I'm not a fan of the expansion of the concept of "fake news" to include any story a subject thinks was not fair.
There are stories that were completely made up by Estonian teenagers, with no connection to facts at all, which were widely republished and shared. That's the "fake news" problem.
The problem of journalists misrepresenting a company (either by mistake or on purpose) is as old as the hills. It was as true back when the media was widely trusted, as it is now.
"Fake news" seems to have become a dead duck term almost immediately, because nobody can really agree what it means.
As you say, there's explicitly fake news from organizations that never pretended to be news organizations and were simply web sites spun up to fool the unwary. But there's also a real problem with "real" news orgs publishing highly suspect claims in sensationalist ways. Then there's hyper-partisanship in the news, where allegations against one side are overhyped and allegations against the other downplayed or ignored.
> The problem of journalists misrepresenting a company (either by mistake or on purpose) is as old as the hills. It was as true back when the media was widely trusted, as it is now.
Perhaps what's happening is that established bad practices are becoming more noticeable as technology advances (in this case, the subjects of stories can post at little or no cost a widely read rebuttal)
> There are stories that were completely made up by Estonian teenagers, with no connection to facts at all, which were widely republished and shared
It sounds like we agree that factual inaccuracies, both on the detail and summary level are harmful. However, in my view, connection with the facts of the matter is only important in that it represents a commitment on the part of the journalist to educate the public on a specific topic. Education toward a more accurate position is the key here.
For example, it was recently pointed out that flossing has no RCTs to support it. This is to not say that flossing has no supporting evidence. Flossing has a tremendous amount of longitudinal evidence to support it. There is also little to no evidence of any kind to discourage flossing. Despite this, the New York Times reported the story as "maybe there's no need [to floss]"[1]. That's a very misleading representation of expert opinion, presumably done to increase readership.
I fail to see how the NYTimes' version of the story is somehow preferable to a hypothetical fact free version written (as in your example) by an Estonian teenager. At least the fact free version is easier to discard as rubbish. One can only wonder how many dental problems the NYTimes' spinned version of the story will cause.
Yes--thank you. I wrote from memory and screwed up the attribution, thereby fulfilling the stereotype of the typical American who can't tell European nations apart from one another.
This tiny little episode shows how easy it can be for wrong info to spread. I should have looked up the Buzzfeed story to confirm the country, but I winged it, and got it wrong.
So was my comment "fake news"? I don't think so, of course. I didn't set out to fool anybody, it was just a mistake. But it did push out a false fact to everyone who saw my comment.
Well, I too confuse the words Baltics and Balkans while trying to recall one or the other, but on the basis of their sound, nothing to do with geopolitics, so I can easily see confusing Macestonia and Esdonia in memory also based on sound, rather than category confusion. It's not like Estonian teens wouldn't be capable of setting up a money making scam site, or any other type of teens for that matter.
Independent fact checking seems like a great idea. Discrepancies in news stories should absolutely be pointed out. But I'm hesitant about the idea of having an "established party to assess the accuracies of what is being said".
Are we supposed to censor stories that this party designate as being fake? Who should oversee such a thing? What qualifies as "news"?
An algorithm that points out discrepancies in news coverage is an interesting idea. Then it could just label discrepancies and let the audience judge each piece of coverage in context for themselves.
Unless a 3rd party fact checker is an open-sourced algorithm I doubt anyone will accept their definition of 'fact' and 'fake'. Even then someone could game it.
There are certain real world institutions which are authoritative for certain data under their domain. Tax data, citizenship status, crime statistics, demographics statistics etc...
In all fairness, it does not establish a censor. It establishes an organization for: a) studying propaganda and b) producing [counter-]propaganda. Seems like a reasonable response, as long as it doesn't go up to censorship, "information sovereignty" or any similar monstrosities. The US has played the propaganda game in the past, what it doesn't do often is political censorship, it doesn't look to me like the CFPDA changes that.
