That's the rub, isn't it? Who's a "trusted" new source? All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation. Lots of people therefore consider some fly-by-night facebook feed that says what the majors don't to be more "trusted" in response.
We shouldn't "rely" on single points of perceived trust, especially in this massive for-profit, for-power media industry. We need to be broadly informed from various angles to have a better chance of piecing together a reasonable sense of what's going on.
To do that, you cannot simply "provide news" anymore. You need conflict. You need confirmation bias. You need to create a wild, screaming echo chamber that induces panic and fear. You need conflict, even if you have to fudge the details to get it. You need to focus on some things and ignore others to increase it.
It's no longer a partisan issue. I'm 40 years old. I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news. Do this yourself: go back and look at newsreels from the 80s and 90s. It's almost surreal. They were still biased, but presented information in a factual manner and then tossed in some emotional stuff. Many of them even... showed both sides of the argument. It's weird to watch now.
A news network simply cannot run with this format in 2018. Fox News was the leader, they were using bias, fearmongering, and propaganda almost from the start. They enjoyed very high ratings because of it. Now the other side has caught up. Because they had to.
It's a mess, but one thing is for sure: we can't trust any of them anymore. Not 100%.
It was a brief modern period when news sources decided to take themselves seriously and rise up ethically and appear "unbiased" to the public. It made the landscape more consolidated and monolithic, but it also drove sources to present relatively whole stories with what limited bandwidth they had to the largest population possible.
That being said, at the same time, radio hosts quite willingly went into the base-pandering and echo chambers. Conservative Talk Radio didn't crop up in the 2000s. They arrived after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine from the FCC in 1987.
TV and print news only later realized if you insert just enough bias to make their viewers feel comfortable and to differentiate from their peers, they could make a WHOLE lot more money. And with the creation of a lot more time to sell news via 24hr channels and the Internet, you had to room to add in fluff, opinion, and other material.
That's an over-simplication.
Sure, Jeff Bezos probably wants to make a profit with his purchase of the Washington Post. But the profits there are probably not his main objective as they are too small to make much of a difference to a person of Bezo's wealth.
Bezo's goal is to have a mouthpiece to push his agendas, such as pushing Amazon and trashing Musk properties. So you say that the purpose in doing that is to make more money. But the problem with that line of thinking is that you could reduce almost any action to "profit". You could reach further back and go a level lower and say that making profit is motivated by reproductive fitness, and thus "News organizations are entirely motivated by sex". But at some point you have to let go of the circuitous route from action to final motivation and focus on the immediate drivers of an action.
Politics, money, sex, job security, prestige, etc all all motivations for news organizations, as well as many other organizations.
We have known for centuries that who says a thing cannot influence its truth. How a thing is expressed can't affect it either. An untreated schizophrenic hobo screaming into the street can be telling the truth, and an esteemed professor reporting on new findings in his field can be a liar. It has always been inadvisable to do anything other than analyze claims critically, and I suppose if deepfaking becomes widespread, that will have to be relied upon more than ever.
I wonder about this. Part of the reason you had to pay attention was that there were far fewer information sources to check against. No one was reporting on Martin Luther King's affairs, and no one was reporting on the FBI's attempts to get MLK to commit suicide over them either.
Bunching those together feels disingenuous. Do the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, etc etc all have their own perspectives? Sure. That's bias, to an extent. But when have they been corrupt? When have they manipulated their reporting?
To put it simply: if a reputable outlet was caught modifying a video of Trump to put words in his mouth it would be a publication-ending scandal. The same is not the case for Infowars. I agree with you that everyone should have as diverse a media diet as they can, but suggesting that every company is as bad as each other is simply inaccurate.
Even the simplest of biases affects editorial decisions as to which content to prefer over others. Omissions of viewpoints or of counterpoint example stories means you don't get the big picture, even without some massive media scandal. People scream distrust at media channels for leaving out information they view as critical, and go elsewhere to find those details (for better or worse).
