I noticed a recent increase in the amount of native advertising, especially poorly labeled "sponsored content," and built a chrome/firefox extension to flag these articles [1]. It includes rules for the sites mentioned - Buzzfeed, Mashable, Quartz, and Vice - as well as about 100 others.
Reactions from publishers and native ad companies were surprisingly positive - some even reached out asking to me add their sites. In general I think a lot of people in publishing are very conflicted about the problem because it gets into journalistic ethics, which are deeply ingrained.
Currently an organization called the IAB provides the standard for the industry, but it's vague and lags behind innovation in native ads [2]. Native ads aren't necessarily bad, but their inconsistency that makes them very deceptive to users. I think publishers would benefit from an updated set of standards that enforce consistent messaging.
A great idea, thanks. A suggestion: If you could post it someplace that allows user reviews, I'd be much more likely to download it. It's hard to tell if it will cause performance problems, installs/uninstalls well, false-positive/negative rates, identifies advertorials that I wouldn't find on my own, etc. I could try it, but there are many, many add-ons to try!
That said, I hope it works well and becomes widely used. The publishers should be putting that alert on their pages themselves.
Thanks for the feedback. The chrome/firefox pages have user reviews but there aren't many of them.
I was sensitive to performance when I wrote it - in most cases detection rules are single selectors. It won't run anything on sites not in the db. No library dependencies.
There's a phantomjs test suite that flags false positives and negatives. Of course, I can't personally compile a list of every site with sponsored content, so if it's not on the list the addon won't display anything.
Hard for me to say whether it can spot ads that you can't. Many people think they aren't susceptible to ads like these, and I'm one of them, but I built this for peace of mind. Sponsored content can be easy to miss. My favorite examples are this Yahoo news article on climate change (written by an oil company), and a Newsweek article on personal injury lawyers:
Here is why the integrity of journalism is so important:
In my experience, most people form opinions by effectively shopping among the various narratives offered by the many forms of media, including those described in the article, and picking the one they like most -- as if they were shopping for a sweater to wear. Then they base their opinion on the chosen narrative, but of course once the questions are framed and facts established, their 'opinion' is preordained.
That is no accident. The narratives often are created by interests whose goal is to manipulate public opinion, and their stories are repeated widely, wittingly by their agents and unwittingly by everyone else. This isn't conspiracy theory; you can read plenty of legitimate research where this process is openly described; even the vocabulary you probably use to discuss public issues often is carefully constructed by someone. Public opinion can be manipulated to vary widely from the facts (consider climate change, Saddam Hussein's connection to 9/11, etc. etc.) and also it is an extremely valuable asset. Manipulating it can change history, and create and destroy political and personal fortunes -- and nations, as well as start/end wars, kill/save hundreds of millions of people, and make/lose trillions of dollars ('regulation is choking the experts on Wall Street'). So of course there are many, many people who will manipulate it. There is a game being played and most people don't know it is happening, much less that they are its objects.
How does this happen? I think many people are swayed by the big lies -- they can't believe so much is so deceitful. Also, in my experience the best educated, smartest people I know are often the most easily led; perhaps they are hamstrung by their intellectual confidence, because I often hear them repeating one side or another's talking points and underlying propaganda. Finally, it's hard to educate anyone on this issue; there is no nice way to say, 'you've been fooled' and 'most of what you say is someone else's propaganda'.
But how does it happen? It's not true that society can rely on citizens to sort truth from falsehood; the reality is that people are easily led. It is up to the elites in our society, including journalists, to ensure they are getting something closer to the truth. I doubt there is a solution for corrupt elites.
I worked for a strategic communications firm and this is, generally speaking, a good summary that lines up with one of the biggest guys in the industry (at least when he spoke to me with a tiny group of interns).[1] He further speculated people are socializing themselves into camps in the US, with majority political parties backing dominant media outlets and viewpoints. Getting people to detach from the Fox News viewpoint (and its supporting outlets) or the other side, is very difficult. This is even trying to discuss relative truth, as something as simple as Iraqi freedom fighter/enemy combatants/terrorist (notice I do not specify, you think what you want) death counts in a bombing or air strike. Iraqi outlets changed the number, wire services, and later news outlets expounded on minimal wire details never recorded in official records quoting unnamed sources (and I am sorry, I simply do not believe any US news outlet has the language or culture skills or the free money for bribery to reach out to even willing Iraqi gov officials to chat all day about everything they ordain in their products. This is pure bullshit and never revealing a source is intentional, as there is none).
