This is a technical mis-reporting which I can understand, but it worries me a lot more that in the wider press this level of mis-reporting occurs over other issues (finance, healthcare, politics, social change, foreign events etc.) and I don't understand enough about them to notice the mis-reporting.
I found a quote at cat-v.org which describes the phenomenon you seem to describe:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.“ — Michael Crichton
I used to love reading The Economist. It was the only printed newpaper/magazine I bothered to read. I always thought they were so insightful about topics I wanted to learn about but knew very little.
Then they ran two articles on topics I did know something about: space tech and bitcoin. And it became plainly obvious that the authors and the editors had absolutely no clue about the subject matter and were merely repeating already debunked pseudo-intellectual arguments from the popular press.
I canceled my subscription, and have basically stopped reading news, except the headlines here. If sometime really peaks my interest I'll take the time to research it myself thank you.
> repeating ... pseudo-intellectual arguments from the popular press.
I often feel similarly about The Economist. Though overall the quality is above average (sometimes by no small amount), it seems very smug at times and many of its viewpoints feel too conventional for me. It can be pro status quo.
But I can usually find similar faults in most reporting, if not worse. So it just becomes a matter of reading everything critically and skeptically, taking the good and the bad together. You take in material and you become aware of where its weaker points may lie, but those weaker points don't often invalidate the whole publication.
It's conceivable that they don't maintain the same level of expertise in all fields. That doesn't ruin the entire publication IMO. Just as HN commenters don't know everything about aerodynamics, mechanical engineering, fine arts - but that doesn't stop them from making cringeworthy comments on those subjects. OTOH that doesn't stop me from reading the comments for genuine insights and technical details on software engineering, for which there really is some world class talent here.
A shallow response. It's unrealistic to expect news suorces to be right all the time, especially about abtruse technical topics (it's the Economist not the Scientist). But you can easily rate how good their coverage is overall over time, by comparing the quality of information received with subsequent historical developments and seeing whether the one would have helped you you predict the other.
Although, if one's interest level were continuously poked into a particular memory location every time it changed, you might find that if you peeked when it piqued you would find that it also peaked.
On an unrelated note, I was writing an article for a travel magazine, and found a very well-conceived online database of recommended places to visit. Sadly, I couldn't use it in my article, because I couldn't figure out how to cite the sight site.
Agreed, but on a more positive note, it's nice that we have easy access to the correct version. The author didn't have to contact all the media that got it wrong in the first place and request that they publish a correction.
If anyone can publish anything, then there will be a lot more garbage along with the gold. It is scant consolation, but you can't really have one without the other.
Most reporters are lazy or pressed for time or both and don't fact-check. This has been a problem for some time. Many articles are also generated by software or thrown together by minimum wage workers to generate clicks. This has also been a problem for some time.
As a consumer of news, you always have to keep that in the back of your mind when you read news.
It would also help to be willing to pay for actual real news reportage, of course. The reason why the online news business is increasingly minimum wage workers driven to generate clicks is because that's the only way anybody's found to make money in the online news business.
I hope these people are suitably ashamed of themselves.
I wrote an article a year ago about the use of an ARM64 CPU in the iPhone 5S and what it meant. In the introduction, I called out several poorly researched articles for getting lots of things wrong. I actually got an e-mail from one of the authors basically whining at me for calling him out in public rather than sending him corrections directly. I was feeling generous, so I went through his article and gave him point-by-point corrections. It ended up being longer than his original article, and nearly every sentence was wrong. I never heard from him again, and the article was never corrected.
It's a struggle to get visibility for good information. Meanwhile bad information spreads seemingly faster than the speed of light.
This story was essentially tech news junk food, filler for a slow news day. While it's amusing to see how much they got wrong, this was not a topic you spend any time researching as it's simply not that important or relevant.
It's like breaking down a tabloid article or one of those shocking viral posts that are shared on social media.
A blog post that ties Ballmer (+1) to the blue screen of death (+1) is linkbait 101, not exactly hard news that deserves scrutiny.
Plus all of the places running it incorrectly are well known for being tabloids. Engadget used to be respectable years ago, but not really now, and The Register, DailyTech, Gizmodo/Lifehacker (same company, Gawker Media) are all pure tabloids of the worst kind.
But in general Tech' is full of garbage news sites. They just seem to make more money since they can attract more views for spurious stories.
Wow, this is incredible how many tech authors were victim to such an obvious oversight. It really shows how much of modern news reporting is just a giant game of Telephone, with very few people willing to actually go to the source independently.
The best part is that if someone said Steve Ballmer wrote the BSOD message, people will believe him because he could cite 10 sources, not knowing that those sources all stemmed from the same incorrect source.
The most entertaining example is arguably the Coati, which due to a widely-picked-up piece of wikivandalism arguably now is "also known as the Brazilian Aardvark"... except, after editorial discussion, on Wikipedia where the name was coined
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Coati
News has always been this way really. In the past readers have lacked the ability to fact check quickly and easily or have the subjects publish corrections on their own with such ease as in this case.
None, the same for traditional media for all of time. Media cares very little for actual truthful, accurate news, its more about viewers, readers, subscribers, listeners and $$. It's been like this forever though.
It seems to me like this wasn't so much an oversight, as it was gleeful embellishment of the facts. I can understand a couple of the situations being honest mistakes, but most of them are perfect examples of how entrenched click bait and the colour yellow is in tech "journalism".
I don't know if it's that black and white, but that's certainly each end of the spectrum. I think the most important thing is to stay away from aggregators and blogs and focus on websites that are making good content that can stand on its own.
Ars Technica and Forbes Technology are two good examples of this that come to mind, and until recently I would have counted The Verge as well. The problem is that instead of supporting the types of sites we want to read, we are complaining about the ones we don't.
How many errors in a simple article a tech writer/blog can get away with is shocking. On the other hand, I don't think they have too much incentive to be correct than sensational these days, as with the power of social media, something sensational would bring much more revenue than something rather accurate. Also, even if the facts are later disputed, the short-lived nature of the medium significantly decreases the costs of such humiliation and shortened links do not tell too much about your credibility while click-bait titles are more than enough to bring attention (and therefore ad-revenue).
I don't know much about online publishing though. These are just my observations as a reader.
I had not heard that anybody claimed Steve Ballmer wrote the BSOD, but I did read the cntl-alt-del article. I guess that shows HN works to filter out the BS :)
This shows that blog spam is worse than useless, it actively contorts the real news itself. It's always better to link to the original source itself, but those tend not to have the catchy headlines that the blogspam articles provide.
