over the history of theirs, and I did contrast it to the case of Stephen Glass, which model conditions where that degree of skepticism is more appropriately warranted.
The show has a stronger journalistic focus now than it did 10 years ago and _way_ more than it did 20 or (almost!) 30 years ago. It's always been part of the show—people who complain that TAL "didn't used to be political" clearly don't remember how many segments they ran about the Iraq war—but for the first decade or so the show had a very strong focus on the arts; they'd have a lot of guests sharing personal essays, short fiction, etc.
The serious journalism-type stories were generally either (1) on-the-ground reporting from their own staff, like a really great episode where they toured an aircraft carrier (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/206/somewhere-in-the-arabia...), (2) stories sourced from other journalists or professional organizations who had serious reputation to lose if they were caught in the supply chain of misinformation, or (3) "this is a thing that happened to me"-type firsthand accounts and observations. And I guess the now-debunked Apple factory story falls into the third category, but the types of stories that had previously fallen into that category tended to be far smaller in scale and/or were presented as more subjective than the Apple story had been.
All of that to say that I think you raise a valid question, and I'm sure some stuff slipped through the cracks over the years, but I also think the implication of that crack-slipping was far less dire in the show's earlier days, and there were just fewer news-ish stories overall.
Citation needed.
If covering up the truth works, why would you risk telling the truth? At worst, the outcome is the same (minor scandal). At best, in most cases, nobody ever learns about the lie. The rational choice is to never tell the truth until it's completely obvious you lied, they e okay dumb.
(Sorry for cynicism. I don't really think like that)
> “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.
On March 16, 2012, This American Life, aired the “Retraction” covering Rob Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies).
“Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass.
This American Life is a treasure.
In the running for best podcast of all time.
As Canadians though, we just can’t listen anymore, it is too depressing and dystopian.
There was the episode about the nice folks who got new neighbours who started some nut job paramilitary thing with automatic weapons. The nice folks live everyday in fear.
There are the episodes of regular women unable to get basic medical treatment because Roe v Wade.
The list is endless, sadly.
We don’t want to live in that world, and we don’t want it taking over our thoughts either.
>Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.
It's reminiscent of Hasan Minhaj's 'emotional truths'. Just such a casual abandonment of objective reality as if that's not going to set off nuclear-level alerts.
It's a pity that it worked. A nation of immigrants is now virulently anti-immigrant.
Your factcheck needs to be factchecked. Accusing me of being dishonest and acting in bad faith is a hoot. I may be ignorant of certain things but I'm only interested in the truth as I can best discover it.
I would love to have debate with someone from "your side", but you are, at best, a troll and haven't demonstrated any good faith.
What if you flipped the scenario and you heard of Americans living in India and locals claimed they have seen them killing and eating local cows? Would that just be incredibly unbelievable to you? Its just absurd to suggest that it just absolutely, 100% never happened, and everybody who has anecdotal evidence is just some racist idiot making stuff up.
And I know you won't believe me, but I actually live adjacent to one of the towns that received a large influx of Haitian migrants. Not Springfield, but a city that was also regularly mentioned on the news, and I saw evidence of the claims that were being spoken at those town halls myself. Our town literally had to put out city notices to ask people to refrain from shooting blow darts into the geese down at our local park, a place where the Haitians were known to loiter all day long for months on end, since they had nothing else to do or anywhere else to go. All of this shit was not just made up, I guarantee it. These were not all model citizens.
Now I am sure this is the part where you call me, a mixed race person who has a child with a minority mother, a racist.
This is the same mentality some people have for coming up with hate crime hoaxes (if it isn't for attention seeking).
I personally find it to be intellectually bankrupt and counter-productive; people willing to blind themselves to a problem will use such examples as evidence that all such claims are false.
I feel like I have a little essay brewing within me about these various examples of indifference to truth and the way they're rationalized. One example is this particular episode of This American Life. Another is Hassan Minaj's Notion of Emotional Truths. Another is Samsung's Faking moon photos and how they tried to blur the lines between image processing and fake photos.
And I'm sure there's other good ones as well.
Or "I'm a single minded sociopath."
More often than not, a biased story is one that focuses exclusively on one set of facts while completely ignoring the other set. Fact checkers may catch falsehoods that are reported as facts, but they rarely point out obvious ommissions.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/florida-misrepresenting-g...
> I could be arrested in Florida because my driver's license says I'm female
A true statement would be
> Florida now requires the gender on newly issued licenses to be your biological sex.
I'm making no judgement on whether or not that is a good idea (I honestly have no idea), but I do care about the truth (and we're in a thread about the importance of fact checking!) so I feel like it's important to point out misinformation.
Also I am going to claim it IS a bad idea. The Florida law intentionally redefines biological sex to not include any phenotypical traits (i.e. what a biologist would use to determine sex) and instead goes by birth certificate as it was filled out at birth. I'm also just generally a proponent of free speech and free thought and dislike the idea of government defining your identity for you.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax...
