If *I* have to fact-check the uncited claims made in news articles, doesn't that make *me* the journalist? - eviltoast
  • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOP
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    1 day 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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      1 day 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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        16 hours ago

        […] 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 […]

        I agree.

      • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOP
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        16 hours 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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          10 hours 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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        16 hours ago

        You can do journalism without working as a journalist […]

        Err, could you clarify this? By definition doesn’t the action of doing journalism make one a journalist? For example, Merriam-Webster defines the noun “journalist” as “a person engaged in journalism” [1]. This would follow logically [2]: If one is engaged in journalism, then they are a journalist; one is engaged in journalism; therefore, they are a journalist.

        References
        1. “journalist”. Merriam-Webster. Accessed: 2024-12-12T00:10Z. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/journalist.

        2. “List of valid argument forms”. Wikipedia. Published: 2024-06-28T20:12Z. Accessed: 2024-12-12T00:11Z. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_valid_argument_forms#Modus_ponens.
          • §“Valid propositional forms”. §“Modus ponens”.

            If A, then B

            A

            Therefore B

        • MudMan@fedia.io
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          10 hours ago

          Working as in “being paid to do the work”.

          I’ll spare you the dictionary definition. As we’ve established, you can source that yourself.

      • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOP
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        17 hours ago

        […] If you think the workload is trivial […]

        I think you might be misunderstanding me — I’m not of the opinion that the workload for journalism is trivial. All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s necessary to work full-time as a journalist (ie in a career capacity) to do the work of a journalist. I think there may be a miscommunication of definitions for things like “journalism”, “full-time”.

        • MudMan@fedia.io
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          10 hours ago

          No, you can do those tasks at any point. I’m not concerned with who is doing the work, I’m concerned with the amount of work involved and how practical it is for every one of us to do it as a matter of course every time we access information online.

          This is why this choice you made of quote-replying to individual statements is not a great way to have a conversation online, by the way. Now we’re breaking down the details behind individual words with no context on the arguments that contain them. This is all borderline illegible and quite far from the original argument, IMO.