Between this and the Rolling Stone U.Va-rape story...this has been a bad month for New York-based magazine reporting (and a boon for media critics). The NYmag reporter insists she made no error, because her lede paragraphs talks about a "rumor". Yeah, but the point of being a journalist is to find out the truth behind rumors, not just to say, "Hey, did you know that there are rumors about a high school boy?"
The reporter claims she saw "bank statements"...the validity of which seem to be in question if the boy has recanted everything. I wonder if she got taken in by the good-ol edit-the-HTML-of-official-documents-with-the-Web-inspector trick?
On the upside, at least this teenager doesn't have to bear eternal Internet shame for being part of a public prank/lie. His name is pretty much Google-proof, or at least as Google-proof as someone named "Jesus Christian" would be. That said...I just Googled "Mohammed Islam" and was pretty surprised to see all the top results relating to the young man at hand. I would've thought that Google's algorithm would've associated such a query with Islam the religion and the prophet Muhammad.
In both of the stories you cite, it's a case of journalists beginning with a narrative and then seeking a story to corroborate that narrative. Whether it's feel-bad narratives like "rape culture is rampant in fraternities" or feel-good narratives like "downtrodden teenager wins big with his pluck and smarts", journalism has become driven by narrative. It no longer reports news.
I completely agree. It's also a consequence of trying to compete with outlets like Buzzfeed that produce a huge amount of low quality stories on a shoestring budget, then optimize the hell out of SEO to get very high traffic.
>but the point of being a journalist is to find out the truth behind rumors
Agreed. Defending the story as reporting a rumour is even worse. As a journalist, being duped is one thing; not caring enough to print a real news story is another.
I suppose Google's algorithm also bases itself on the current information trends at the time of searches, and with the ridiculously large amount of news stories about the kid, it is to be expected (I live in South America, and we also got a lot of reports about the kid).
Now, the kid is not your average school-goer, but definitely petite enough to get himself in this situation. I blame him, but definitely not as much as the reporter, this looked like a load of BS right from the moment I saw it.
In fairness the original "reporting" was for some buzzfeed-y 12 reasons to love New York, alongside "Because We Were All Taylor Swift Once" (which seems to be some tautology about being excited about NYC, not really sure). Anyway, over the last few hours Pressler switched her twitter to protected so I don't doubt she's getting sufficiently called out for this error.
Yes, this story made me cringe really hard as I was reading it last evening. First off, if the reporter just bothered to speak with only one person who ever traded derivatives, she would have learned this was a complete hoax. Simply put, even if the kid started with $1m and ended up with say $60m after two years (being generous all around given the context), that would still amount to 6,000% return. Here is why that couldn't happen -
He made directional outright bets. In other words, say he bought call options betting for the price of the underlying security to go up. This is akin to buying underlying security with massive leverage. If the bet goes your way, you could make a massive return (for example, in Oct '05, I made ~1,000% one-day return on a very small amount buying Google out of the money calls expiring the next day and selling them in the money after stock picked up following earnings report). This is an incredibly dumb strategy and it is completely unscalable to the figures quoted in the article. First, public/listed options are incredibly illiquid in most stocks/securities, and particularly at strikes that could yield this return. This would limit him to making really small bets. Second, you would need a catalyst for a significant price move, which doesn't come too often, so most of the time you would just bleed your option time-value ("theta decay"). Finally, and most importantly, no one is lucky 100% of the time and this type of directional strategy is sure to backfire on you and cost you ~100% of principal (trust me, been there, done that)
He traded volatility. This is effectively a hedge fund strategy, where you buy the option and short the delta of the option in underlying security ("delta hedging"). The hedge gives you protection against the price moves in the underlying and you effectively make money for small moves in the security, regardless of whether it goes up or down (due to "convexity"). Most of the time, you earn pennies on the dollar as the price fluctuates a bit and you trade your delta, and perhaps some of the time you make a bit more if the price moves a lot ("gamma event"). Now, here is the kicker - this is not fool proof either. The strategy trades the risk in the price of the underlying security to the risk in volatility - in other words, if you buy volatility high and sell low, you will still lose money. Most listed options have notoriously bad bid/ask volatility spreads and retail investor would unlikely make any money consistently and reliably enough following this strategy. Needless to say - no way to scale it to the numbers quoted in the article using listed options. Hedge funds and derivative desks at banks mostly trade in OTC (Over The Counter) options which are bespoke bilateral contracts with a ton of protective provisions (averaging periods, stock borrow protection, illiquidity protection, etc) and they still have to take a view on volatility and they do get it wrong sometimes. Even for professionals who are wicked smart and do this day in and day out, the only reliable way to make money is to buy volatility on the cheap in a special situation.
