Given that anyone can claim anything, and that a lie can go around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on, the veracity of almost anything you read nowadays is questionable. Especially given that many sites are notorious for taking kernels of fact and misrepresenting them, or fake news sites are taken for real. My proposal is that we need a dedicated forum (or at least a sticky thread) just for dealing with this, for asking whether or not the latest viral statement is accurate and confirmable, or not.
I see your point, but the fact is that no one, any where, should need “fact checking.” It used to be an integral part of journalism, not something that needed to be dragged in to make up for sloppiness and bias.
I don’t see where we need a new forum. GQ is the place for factual questions. If you want to know if something is factual or not, that’s a good place to ask.
Alas, just as a lot of GQ questions get shifted to GD, so it would certainly happen with a FC forum. We’d try to establish the objective facts, but we’d get tied up in opinions and beliefs.
As Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?”
To the extent that such a forum is possible, it’s GQ. To the extent that it’s not possible, it wouldn’t be any more so in a new forum.
What is your evidence that it ever was integral to journalism?
I don’t see how this differs from GQ.
Ever heard of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Woodward and Bernstein? It’s not so much integral to journalism as the very definition of what journalism is. The problem is that technology has driven journalism into decline, particularly newspapers, and along with it, has driven some of its principal institutions like investigative journalism into near-extinction, as we can see here or here, for example. Instead we have fake news, Facebook posts, fake astroturf advocacy sites, and stupid tweets. We are creating a major demographic of uninformed know-nothing ignoramuses, who then go out and vote.
The OP seems to be talking about things that are typically handled by snopes or factcheck.org. I don’t see why we need to duplicate their effort, or (as others have noted) created another GQ.
Throughout history, there have always been occasional journalists with professional integrity. There have also always been many more without it. Anyone remember from your history classes, Hearst drumming up a war just so he could sell papers? We’re a lot better off than that, even today.
And here wolfpup gives a beautiful example of why such a forum probably wouldn’t work any better than what we already have. It is astonishing how many people post “facts” without bothering to verify. Any person who is familiar with American history knows that his assertion is incorrect. Many, many newspapers used to be openly biased.
I will have to say that this also omits a lot to get that conclusion. Not to mention that wolfpup concentrated on ignorance being championed by many sources of information now. Past biases were not what he was referring to, so the post here is more like a straw man.
One very important thing that was not mentioned is that historians and I (that also knows and has even taught history once) were aware of the biases and crass partisanship of newspapers in the past. But me and others are also aware of the improvements that came later and the current decline.
Even the main local conservative paper that decided to endorse Clinton and not Trump was originally known as “The Arizona Republican” it mellowed out and became “The Arizona Republic” so as to include everyone as the situation had changed.
What was ignored in the post quoted here is what did happen next. It is long and complicated so lets look at one factor that did a lot to improve the accuracy and to reduce the blatant bias seen before. in more modern times political parties and the advertisers lost the chances to impose their views on the news “product”. What happened was that there was a period when multiple sponsors came on board; after the newspapers and TV became more mainstream and finished a period of swallowing others. With that consolidation came a diversity of sponsors (with a diversity of eye balls) and that meant that no one advertiser could control the newspaper or the programs like in the “good old days”.
What is going on IMHO is that now new technology has made possible the fragmentation of what before were institutions that had many sponsors that made possible then to support different points of view, or even independent ones (investigative reporting with less of a chance of being spiked by the main sponsor).
What you are complaining about is really a comeback of the biased fragmentation seen before. Where rich corporations fund dubious science besides the sources of information that they also use to then report that dubious science or other fake news.
I notice that both of your examples are circa 1790 or thereabouts. :rolleyes: I was thinking in terms of, shall we say, slightly more recent developments, and specifically the decline of newspapers and legitimate journalism in the age of electronic media.
The major fact I would cite as evidence of this decline is precisely the emergence of fake news that is the subject of this and many other threads, and the shockingly uninformed rantings of many voters who seem to believe everything that appears on their Facebook feeds or the virulently biased echo chambers that are their only source of news. And it’s not even limited to politics per se – there are an astounding number of Americans who fully embrace creationism, vehemently deny the science of climate change, and even believe in medical mysticism and anti-vax garbage. And when these people vote, they vote with the same lack of insight and ignorance of facts.
I further submit that the political trajectory of the US in recent decades is at least partly explained by these phenomena of the Internet age. FDR brought the nation social security, LBJ brought Medicare and civil rights, and even Nixon, for all his faults, tried to introduce constructive health care reform and, to his everlasting credit, established the EPA. Today – when even something as innocuous as the ACA is under threat – none of these things would be possible.
Moderator Note
While a certain level of discussion regarding fact checking and journalistic integrity is expected in this thread, let’s all keep in mind that this is in ATMB, so let’s keep that discussion relevant to the rules and administration of the SDMB.
If you want to have a more general discussion of the decline of fact checking in journalism, there are more appropriate forums for that type of discussion.
I’m not saying you can’t discuss it at all here, just keep it relevant to the topic of this thread.
Let’s keep in mind that this was the original statement that was objected to, and is clearly not true-- the implication that no one ever needed fact checking during some “Golden Age” of journalism in the past, and so that’s why we need the Fact Check forum now.
See: All the President’s Men. Get back to us.
I by no means meant there even was a Golden Age; I’m quite familiar with the Hearst and yellow ages.
But until the last few years, it was not a given that all news was tentative until some other reliable source had validated it. Authentic news sources repeatedly check and vet their stories before publication. The best still do and have not fallen into, say, CNN’s mode of run it now, check the facts later. Much less the newsblog mode of vomit it out quick and rush onward.
Lots of this site fact checks already. Has done so forever. It’s what we DO.
You should consider putting that on as part of the logo or something.