[MountDoom]

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.

First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.

In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.

Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.

[vintermann]

Especially the actor one, understanding why someone would take the trouble to check that is almost as hard as understanding why someone would take the trouble to lie about it. Should we expect it of media? Probably.

The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract.

But looking into it, that company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships?

Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.

[zahlman]

> The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract.

Which is a rather strange approach to writing the article, because I had to do quite a bit of clicking around to have any understanding of what he was talking about.

[edent]

Author here. The "payload" was no such thing. I was merely using that as an example.