There are a few other strategies that come to mind (e.g. Black Swan) but there has been either no catalyst to make it work or they would be inaccessible to a high school kid from Queens.
The second part that really made me cringe were all the negative references to SV by the kids and by the reporter in her subsequent Tweets. Reality of the situation is that, whatever you may think about early stage bubble in SV, SV tech companies actually create real value, have actual products and serve actual customers/users.
Finally, what is sad about all this is that Mohammed appears to be a smart talented kid and I can't help but think he tainted his prospects quite a bit with this debacle. On the other hand, all this makes a hell of a "what I learned from a failure" college essay.
I was once told that in vol trading, if you're "making more than 60% a year, you're doing something wrong". The point being that with any option spreads, there is a risk-reward ratio, professional's care about money management than profit. You're trying to earn on the theta decay or vice versa, facing theta decay and banking on gamma moves. So you're either facing the death of a thousand paper-cuts with option time premium eroding your bankroll, or you're facing the LTCM catastrophic loss with the wrong kind of risk management.
Even when you trade directional, this past year, both realized and implied vol has been low, with VIX bouncing between 11-20 with median at 13 or 14; you can make lots of money long OTM options in 2008 or flash crash, basically you're playing Nassim Taleb's "long-tail"; this past year simply doesn't warrant that kind of performance unless you're doing some kind of OTM buying on biotech companies and betting correcting on a majority of your catalyst events.
Yep, you are spot on about how it works in the real world. Incidentally, you may get all three (i.e. small profits from daily delta adjustments + theta decay + gamma upside) on some trades, but the bottom line is that it always requires a vol view when you enter into the position, which lends it self to being wrong sometimes. There, you hit on another interesting point - even with all of the mess brewing in Ukraine, realized has been relatively low (and probably way below desks' expectations) this year, which I would bet caused some underperformance across the vol desks this year.
Don't know what was realized vol in oil lately (likely high given recent price action, have no sense of the shape/magnitude), but perhaps that's where he's seen some returns in simulated trading. Needles to say simulated trading is very, very different than the real world, with bid/ask spread dynamics, options illiquidity, collateral requirements, funding costs, borrow costs, etc.
Maybe, and in my view, PR reps interference just makes things appear a bit worse.
The way I think about this is that if I was Sty teacher who wrote Mohammed's college recommendations, I would be very uneasy right now and think really hard about what I do next. If they really like the kid and believe in him, they may leave it as is and perhaps write it off to youthful indiscretion or lack of life experience (and there is a ton of that, starting with choice of friends - Kazakh "oligarch" heir made me puke on the inside a couple of times). On the other hand, they may be worried about their reputation with college adcoms' and really smart talented kids they write recommendations for in the future. Bottom line - they may be inclined to write a retraction.
I just fail to see this in a positive light. At the end of the day, when you stack up with a ton of other smart talented kids (as is 100% the case at Sty and with credible applicants at all top schools), intangibles like judgement, view and character become really important. He unfortunately failed on those just at the time when colleges are rolling out their decisions. I, perhaps naively, refuse to believe that duping a reporter with lies would give you any good credibility.
The claim was that his main markets were gold and oil futures, not other derivatives. It's technically possible in those markets to earn 100x in two years, albeit with extreme amounts of leverage. (You may be able to borrow twenty times the amount of funds you have in your account.)
Exactly, you are spot on. Leverage you can get either through options on the futures or margin.
A high school kid from Queens wouldn't have the type of collateral and in the amounts required to get that type of leverage. Heck, he wouldn't even pass diligence process for account opening at a prime broker that could provide him with the level of leverage required.
That's why I thought of options as the only way the story could maybe perhaps work. At the core, challenges with options strategies are similar regardless of whether they are credit, equity or commodity options.
Yeah, but probably more of this kind [1] :) Funny thing is that this story popped up on my Facebook feed and I read it right before I read about New York Magazine's boy genius, so it really helped provide a nice context in contrast.
At the end of the day, who knows, but I really hope the kid bounces back and makes the best of it. And if not, he can always get into NYU's finance program and work on Wall Street </snark>
I can't help to think he tainted his prospects quite a bit with this debacle.
