Jernalism!

[nosimpleway]

Walgreens belongs to the Nords!

[Büge]

[beatbandito]

Nord communities have serious mobility and access issues. Because of all the arrows they took to their knees.

[Büge]

[Thad]

Time: How Ukraine's Dam Collapse Could Become the Country's 'Chernobyl'

[Thad]

The Hill: "Catch-22: Scientific communication failures linked to faster-rising seas"

Scientists failed for decades to communicate the coming risks of rapid sea-level rise to policymakers and the public, a new study has found.

If only there were people whose job is to disseminate important factual information to the public, who could have communicated those scientific findings clearly and urgently.

[Mongrel]

OH COME ON

[Thad]

(via)

[KingRoyal]

People have pointed out before how if you go looking for news online, all of the worst sites in existence are free to read while places like New York Times, Washington Post, etc are all paywalled. And while there's a lot to criticize about the big media outlets, especially in how they choose and frame stories, for the most part they're still factually grounded in reality, unlike say Breitbart or that one that's basically Donald Trump News

Not that access to these media outlets would have changed the mind of someone who believes the word of Donald Trump, but I do wonder how many people who wanted to get engaged got funneled into right-wing rags

[atog]

People have pointed out before how if you go looking for news online, all of the worst sites in existence are free to read while places like New York Times, Washington Post, etc are all paywalled. And while there's a lot to criticize about the big media outlets, especially in how they choose and frame stories, for the most part they're still factually grounded in reality, unlike say Breitbart or that one that's basically Donald Trump News

Not that access to these media outlets would have changed the mind of someone who believes the word of Donald Trump, but I do wonder how many people who wanted to get engaged got funneled into right-wing rags

This has been the case since the 1990's when many people started getting their news mostly online as opposed to paper delivery or major TV networks.

Information wants to be free, but decent journalism, like scientific discoveries, costs money, time, and effort.

Commodifying information for profit has long been a major flaw in our civilization. The greedy networks and publishing giants played themselves though, quibbling over pennies while the apex predators spend apparently bottomless fortunes on creating "news" to give away to citizens free of charge, only expecting their identities, friends, family, headspace, and devoted obedience in return.

[Mongrel]

Writer Who Defended Hitler on Twitter Fired By Seattle Times After One Column

Guy moves from Georgia to Seattle and starts hollering about Hitler on his first (and I guess, only) day. Didn't even stop at first, kept digging the hole.

When someone pointed out how stupid that belief was, Volodzko attempted to further defend himself and things got worse:

"why do you bring up genocide when I am simply trying to defend Hitler???"

You can't make this shit up.

[Thad]

So when does he get his ten grand from Twitter?

[KingRoyal]

I know this is my own fault for reading the articles that Google recommends on my phone, but remember that incredibly misleading headline about kids needing to be warned about Matt Berry that was actually just about Lazlo swearing?

Here's a headline from Fandomwire:

Cops Came to Protect 18 Year Old Girl after Dwayne Johnson Tried Having S*x With Her in Public Park: "Complete Nightmare"

The actual article is a story The Rock is telling a story about when he was a teenager trying to score with his girlfriend and getting interrupted by the cops

Again, my own fault but seriously. The cover photo was a picture of The Rock in handcuffs with cops, that I'm gonna guess was from a movie

[Friday]

Headlines have become so insane that I no longer auto-assume headlines are misleading, I now auto-assume headlines are vile malignant lies.

Because, you know. It's sort of like being locked in a room with twenty other people and you know one of them is a violent psychopath who will kill you if you turn your back on them for one second, but you don't know which person it is exactly. The logical thing to do in this scenario is to treat all twenty people in the room as if they were the violent psychopath, making sure to never turn your back on any of them, even though only 5% of the sample is actually dangerous.

Same thing for headlines. I'm sure 95% of headlines are either fine or "just" misleading, but you cannot afford to assume so if you want to avoid being tricked into believing something insane.

Of course, I still (mostly) avoid the news as much as I can, and this is just one more reason to do so. But I can't block them out entirely, they creep in in the form of my irl friends telling me untrue shit they got from a headline if nothing else.

[nosimpleway]

Because, you know. It's sort of like being locked in a room with twenty other people and you know one of them is a violent psychopath who will kill you if you turn your back on them for one second, but you don't know which person it is exactly.

Guild.

[Thad]

We talk a lot about terrible headlines, but rarely about great ones.

Donald Trump’s Attorneys Are in the Pants-Shitting Phase of Criminal Investigation Process: Report

[Thad]

A kinda weird side effect of the SAG and WGA strikes is that Comic-Con was this past weekend and all the news I've seen out of it has been about comic books.

Variety called the absence of big TV and movie promotions an "existential threat" to the con, a take which is so utterly blinkered it makes me wonder if it's some kind of anti-labor slant dictated by management, but in deference to Occam's Razor I think the likeliest explanation is that it's just a clickbait headline.

That or whichever Variety reporter wrote it (not necessarily the guy with the byline or any of the other credited contributors) is so dumb that they don't realize that the things a Variety reporter attends Comic-Con for are not necessarily the same things the other 130,000 attendees are there for.

[Thad]

The Internet is not forever after all: CNET deletes old articles to game Google

Google responds, "That's not a thing." I am not paraphrasing.

CNET lost me a decade ago when its corporate parent started interfering with its product reviews; things have gotten worse since, most recently with its use of AI-generated articles.

It sure doesn't sound like the site is long for this world. It's just a pity that management figured it wasn't enough to turn it into a garbage fire, they had to destroy the evidence that it was ever anything else.

[Mongrel]

This is disgraceful even by NYT standards: “You Betrayed Us, Azeen” Allegations of former St. Louis gender clinic staffer Jamie Reed left parents who spoke with NYT reporter Azeen Ghorayshi crushed.

This comment reply from the author at the end of the article added a key bit of perspective not directly included in the article itself, I think.

Rando:

I don’t like Ghorayshi’s product, but as a former reporter, the perspective from these parents — if we don’t like what you write, we pull out — is not something reporters can just let happen. How do you report any story with two sides if one demands the other side be painted in a certain light?

Evan Urquhart:

Something I knew going into writing this story was that for journalists, including myself, one of the most shocking thing here is that Ghorayshi seems to have been paraphrasing her story paragraph by paragraph to a source who either retained or believed they'd retained the right to pull their participation if they didn't like the story.

But, I mean, that's not on the family. Either Ghorayshi made a very unusual agreement with them or they thought she had done so. The family had no reference for how unusual that sort of agreement would seem to other journalists.

[Thad]

Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of News Corp and Fox News.

I don't expect much to change. His successor is his son Lachlan, who's fine with Fox the way it is. (His other son, James Murdoch, was at Fox for awhile and seemed like more of a traditional conservative -- ie couch the racism in fiscal policy and stop saying crazy shit out loud -- but he bailed when it became clear there was no chance of reining Fox News in.)