[mk_chan]

This is very important to write on. A lot of people believe news is worth consuming for the truth and often cite it as a primary source of information. News producers may not necessarily lie but they cherry pick to maximize reach and that content plays on peoples belief that what they see on the news is all the information you need.

The news in a vacuum can actually be quite misleading and I too believe people should realize that it is not the ‘whole’ truth.

[whycome]

It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth. I’ve noticed a couple incidents recently where the news just literally had the facts wrong and the Wikipedia article for the related topic ended up in this weird limbo until the news stories were updated despite more relevant sources being available.

[patates]

Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story. It's usually the "which truths get picked and which not" part that gets tricky. Wikipedia makes its own compilation, so citing facts out of newspapers doesn't sound too bad.

[willdr]

Recent Wikipedia articles are kind of an oxymoron; Wikipedia by design is meant to be a tertiary source, downstream of both news media but also mainstream scholarship. The problem is that it's "an encyclopaedia anyone can edit" — and that inherently means a rush to create or update articles when news outlets publish something novel.

While news media is an acceptable source, proper peer-reviewed journals and other scientific publications are preferred. People would do well to remember Wikipedia is NOTNEWS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...).

[johannes1234321]

Wikipedia isn't aiming for an objective truth. That barely exists, but a common understanding. See this essay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_cannot...

[Braxton1980]

What should they do instead? Any source can wrong.

If you cite a news article a person should be able to use that to locate additional sources.

[tchalla]

Wikipedias aim is to collect information not tell us the truth. It’s a mirror not a light. News articles are a source of information because they can be verified. For every claim where news articles have gotten wrong, there are 100x times “relevant sources” getting it wrong.

[BeetleB]

This has been a problem since Wikipedia's existence. I've had the (mis)fortune of personally knowing people who were charged with serious crimes - serious enough to garner nationwide attention.

The stuff that got printed in the news was at times just plain false. Stuff that anyone in our town could easily confirm to be false. A reporter would hear something wrong, or interview one person who misspoke, and (s)he would never fact check. Eventually those inaccuracies would end up not just in Wikipedia, but in books written by experts on the case in hand.

Even recently, my company has been in the news a lot (negative news). You'll get stories where anonymous employees are telling journalists things about changes in the company. A lot of it is flat out wrong.

[Spooky23]

My father in law was a fixture in the city newspaper coverage for many years. The facts are usually reliable or refined as a story develops. The narrative is not -- as the people talking to reporters always have an axe to grind, be it ego, resentment, moral outrage, revenge, etc. Bigger stories are usually better if there's some baseline.

For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.

[stuffn]

> It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth.

Wikipedia is arguably worse than the sloppiest news slop the media machine can manufacture. It's lawless, it's been shown majority of articles are written and edited by a single cabal of people, and it's also been shown a distinct bias towards one side of the political aisle.

I wouldn't trust Wikipedia any more than anything Rupert Murdoch owns. Perhaps slightly less, because at least in theory Murdoch can be held accountable for fake news and Wikipedia is powered entirely by fake news and accountable to literally no one.

[0xEF]

I don't know for certain, but I believe it's because newpapers (aka "The Press") are at risk of libel or slander charges if they don't get their facts straight. That may also be a US-centric thing, too, I am not sure. To put a pin on it, we want to believe that the possibility of punishment for misrepresenting facts imposes some level of accountability on a print publication.

Still, despite the fact that they can be sued for lying by the people they are lying about, I'm sure they find plenty of ways to bend the truth while still technically telling it.

I suppose that calls into question why we trust any media source that we can't directly verify ourselves as an authority. It's all very confusing to me, to be honest and I simply don't know what to do about it. Not being able to trust information is maddening.

[wat10000]

News is, by definition, unusual. If you consume it to learn about unusual events then it can be alright. If you use it to build a picture about common events, you're going to end up with a completely upside down picture.

My general guideline is: the higher up the news hierarchy (local, metro, regional, national, international) a personal risk is, the less you should worry about it. Car crashes barely make the local news most of the time, they're worth some attention and care. Airliner crashes make massive headlines, not worth worrying about. The news is very informative here, you just have to understand what it's really saying.

[amiga386]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog

> The phrase man bites dog is a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences (such as a dog biting a man.)