I don't see it as a major mark against him. First, it's unclear that he, himself, tried to create the lie. Second, social proof arbitrage (which we both know isn't a real "arbitrage" but the hacking of peoples' reference-counting algorithms in order to establish personal credibility) is something that everyone does, especially in Silicon Valley where it's just a necessary social skill. It's just a bit juvenile to attach it to a rather verifiable claim of having made $72 million. The best social proof arbitrage is when you dishonestly represent the opinions of influential or reputable people, rather than creating false facts (that will eventually be refuted).
It might be Google's recency algorithm coming into play, or he could be coming unstuck through the variable spellings of Mohammed (of which, I think Muhammad is actually the most common, at least in the West.)
You forgot the BitCoin creator story,that was entirely fake.The guy didnt even know what Bitcoin was.Just because he was called Satoshi it was good enough for the journalist.
Honestly, this story is so unbelievable that it leads me to believe that many journalists have no idea how investing or the stock market work. Even if he started with $100,000 to invest, it would be an insane annual yield. A yield so high, that even crazy frauds like Bernie Madoff wouldn't promise it.
It's not that you couldn't make $72 million dollars by investing in the stock market in a few years, but rather that it would usually take a rather large principal to do so.
This isn't the same as the UVA rape story, as that took months of reporting and fact checking. That's one of the biggest journalistic mess ups in the last decade or so, and will have far reaching consequences for Rolling Stone. We'll be discussing the UVA rape story for the entire next episode of my podcast.
This is the more run-of-the-mill story about how a lot of journalists have so little knowledge about things outside of journalism that they get duped by these stupid and false feel good stories. This is more embarrassing than harmful.
Bernie Madoff offered returns in the 10% range. If he had started with $100K, after three years, he would have claimed to have $33K in returns, for a total of $133K. Just to put these kids claims into perspective.
Yes. Madoff offered higher-than-normal returns but still something that looked plausible. Returns that could plausible food people.
There must be people who really think you can become rich just from trading stocks. But that's not how it works. When you have a lot of money, you can make more money by buying and trading stocks, index funds and other similar vehicles. Once you have enough money, you could certainly make millions a year in stock, but that requires you to have millions of dollars in the first place.
But the idea that you could take a small amount of money and a couple of years later have almost $100 million just from buying and trading stocks is not believable to anyone who has ever bought and sold stocks. This sounds like the plot of a bad (good?) Disney movie.
Most of my money is tied up in retirement accounts, but I do have some stock as well. If my individual stocks made 10% a year for several years in a row, I'd be very, very happy. With compounding interest and dividend reinvestment, that money can grow at a robust rate, but it's not going to make me rich.
This story almost sounds like the reporter kind of confused this with investing in IPOs and the current tech boom. You can make a much bigger return off of investing in startups early, but most random teenagers aren't able to buy into startups.
If anyone fron NYMag is reading this -- I'm the son of late Nigerian king Joseph Mabadu and would like to share my billion-dollar fortune with him if he can help me transfer my wealth out of the country. As a show of good faith, I'm also willing to hand him over my title for the Brooklyn Bridge. Please call urgently to discuss...
The average person would be blown away at how sloppy (and really non-existent) fact-checking has become in the Internet age. Most people on HN seem to be a little bit pessimistic about it, but it's likely way worse than you think. Of course, we know that random people retweeting garbage on Twitter aren't fact-checking, but I'm talking about the largest media organizations around -- they just don't care enough to check.
We don't need to look any further for this than ISIS. Not only is ISIS controlling the whole world's talking points by carefully crafting what news they'll release, but they're spreading stories all the time that are completely bogus. Look, for example, at this story about ISIS crucifying one of its own members for corruption: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/06/27/.... It all started with a tweet from a now-deleted Twitter account, because ISIS wanted to spread the idea of how intense they are and how strongly they fight their perceived evil. So they plant a story about how they crucified one of their own members. Every media organization knows that's free pageviews, so they report it.
But look at the feature photo in that story, which constitutes most of the "tip" from the tweet. Do a reverse image search and you find the original source: It's a Danish Roman Catholic reenacting Christ's crucifixion in the Philippines. http://d.pr/i/183Sf. The story of the ISIS crucifixion was made up out of thin air, based on a photo that was easily discoverable (and in the AFP database), but now the lie is in every mainstream media publication I can think of, from CNN and The Telegraph to The Guardian and the New York Times. They didn't even have time for a reverse image search. And ISIS wins.
A lot of what my startup does is fact-check stuff that's going on in the media (it's a newsroom for the Internet - https://grasswire.com), and every media organization (and I mean every) from Al Arabiya and the New York Times to Newsweek to Rolling Stone and New York Magazine are quite frequently full of inaccuracies and intentional lies. Sometimes people catch these lies, a few people freak out for <24 hours, and we all forget about it.