I am in the investment world and have long found Dalio to be crazy on the order of batshit level, and frankly there are a number of issues regarding Bridgewater that make my BS detector go wild. Their returns are a complete mystery to me. They charge high fees and consistently beat the market with low volatility, without leverage, and owning an extremely diversified group of assets, none of which are farther down the risk spectrum (eg equities, VC, etc). I haven't seen even the most sophisticated alternative fund allocators (eg big university endowments) sufficiently explain what it is that Bridgewater does.
Unrelated, since Jon Rubinstein is the co-CEO of Bridgewater, perhaps it does have some relevance to HN. (Although I have a side bet with a friend that he will leave in less than 24 months)
> They charge high fees and consistently beat the market with low volatility, without leverage
>>I haven't seen even the most sophisticated alternative fund allocators (eg big university endowments) sufficiently explain what it is that Bridgewater does.
What? Bridgewater uses leverage. It is the basis for their strategy. They explain how and why they use it right on their website. Also their fees are lower than average. No I don't work there.
When you say you are "in the investment world", do you mean professionally or like you trade stocks from an e-trade account in your free time?
This article resonated with me quite a bit, the Bridgewater connection notwithstanding. People love to sensationalize Ray Dalio as a cult figure and, at the same time, seem to not be able to stand how successful his firm has been. My encounters with Bridgewater staff (interviewers, friends, and a day onsite) all struck me as unusual but refreshing, even though at the time 7-10 years ago I could not succeed in that environment. Nowadays, I find myself shooting for a similar level of transparency in my work and personal life and being much more successful because of it.
This is a case study of distorted news from an individual who understands the motivations behind it like few others, because he has been targeted by this sort of distortion more consistently than most. Those motivations include:
- pressure from management to spin a story a certain way
- the reporter's personal desire to confirm his/her point of view
- the desire to put down success stories to feel better about oneself
The distortion of news is not the only place in the world where these forces are at play, but given the platform news organizations have, we must find a way to control for them.
"if you have a society where people can't agree on the basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?"
with a functioning priesthood as the mediator of truth exactly like societies around the world throughout history have determined the truth. The question is not if this will happen, it's "who are currently the priests?"
We (as the tech community) have inherited that role.
How one defines truth is probably outside of the scope of my reply, so I'll abstain from commenting on it.
However, suffice it to say I would rather have a plurality of viewpoints, where some may be misleading, than a singular viewpoint handed down to me.
Billionaire CIO isn't happy with how the Wall Street Journal (a famously business-friendly newspaper, as its name suggests) covered his company, rumbles ominously about curtailing free speech for journalists. That's about accurate, isn't it?
Where the author says: "The problem is that people who are happy with their experience and respecting our rules are not allowed to speak with the media so you end up hearing disproportionately from disgruntled people."
Do you agree or disagree with this assertion? I think it's reasonable to expect that employees seeking to speak with the press are not pleased with the work environment but to determine what that means wouldn't we need to know what % of employees speak to the press at Bridgewater relative to other financial firms?
Where the author says: "We also offered to put Copeland in contact with three prominent organizational psychologists and researchers who" ... "had studied our culture in depth" ... "These researchers" ... "had access to anyone they wanted to speak with when they did their studies. Copeland and Hope" ... "chose not to speak with these experts."
Do you think this sounds like a fair effort for honest reporting? Do you think the author is lying about such an easily verifiable statement or can you explain why the journalists chose not to speak to these individuals?
There's more, but reading through the author's words it appears like he made an honest effort to represent the good and the bad at their company. Years ago, the WSJ was considered a pinnacle of financial reporting so when Rupert Murdoch acquired it there was a lot of concern about the potential for bias to creep in.
I worked for a financial company that was the lead story in the New York Times financial section. I hold no affection for this company but, having familiarity with the circumstances they were discussing, it was clear they misrepresented the facts to make things look as bad as possible.