To summarize, the fundamental problem, whether you like it or not, is also breaching the "other side" with truth or opinion or whatever. This media Balkanization is dangerous, and what you point out is that it is greasing the wheels of this operation.
So stop judging, read Aljazeera, RT, Iranian news feeds, and Chinese, Fox. I have read it all. You need to average out the facts and also see what opinions are being sold in the extremes, as that is the only way out of being mind-fucked in this system.
> It is up to the elites in our society, including journalists, to ensure they are getting something closer to the truth.
I up-voted you before I got to your last paragraph. I wish I could undo my vote.
Think about what your statement says about democracy. It's a fair position to take on a question that has been debated for centuries. But did you realize you were taking such a position?
>> It is up to the elites in our society, including journalists, to ensure they are getting something closer to the truth.
> Think about what your statement says about democracy. It's a fair position to take on a question that has been debated for centuries. But did you realize you were taking such a position?
I can imagine a few things you might be implying, but I'm not sure which one. I'd be very interested in learning what you mean.
That is one of best deconstruction of current media spin I have read.
The hypocrisy of many knowledgable people is astounding and when you dig deeper, you realise they are unaware of it. That is the depths to which we have sunk.
To rebut many of the common arguments it would take hrs given the layers of spin that needs to be peeled.
If you come up with a different understanding from the mainstream it will take an hour of your time to explain it to the average person, if and only if they are extremely open minded, and then they will forget it.
The mainstream media gets to talk to hundreds of millions for a couple of hours every week. At least it's a bit better now that there's the internet.
Probably double digit millions if you add it all together. There is likely a lot of overlap. "News junkies" watching ten newscasts equals ten views, but doesn't equal ten different viewers.
Maybe triple digits if you add the entire world together across all languages and cultures. But that might be pushing it.
The primary use of the news is signalling positions to the other side. Nobody is supposed to learn anything from it, just signal to other groups.
I have noticed that more educated people do seem to be more apt to take a party line. I wonder if part of the reason for this is actually because they consume more propaganda than less educated people. If you are being educated and responsible in the run up to the war and you read the New York Times and watch Meet the Press and so on, the only effect would have been to be more inculcated with lies and BS.
The "uneducated" who are less exposed are less apt to have their brains so washed away. I think it takes significant exposure to a lot of different media and narratives over a sustained period of time to develop an awareness of how untrue our news really is and how to read between the lines not to find out what's true, but what probably isn't. The average "educated" person might read a few news articles a day and watch the evening news. That doesn't cut it.
I think a factor is that critical thinking is a skill that has been eroding in society across all levels for quite some time on. Even if more technically savvy, the "educated" are not better prepared to resist propaganda than the "uneducated".
What the first group is, is more comfortable in processing and manipulating abstract ideas. This factor makes you more vulnerable to propaganda because of the natural tendency to dismiss data that does not confirm your working hypothesis as "noise". I am pretty sure highly focused propaganda will exploit specific cognitive biases of the "educated" too.
The second group thinks in a more concrete fashion, so it is harder to dismiss conflicting evidence for them. So, they will get a gut feeling that there is something wrong with the hypothesis/propaganda, though they not necessarily can pinpoint what that might be. Attempts to make sense of these strange Rorscharch patterns provide the raw material for plenty conspiracy theories, too.
> Are you saying there is an elite group that is publishing something close to truth? Who do you mean?
I mean people with the power to shape public opinion, from political and business leaders to other public figures to some people in the media industry. Many are described in that FT article. It's not rigidly defined and there is no membership card, but clearly a NY Times reporter is among the elite and the vast majority of people have no such power.
As a side note, notice that left-wing public interest groups seem to have faded; from Greenpeace to union leaders, they rarely seem to be in the public debate any more.
The single most depressing quote from the article, understandably lifted even on the page itself:
> "For every working journalist in America there, are now 4.6 PR people, up from 3.2 a decade ago"
We can respin (pun intended) that in slightly different way: journalists in US are outnumbered by spin doctors more than 4 to 1. That's a sad figure for anyone who cares about finding out the truth.
Not sure what makes me more sad, the idea that you think journalists are in some way involved in the task of "finding out the truth" or that you are surprised by the ratios. Journalism has been on its death bed for at least a decade with the number of people working in that field dropping every year, while marketing and advertising have continued to grow in a world where the standard user expectation is to not pay for online content and where they instead expect to be surrounded by advertising as the price of admission.
It is subtler than that, but I am surprised by the ratios.
