Why I no longer read “news”
January 25, 2018 Leave a comment
I realize that there is a rather tired trope of “fake news”, and maybe if you’ve read other of my posts here, you’ll see a trend where I’ve tried to detox from the monolithized “mainstream” media and use tools like RSS to refine what I see. Today one of them slipped through, so I can show you precisely what my grievance is with a solid example.
One of the paramount reasons we call a story “news” is because we trust that there is a reasonable relation between the article we read and the sources it cites. A good journalist will follow through in ways such as reaching out to the people involved in the article, or ask clarifying questions for the reader to consider. Newspapers also have a section where a writer can indulge in their own opinions on a topic, hence called the “Editorial” or “Opinion” section.
So take a look at this “article”, from The Guardian, an outlet typically held in high esteem:
The author opens with a single source cited (we’ll get to that in a moment), proceeds to draw a conclusion based on the source that car insurers are charging higher premiums for people with Hotmail email addresses than other address types, and proceeds to indulge us with a personal recollection of how things “used to be.” She has a couple paragraphs of nostalgia, followed by a concluding remark that if Hotmail is the “worst” email to have, a personal vanity domain is the best, backed up by a single anecdotal experience she had. In my opinion (ironically), any editor worth their salt would have tossed this in the bin, or at least routed it to the Opinion section, where it belongs, rather than being paraded under “Technology>Email>Shortcuts.”
The verdict gets more damning when you bother to read the source. First, one look at the source website screams tabloid to me. Second, the source article is based on an “experiment” run by the author, hardly scientific. Third, the correlation between the points in the source and the points in the parent article is nonexistent. Let’s look at some examples.
The Guardian article headlines with a quote, “A sign that you’re not keeping up.” Clearly the implication is that the conclusions for this article were justified by something car insurance companies have said. Except that the quote is nowhere to be found in the source. Second, the article headlines with the phrase “car insurers.” Plural. But the source shows a simple experiment with a single insurance company, in the UK. Third, the source contains a brief quote from the insurance company in question, which never made it into the parent article. Therefore, the entirety of The Guardian article is baseless lard, opinions of the author being passed along as fact.
The reason I’m analysing this so deeply is the reason I discovered this excuse for news. There is currently a thread on Hacker News, bearing a headline that actually grabs the first sentence of the article in question, and there is a 200+ comment discussion assuming that the article is fact, and people coming up with theories as to why such widespread discrimination against Hotmail users is happening. For example, the very top comment declares it must be some kind of AI modeling.
So what we have here is the following chain: a barely functional tabloid article about a nebulous-at-best non-scientific experiment on a single car insurance company in the UK, which then turned into an opinion-piece-masqueraded-as-fact declaring an epidemic happening with multiple insurance companies not limited to any location, which then turned into a discussion about why such systemic discrimination is happening, and tapping into clear fears people have about how these insurance companies are clearly doing lots of data mining.
I wish this could be a post about why The Guardian has fallen, but I’ve seen similar pieces from the New York Times and other places. This kind of garbage is precisely why I’ve had to start honing my RSS feed to pay attention to particular journalists who have earned my trust, and disavow the fourth estate as whole.