Caught how? You could show people the original video, but the reputable outlet and its allies would be pushing the narrative that the so-called "original" video is a deep fake produced and pushed by conspiracy theorists. After all, our outlet would never lie, would they?
I suspect the scandal would be less publication-ending than you think.
I think this is your bias showing if you believe the New York Times, Washington Post, and WSJ are not just a manipulative in their reporting as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
Do they outright lie, of course not, but they omit things, they choose not to run some stories that do not fit their narrative, they choose to "expose" the most extreme version of the story.
The Current Gun Rights debate highlights this nicely for all of them.
If you're interested check it out: http://www.civikowl.com. Feedback welcome (If you want to check out beta mobile app hit me up: arjunm at civikowl dot com)
(There's also a whole business model behind this that helps news orgs move away from reliance on ads but that's a longer discussion).
Instead of disproving what is fake it will be about proving what is real
I suspect people would be able to disassemble a camera and cause it to certify video that originated in a fake news studio.
Facebook is increasingly populated with a large number of new users from developing nations who are basically one or two generations removed from subsistence farming. The level of naivete and rumor spreading that you can see in Pakistani Facebook is alarming. Now combine nation-state funded agitprop campaigns with naive users and fake video. Read the following article and imagune how much worse it could be if a malicious organization with funding decided to further weaponize content on myanmar-oriented Facebook groups and pages.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/revealed-faceb...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-f...
My spouse, who is a native fluent speaker of the languages, follows a large number of Dari and Urdu language Facebook groups and friends. If you think Americans have a problem with reposting stupid things that can be easily debunked by Snopes, you would not believe the amount of naivete on display daily in those language formats. It's hard to explain unless you've seen it firsthand.
People who are one generation removed from subsistence farming are not less intelligent than others. However, they and the family have had a lot less time to view mass media bullshit (tv cable news, internet, etc) and develop the mental callouses necessary to understand the nature of media biases, who owns what media organizations. And in general have had less formal secondary education at the post high school level that teaches critical thinking, skepticism and gain some degree of innoculation against propaganda.
Just take any random Barack Obama video which we have plenty of, use similar male voice, or copy&paste convenient Obama's voice without context, and some people believe it.
It won't fool everybody but that is not that important. Some people still believe it and act accordingly(Pizzagate conspiracy theory) and that's more than enough to achieve the malicious intent.
(Disclosure: I work for BuzzFeed)
Speedtest comparison: https://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=180417_X...
If you look at the progression of film CGI, with its persistent flaws despite massive budgets, there's no reason to suspect that indistinguishable fakes are coming any time soon.
You won't even need a good impersonator, however. The same technology behind FakeApp that blends this video together could be used to blend audio together.
This is supposed to look fake and sound fake because you're supposed to see it as fake. What happens when that isn't true anymore?
Realtime video synthesis has been around for awhile. I recall reading in 1999 that if you watched the ball drop on New Years Eve, the advertisements on the buildings you see won't be the advertisements that are actually present in real life. They were being replaced on the fly with different ads. Now, it's basically possible to replace people. Everywhere that people appear. And this isn't something we can deal with simply by going off of gut reaction and intuition, it really raises significant questions.
Who will be the first politician to use a younger version of themselves to promote themselves? Which celebrity will be first to replace not the face, but their body, in film to make themselves more attractive? Which movie studio will be first to film a movie using cheap performers and then re-use the right they have to a major celebrities likeness by just faking them into it? Or maybe they'll only bring in the actual celebrity for close shots?
This can be done on commodity hardware, and will only get easier. It will be used for schoolyard bullying, for amazingly uplifting and important artistic works, for debasement and aggrandizement. It's one of these things that we've got to do some thinking about as a society.
I believe that studios have done with dead actors. Paul Walker and the guy who played Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One being examples that came immediately to mind.