A neutral/honest article isn't as sensational as one building a bogeyman. Is it possible that this billionaire CIO just has a loud enough voice to point out how inaccurate the reporting was?
Any time I see a subject in the news I'm familiar with I see numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations, have you had this experience? Do you think that phenomenon is limited only to your knowledge domain?
Yes, the CIO has incentive to discount the article, but do you see how the journalists may have incentive to undermine the company?
Honestly, I think the journalists have a reasonable case to not engage too closely with stage-managed information that their subjects present them, and instead seek out their own sources.
I'd be pretty skeptical of someone who says stuff like:
> We have about 1,500 people who work at Bridgewater, most of whom love it rather than feel oppressed, so the picture they gleaned from these dozen people was clearly not representative [emphasis mine].
The CEO's blog post read to me like someone who is upset that their biases an beliefs (which they view as "accurate") weren't reflected in the reporting, but it's not "distortion" to fail to report your own distortions.
I think most of the first part of the article is pretty dishonest. The kinds of inaccuracies that lead people to distrust media in general are very different from the kinds of "distortions" he complains about: that the journalist found his own sources, rather than relying on those cherrypicked by the company; that the journalist's depiction mentioned negative facts (which he doesn't dispute!) but didn't also mention the positive ones which he likes better.
The WSJ article is easy to find, and I think it's pretty apparent on reading it how weak these complaints are. These are nothing more than the petulant complaints of a powerful man who wishes people not be allowed to criticize him.
I don't see numerous inaccuracies or misrepresentations in the news articles I read that discuss areas I'm familiar with; when I do see such inaccuracies, I tend to avoid those news sources in the future. I would venture that if you're seeing those kinds of distortions all the time, you should seek out better news sources.
But if you think a writer is doing a bad job because he finds his own sources rather than relying only on those handpicked by organization he's reporting on, I think the word for what you're looking for is a different one than "journalism."
The quote I was thinking of was, "...if the industry doesn't fix its problems, other forces will cause the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction, which will lead to some of the cherished press freedoms being lost."
I think Australia's ABC is a step in the right direction, but I would like to see more transparency.
News organisations should not need to be popular. They need to be able to tell us the hard truths. Journalists need to be given the time and the resources to do thier job.
Like the BBC? Which is abused roundly by everyone (so about as neutral as humanly possible)
There's no real solution. In the end news firms are bought by businesses as they struggle to survive.
Businesses need profit, so those firms end up giving ground to the necessities of survival. All the firms you see today are the survivors.
The firms which don't deal in interesting stuff, don't carry much weight in the mainstream since they aren't "communicating to their core audience." And are left for those few people who have the time, patience and willingness to dig through what is today considered "long form" journalism.
These firms are in turn targeted by those vested interests who still need the facts massaged. (Cut funding! It's Biased against X groups! It follows a liberal agenda! It's conservative!)
This leads to the final 3 points.
1) a fair media is a source of power. The powerful politically minded will always vie for control or work to discredit it
2) mainstream media will continue to be a lost cause, and actual discussion of facts will be done in specialist and scientific journals. Nothing will survive the vortex of money and power.
3) fact checking is now dependent on the moral and intellectual fiber of the reader. Those people who cultivate open minds and self doubt will be the few who make the effort to know the world. (To what end though, you try to communicate and it will be lost in the vortex)
Make civics a mandatory part of K-12 curriculum. Include exercises where one sifts historical yellow journalism from real news. Democracy won't survive if we try to patch over citizens' lack of critical thinking.
It's also painfully apparent when "educating children On X" is applied.
Most kids don't pick it up, and it's just an additional burden on them.
I come from a country where this is precisely the situation and it has 0 impact, except it is yet another avenue for children to practice their rote learning skills.
I find that The average American is far more informed about the operation of his legislature than is the average Indian.
