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   Laurie Voss (seldo@alpaca.gold)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:05:56 JST Laurie Voss

   There are 5,000 political articles about the Trump indictment all of which have the same three (3) facts to cover but damned if they aren't all trying to spin those out into 2,000 words each.

   • clacke likes this.
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     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:05:57 JST mcc

     in reply to

     @seldo I like to go directly to the primary documents so I tried to look for it yesterday but I couldn't find it so I was like oh well, I guess I'll just have to read the regular news articles. I got through a surprising number before I discovered the indictment is still under seal and none of the news article authors had read it. Everyone is trying to analyze whether the case will be hard or easy to prove or justified or unjustified without even knowing the actual charges

     clacke likes this.
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     json web tokin' (est@social.emily.news)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:05:58 JST json web tokin'

     in reply to

     • mcc

     @seldo @mcc it is the job of a news org to take those facts and contextualize them (why is this important? what led to this? what may come next? why should I care?), so there is a LITTLE wiggle room there for people to actually write things.

     clacke likes this.
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     Laurie Voss (seldo@alpaca.gold)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:05:59 JST Laurie Voss

     in reply to

     • mcc

     @mcc exactly. Literally all they know is he's been indicted, and is surrendering on Tuesday, and it's sealed. There are zero other facts to report.

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     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:06:00 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • json web tokin'

     @est @seldo The problem as I see it is like… news organizations seem to have a bias against sending people elsewhere. If the Washington Post scooped the NYT the NYT doesn't like to say "and the Washington Post reported this, so now we're reporting it" because it will send people to the Washington Post. And I think part of this is they do not like saying "we're basing this on senate bill S.124" or "this is from the ruling Sanford V. State of New Jersey released March 6".

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     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:06:00 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • json web tokin'

     @est @seldo They want each fact to seem like Their Reporting. And this then creates a problem where it's a lot more difficult to chase down where each vaguely-cited fact came from, and this makes it really hard to tell when NEW FACTS JUST KIND OF APPEAR IN THE JOURNALISM SPHERE WITHOUT ANY BASIS and then get passed around to new articles because hey another journalist said it so we can just cite them—

     clacke likes this.
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     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:06:01 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • json web tokin'
     • Nire Bryce

     @NireBryce @est @seldo Yeah. I mean it's a very general problem but the reason I bring it up in this case is, this bias against clearly citing primary documents is obscuring the fact that *THERE*! *ARE*! *NO*! *PRIMARY*! *DOCUMENTS!* this time

     clacke likes this.
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     Nire Bryce (nirebryce@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:06:02 JST Nire Bryce

     in reply to

     • mcc
     • json web tokin'

     @mcc
     @est @seldo

     tangential gripe: every article written about a study that links neither the journal article nor writes the title

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     json web tokin' (est@social.emily.news)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:06:03 JST json web tokin'

     in reply to

     • mcc
     • Nire Bryce

     @NireBryce @mcc @seldo it's like that loop where "facts" get made up on Wikipedia, then someone uses it in an article, then the article becomes the source for that "fact."

     but they've cut out the Wikipedia part.

     clacke likes this.
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     Nire Bryce (nirebryce@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 04-Apr-2023 21:06:04 JST Nire Bryce

     in reply to

     • mcc
     • json web tokin'

     @mcc yeah reading through the leaked anti trans emails I'm baffled how easy it is to transparently launder slander that way

     @est @seldo