
He Said, She Said Journalism (2009) - aaronbrethorst
http://archive.pressthink.org/2009/04/12/hesaid_shesaid.html
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rustynails
The truth is that controversy sells, truth does not. Truth is the first
casualty.

The use of propaganda has increased significantly as a substitute for research
and robust argument. Today, it's rare to find a media source that is unbiased
and honest (I'm struggling to think of one). What concerns me more is that the
propaganda is getting worse. Maybe, it's a side effect of free news on the
Internet as there's no money in journalism anymore.

I agree with most of the sites that have been criticised in this thread.
However, I'd rather see a list of media sources that people respect. I used to
love ArsTechnica until about 18-24 months ago. Something happened in their
management because they started with prejudice and politics in their articles
(read Casey Johnson, San Mechkovich and Megan Guess articles as an example)
and by dumming their content (someone used a camera/drone rubbish that appears
almost daily).

These days, HN is one of the better (not really media) resources around for
openly challenging propaganda. I think it struggles with Political Correctness
but it's significantly better than most other outlets.

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pbreit
Wikipedia has gotten like this. As long as you can cite it, you can include
it. Articles have become just a list of citable blurbs with very little
overall thought or coherence.

~~~
Someone1234
Plus not all citations are born equal. You can use Gawker Media as a citation,
but they're no more than a series of gossip sites. Or the Daily Mail or often
re-print stories taken directly from anonymous internet comments.

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smacktoward
_> You can use Gawker Media as a citation, but they're no more than a series
of gossip sites_

This isn't true anymore; Gawker sites have done valuable reporting in a number
of areas. As have Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, two other sites that HNers
tend to dismiss automatically. (IIRC, HN's software will silently reject any
submission of a Gawker URL at all, which is kind of ridiculous.)

~~~
diabeetusman
For what it's worth, that doesn't look like it's true. There's this[0] link on
the front page to Kotaku.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697939)

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pdeuchler
The sinister thing about this is it allows people to divine their own truths
and meanings from seemingly "objective" fact, more often then not just
reinforcing previous biases and predispositions. This can also be used to
explain away a problem with a position or argument that a journalist favors.

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lintiness
if the title of a piece contains a quote and an opinion, it's not news.