The other issue is that it tosses the problem to the next generation to solve. But that won't work - the next generation will be even worse of than ours when it comes to infowars.
The idea that a journalist at the WSJ or NYT is in any way influenced by your nebulous "necessities of survival" (the advertisers, I'm guessing?) is simplistic and false. Most of them would actually love to be asked just so they could never stop telling the story how they threw that manager out of their office.
>1) a fair media is a source of power. The powerful politically minded will always vie for control or work to discredit it
So how do we make the power-minded compete against each-other to pay to control or discredit the fair media, thus giving the media itself an incentive to check the power of the powerful?
No clue. Yours is a pretty efficient idea but the powerful work aren't idiots.
The power minded are already competing to control the message, hence Fox News vs CNN etc. in America and similar parallels in the rest of the world.
Speak power to power i suppose. Someone has to intelligently take the fight to them, and it has to be executed and planned at a higher level and with a broader more practical humanitarian vision than what someone in an HN forum could bring to bear.
> ... specialist and scientific journals. Nothing will survive the vortex of money and power.
You should be wary of the cognitive dissonance being displayed here. What makes scientific journals immune to the corrupting influence of money? Is it perhaps just that you've up to now had no reason to dislike the political agenda found therein?
Here, let me finish that comment for you: "Gotcha! You don't read this one specific (if very prestigious) journal I can name and aren't familiar with its particular foibles, so you must not be able to provide any evidence for your claim!"
Actually, there's really only one big politicized issue in the natural sciences, not counting ethical concerns in biology (I'll let you figure out what it is on your own). This is unsurprising given that it's much harder to twist the facts to suit a narrative.
The social sciences, on the other hand, are full of politics. I don't have links handy, but X% of researchers in some social sciences openly admit to political discrimination in hiring decisions, for some large X.
The republicans hate NPR because they cannot influence it. They have wanted to defund it, forever.
Propaganda 1.0 was Fox News (and later CNN, MSNBC). A lot of "news" shows are really just opinion factories where the basic "facts" are in dispute. Now we are in a state of propaganda 2.0 where foreign interests have figured out how to influence people on Facebook.
I don't think this is possible to actually stop. This is the continued evolution from the Op-Ed where people want to be told what to think and how to vote.
Edit: And they won't trust true experts such as academics because they "obviously" have a liberal bias "by definition".
Specifically, several decades ago in the U.S., there were laws mandating fair news in exchange for some type of compensation - I'm not sure of the specifics though. If anybody would be so kind as to shed light on that.
I thought it was part of the original broadcast rights grants to NBC & CBS that stipulated that certain periods of time be devoted to news programs, but I could be wrong.
Crowd fund it! Of course, then you have the issue of a journalist that becomes popular and gains more power, and then distorts stories for profit and more power ... and ... never mind. :-)
> The problem is that people who are happy with their experience and respecting our rules are not allowed to speak with the media so you end up hearing disproportionately from disgruntled people.
Well, perhaps Dalio should consider extending his "radical transparency" to include not gagging his supposedly happy employees!?
I really want The National Enquirer and other tabloids to have a "For Entertainment Purposes Only" banner on top. And if I see Dr. Oz gurning at me from a "health" magazine one more time, I'm going to get a permanent twitch in my right eye.
This is not a very enlightening article. Very few people care about Bridgewater, especially on HN. More focus on specific issues and possible fixes with 'distorted news' would have been of interest, but is not present in this article.
I disagree. I don't know about the specifics that Dalio lays out, but as a media person who has been on both sides this issue, his detailed account of the WaPo's alleged journalistic malpractice rings very true.
In other words, what he describes may or may not have actually happened in this case, but boy does it look exactly like the kind of thing that used to be very routine at every level of the old-line print media, from local papers to big magazines.
