Like I said, we should get research methods taught in school from very early on. For one thing, understanding what even counts as a source is not a trivial problem, let alone an independent source, let alone a credible independent source.
There’s the mechanics of sourcing things (from home and on a computer, I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media), a basic understanding of archival and how to get access to it and either a light understanding of the subject matter or how to get access to somebody who has it.
There’s a reason it’s supposed to be a full time job, but you can definitely teach kids enough of the basics to both assess the quality of what they come across and how to mitigate the worst of it. In all seriousness.
Okay, well I don’t exactly follow the relevance of your claim that journalism can be practiced full-time. I also don’t exactly follow the usage of your language “supposed to”. Imo, one needn’t be a full-time journalist to practice journalism.
You can do journalism without working as a journalist, but there is a lot of work involved in doing good journalism, which I presume would be the goal.
If you think the workload is trivial, consider the posibility you may not have a full view of everything that is involved. I’m saying everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated, but it’s not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.
[…] everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated […]
No, it’s an argument against some of the proposed remedies.
The step you’re skipping over is that citing a claim by itself doesn’t do much to guarantee its veracity if the reader of the citation isn’t willing to get in touch with the source of the citation and verify its content. Citations aren’t magical. As you’re using them in this conversation they are merely a tool for a peer review to be able to verify a bunch of precedent information without having to include it all in the same place every time.
The difference between journalistic information and peer review in science is that news are supposed to have gone through a journalistic verification process first, which the reader trusts based on the previous operation of the news outlet. A paper is presented to go through peer review and published after it has gone through that process.
You can do journalism without working as a journalist […]
Err, could you clarify this? By definition doesn’t the action of doing journalism make one a journalist? For example, Merriam-Webster defines the noun “journalist” as “a person engaged in journalism” [1]. This would follow logically [2]: If one is engaged in journalism, then they are a journalist; one is engaged in journalism; therefore, they are a journalist.
I think you might be misunderstanding me — I’m not of the opinion that the workload for journalism is trivial. All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s necessary to work full-time as a journalist (ie in a career capacity) to do the work of a journalist. I think there may be a miscommunication of definitions for things like “journalism”, “full-time”.
No, you can do those tasks at any point. I’m not concerned with who is doing the work, I’m concerned with the amount of work involved and how practical it is for every one of us to do it as a matter of course every time we access information online.
This is why this choice you made of quote-replying to individual statements is not a great way to have a conversation online, by the way. Now we’re breaking down the details behind individual words with no context on the arguments that contain them. This is all borderline illegible and quite far from the original argument, IMO.
I’m assuming you’re in a microblogging flavor of federation and that’s why this is broken down into a bunch of posts?
No, I’m not on a microblogging platform. I personally prefer to post atomic comments. I believe that threads should be restricted in scope so that they are clearer and easier to follow. I think that it also helps prevent miscommunications.
[…] I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media […]
You, then, clarified that:
[…] a journalist would often be expected to get in touch with a source directly, which is not feasible if we’re all doing it.
If you are referring to the original root source (assuming that it’s, for example, a conversation with someone), to me, that reads like you are saying that a journalist can’t cite the report by another journalist who first interviewed that source (ie novel information), and that each journalist needs to independently interview the source themselves in a novel way.
No, but most original reports would be expected to in fact reach out to a primary source, and fact-checking them would often require the same thing.
That doesn’t need to be novel. Verifying a source or a piece of information often just requires reaching out to a primary source to have them confirm the second-hand report that is available elsewhere. Not all journalism is built by aggregating other reports, the process needs to start somewhere. And you can’t just take the fact that a source is mentioned as a guarantee of accuracy, you have to verify information.
This is, as I said, a full time job for a reason. Many corners are cut in the modern day of endless news cycles, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t require work to do properly.
Think about it this way, the effort to process the information is some multiplier of the effort it takes to consume the finished piece of information.