Journalists do not themselves uncover truths. They uncover material and details that can point to a truth. And the core of the problem is that journalism is slow. In the time it takes to fact-check an investigative article, the spinmeisters have had ample time to do what they do best. Namely, set up smoke and mirrors.
The power asymmetry is painful, and I have no doubt about this being even a recent thing. There's a quote attributed to Mark Twain on the subject: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
>I wonder when the golden age of unbiased news reporting was. I'm 55 and my whole life everyone complained about the biased media.
Agreed; people naturally exaggerate the good old days and forget how advertisers and other interests often owned [EDIT: figuratively and literally] many media outlets. Maybe it's better that those powers publish their own stories; at least they generally own up to it rather than hiding behind journalists for legitimacy.
But I also disagree strongly: It's a matter of degree, of course. No journalism ever was written, edited and published by wise saints, but some is much better than others. There is Fox News and there is the Financial Times; neither is purely bad or good, but one is far better than the other. The problems discussed in the article make journalism significantly less valuable and reliable, and there is no good substitute for it. The public simply will lack good information and will believe more false information.
> There is Fox News and there is the Financial Times; neither is purely bad or good, but one is far better than the other.
I used to believe so too. And I also believed that the BBC was far better than either, because they may have failed to be unbiased, but they definitely made a goodwill effort towards it.
That's what I used to believe until the recent Scottish referendum, when I started observing the actual behaviour of the media closely. And then you start to see that there is no difference. The BBC were just as nasty, ignorant, lying amoral shits as Fox news generally are.
I would look at the Google News feed and watch as the Daily Mail and the BBC and the Financial Times would compete to update the same lying crap to basically spam the newsfeed so that they would always be the top story. Truth be damned.
I love the world, and I love most people because people are generally great and mostly do the right thing, but you are not cynical enough.
Your post is no better than the reports from the flawed media; it's full of name calling and presents zero facts backed by any evidence.
It's not like we can approach the Scottish independence as a physics experiment: run it in a controlled environment, adjust for different variables, and expect the results to be replicated in another laboratory. So in this case I'm going to be skeptical of anyone who claims there's a "truth" that I can choose and sleep soundly at night knowing I made the right choice. It's too complex of an issue - socially, politically, and economically.
I'm cynical enough to suspect you're not unbiased either and that you have a self-interest in one side of the Scottish independence discussion.
Too bad for both of us that cynicism have never solved any problem.
I agree, the BBC's coverage of the Scottish Referendum has been appallingly biased.
Even after the referendum, the reporting of attacks (by a large contingent of pro-union thugs) on peaceful Yes supporters who gathered in Glasgow's George Square last Friday was heavily skewed and managed:
The selective editing by the BBC's Nick Robinson, who didn't get the answer he wanted from the First Minister, during his international press conference on the 11th of September was another example:
I used to be proud of the BBC and thought the license fee was good value for money. But since 2006 they haven't had a single penny from me. It's a morally corrupt organisation.
I still doubt anything has changed. I remember the hatchet jobs "60 Minutes" was infamous for 40 years ago.
"If it bleeds it leads" is a very old saying. So is "history is written by the victors". And it's normal for news to run hysterical stories, because those sell.
But there's a more general problem. There are some fields I know a great deal about. Whenever I see a news story about one of those fields, they're almost always pathetically wrong. This is because the journalists are reporting on something they have no understanding of. I've also seen them report on events I have personal knowledge of, again, they get it all wrong, usually because they're in a hurry to get the story "in the can" and simply don't care to fact check.
My father was a historian, and in our discussions we'd often wonder how much of conventionally accepted historical truth is utterly wrong.
Wow. Scary trend in corporate control of the local news.
I have been concerned for a long time about corporate control of the few large news outlets like MSNBC, Fox, CNN, etc. I think that they all filter the news and enforce a slanted version of the news not in the public interest. There are some organizations like Democracy Now that do a much better job.
> Scary trend in corporate control of the local news.
Local news has been in a death spiral since the early 1990s, and no longer exists in most places that aren't big enough to have skyscrapers. I think there's a strong case that this is better than nothing, and that the honesty of its patronage limits the damage (and will encourage competition).
This is not theoretical to me. I grew up in the area, and do not feel that McClatchy (who basically has a monopoly) has managed its East Bay mastheads in an effective or useful manner.
There used to be good independent radio in the early 90s too but it all got bought up by clear channel. I used to listen to the radio but the music stopped changing in the early 90s after grunge came out.
For music I like to think that Gen X nailed it. My 18 year old bought a record player and collects 80's and 90's records while keeping up with the new stuff, but maybe it's just the man keeping her down.