The notion that a publication's relevance is based purely on its accuracy is, in my opinion, false. We don't have the time or energy to process which media organizations we trust and which have mislead us, because, unless we're ruthlessly sitting behind a computer fact-checking stuff, we probably don't even know that they're making mistakes in the first place. For every one person The Daily Mail pisses off by publishing its false stories, 100 people are reading it and saying, "Wow, The Daily Mail does some daring reporting." Very few people care anymore -- we don't have time to.
In Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, Ryan Holiday talks about how easy it is to get lies to spread throughout the Internet, and thereby all of mainstream media. The premise is very simple. You find someone at the bottom of the press pyramid - the person responsible for putting out 4 or 5 articles a day so that his or her publication can get enough pageviews to stay alive. There's not a chance that person can do any sort of verification. You send them a "tip," get a few smaller blogs to write about it, and the snowball starts rolling.
These publications all read each other, and most of them just want to pick up stories from each other and ride the wave of whatever's going viral. That's not just cat videos; that's stories about ISIS and Russian fighters in Ukraine and what we consider "hard news." The stuff we all talk about in the United States is mostly driven by PR folks who are carefully planting stories that push their agenda forward. In most other countries it's even worse. Few of my Russian friends are even aware of the fall of the Rouble and the pending collapse of their own economy.
I don't know what the solution is (I'm trying to find/create one), and I don't want to pretend like this has only happened since the Internet came into existence, but I find most people put way too much trust in the press machine we've created. I would like to think that somewhere there are independent reporters and people who are digging up stories, but I've come to realize that most stories aren't ever dug up - they're pitched.
As we struggle through this point in our history of what news is, we must remember that journalism ebbs and flows on its integrity. Look back to the 1880's where yellow journalism was rampant (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Puck11218...) and could be faulted for the Spanish-American war.
Journalist and the newspapers they work for must find a way to get you the reader to part with your money to fund their enterprises. The online sites do this through link baiting, local newspapers do this through circulars/coupons and piggybacking onto the latest outrage (classifieds died when craigslist was created), and the TV stations rely on murders, perceived and actual racism (George Zimmerman's audio recording being doctored to appear racist) and missing children to get viewers.
The amount of time that it takes to properly source, investigate, corroborate, and expose a story is nothing compared to the piggybacking approach. Example 1 is the University of Virgina fraternity rape story: A single reporter writes up a fantastic expose on a UVA fraternity hazing procedure that includes an alleged gang rape, friends pleading to rape victim not to go to police, and a university system appearing not to care. The correct approach would be to interview the victim, the alleged perpetrators, the university, and the friends to get an idea. Each of these individuals must be contacted, a source found, agree to be a source and then be on record, this all takes time; if you estimate a week per source (very generous) and there are 15 must contact sources (those involved with the alleged gang rape and those friends), that is 15 weeks worth of just putting together information. Then write up the story, anywhere from one to two weeks. Get the editor and the ombudsman to sign off on the sources and information, one week. You have almost 20 weeks invested into a single article, for Rolling Stones that is 5 magazines before getting a single article. And then, at any point the story could turn out to be suspicious to bogus.
Now, be any of the TV shows / newspapers and you simply pull a Puffington Host and extract parts of the story and refer to them in snippets and viola, you save yourself 20 weeks of time and money. That is why the Ryan Holiday stuff is not too surprising.
In 1835, the New York Sun (a serious newspaper [0], 1833-1855) published some articles [1] describing alien civilizations on the moon that can be seen through a new telescope in South Africa.
From Wired,
> The Sun, ever the champion of the public good, claimed, no joke, that it was actually all a public service… to get the nation to stop worrying so much for a second about that whole slavery thing.
So, there are good journalists, bad journalists, "journalists" who aren't even journalists, and they've all existed since the birth of the printing press.
Exactly - Look at the Serial podcast, I'd consider this one of the better pieces of journalism in the past few years. But it took her six months (maybe more?) and countless hours of research, investigation and interviews to produce. At the end of the day, this piece will do pretty well, but in those six months, The Huffington Post's on the internet have put out tens of thousands of articles garnering billions of ad impressions. Fortunately we're left with an extremely interesting story in Serial, but imagine if 2-3 months into all that hard work the whole thing fell apart? All that work for nothing? Not worth the risk for major publications.
No idea what the solution is here, very difficult problem.
To be fair, your two examples fill very different roles (daily news versus long-form nonfiction). Serial strikes me as closer to fiction or memoir than daily news.
