Joe Roberts (They/Them)
hannah onlinemastodon getting mainstream coverage has been such an intense demonstration of that effect where you only realize that the news is completely, outrageously wrong about the most basic shit when it talks about something you're actually familiar with
neville park@prehensile a. k. a. Gell-Mann Amnesia
@nev i knew it had a cool name!
Blake C. Stacey@prehensile @nev "Gell-Mann amnesia" was coined by Michael Crichton, a climate-science denier and generally awful person. It's entirely possible that in whatever examples he had in mind, *he* was the one in the wrong.... But if we're avoiding 4chan lingo, we should avoid that too.
brennen@nev @bstacey @prehensile i wind up re-litigating this inside my own head every time it comes up. it's such a useful concept that i could really use a name for it not coined in a talk[0] arguing that climate science is alarmist bullshit.
[0]. https://web.archive.org/web/20190808123852/http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/
Martin Vermeer FCD@brennen @nev @bstacey @prehensile There is the expression 'falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus' specifically from the legal field... but we could adopt it.
Deborah Pickett
Richservo 
@bstacey @prehensile @nev not the author of Jurassic park tho, right? If so. That’s some insane irony.
az
Zed@nev @prehensile always good to learn new stuff
Amelia 
@prehensile I stopped listening to Radiolab when they did an episode about figure skating and they got a bunch of basic facts wrong and I went, "oh, no,"
Brandon "Dreg Mangler" Kirkman@prehensile Also each time the sheer disdain any mainstream outlet has when they find out it's not about advertisement or revenue. The blood thirsting of capitalism is real
Alice 🔥 End Of An Era@prehensile I mean, that's been my experience in general as someone who has worked in tech all her life and lived with guardians that very much always had the news on.
Relee the Squirrel@prehensile It was a dark day for me when I first noticed that.
Harold Daniel@prehensile Absolutely true.
@prehensile this but also "the news" includes 8 zillion takes from very confident posters
helleano)))r@prehensile the constant crunch to produce in a news cycle makes for perpetual "crammed in the last minute before exam" energy
true research takes 5 minutes but the news needs something out in 2
Eebie Abby Obie@prehensile I've felt this for a long, long time. I take a healthy interest in a wide variety of things, and each time the news would report on something I was familiar with they got almost everything wrong. It was so upsetting that when anything would happen, I'd try to just go straight to the source.
Simon Coles@prehensile I've been preparing some resources for friends and I'm struggling to find articles which are worth including. Makes you wonder what else the mainstream press get wrong!
Holobrine@simonc @prehensile I think this EFF article is pretty good
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/mastodon-private-and-secure-lets-take-look
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/mastodon-private-and-secure-lets-take-look
Is Mastodon Private and Secure? Let’s Take a Look
This post is part of a series on Mastodon and the fediverse. We also have a post on what the fediverse is, why the fediverse will be great—if we don't screw it up, and how to make a Mastadon account. You can follow EFF on Mastodon here.With so many users migrating to Mastodon as their micro-...
peter
Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】
@prehensile "The hacker known as Mastodon."
🏳️🌈 HeroRareheart 🏳️⚧️@prehensile can you post a few links or screenshots? I wanna see what they are getting wrong.
D S@prehensile "They call is mastodon, its a version of twitter that no one can figure out how to sign up for..."
aji@prehensile i've heard it called "gell-mann amnesia"
🐚 Undo Influence 🐚I enjoy reading three sentences into an article and realizing that its headline says the exact opposite of what's actually in there. Really inspires my confidence in the news outlets.
I also enjoy how they find some incredibly unflattering photo of whoever they're disparaging, just to make sure I get how terrible that person is. :/ This doesn't feel manipulative at all.
Sven "DrMcCoy" Hesse@xenophora @prehensile (the reason for that is that usually, the author of the piece doesn't write the headline. that is written by someone else, who hasn't even necessarily read the article in detail, solely to make it sound as clickable as possible)
Yeah, I know. But regardless of who allows (or demands) that, it breeds a lack of trust in the reader since it indicates utter disrespect for us.
Streeter Sweeper
Grumpy Jules@prehensile yes, 💯 - it happens 1000x a day with #macroeconomics too (i.e., how government finance works - hint, it's nothing like a household - #MMT).
Most days it feels terrible to know the truth and have no power to overtake the #MainstreamMedia lies and fearmongering.
Most days it feels terrible to know the truth and have no power to overtake the #MainstreamMedia lies and fearmongering.
Kalany Vir'harellan@prehensile my frustration with this is amplified by the fact that in science coverage I can't even find out whose press release they're badly misinterpreting unless I pay for the article. I think journalists who write about scientific papers/press releases/etc should have to provide their citations outside the paywall.
nebuchi_25 
@kalany @prehensile i always go straight to sci-hub for that exact reason.
@nebuchi @prehensile Problem is, I'll see an article headline, maybe even the first graf, and they've so badly mangled the research that I can't even tell if I've found the right one.