Journos (or, in many cases, their editors) have a sensational story they want to tell, and they're going to tell that story regardless of how the actual reporting goes and what facts it turns up. This happens again and again and again. In fact, it used to just be the way things were done, with any positive deviation from that coming about by happy accident. Recent incidents that come to mind are the big Asian nail salon expose that had a ton of problems, or the infamous Rolling Stone rape piece. The list goes on, tho.
So this post is a really good look at how "fake news" has operated for at least the past six or so decades.
Why would people on HN not be interested in Bridgewater? I'm on HN. I'm very interested in Bridgewater. I also like reading things written by Dalio, as this piece is. Your criticism is bizarre.
I got bizarrely excited when I saw they'd mischaracterized his opinion of James Comey. I share a tremendously positive opinion of the current FBI director, but his handling of tech issues [1] and hiring/firing [2] have been less than ideal. There may not be a way to describe people you feel 98% good about in this media climate. All the good becomes invisible because the disagreements become all anyone speaks about.
And yet, having someone in a prominent role who never disagrees with you is worthless. So there are some really bizarre incentives here.
What's even more bizarre is that e.g. Clapper never got even remotely that level of non-controversial good-doing-ness, and yet we have dramatically fewer conversations about that.
I want to have a positive opinion of Comey! I like the idea of people running our most important/powerful institutions being fundamentally competent and principled, even when I disagree with them politically. But I have a hard time getting past the way he handled the Anthony Weiner email stuff at the end of the last election. It seemed unprincipled. Have you thought much about that? Am I missing something?
Comey was in a bind. Internal leaks were happening - if word got out of more Clinton email investigations before he made it public, he'd have been screwed and when it leaked, he'd look very partisan.
If he were to publicly announce it as a major issue, he'd have looked partisan. Instead he tried to walk the middle ground by announcing it publicly and downplaying its significance. It was a challenging situation and it seems a fairly reasonable response to me. About as principled as he could be given the situation at hand.
> Comey was in a bind. Internal leaks were happening - if word got out of more Clinton email investigations before he made it public, he'd have been screwed and when it leaked, he'd look very partisan.
Comey's priorities must be far greater than personal fallout: He is responsible for things so important we don't even question them (or don't want to): The law, justice, one of the most important institutions in the U.S. (the FBI), and in this case, arguably the most important institution in the world, the sanctity of U.S. democracy.
I don't care if he was in a bind; that is not a concern at all with these stakes; he shouldn't have the job if he can't handle these situations.
It may appear to civilians as if it is a bind, but my understanding based on what a large number of former top officials said is that the FBI and Justice Department have two unambiguous, long-standing policies on these issues: 1) Never talk about ongoing investigations, and 2) never say anything that will influence an election in any way.
You don't want the head of the FBI making decisions every four years (or 2 - they could influence every House and Senate race) on what election-related information they will reveal. Finally, did Comey reveal every investigation that might have influenced the election? No, only one. What about the one into Russian interference, for example? The only violation of those policies, ever AFAIK, was what Comey did.
Also, the reporting was atrocious and definitely shaped the anti-Comey narrative. For example, any leaks of information that were pro-Comey or anti-Clinton were spun as obviously Comey's doing, because no-one would dare leak anything without his support, and as proof the FBI was anti-Clinton. Meanwhile, any leaks that hurt him or helped her were taken as pure fact. It even turned out that the timing wasn't just dictated by Comey, but by the deputy director (apparently a Clinton ally) delaying telling him until well into the pre-election period. This was naturally spun as more proof the FBI were out to get Clinton. The press systematically ignored or downplayed evidence that contradicted their preferred angle.
It was a legitimately tricky scenario. Without justifying it, here is why I consider that a borderline call (one I disagree with, but a borderline call I think he's qualified to make):
Imagine Congress calls you in to testify under oath about something, over and over. This is not a big priority for you, but it is something the oversight committees care about a lot and cooperation can make your life easier when it comes to e.g. getting funding for solving serial killings.
They make you testify under oath over and over about e.g. the number of emails. They ask you on Monday under penalty of perjury, and by Wednesday you have a new answer.