Yeah, sorry wasn't clear in my original point that it's extremely tough to produce high quality investigative journalism when there's a far easier and more profitable model out there.
But truth is fleeting. Despite all Sarah's work on Serial, there is a possibility that some contradicting detail will emerge as some point in the future. Even the infamous Best Buy phones waver between fact and fiction.
To this point, it may be impossible to fully fact check an article to the point of certainty, but New York magazine could have at least done better.
Seems like it's ripe for an overhaul of journalism based on more scientific principles. Seriously, a business model where everything is vigorously fact-checked, sources cited, and reason applied. This form of news will be slower to print than the "shoot now, ask questions later" form of journalism we see today, but I think there is a real thirst for it in the market place.
I don't have the time or energy to sift through 10 metric tons of bullshit or spend three hours in my day doing my own investigation. I would prefer to hear the news a day late, but know it is well-researched and factual.
Make all of this super transparent and apparent. Make it very well known that your site will be slower, but more accurate, and that you rely on donations/subscriptions. Make it very well known that by supporting you, the readers are undermining the awful state the media is in and usurping the corporate/governmental tentacles in other forms of media.
What you are describing used to be the goal at respectable institutions. At some, it was even the norm. My dad was a copy editor for 25 years - this is what they do. Ask any of the thousands of professional copy editors laid off by city papers in the last 10 years; they would all be elated to do real work again.
The market has become to efficient to allow for a large staff of professionals who do slow, technically unnecessary work and don't contribute to revenue growth.
If you can find a way to pay for it, you win. But traditional newspapers have tried - their business depended on it - and none of them cracked it. So everybody laid off most of their staff and became a thinly veiled BuzzFeed.
I can tell you that there are hundreds to thousands of disgruntled idealistic professionals collecting unemployment/"freelancing" and if you offered them a decent middle-class salary to do their jobs again, they'd flock to you instantly.
This form of news will be slower to print than the "shoot now, ask questions later" form of journalism we see today, but I think there is a real thirst for it in the market place.
He's probably a bit optimistic if he means that there's a huge, mass-media-proportioned market for it. But he's not wrong if he means a small publication (or more likely, an individual journalist) can make a successful go of it. Consider the "1000 true fans" business model. It is entirely possible to earn a respectable, six-figure income doing independent journalism for a small, but loyal base of subscribers.
It's extremely hard work. The payoff/effort ratio is probably lower than the ratio on the kind of corporate job that someone smart and hard-working enough to pull it off can take instead. (And this is probably why you don't see legions of smart, hard-working people trying to do it.) But it's doable, and some people are doing it. They're doing it on a small scale, to a loyal niche.
I have my doubts as to the scalability of the model, i.e., building it out to support a multi-million-dollar business. Plenty of well-connected and well-funded people have tried. Some of the best journalists in the business have tried. A few of these people have very publicly failed. But I am inclined to think that there's a decent sweet spot out there. It's not big, but it exists.
Stranger things have happened, though. This is a crude analogy, but consider the success of a show like The Walking Dead. Ten years ago, if I'd have told you that a show about zombies on basic cable was going to be one of the most watched shows on all of television, you'd have told me I was insane. And all available data at the time would have supported your position. The truth is, TWD could not have been a hit 10 years ago, much less on AMC. Various supporting technologies make its success possible: Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, VOD, and so forth. (Even DVR was in its early-adopter phase a decade ago.) Game-changers happen when the supporting infrastructure is in place to enable bright, risk-taking people to put the pieces together. For all I know, the conditions are in place to let someone find, address, and serve millions of people who are ready for "slow" journalism. It's an uphill battle, but I sincerely hope more people will strap on their climbing gear.
Nor should he or she. The future of journalism may well belong to a lot of small, targeted publications (combined with some very productive individuals) serving effectively small paying audiences, but incidentally reaching a lot of other people through social distribution. In such a scenario, global coverage would be provided by specialists in the global news beat -- be they publications, or individuals choosing to specialize in that area.
No one journalist or publication will cover everything. The economics of trying to do that just don't work anymore.
Seems like it's ripe for an overhaul of journalism based on more scientific principles. Seriously, a business model where everything is vigorously fact-checked, sources cited, and reason applied
Honest question: what exactly is ISIS "winning" by depicting their group as crucifying members that they couldn't accomplish by, say, actually crucifying members?
Don't get me wrong, I agree with essentially everything in your post; the planted stories, how virality works, the lack of any diligence in fact-checking, the state of modern media in general. I just don't understand your reasoning for ISIS wanting to plant the story, rather than some stupid teenager in Wisconsin.