I don't know how you would do that in the absence of the real world source, since the recording event would no longer exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOpSV3ZcUcw
Whether the demo is accurate or massaged, I can't say as I've never used the software myself. But if it is anywhere near as good as their demo suggests, it produces output that is more natural than the current deepfakes video outputs (though it also isn't perfect).
As far as I can tell, it's still early days for the audio faking side of things. I'd give it a year or two before it's indistinguishable from real voice. Then we're in trouble.
A wealthy person has a net worth of $100 billion, is driven around in a Mercedes S600, has a 120 foot sailboat, goes to private parties at Sundance, values their time above everything else, and is focused on his legacy and place in history. His economic activity is focused on investment. He wants to leave his kids with enough money, connections, and capabilities to become among the great American families, shaping policy and public life for centuries. Think Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates.
Are the NYT, WP, and WSJ biased? Sure. Are they corrupt in the sense that CNN was? I haven't seen evidence of it.
[1] https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...
NY Times often used spurious polling and statistics to push Hillary. They messaged that Hillary was in the lead before primaries even began based on predicted super delegate numbers. They claimed with over 90% certainty that Hillary would win the election on election day, even when it was obvious to casual observers such as myself that that number was totally wrong. They were trying to manufacture consent.
Which was true.
> They claimed with over 90% certainty that Hillary would win the election on election day, even when it was obvious to casual observers such as myself that that number was totally wrong.
Even election day doesn't necessarily prove that "wrong". 90% chance of Hillary winning means a 10% chance of Trump winning. If I draw a red ace of clubs out of a deck of cards, I don't go "that's statistically unlikely, fake news!"
It appears that 538's model was better, in hindsight, as he appears to have been correct to give more credence to the chances of a multi-state polling miss. It's not clear the NYT's model was necessarily wrong, through.
Except that it was not. Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.
You seem to be defending the news coverage. Do you also want to respond to the WP Bernie posts, or are you going to conveniently ignore that one?
The superdelegates were always going to vote for Hillary. Everyone involved, Bernie included, knew this. You might say that's very unfair and I'd agree with you, but surely the problem here is the Democratic party's delegate system? It seems very odd to blame the media when they were simply reporting the accurate facts on the ground. Should they also refrain from reporting polling numbers? After all, those too can change in time.
So? We consider "x is likely to happen" to be legitimate things to cover everywhere else. We knew which way the superdelegates were likely to break, just as we often know which way the Supreme Court is likely to rule.
> Do you also want to respond to the WP Bernie posts, or are you going to conveniently ignore that one?
Lacking information on the max negative-per-day re: Trump and Hillary, and lacking information on the max overall posts in a day, I have no useful information to evaluate that one. I'd suspect both Trump and Hillary have had more than 16 negative WaPo headlines in a day.
And I can tell you that I recognized the anti-Bernie coverage before I ever saw that FAIR post. I specifically looked for negative Hillary coverage on the WP around that time and was hard pressed to find more than one slightly negative article every other day. I eventually googled on WP being slanted against Bernie and found that FAIR article.
While that is sometimes true, and I think the media was hoping that would be true it back fried in 2016, because very few people voted for Trump, they voted against Clinton.
The media claiming every day that Clinton was the for gone winner made people that desperately wanted anyone but Clinton to win to come out to vote in droves. And no it was not because she was a women, it was because she was a terrible candidate the has Elitism poring out of every word she uttered.
//For the Record I never vote R or D, I always vote a 3rd party, 2016 was Libertarian Party.
The Democratic party did wrong by Bernie Sanders, unquestionably.
The media generally made errors in their coverage of the entire election cycle. But there are reasons for the media's inability to understand the dynamics at play, and acting as if the media were complicit with the Democratic party is assuming facts not in evidence.
Meanwhile, direct comparisons between the Washington Post and Fox News is a false equivalence.
But the were. There is plenty of evidence. In fact CNN was caught red-handed giving Hillary town hall questions in advance.
And who said anything about Fox news? What are you talking about?