Your choices are to tell them, have it leak, and be criticized for influencing an election. Or don't tell them, make your life harder, and have them say you were concealing relevant information before the election (because we all found out it was nothing in advance of the election, so the concealing would have broken as a news story too).
Honestly, he was going to get tagged with this either way. It was just which flavor of scandal he wanted.
His incompetence/misdirection on technical matters could lead us down a very dark path. It leaves me little patience for anything else from him, as either he's too dated to function in a modern era and too proud to delegate, or he's busy selling out everyone.
That's not "his" stance; it's the stance of pretty much the entire law enforcement community, and a pretty substantial chunk of Americans. We all cheered --- I did too! --- when Apple failed to produce the contents of the San Bernardino iPhone. But people outside our industry do not see this as a good thing, and --- as unpopular as this statement will be in this community --- that's not an unreasonable perspective to have. Reasonable people can disagree about it.
(If you think reasonable people can't disagree about it, you're probably misconstruing the debate. You know this is happening if, for instance, the next rhetorical move you have to make is about how it's impossible to "ban mathematics" or about how "only outlaws will have cryptography".)
I am very unlikely to hold a bias against encryption against someone like James Comey. And I work in cryptography! I disagree with him about it, but that doesn't make him a bad person.
On the other hand, I have a hard time working around him violating what is apparently a very real election norm of the institution he runs. That to me suggests that he's unprincipled, which is the kind of thing I really have a problem with.
I think the theory of those who believe he was trying to do the right thing is that he foresaw a situation where if he didn't act, the result would be roughly equivalent to a much worse violation of said norm - and so he chose to preserve as much of the spirit of the norm as he could at the expense of participating in the violation of the letter.
Whether this theory seems correct, and whether it argues for principled or unprincipled, I suspect will have varying answers depending on who you ask.
That he said things to the press about the Apple/iPhone incident that he had to know to be untrue at the time didn't indicate his lack of principle?
He said the agency was pursuing terrorists and he thought the locked iphone was important, but he specifically didn't actually take it to anyone who could help, indicating that he was 1) lying or 2) willing to let more attacks happen to make a point.
Words mean things, and the word "treason" in particular is, alone among offenses, defined in the body of the Constitution. There's no circumstance in which Comey's actions could be "treasonous", even if they were done in bad faith.
Actually, it seems to be incredibly broad and could cover anything deemed to help the "enemy". Considering we don't declare war anymore this is either absolutely unenforceable, or is totally open-ended as to what an enemy is. (Is ISIS an enemy? The Free-Syrian Army? The Kurds?)
He decided to try to blackmail Apple by taking the matter to the news when they didn't comply with his illegal orders. It's like the police coming by your work to arrest you for questioning as intimidation.
To make the undue public attention worse, they (he specifically, as well) lied to the press about the facts of iphone issue, saying things he couldn't know as fact (the difficulty for Apple to crack the device) and inventing other details.
Also, I know he had offers from security firms to crack the phone from day 2. He sat on what he claimed to have thought could have been important evidence in an attempt to force Apple's hand. He could have ruined the investigation and let terrorists escape because he thought it was a good time to showboat.
Also, under his watch the FBI has pursued numerous stings against mentally handicapped Americans in America. Trying to create terrorists by inundating them with hateful propaganda, providing functional arms and ammunition, etc, and encouraging them to commit horrific crimes in an attempt to make the FBI look competent when they catch their creation.
We've rarely had someone either so incapable of doing their job, or so efficient at destroying everything the agency has stood for. In the end what's left will resemble the political wing of the KGB.
There are stories that were completely made up by Estonian teenagers, with no connection to facts at all, which were widely republished and shared. That's the "fake news" problem.
The problem of journalists misrepresenting a company (either by mistake or on purpose) is as old as the hills. It was as true back when the media was widely trusted, as it is now.