[…] 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.
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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