It's not about ISIS crucifying or not crucifying its members; it's about ISIS constantly deciding exactly what we're talking about.
Most of ISIS's PR strategy would rightly seem insane to most of us, but ISIS wants to amplify how extremist they are. They want to be perceived as a group willing to do anything for their cause. With every story they're saying, "We are creating a perfect Islamic state, and nothing in our way will stop us. You should both fear and respect us."
There's an interesting PR term called "agenda setting." You can't dictate whether or not people agree with you, but you can decide which angle they're looking at you from.
The beheading of US journalists was completely intentional. They wanted us to be afraid of how ruthless they are. Now we're getting stories of "Teenage boy from country X left his family to join ISIS." That's just them recruiting.
The sad part of all this isn't that ISIS has a PR machine, but that we're so awful at detecting it, and that we let them get away with it even when it's made up out of whole cloth.
4th Generation warfare is mainly about legitimacy, particularly of non-state actors. ISIS is fighting to be seen as the legitimate representative of Iraq and a broader caliphate, and self-policing corruption furthers that goal.
I highly recommend reading Bill Lind's stuff on 4G warfare, which helps make sense of lots of things in modern warfare: why massive armies don't win wars, why the pentagon is infatuated with expensive technologies, why 4G combatants act the way they do, etc.
"If you can stomach some old-right cultural conservatism,"
Though just to make sure that doesn't overly turn off people it really shouldn't, bear in mind that this is the sort of 'old-right cultural conservatism' that, at least so far into my reading of the book, was unremittingly hostile about every aspect of the Iraq war, from its goals, how it was run, who was running it, and so on. It makes left-wing criticism of the war look anemic and bereft of detail by comparison.
I mean, I strongly recommend that a serious intellectual ought to with some frequency seriously entertain viewpoints that don't match their own anyhow, but I do feel it's worth pointing out that an anti-war left wing partisan will probably have less trouble with the book than that summary would indicate.
My guess is ISIS has a public reputation they want to uphold which is an amplification of what they're actually doing. By planting the story they benefit from the extremist world view without having to actually commit the act that the story is about. Its also faster to make up a story and leak it than going out and actually finding corruption and do the act for real.
You're right, it didn't start with the Internet. But the arrival of the Internet, and the simultaneous dismantling of publishers' editorial checks, has amplified the trend.
It's also led to this weird reverberation effect, as false news is sometimes rediscovered and re-reported on secondary blogs, news sites, and forums. One example is this bogus quote, supposedly uttered by Mariah Carey:
"When I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world. I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff."
In the summer of 1996, the quote appeared on a satirical news site and was re-reported as fact by MSM sources, including The Independent and the San Francisco Chronicle. Fifteen years later, the hoax was still being perpetuated by celebrity blogs and online forums.
Probably because fact checking can be a time consuming, and therefore costly process, and by skipping it, mainstream news can push more "live feeds" (news from Facebook and Twitter), in an attempt to be First and Exclusive.
There is a negative ROI on research for the media, and thus they have no incentive to be accurate or factual, because consumers lap it up even when it is sensational, unbelievable, or just plain wrong.
Something similar happened with the story about 4chan supposedly threatening to release nudes of Emma Watson a few months back. That was started through a plausible-looking but completely fake news site run by the hoaxers, who also set up a website for the hoax. A few seconds Googling would've shown that the news site was fake - there were months-old articles linking it to the hoaxers behind it and explaining how they'd tricked the mainstream media before - but enough sites were willing to jump on the story based on that one bogus report on a fake site, and then their stories helped to convince the rest of the media to go with it, and soon everyone was reporting on it. Critical facts like the claim it was started by 4chan had literally no source other than the fake news site, but by the time it hit the major news sites they'd been thoroughly laundered of their source.
> But look at the feature photo in that story, which constitutes most of the "tip" from the tweet.
I'm late so I doubt you'll see this, but I don't understand what you're saying here. The Al Arabiya feature photo clearly states it's an AFP file photo. There are no references to a tweet, and certainly no direct claims that it's an actual photo of the executed man, or that it's their "source" for claims that ISIS crucified someone. Maybe they are giving too strong of false implications about the photo, but I don't follow your jump to "made up out of thin air" just because a file photo was used for illustration. I could agree the story sounds shaky, but not based on the evidence you gave here.
I would love to subscribe to a news outlet that did nothing but put popular stories under the microscope, fact-checking and even putting an uncertainty value of various facts - not just presenting them in black and white, and then putting the story into a larger context. e.g. here are the facts for this plane crash, but here are how many of this class of plane crash per year in the last x years, etc...
