Commenting, online “debate”, “news”
Saw this a couple of days ago over on Hot Air’s headlines. Finally got around to reading it to see if it was as idiotic as I imagined. It was.
It’s all about how allowing comments on news stories is a horrible thing. It distorts readers’ opinions of the article. While that may be somewhat true, the main problem is not with comments. The problem is with journalists who wouldn’t know impartiality if it bit them in the persqueeter.
If you want to be depressed about the state of humanity, read a comment section of pretty much any website that deals with current events. If you want to find someone who validates your reaction to an article, read a comment section. If you want to find someone who validates the echo chamber you choose to live in, read a comment section. If you want to be informed skip the comment section and hit a search engine to look up more than just one site that has an article about the event in question. And look for the source attribution – so many sites simply use what the AP or Reuters puts out that you are quite likely to get the same slant to the article in many locations.
If you want to read a “just the facts, ma’am” article about current events, well, good luck. Let me know when you find some journalist who does this because I’d love to read their stuff. Otherwise, someone needs to come up with a program that you can run articles through and have it remove all emotionally charged words and judgemental phrasing, then you can read the two sentences that remain.
Once “journalists” can write just news stories while using competent English skills then they can bitch about the comment sections ruining their “work.”
Start off assuming that what you read from the Hivemind is a lie. Attempt to falsify it by looking up source material dealing with the issues lied about in the article. If it’s employment, go to BLS statistics and dig a little. If it’s education, check the literacy or math scores, etc., against the pdfs of in depth surveys at different sites–colleges and universities, department of (mis)education, etc. Oh, the sources will all lie and spin on their presentation pages about what the tests, surveys, etc., found, but if you can get hold of the actual stats–and quite often you can–you can lay their lies to rest.
Youtube or CSPAN videos of complete statements from political figures–or often even Reuters or AP complete transcripts!–will often give lie to the slant a Hivemind Podperson has presented to fit the Hivemind narrative.
And then there remains simple literacy–math, historical, cultural literacy, to mention areas the Hivemind COUNTS on sheeple being ignorant in (areas the Hivemind Podpeople are frequently ignorant in as well).
A little digging will usually turn up at least one or two facts that reveal a given “report” as an attempt to deceive. That’s easily enough to falsify the “report”.
It’s not just that they’re biased, it’s that they’re also lazy, stupid and ignorant.
Although the bias has gotten so bad in the Age Of Obama that you don’t notice the laziness, stupidity and ignorance so much.
So true.
Not just news sites.
One of my favorite XKCD cartoons ever takes on YouTube comments: the YouTube Comments Virus.
I would argue we need that virus for most sites allowing comments, though I suspect some trolls would just get off on hearing their comment read back to them.
That would indeed be awesome.