Showerthoughts

31314 readers

319 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1

Rules

All posts must be showerthoughts
The entire showerthought must be in the title
No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- If you feel strongly that you want politics back, please volunteer as a mod.
Posts must be original/unique
Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

626

If I have to fact-check the uncited claims made in news articles, doesn't that make me the journalist? (self.showerthoughts)

submitted 2 months ago by Kalcifer to c/[email protected]

237 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Kalcifer 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If a journalist phones a couple of sources, hears from them the same thing they are seeing somewhere and publishes that information, then the fact-checking has been done once and reaches thousands or millions of people.

If the way the information is disseminated requires those thousands or millions to do the fact-check themselves using the same process, then that is entirely impractical, which was my original point. Crowdsourced fact-checking is always going to be less reliable and exponentially more work than properly verified broadcast news sources. Even if many of them share their fact check, we have plenty of data to suggest the reach of that correction will be much smaller and it will still require a lot of private effort to correct the original info.

Sure, but would it not be better if they had also just cited the transcript of their contact with those sources? I understand that the news outlet can just fabricate a source, but at least a source will give readers an official starting point for investigation rather than just blind continuous skepticism. I'm of the opinion that a sketchy source is better than no source at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, no, a sketchy source should not be published in the first place. That's the job he journalist is supposed to be doing during the verification stage.

The process we're discussing isn't about verifying the final article, it's about verifying the source itself.

[–] Kalcifer 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

The process we’re discussing isn’t about verifying the final article, it’s about verifying the source itself.

Okay, sure, but one can't verify a source if the source wasn't cited in the first place.