• MudMan@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    Like I said, we should get research methods taught in school from very early on. For one thing, understanding what even counts as a source is not a trivial problem, let alone an independent source, let alone a credible independent source.

    There’s the mechanics of sourcing things (from home and on a computer, I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media), a basic understanding of archival and how to get access to it and either a light understanding of the subject matter or how to get access to somebody who has it.

    There’s a reason it’s supposed to be a full time job, but you can definitely teach kids enough of the basics to both assess the quality of what they come across and how to mitigate the worst of it. In all seriousness.

    • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      2 months ago

      […] There’s a reason it’s supposed to be a full time job […]

      For clarity, by “it” are you referring to journalism?

      • MudMan@fedia.io
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        2 months ago

        I’m assuming you’re in a microblogging flavor of federation and that’s why this is broken down into a bunch of posts?

        Yes, I’m referring to journalism.

        • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          2 months ago

          Yes, I’m referring to journalism.

          Okay, well I don’t exactly follow the relevance of your claim that journalism can be practiced full-time. I also don’t exactly follow the usage of your language “supposed to”. Imo, one needn’t be a full-time journalist to practice journalism.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
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            2 months ago

            You can do journalism without working as a journalist, but there is a lot of work involved in doing good journalism, which I presume would be the goal.

            If you think the workload is trivial, consider the posibility you may not have a full view of everything that is involved. I’m saying everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated, but it’s not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.

            • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOP
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              2 months ago

              […] it’s not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.

              I agree, but I don’t think that that’s a valid argument in defense of a journalist not citing their claims.

              • MudMan@fedia.io
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                2 months ago

                No, it’s an argument against some of the proposed remedies.

                The step you’re skipping over is that citing a claim by itself doesn’t do much to guarantee its veracity if the reader of the citation isn’t willing to get in touch with the source of the citation and verify its content. Citations aren’t magical. As you’re using them in this conversation they are merely a tool for a peer review to be able to verify a bunch of precedent information without having to include it all in the same place every time.

                The difference between journalistic information and peer review in science is that news are supposed to have gone through a journalistic verification process first, which the reader trusts based on the previous operation of the news outlet. A paper is presented to go through peer review and published after it has gone through that process.

                • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOP
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                  22 days ago

                  For the sake of clarity, do you think that journalist should directly cite their sources in their work? Or, perhaps, more specifically, under what circumstances do you think a journalist should directly cite their sources in their work?