
Ask HN: How do you `audit' a news? - methou
Are there any paradigms to establish accountability for the authors, news agencies, and check the traces of facts?
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moksly
We actually have a law in Denmark which holds news publications accountable
for what they print, meaning that their editorial staff could go to prison if
it can be proven that they knowingly misinformed.

In general I prefer to pay people to do my editorial audit for me. I go a step
further though, I subscribe to a physical news paper that only comes out once
a week, because by doing so, I also filter out all the things that weren’t
important enough to make it into the single weekly print. I do sometimes turn
to public service for a quick view of the daily news, and when something major
happens. I used to read free internet news, but I was really dissatisfied with
it, turns out you get what you pay for, and filtering out 90% of the bullshit
has improved my outlook immensely.

When I chose my news paper I did some research on which Danish papers were
considered the highest quality, and a few came up. Then I bought one of each
for a few weeks and found the one I liked the best. That was Weekend Avisen.
It contains a lot of stuff on culture, which I often skip, but it’s articles
on news and the political scene are great. What it does that a lot of news
media doesn’t, aside from filtering a lot of the day to day nonsense, is
respect the fact that things are never black and white, and it handles this
intelligently.

I’m extremely skeptic about things that are user audited. You can find a lot
of good user driven content on the internet, but it’s often a little
misleading even when it doesn’t intend to be. HN is a great example of this.
The content here, on things like which programming languages are hot, is so
far from the real world, at least the one I live in, it’s silly. We have so
many topics about things like Rust or Go, but when I look at the Danish job-
market there is literally just one listing for Rust, and that’s for a c/c++
job at Google where it’s listed as “nice but not necessary”. HN is still the
best and most relevant place for tech-news, but I kind of wish there was a NYT
for tech, where a real editorial staff would weed out all the medium bullshit.
Because it’s really kind of a waste of our time when we all have to do it, and
that’s probably why people turn to the comment sections before they read the
articles, we want people to audit our content. I just go a step further,
because I want trained and accountable professionals, not anonymous people to
do it for me.

