Fears that ‘pink slime’ sites could be as harmful to political discourse as foreign disinformation in 2016 and 2020
Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during America’s bitterly fought 2024 election.
Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that: “The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”
even actual local papers are now suspect because your local news is owned by a national news megacorporation that sponsors our elections
so between fake news and local national news propaganda there is no news
This-is very-dangerous-to-our-democracy.mp4
Local news is often the highest quality. The incentives are too different and the stakes are lower. Of course this means local news reporting on local stories. National stories are, as you mentioned, likely written based on a press release authored by who knows.
no more local news just articles about the latest restaurant in the more gentrified area and about how great it is to live here plus lots of sports
I think that we will just have to disagree on this one.
I deal with local news quite a bit (and occasionally national news) in my real life. It is one of the last places made up of actual people going out, doing interviews, asking questions, reporting on the facts that they find, and held accountable to the people of the community. I’ve had the same experience with TV and print news.
When national reporters show up, they generally already know the story they are going to tell and are looking for pics and quotes to confirm their version of a story.
There are national journalists and even (a few) independent journalists who are also doing honest, important investigative work, but I personally have not dealt with them.
Both you and the other commenter are right: local news often features better journalism than national news outlets, however the US is currently undergoing a mass extinction of local news organizations. “News deserts” are quickly becoming a thing.
Also true. It’s not easy to support local news but it’s very important. I haven’t really seen a good model of how to do that.
They provide a public good, so maybe they should be publicly funded? It works okay for the national broadcast news systems that exist in a lot of cases (PBS, NPR, BBC).
As with so many things, you can blame Ronald Reagan.
Prior to Reagan, there was a thing called "the Fairness Doctrine.’ A company could only own two local radio stations [AM and FM] and one VHF television station. If a station ran an editorial, they had to allow the opposition equal time for rebuttal. And half hour commercials like “The Transformers” and “GI Joe” were not allowed.
What people often leave out of this is that it only applied to broadcast publicly available television. It did not pertain to subscription cable tv which is why it was deemed unfair to local stations leading to its demise.
Considering this and other “public” versus “paid” examples in commerce and welfare, it says a lot about our culture. We care more about our freedom to spend money than we care about the general welfare of the population. We Americans want the freedom to be “bad” people (for lack of a better term) while rejecting a government that would promote our wellness and prosperity.
This is because our federal guidelines (aka The Constitution) merely outline the root level philosophies and leaves the majority of government responsibilities to the states. And in a time when borders are nearly meaningless in an always instantly connected world, beginning with nationally distributed cable television channels, a lot of people are ignorant to their own state’s legislation and power of their local representatives and own voices.
This country has changed a lot in 250 years. The old rules and guidelines are failing us. The death of the Fairness Doctrine wasn’t unfair, so to speak, but there’s a desperate need for new legislation that does the same on a national level. That’s never going to happen because the federal government can’t limit the “free speech” of entities people have to pay for to gain access to.
I would guess that anything that requires an account to gain access to it, even just an email log in or ISP / cellular subscription, skirts around the same rules that apply to free over the air television. To reiterate, we want the freedom to pay to be lied to. And our Constitution grants us that right.
That’s correct. It’s also where the false notion of the FCC not regulating cable came from. The FCC absolutely regulates cable and satellite, as well as broadcast TV and radio. They’re just toothless now.
https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/broadcasting_false_information.pdf
At this point, even the safeguards Reagan took down wouldn’t be enough because of the endless pseudo-news websites set up in other countries for the sole means of fooling people.
And if Fox had to abide by fair standards and practices on broadcast TV or even on an American website? They will have no qualms about setting up Fox News Russia or whatever and sending their people to watch it online. With Elon’s help.
It’s too late for that.
The problem with that is some topics don’t deserve equal time. For example, should we allow Dow Chemical to dump their toxic waste into the environment? No, absolutely not, no question. We shouldn’t give them a platform to misinform people.
And yet we give Dow all the platforms to misinform people now because they have more money.
I see they got the little both sides thing in there, but I’d like to see a breakdown of just how “both” it is.
both sides have campaign funding coming in from the big megocorp news
Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information
bOtH SiDeZ!!1!
(BZZZZT)
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
There are 3 categories of games:
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Positive-Sum Games, win-win, ie alliances
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Zero-Sum Games, lose-win, ie contests
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Negative-Sum Games, lose-lose, ie nihilism
People don’t understand that disinformation is nihilism: eradicating viability of humankind.
Treat it as war-against-our-species’-viability.
There isn’t much time left for faffing everything, before ClimatePunctuation will have accelerated to the rampaging-butchery stage of The Great Filter.
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All that research into GAI and this is what they come up with?
What did you just call me?
Week ago I listened to a podcast about history of misinformation and censorship in first republic Czechoslovakia.
And tldr of it is that we didn’t learn anything - they wanted to regulate sale of newspapers and everyone listened radio.
I think there is big parallel the discussion about censorship was same, and when it was implemented it wasn’t effective. Be it Russian propaganda or some other affairs.