There would be lag, but maybe if they timed things right, they could be able to hit the final downslope of a story, becoming the best & last word.
NPR's "On The Media" has been doing this for decades. They have a podcast you can subscribe to for free. It's an hour each week and usually dissects the weeks news stories, often pointing out when the stories were completely wrong. You can find the podcast on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts from.
That sounds very interesting, I'll have to give that podcast a spin. Though I do wonder if it sounds too much about the process of the media, instead of a recalibration of the stories themselves. And I also worry about already getting too much of my news from NPR sources.
>but now the lie is in every mainstream media publication I can think of, from CNN and The Telegraph to The Guardian and the New York Times. And ISIS wins.
I've just been googling for a few minutes and I can't find it in any of those. Maybe it was and they took it down? The most mainstream source I could find that still has it is Yahoo news uk / IB Times (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/isis-militants-brutally-execute-co...)
I think the internet's power to debunk things must help a bit.
How do we know they really didn't crucify one of their members and the IT guy just got lazy with pics because the camera phone one was fuzzy?
I don't disagree with your overall point. My assumption since the invasion of Grenada was every domestic source was trying to mislead me. I listened to RCI, DW shortwave coverage of the invasion for 8 hours before the embargoed US networks mentioned it.
Today, I doubt there's any delta between domestic and foreign sources. RT is a propaganda organ, but I trust it more for US foreign policy coverage than US sources.
There's a general rule when trying to determine facts. The one making the claim has the burden of proof to prove it true. If you say you crucified someone, it's on you to show that you did that. If you're too lazy to take and release a reasonable photo, it's not on us to believe you actually did it. Same goes for bigfoot, UFOs, and reporting who won the Super Bowl.
In the west, true. In the salafist world, is it safe to make that same assumption wrt to media claims? Or would one be more suspect? Was Baghdad Bob the norm or an outlier?
If (questionably) they have such a lower bar for executing someone, why bother lying?
I'm reminded of the fall of Mosul (I think) where they just marched hundreds of locals to a ditch and started shooting. It was weeks of western media questioning whether it was fake or not until better vids/UN testimony appeared. I would guess that was probably because westerners could not conceptualize such a blatant slaughter.
Charismatic falsehoods are a real problem in the media, especially because they're usually connected to an underlying truth that they take down, as well, when they're shot down.
Take the UVa rape case. This sort of thing happens often (and definitely not just at UVa) and the perpetrators often get away with it, because they tend to come from upper-middle and upper-class backgrounds and have access to the best legal representation their parents can buy. It's disgusting. Unfortunately, the holes in this particular story are going to lead people to conclude that fraternity-house rape isn't a problem because this one case was "refuted" (even though it's not clear that it has been refuted, only that she recalled some of the details incorrectly).
The "boy genius" making $72 million is another charismatic falsehood. The underlying truth is that the upper classes aren't any smarter or more competent than the middle classes. We like being reminded of that, when a public-school student (granted, from one of the best public high schools in the world) beats the pants off the market. Sadly (?) it turns out this was achieved in simulation rather than with real money, and 'nemanja already addressed why it would be hard to pull off on the real market. Unfortunately, the rich twats who control all the social access and the jobs where one can actually have a $72M impact are going to read this story and conclude that "the poors are just dishonest".
Being somewhat of an expert on the startup career, I'm familiar as well with the aggressive use of charismatic falsehood that people have to use to advance their own careers and gain credibility/worthiness in front of investors. They concoct a story that is factually false but, as they see it, betrays an underlying truth (pertaining to their own competence). Unfortunately, if they get caught, it takes down (i.e. falsely refutes) the underlying truth along with the (usually small) lie.
"Sadly (?) it turns out this was achieved in simulation rather than with real money.."
Actually he says directly that he doesn't know where she got the $72M figure. He doesn't say in this interview exactly how much he would have made in simulation, only that "The simulated trades percentage was extremely high relative to the S&P". The point being that I don't see any evidence here to support that claim that he made anywhere near $72M even in a simulation.
> Take the UVA rape case. This sort of thing happens often
By "this sort of thing" you mean the violent premeditated (large) gang rape of a sober, unwilling victim as part of an official fraternity event? No, that does NOT happen often. It seems unlikely that it has ever happened even once outside of fictional stories. Which is exactly what made the claim newsworthy.