As Marshall Mcluhan said: The medium is the message.
When television came to dominate the media landscape in the 60s, it also redefined news and media. Now social media and the internet is starting to do the same, in its own way. Inherent properties and biases of this new medium are distorting the types of content that fit in it.
Personally, I think this is a good thing, because the more blatant aspect of the propaganda coming out of these outlets will inspire and frighten the people on the other side -- inspiring competitive voices.
We've operated in a world where influence is more subtle and it was easy to pretend that the news was unbiased. It wasn't, especially at the local level. The reporting wasn't propaganda, but the editorial board directs the reporters -- and the juiciest news is always the stuff that isn't in the paper, or is buried in section Z somewhere.
One of my relatives was a cabinet-level official in a mid-sized city in the 80s and 90s, when a hotshot reporter drove a Porsche. Unless it was a personal scandal affecting the Mayor, or people were marching in the streets, my relative could either make a phone call or have his boss make a phone call and kill/neuter a story.
If you look at news in the American Revolutionary era through the Civil War, it was big mess of different news outlets with very well defined biases. It's different than the late 20th century model of Woodward and Bernstein in the paper and a fatherly figure with good hair on TV, but it worked and will work again.
... and both the editorial board and reporters select how to cover the news.
Some of my relatives were active on a significant political issue in the 80s and 90s, holding state-level positions in a well-known organization. As a teen, I would occasionally attend rallies, protests, etc. (sometimes with counter-rallies/protests across the street) and watch from a distance, and then I'd watch the news coverage that evening. The camera always seemed to fall on awkwardly dressed senior citizens from our side, ignoring our speakers who were often young professional women who were excellent public speakers, and ignoring the large and diverse crowd. And the camera never showed the guys on the other side making threatening remarks (though I know they got those remarks on film); they'd instead seek comment from a lawyer in their office to give a calm presentation of that side. So even though they covered the event, the coverage gave the impression that one side was professional and well-spoken while the other was out of touch and weird, which was exactly the opposite of the impression I got from being there.
I was once filmed for a documentary (on migrant workers) made for BBC and I was quoted saying something like "This newspaper used to be full of job ads" - they cut off the ending of my sentence: "now it is all in the internet". Plus starting the interview with my daughter crying - while in fact she was mostly quiet during the 3 hours filming - they cut the moment that she did cry and put it at the start of the interview to set up the emotional tone.
I understand that they did this to make a 'story' out of it, it was not really malicious - but I was surprised to see such a blatant manipulation done in a BBC documentary.
I intentionally left it out because the important point is that the coverage was completely non-representative. I have other friends who have told me similar stories about other issues, sometimes even on opposite sides (in different cities or with different channels.) I don't want that point to get lost based on what any given HN'er thinks about the specific issue in question.
This is a serious issue in the UK, particularly where local governments use taxpayer money to put free 'newspapers' in everyone's doors. It's actually reached a point where the national government has had to look into what one MP has called, "propaganda masquerading as independent newspapers"[1]
This issue comes from the increasingly shameless attitude from corporations toward what is, plain and simple, getting money. Now there are news about multibillion dollar businesses coming up, start-ups that become successful, etc, etc. Big companies are realizing this and are starting to take action. Ugly action.
"emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands such as Patch"
Patch is closing down and firing people. Ours closed. It does not appear to be a survivable business model, although they gave it a good try and it was interesting reading while it lasted.
I'm not sure how that's really new tho. Its stronger than ever before if anything, but ive seen non-sponsored news and news that were factual since i dont know.
What's the difference between corporate influence and political influence regarding news? Politicians influence the news from their beginning, the only difference being that they pay reporters and media outlets with tax money.
Given the small revenues that a news article generates, I fully understand the temptation to write for a check. Hey, at least the journalist doesnt have to blackmail any company/individual with disclosures they want to remain secret.
Not sure where you're from but the US government doesn't fund any news organizations in the US. In developed countries with taxpayer-funded news (like the BBC), there are several layers in between the funding and reporters to protect their independence.
I found this article to embody every problem with the attitude of journalists from traditional media institutions. The author effectively is lamenting his loss of role as the gatekeeper of all information. Apparently, all journalism was 'pure' and devoid of any conflicts of interest and the only way to receive the 'truth' for a reader.
You can see this near arrogance flow through much of the anecdotes. "Ugh, more and more PR people trying to get my attention all the time. It's sooo annoying." "Ugh, PR girls are even trying to sleep with me, but you can't compromise my editorial integrity." It's perfectly represents the entitlement of the gatekeeper role that must've been built into that last generation of journalists.
