alt Hacker News> People love to demonize journalism, but who else will hold the powerful like Google to account?
That sounds like "people love to demonize collective farms, but how else would you grow food?" The question begs the answer - other people who are not part of collective farms could do it very well and have been doing it for centuries. You don't have to be a part of billion-dollar corporation controlled by a billionaire and have a degree for which you owe your whole net worth and hope some politician will consider you worthy of bribing to pay it off - you don't need any of that to tell the truth. Especially not these days when literally anyone still can speak publicly easily, despite all the efforts from "real journalists" to put an end to it.
> I mean high-quality sources like NY Times, CBS News
ITYM "corporations that are constantly lying to us like"...
> where they've been accused of failing,
They are not "accused of", there are literally dozens if not hundreds only recent cases where we know they lied, we know why they lied, they know we caught them lying, and yet nothing happened and people like you keep calling them "high-quality sources".
> The targets of professional journalists' investigations will lie their asses off
Unfortunately, the professional journalists will lie their asses off as frequently, if not more. The good news are that we don't really need them anymore.
What I'd love - maybe you'd love - is if bloggers formed a new Social Media Accuracy Collective (SMAC). To be a member, you need to carefully verify - corroborating with at least three, credible primary sources with direct knowledge of the subject; and personally verify primary materials - every word you write, and painstakingly review every analytical claim you write for 100% accuracy, and verify every secondary factual claim (e.g., the weather on that day), and then have others closely verify all that in a sort of peer review. And only then can SMAC members post on their blog.
In addition, most of what SMAC members post has to be new to the public (not something others have posted) and significant to their community.
Then those bloggers would be journalists. But if they did, I wouldn't care if they worked for the NY Times or whatever, or if they called themselves journalists. But who else but journalists and scientific researchers matches those standards?
> You don't have to be a part of billion-dollar corporation controlled by a billionaire and have a degree for which you owe your whole net worth and hope some politician will consider you worthy of bribing to pay it off - you don't need any of that to tell the truth.
You setup that strawperson. It does take a lot of education, training, and work, including resources to do all that work. Could SMAC exists without funding and other resources?
> there are literally dozens if not hundreds only recent cases where we know they lied, we know why they lied, they know we caught them lying
If you can provide examples, that is great. Otherwise, who is making things up?
That's the difference between social media (including HN) and professional journalism. On social media people just write whatever. If they NY Times writes 'literally dozens', there are actually more than 24 or 36; when people on social media write it, it's kind of an expression of 'a lot' and we all know that the person writing is just performing an emotional play, and very possibly doesn't know.