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yn79AoPEm t1_j93hrdx wrote

Reply to comment by Sansa_Culotte_ in Transparency and Trust in News Media by ADefiniteDescription

Or, maybe, because they also just make shit up or run with stories that fit their narrative before verifying whether or not they're true.

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zedority t1_j941vef wrote

Glenn Greenwald's misleading presentation of honest errors as deception is more about Greenwald's kneejerk refusal to accept Russian interference as a real news story than it is about whether any media outlets actually engaged in "making shit up".

His false portrayal hinges on accepting this falsehood: "It’s inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that’s being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories". Besides having no way to confirm whether his cherry-picked list actually included all available inaccurate stories, the real test of whether an honest error occurred has nothing whatsoever to do with the distribution of errors. The real test is as follows: did the media outlet that ran the false story issue a correction?

Greenwald not only fails to highlight the vital fact that these "false" stories got corrected, he actuallly and bizarrely complains at one point that a story was getting "diluted" by editorial corrections, as if trying to get at the truth and correct one own's errors is some sort of nefarious political trick.

It's ironic that the news outlets that actively acknowledge their fallibility and try to make up for it get this used against them to supposedly prove their nefariousness, while right-wing attack sites can routinely lie and get away with it simply by never admitting error and by leaving huge errors uncorrected, or by deleting false information without mentioning they have done so if they absolutely have to, even covertly altering information in their reporting without ever admitting to it.

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yn79AoPEm t1_j94bjhu wrote

>Greenwald not only fails to highlight the vital fact that these "false" stories got corrected

> 9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)

> ...until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was false...

> 8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)

> ...producing one of the longest Editor’s Note in memory appended to the top of the article...

> 3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)

> ...numerous other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however, to this date has refused to do either...

Not to mention the images provided of the original articles in which the corrections are literally highlighted.

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