Some info comes in, a journalist of some description processes it into finished, verified news ready for consumption. That effort is some magnitude bigger than just reading the unverified news, and that work is enough to keep a lot of people working full time for the volume of information we all consume each day.
It’s kind of absurd to break down that statement to this level of detail, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate.
[…] That doesn’t need to be novel. Verifying a source or a piece of information often just requires reaching out to a primary source to have them confirm the second-hand report that is available elsewhere. Not all journalism is built by aggregating other reports, the process needs to start somewhere. And you can’t just take the fact that a source is mentioned as a guarantee of accuracy, you have to verify information. […]
I feel like this could be self-limiting — once enough independent verifications have been completed and released, the collection of them should reach a point where its deemed unnecessary to further prove its veracity. I think it would be akin to meta-analysis.
You need far less info to reach a bar for journalistic veracity than you do for a meta analysis paper. The question is where in the process the effort is being aggregated.
If a journalist phones a couple of sources, hears from them the same thing they are seeing somewhere and publishes that information, then the fact-checking has been done once and reaches thousands or millions of people.
If the way the information is disseminated requires those thousands or millions to do the fact-check themselves using the same process, then that is entirely impractical, which was my original point. Crowdsourced fact-checking is always going to be less reliable and exponentially more work than properly verified broadcast news sources. Even if many of them share their fact check, we have plenty of data to suggest the reach of that correction will be much smaller and it will still require a lot of private effort to correct the original info.
That’s the point of the entire “it’s a real job” argument. Journalists are doing a lot of legwork once and we’re all relying on that job to acquire a lot of our information instead of all of us doing the same legwork again. The two problems we’re facing are 1) that this trust opens us up to propaganda from activist or opinionated journalism, and 2) that we’re no longer just getting neatly processed info that has gone through a journalistic process, we’re also getting a firehose of misinformation from many individual content generators over the Internet.
Like I said, we should get research methods taught in school from very early on. For one thing, understanding what even counts as a source is not a trivial problem, let alone an independent source, let alone a credible independent source.
There’s the mechanics of sourcing things (from home and on a computer, I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media), a basic understanding of archival and how to get access to it and either a light understanding of the subject matter or how to get access to somebody who has it.
There’s a reason it’s supposed to be a full time job, but you can definitely teach kids enough of the basics to both assess the quality of what they come across and how to mitigate the worst of it. In all seriousness.
For clarity, by “it” are you referring to journalism?
I’m assuming you’re in a microblogging flavor of federation and that’s why this is broken down into a bunch of posts?
Yes, I’m referring to journalism.
Okay, well I don’t exactly follow the relevance of your claim that journalism can be practiced full-time. I also don’t exactly follow the usage of your language “supposed to”. Imo, one needn’t be a full-time journalist to practice journalism.
You can do journalism without working as a journalist, but there is a lot of work involved in doing good journalism, which I presume would be the goal.
If you think the workload is trivial, consider the posibility you may not have a full view of everything that is involved. I’m saying everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated, but it’s not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.
I agree.
I agree, but I don’t think that that’s a valid argument in defense of a journalist not citing their claims.
No, it’s an argument against some of the proposed remedies.
The step you’re skipping over is that citing a claim by itself doesn’t do much to guarantee its veracity if the reader of the citation isn’t willing to get in touch with the source of the citation and verify its content. Citations aren’t magical. As you’re using them in this conversation they are merely a tool for a peer review to be able to verify a bunch of precedent information without having to include it all in the same place every time.
The difference between journalistic information and peer review in science is that news are supposed to have gone through a journalistic verification process first, which the reader trusts based on the previous operation of the news outlet. A paper is presented to go through peer review and published after it has gone through that process.
Err, could you clarify this? By definition doesn’t the action of doing journalism make one a journalist? For example, Merriam-Webster defines the noun “journalist” as “a person engaged in journalism” [1]. This would follow logically [2]: If one is engaged in journalism, then they are a journalist; one is engaged in journalism; therefore, they are a journalist.
