It is currently a broken system. I don't think there has ever been a time in which trust in news sources has been lower that it is right now, and this is having all sorts of negative impacts in society. One of the problems is that news outlets don't have the right incentives; back in the time of printed paper you would spend your dollar on what you would consider a "trusted" news source, nowadays much of "news" is clickbait. The majority of what I see in online news aggregators today, would have been considered unacceptably low quality back when I was still in the field of journalism (2005-ish)
> Do they have an incentive to publish a story that is sensational when the story could be either true or false?
It's obvious from US political coverage, especially since the 2016 election, that the answer to this is: Yes, journalists have incentives to publish sensationalist stories fortified with "anonymous sources" that may be falsified and have little to do with reality for the sake of ratings, clicks and the ilk, as well as pushing either their own or their employers' political agenda(s).
I'll say this clearly: this is true of all media, left, right & everything else.
The media has repeatedly demonstrated that they are just as corrupt as the politicians that they are supposedly holding accountable. The difference is: no journalists have gone to jail for their corruption. And no, I'm not calling for an end to a free press. We, their audience, need to hold them accountable by depriving them of the funds to keep their corruption active. We should demand our journalists hold the same level of integrity we wish of our politicians.
The journalist has an incentive to maintain and advance their career. That's really the primary incentive at play here. There are no rewards for integrity or honesty.
So you'd rather trust a complete blank than book a maybe in your mind? Just don't trust shit you read on the news, this has been true since the inception of print media.
If you want to stay informed and intellectual, a lot of maybes will have to compete for space in your brain.
nobody does this. they should, but they don't. nobody keeps the wavefunction of their views on a topic uncollapsed. this takes incredible mental fortitude and immunity to emotional resonance, which increasingly few people have.
Oh c'mon, this is really overbaked phrasing ('wavefunction...uncollapsed' lol). Every single person in the world knows how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources: The weatherman says it won't rain, but the sky looks dark and I'm going to carry an umbrella anyway.
did you try to see what I was getting at before dismissing my statement?
when's the last time you successfully maintained something resembling internal undecided neutrality on a given topic, instead of resolving your views into a concrete position? it seems to be human nature to know that [something] is [true/false/some other quality], instead of maintaining an ambiguous perspective—even for complex issues, we seem to want to boil them down into something like a polarizing binary choice of belief—rather than allowing ourselves to remain uncertain, as soon as possible—to avoid the mental burden of not having come to a decision yet.
always-online smartphones in everyone's pockets and social media have made the world increasingly polarizing. fence-sitters are not tolerated: pick a side, you're either with me, or against me, and everything I stand for! which is to say, you're emotionally compelled to choose one end of the binary spectrum over the other—when the reality of the situation might not even be a binary choice to begin with!
if human beings were better at remaining "undecided until further evidence" on issues, and if it was more societally-permitted, the world would undoubtedly be a better place.
(is this phrasing less "overbaked"? I still don't see what's wrong with the wavefunction collapse analogy.)
> Every single person in the world knows how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources: The weatherman says it won't rain [...]
I completely and wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. everyone knows that weather prediction is uncertain, and takes such predictions with a grain of salt accordingly. this is not the case for news media. historically it has been mostly trusted implicitly, and this is largely still the case, but now there's people who don't trust any news media at all (or perhaps only their preferred, alternative sources). regardless, "every single person in the world" does NOT "know how to deal with uncertain information from dubious sources" in the smartphone/social media age. it is delusional to believe otherwise.
because it lines up with what I have already determined to be the truth, therefore it too must be the truth. who needs trust or verification when you have emotional resonance?
"In the buildup to the 2003 war, the New York Times published a number of stories claiming to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. One story in particular, written by Judith Miller, helped persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD: in September 2002 she wrote about an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes which the NYT said were to be used to develop nuclear material."