Media tends to interview the most outrageous looking imbecile they can find at any event... regardless of political affiliation. The Sinclair Broadcast Group helps local news maintain consistent messaging, and thus any mistakes intentional or not are less noticeable.
Fact-checking is only as good as the data sources people find. There are groups that ran entire fake scientific journals to sell the public outright nonsense.
Verifiable facts are difficult to validate. "AI"/LLM slop content just made it worse =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=...
You can still find it on Spotify, with a mea culpa attached.
https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5...
That's why no one reads past the reddit title or the Google news headline.
I don't know how we get past this, but I'm teaching my kids to believe NOTHING they read online or on youtube. NOTHING. I'm teaching them to get information from first hand sources, not even "reliable" sources like newspapers because they have their own agendas too. There's a hierarchy of believability, and the higher you go, the less you put your faith into that information.
It's a sad way to grow up but when almost everything is faked for engagement, it's a reality that you can't trust anything.
There is no need to exaggerate. But I'm not only calling out a poor choice of words...
A lot of people (not as many as we would hope, I grant) care about the truth about facts. Even in this group, however, we have a problem: by the time these people are "looking for facts" their brains have already been shaped in various ways that bias how they look for facts, as explained in articles about motivated reasoning.
During this entire time; however, print journalism was still widely distributed and you could find an absolutely huge range of off beat reporting even from fairly large publications.
The internet era was initially great for this model but once all the advertising effectively got monopolized and search giants started walling off and cherry picking content to place under their own banner it finally killed the rich set of options available in print.
I completely agree with how disappointing it is that we can’t trust anything in reality anymore
Professor Legasov would be disappointed
I’m optimistic that we can find new ways to ground our media in truthfulness over the next few decades. Some people care about that a lot.
It's known that a few research papers (e.g. [1], [2]) have been fabricated on various topics. So when you read the news about those, do you read the papers? If you do, can you verify the claims in those papers? It's not possible to do at scale, so you have to trust the reporting on those stories.
A lot of reporting on things like that, or releases from major companies, tend to be based on press releases. You also have papers and websites that use others as their source of the information, so any inaccuracies or biases in that initial reporting gets magnified. It also depends on the knowledge of the person reporting -- if they are not an expert in the field they can easily get some of the details wrong.
It took a long time, combined effort, and a lot of resources for the Leela Zero team to replicate the results of Alpha Zero [3]. And that's with papers that don't have the source code, or exact details on the training methodology. I've seen quite a lot of papers on things like arXiv that amount to a summary of "we did a thing, here's a table of results" -- this makes it hard to replicate the results. And a lot of papers build on work of others, so quite often you'll need to read and understand hundreds of papers.
Then you have reporting from trials. They will not cover everything in the trial, but provide summaries of the results. See both the Lucy Letby case and the Johnny Depp vs Amber Herd trails for how those are reflected in the relevant media, both during and after the trials. You can't go to all the trials and even when there are recodings of them there will be multiple weeks of video to go through, which is impossible for all trials. So you have to rely on reporting or reports from the people who have done that, and are reliant on the witnesses and evidence given during the trial to be accurate and in support of the outcome of that trial.
Then there's reporting of things like campaign events and rallies during elections. Media will only show soundbites that can remove the context from the original -- see also the countless "out of context" videos on YouTube. You can't always get the original sources, an you can't always go through the entire context. So you have to rely on the media reporting. That gives wildly different perspectives from the different groups on a given topic -- see e.g. the left and right reporting/coverage on things like Donald Trump doing the stint at a McDonalds.
I don't have any answers on how best to solve this other than:
1. listing (and preserving) sources reported on that are not anonymous and can be verified -- including linking back to any press releases, research papers, trail transcripts, videos, or other relevant sources;
2. having a mechanism for replicating results from research papers, and having a way to find if/how that was done for a given research paper;
3. consuming reports from different sources, ideally ones that have different perspectives.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-plan-ret...
[2] https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-amy...
Telling your kids to "Believe NOTHING" is as dangerous as teaching them to believe everything. You're just handing them over, defenseless, to a different monster.
It's very easy to present a story that is 100% factually accurate, but that implies causal links or other claims that are not. Our brains love hasty generalizations, and media outlets rely on that to present near-100% truthful facts to their viewers, such that they jump to completely opposite generalizations. We're further primed for this with thought-terminating cliches like "trust the data" and "look at the facts". Media profits enormously from the subsequent outrage.
The more folks talk about "fact checking" without acknowledging the danger of cherry-picking and Texas sharpshooters and confounding variables, like in this article, the less I trust "fact checking" as a useful mechanism for forming opinions from their reported facts. Fact-checking is definitely a requirement, but still insufficient.
This is also exacerbated by narratives like those presented by TAL that introduce enormous complexity to the task, due to the emotional context.
In addition to that, I am not sure if you have ever worked with an independent fact checker, but they very much do make an effort to point out misleading, cherry-picked, and out of context information.
I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.