References
Working as in “being paid to do the work”.
I’ll spare you the dictionary definition. As we’ve established, you can source that yourself.
I think you might be misunderstanding me — I’m not of the opinion that the workload for journalism is trivial. All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s necessary to work full-time as a journalist (ie in a career capacity) to do the work of a journalist. I think there may be a miscommunication of definitions for things like “journalism”, “full-time”.
No, you can do those tasks at any point. I’m not concerned with who is doing the work, I’m concerned with the amount of work involved and how practical it is for every one of us to do it as a matter of course every time we access information online.
This is why this choice you made of quote-replying to individual statements is not a great way to have a conversation online, by the way. Now we’re breaking down the details behind individual words with no context on the arguments that contain them. This is all borderline illegible and quite far from the original argument, IMO.
No, I’m not on a microblogging platform. I personally prefer to post atomic comments. I believe that threads should be restricted in scope so that they are clearer and easier to follow. I think that it also helps prevent miscommunications.
Can you clarify exactly what you are referring to here?
Well, a journalist would often be expected to get in touch with a source directly, which is not feasible if we’re all doing it.
I’ll grant you, it very often doesn’t happen, but still.
Are you saying that journalism only deals in novel information?
No. Not sure how you get that from the quote.
Let me try to clarify my thinking:
You stated this:
You, then, clarified that:
If you are referring to the original root source (assuming that it’s, for example, a conversation with someone), to me, that reads like you are saying that a journalist can’t cite the report by another journalist who first interviewed that source (ie novel information), and that each journalist needs to independently interview the source themselves in a novel way.
No, but most original reports would be expected to in fact reach out to a primary source, and fact-checking them would often require the same thing.
That doesn’t need to be novel. Verifying a source or a piece of information often just requires reaching out to a primary source to have them confirm the second-hand report that is available elsewhere. Not all journalism is built by aggregating other reports, the process needs to start somewhere. And you can’t just take the fact that a source is mentioned as a guarantee of accuracy, you have to verify information.
This is, as I said, a full time job for a reason. Many corners are cut in the modern day of endless news cycles, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t require work to do properly.
I mean, I would say only if one wants to do it continuously — I suppose it depends on how you are defining “full time job” in this context.
Think about it this way, the effort to process the information is some multiplier of the effort it takes to consume the finished piece of information.
Some info comes in, a journalist of some description processes it into finished, verified news ready for consumption. That effort is some magnitude bigger than just reading the unverified news, and that work is enough to keep a lot of people working full time for the volume of information we all consume each day.
It’s kind of absurd to break down that statement to this level of detail, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate.
I agree.
I feel like this could be self-limiting — once enough independent verifications have been completed and released, the collection of them should reach a point where its deemed unnecessary to further prove its veracity. I think it would be akin to meta-analysis.
You need far less info to reach a bar for journalistic veracity than you do for a meta analysis paper. The question is where in the process the effort is being aggregated.
If a journalist phones a couple of sources, hears from them the same thing they are seeing somewhere and publishes that information, then the fact-checking has been done once and reaches thousands or millions of people.
If the way the information is disseminated requires those thousands or millions to do the fact-check themselves using the same process, then that is entirely impractical, which was my original point. Crowdsourced fact-checking is always going to be less reliable and exponentially more work than properly verified broadcast news sources. Even if many of them share their fact check, we have plenty of data to suggest the reach of that correction will be much smaller and it will still require a lot of private effort to correct the original info.
That’s the point of the entire “it’s a real job” argument. Journalists are doing a lot of legwork once and we’re all relying on that job to acquire a lot of our information instead of all of us doing the same legwork again. The two problems we’re facing are 1) that this trust opens us up to propaganda from activist or opinionated journalism, and 2) that we’re no longer just getting neatly processed info that has gone through a journalistic process, we’re also getting a firehose of misinformation from many individual content generators over the Internet.
Those are both hard problems to manage.
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I agree.
I agree.