Sorry for the mild rant but sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit, whether produced by a corporation, a newspaper, or an individual. When news media held a monopoly on distribution and there were few sources of info, I understand the danger of a corporation holding the sole lifeline of info. That's no longer the case.
> sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit,
Oh? I've had the opposite impression. That Reddit adequately demonstrates that readers are impulsive, poorly informed, narrow-minded, and easily manipulated. On subreddits with the most passive style of moderation, the comment threads are a self-congratulatory shouting match where any contradictory information is shouted down regardless of its merit. On the other hand, where conversations are productive and good information is rewarded, those subreddits are moderated strictly and editorial control is frequently used to remove distracting comments or guide conversations.
In my opinion, Reddit validates the usefulness of a gatekeeper for news.
More rigorously, the explicit goal of sites like Reddit, Facebook etc is to present you with content that you like. In effect, they're doing a search over recent news stories to optimize for likability.
Journalism outlets, at least those operated in the traditional manner with a wall between business and copy, explicitly eschew this goal. The whole point of "church and state" separation in news outlets is to enable journalists to write about stories that readers probably wouldn't upvote, but is important for them to see. This sort of story will be given _much_ less exposure on sites that are single-mindedly optimizing for likability in general.
I think traditionally-operated news outlets serve a socially-useful function, and that the metamorphosis of these outlets into likability optimizers means everyone loses out. You may disagree, and that's your perogative!
Would disagree here. Facebook as a platform promotes feel-good stuff and it's been self-reinforcing. It makes the space more attractive to advertisers and everyone "wins" (while we all lose).
I still however believe people are smart on average, and are becoming better and better at thinking critically. Possibly a bit naive, but I hope as information becomes more accessible, people will only develop a better sense for what's bullshit (again, no matter who it's produced by).
> Sorry for the mild rant but sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit
It's not that they are not capable or smart, it's that they don't bother fact checking every single story or seek out opposing analysis or interpretation, especially for things like US foreign policy.
Main difference is stories aren't fact-checked before discussing. In the end the right information ends up disseminated probably as often as a standard news story, it's just the 'sausage is made' in the public eye vs. in a closed newsroom the public has no visibility to.
This is way I built sagebump over a weekend as a side project for myself.
It applies merging aswell as custom filtering using open source algorithms I came across on HN and elsewhere. I only wish more people gave it a go, I seem to be the only user at the moment unfortunately. Feedback is totally welcome if anyone wants to take a quick gander.
Use this link for a "Technical filtering pass" http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info
1) Auto-categorization: Great if it works. I understand it's beta, but it isn't working now. For example, almost every story is labeled 'Controversy' including "High school football player gives best post game interview ever.", "Chocolate lab after the dog park" and other similar stories.
2) Auto-curation: Again, great if it works and I know it's beta, but the Technocrat view currently offers "LPT: The correct & easiest way to safely break up a dog fight", "California boy gets detention for sharing school-prepared lunch with another student", etc.
Those are hard problems; if you could solve them, count me in. Possibly I misunderstand your goals, but as the other poster said, they could use more explanation.
1)Content is not categorised. It is filtered on a personal level (your self) then again on an application level (sagebump) to provide a reading digest. I am not sure how I would categorised such a product.
2) Where you using either the default views (technocrat for instance) or your own personal feeds? The articles selected are only as good as your feed filters on your different sites and the settings selected in the menu.
I think you really need a clearer explanation of your goals for the project. I mean, it looks like it could be a neat time-saver, but I don't think I can customize it (I've picked my subscribed reddits carefully already), and it doesn't have the niceties of Reddit Enhancement Suite.
The point is you enter in your customised reddit feed link, the add the other accounts you have from other websites (EG slashdot) so you can have a merged, filtered, organised list on the same page.
Sagebump sits ontop of your different aggregator site accounts.
Reactions from publishers and native ad companies were surprisingly positive - some even reached out asking to me add their sites. In general I think a lot of people in publishing are very conflicted about the problem because it gets into journalistic ethics, which are deeply ingrained.
Currently an organization called the IAB provides the standard for the industry, but it's vague and lags behind innovation in native ads [2]. Native ads aren't necessarily bad, but their inconsistency that makes them very deceptive to users. I think publishers would benefit from an updated set of standards that enforce consistent messaging.
[1] http://ianww.com/ad-detector
[2] http://www.iab.net/nativeadvertising