Incredible News!
Literally, news that lacks credibility.
There is a type of attention-getting internet news story about X claims Y.
X is somebody that you never heard of. Y is some outrageous thing. Outrageous things happen every day, so Y may have happened.
But we are literally talking about “I saw on the internet that somebody I never heard of said Y… so I believe Y.”
Nobody reading this would say that was real evidence of Y. One visit to Free Republic ought to persuade anyone that being linked to a page on the internet does not confer credibility.
Publishers like sensational news. One reliable way to get sensational news is to only get one side of a story. Man says the sausage factory he works at uses whole human babies. That is a great story, and will remain a great story until one interviews some other employees.
“News” stories sourced only to what one person in an incident says happened, or says other people said are not really news. It is not that one should form a firm opinion of whether the source is lying or telling the truth. One should form the view that there is no reliable information there.
You know the five Ws of journalism? Who, What, When, Where and hoW.
Who: Somebody. When: Yesterday Where: Somewhere. How: via the spoken word What: said that his neighbor killed his wife.
The important verb in What is “said” not “killed.” The news story isn’t reporting a murder, it is reporting somebody talking.
Now, follow it with, “And the people at the morgue confirm that the guy’s wife is here, dead, with multiple gunshot wounds, and police confirm they have him in custody on a charge of murder.”
Suddenly there is more of a story.
We are accustomed to journalism that doesn’t publish, “A guy said…” stories without additional information.
But that era is past, if it ever existed. Every day we see multiple stories sourced to nothing but one person’s version of events.
Stories based on lawsuit filings are an internet favorite because that story is usually more interesting than the whole story. One side’s brief in a lawsuit is equivalent to watching only the prosecution side of trials. It is a very unreliable look at a case.
Another perennial one-source story is the compliant story. A person complains about something he says happened. This is even worse than the law-suit story.
Literally, “a person somewhere said…”
But such stories are often taken up like crusades. One is supposed to credit or discredit the “person who said…” based on whether the claim is compatible with one’s religion or politics or prejudices.
But the person has no presumed credibility. That doesn’t mean the person is a liar. It means that there is no rational basis to credit or discredit the person’s story.
“I saw something on the internet. Is it true?”
The answer is that from your perspective it is neither true nor false, so far.
But we don’t like that kind of uncertainty. (And I do mean “we”… my mind is the same. Each additional word in a sentence is changing a sense/picture of meaning in my head. “A physicist said…” I am already starting to credit or discredit what some supposed physicist said based on a million factors. “that Y…” If Y is something I have always suspected to be true, or hoped was true, I am now really starting to be on this guy’s side.
I once got hung up on a story for about a year. One New England newspaper published one story saying that money from Reagan’s sale of arms to Iran had been diverted to Republican political campaigns.
It was perfect, but it was also not well sourced, and was never confirmed or usefully elaborated upon, even by the original author. A lot of reporters looked.
I really wanted that to be true, but without evidence or credible sourcing at some point we recognize that somebody a reporter thought was credible and had deep inside access gave a hot tip off the record that was bogus… maybe not even first hand .
Consider the mother of the Newtown shooter. When she was a teacher shot at the school she was a somewhat sympathetic figure. When she became a divorcee with a big alimony who was not a teacher she started to slip. When she became the registered owner of a lot of guns she became the most evil person on Earth.
But we didn’t really know much about her beyond some loaded categories. As each abstract datum was dropped into place we (people on the internet) suddenly “knew” all sorts of stuff about her character, intelligence, etc..
Someone should study that aspect of the event, since the morphing of public attitude is so well documented, minute by minute, (I am reminded of the guy who said he and Doris Day went back so far that he had known her before she was a virgin.)
And this brings us to a special internet problem. Nobody expects reliable tabloids or local TV news, but the internet boot-straps both of those to some pretense of reliability.
And people publish a lot of things without much caring whether they are true because they have no connection to the audience and can be treated as pure entertainment.
Some Chinese newspaper is mocked every week for publishing a story from the Onion as news. But they don’t care. If the people in some province in China think that some guy in America said something dumb or weird… so what? It’s entertainment.
I have noticed that a lot of sensationalistic and journalistically weak stories about everyday American life happen to come from the UK (Daily Mail in particular), Australia and other far flung places that speak English.
They can grab anything that seems outlandish from any American news or rumour source and run with it because to their readership it is pure entertainment. It is about something in a foreign country.
They don’t care whether it is true, so they do not mind that it contains no persuasive sourcing.
Similarly, a lot of our “who cares if it is true” news comes from far away. Think of all those hard to believe stories about some guy in Tibet’s memory or the man who ate a million onions that come right at the end of local newscasts. It’s entertainment offered as “the lighter side of the news.”
In summation: One side of the story is not presumptively 50% right. It is presumptively kind of null… we have no information. So we impress our predjudices on the thing. Our brains are engines of reality creation… we must make sense of things. Show us a random field of stars and we will find a lion or a swan in there.
So we are not great at, “This story really tells me nothing except that somebody said something.”
Is this person white, female, middle class, a fire fighter, younger than 40? And what do I think about those traits? Did I once hear a similar story that was true? Did I hear a similar story that was not true? Does this remind me of myself of someone close to me?
But no matter what prejudices we bring to the table, “I saw on the internet that somebody I know nothing about said something.”
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