@kalany @prehensile that's really effed up😒
Half-baked@kalany @prehensile Plus a ton of science coverage doesn't mention what they're citing _at all_ outside of maybe an institution or a person involved. It takes barely any characters to include a DOI, but alas 
David 
+"So I got myself a Mastodon but then the guy from Weezer is the boss of it and he said I can't post there anymore so now I lost my Mastodon forever"
David Wells@prehensile ..though On the Media did a pretty good job with their segment, considering. (of course, their main purpose is calling out the media when it is completely outrageously wrong, so...)
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-flipping-bird
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-flipping-bird
Stu Duerson, machina exo deus@prehensile As a commercial pilot, I could find an inaccuracy in virtually every press report on aviation accidents, some really, really stupid.
Personally, after watching my own airplane on TV, coming back into ATL with a switch problem where the media turned it into a conceivable gear up landing, I developed defenses. From then on, I crafted every emergency call so as to not bring it to media attention. Quite successfully, I might add.
Personally, after watching my own airplane on TV, coming back into ATL with a switch problem where the media turned it into a conceivable gear up landing, I developed defenses. From then on, I crafted every emergency call so as to not bring it to media attention. Quite successfully, I might add.
Emily GB 🏳️⚧️@prehensile I've worked most of my adult life in or around the space industry (it's just a big tech space in my area).
They got so many of the basics wrong, or drew wild conclusions from literally nowhere.
It was eye opening.
A handful of reporters with deep experience in the field got it right far more often, but those folks were often the first to be let go.
@prehensile have you ever had the displeasure of being interviewed by a journalist? i was interviewed several times on various medias. the worse is when it's not live and they edit it later. sometimes you'll find your words twisted beyond recognition. and it's horrible, because you said it, but it wasn't like that, and now everyone thinks you said it. that's why i always prefer to send my articles to the paper and not have someone else write about me.
Hegelian Princess@nebuchi @prehensile even in the best case they focus on the most boring thing you say
Rev. Bussy Body of The Church of America MLM and Shooting Club@julieofthespirits @nebuchi @prehensile one time i responded at length to an interviewer by email and the end product was clearly pre-written without my answers and had like 3 snippets of what i said, in the wrong order, out of context, stripped of anything containing new information
bitsavers.orgThere is a reason why my introduction says
"I eschew interviews."
I tried really hard not to give someone an out of context sound byte, and they managed to find one.
Dr. Fortyseven ◣ ◥◣ ◥ 🥃@prehensile HAH. I was literally just taking about that phenomenon the other day. It's an incredibly uncomfortable realization. 😭
Lord Kelvin@prehensile
This.
I mean… on the one hand, the big liar who only ever lies, who whines about “fake news” is full of $#!+.
OTOH, 100% of the time the news includes anything in my areas of moderate expertise, they’re dead wrong unwatchable. So I don’t.
But I hate that it implies conceding the point.
nerdparkerI worked in an emergency room.
Then I worked in an operating room.
Then I became a lawyer.
Now I'm a software developer.
I can no longer watch broadcast television.
pandabutter [I have moved]@prehensile Oh look, a rant I had a bit ago about how "neutral" language in the press can be used to propagate bigotry! Wonder how that got here?
https://tech.lgbt/@xelle/109160670553503430
https://tech.lgbt/@xelle/109160670553503430
xelle (@[email protected])
Content warning: Liberal centrist bullshit, homophobia, monkeypox
Rey 
@prehensile the amount of time I spend yelling "that's not how that works, that's not how ANY of that works!!" at the news... :shudder:
aeva@prehensile "Are YOUR CHILDREN buying FENTANYL from TRANSEXUALS on THE DARK WEB?!?! Tune in at 8 to find out more about Mastodon, the next big moral panic!"
@aeva @prehensile Is this common food giving you CANCER??? A study found that this food DECTUPLES your rate of cancer!
(if you eat a stupid amount of it)
(and the risk was like 0.1% instead of 0.01%)
In other news, thing shown to treat serious condition!
(in mice/isolated cells under very specific lab conditions)
(this was small-scale and has not been replicated yet)
Dudley of Yesterzine 
@prehensile @stevelord Oh my yes, like when no such thing as a fish tried to do a motor racing thing. They weren’t totally wrong of course but the stuff I immediately spotted certainly informed my processing of anything they (and QI) has said since,
Limited For No Good Reason@prehensile Many of us who are stuck in the center have been saying this for a few decades.
America is Angry because we're only fed the part of the news story that causes the most sensationalism.
The scary part is that the people who are being manipulated, which is most of America, don't even realize it's happening, because, it's THE NEWS and THE NEWS wouldn't tell only part of the story in order to get ratings, would it?
Jeebus, I miss Walter Cronkite.
America is Angry because we're only fed the part of the news story that causes the most sensationalism.
The scary part is that the people who are being manipulated, which is most of America, don't even realize it's happening, because, it's THE NEWS and THE NEWS wouldn't tell only part of the story in order to get ratings, would it?
Jeebus, I miss Walter Cronkite.
Slade Rice Watkins
The Doctor@prehensile Can I quote you on this?
@drwho sure, but I’m curious about where!
@prehensile My .plan file.
https://drwho.virtadpt.net/drwho.plan
I push updates to it a couple of times a year.
@drwho wow, that is a lot of quotes!