Think about the situation described - it implies that 9 (nine!) young men with everything to lose conspired to commit a felony act that could ruin all of them if discovered and believed - an act easily traceable back to them - and then released the victim knowing that nobody would ever believe her word over theirs AND knowing none of them would ever spill the beans.
This is a movie-plot threat.
The story is only plausible if you start out with the assumption that frat members are ALL an oddly incorruptible strain of pure mustache-twirling cartoon evil AND you also assume that "rape culture" values completely guarantee the woman wouldn't be taken seriously.
Whereas relaxing either assumption in favor of ordinary common sense renders the UVA story absurd.
> even though it's not clear that it has been refuted, only that she recalled some of the details incorrectly
She recalled ALL of the details incorrectly. Essentially every claim that could be checked has not borne out.
Just in case you are also trying to claim that your statement of "It seems unlikely that it has ever happened even once outside of fictional stories" applies to "gang rapes of a sober unwilling victim" as well:
P.S. Gang rape of a non-sober unwilling[0] victim is still rape.
0: gang rape of a non-sober unwilling is redundant. You can't have a "gang rape of a non-sober willing victim". Your bias is crystal clear, and you should probably see a psychologist as you are likely a danger to those around you.
> Just in case you are also trying to claim that your statement [...] applies to "gang rapes of a sober unwilling victim" as well
I am assuredly not trying to claim that. The context of bros at an american college fraternity party was a necessary part of what made the claim an unbelievable (but newsworthy!) story.
(But hey, feel free to respond to more things I didn't say with irrelevant links, if inventing claims and attributing them to other people is what floats your boat!)
My chief crystal clear bias here is in favor of believing that most people who do terrible things that might result in large prison sentences don't want to get caught and this at least somewhat influences their behavior.
> Charismatic falsehoods are a real problem in the media,
No, printing false information is a real problem in the media.
Charisma is a whitewashing of the real problem - honesty in journalism. By failing to do the most basic topic research, or any fact checking of any kind, they are simply publishing falsehoods and lies in the name of profit. Essentially the same motivations that drive the issues above.
Fair enough. I wasn't implying that a falsehood being "charismatic" makes it OK for a journalist to print it. Sadly, it seems less likely to be checked when it's (a) reflective of a genuine truth (such as privileged frat bros getting away with sexual assault; UVa aside, it is a real problem) and (b) something that people want to believe ("we've finally caught one!") That doesn't make it right.
One of the problems with the tech press (and, increasingly, the mainstream press) is that it refuses to rise to the higher standard expected of a journalist. For private individuals to inflate their histories and reputations (using charismatic lies) is ethically OK, because one has to do it (paradoxically, and perhaps disturbingly) to gain credibility and trust in a world like Silicon Valley. Journalists, on the other hand, are supposed to cut that shit away and get to the facts. The problem is, with the tech press, that they value access (into a morally bankrupt sub-tract of the private sector, that will shut them out for any coverage other than effusive praise) more than doing their jobs.
The real shame is that this article would have still been great even if she'd done the fact-checking and found out he was lying. You've got two kids in suits buying apple juice and caviar, trying to convince a grown woman that he's worth $72 million. It's the makings of a great Vice article. I would have loved to read about these two kids as they try to pull a highly-transparent confidence scam while all the adults in the room know they're lying.
One thing I'm still confused about: if the parents have literally excommunicated him/functionally (temporarily) disowned him, who's idea was the PR firm, and moreover, who is paying for it?
They might be working for free as part of some sort of partnership. In the aftermath of this, a good PR firm would have no shortage of ideas for monetizing these kids' infamy. In fact, it's quite possible the NY Observer paid a pretty penny for this exclusive interview.
I doubt he's literally disowned. This sounds like some hyperbole on his part, as well as theirs. Look at the quote:
> So what did your parents think when they’re reading that you’ve got $72 million?
> Mohammed Islam: Honestly, my dad wanted to disown me. My mom basically said she’d never talk to me. Their morals are that if I lie about it and don’t own up to it then they can no longer trust me. … They knew it was false and they basically wanted to kill me and I haven’t spoken to them since.
He didn't say they haven't spoken to him; they didn't say they did disown him. I've had my parents angry at me, to the point where they've yelled and said "I could kill you!" - but they're not literally going to murder him, and they're probably not literally disowning him.
A crisis PR firm would love the publicity from an event like this and many would be willing to take these clients pro bono (not that they did in this case).
This is the really dangerous consequence of chasing after stories that have nice narratives. If a story fits your ideological narrative perfectly, you should be twice as skeptical - real life stories are messy, imperfect, and very rarely perfectly illustrate whatever theory you have in mind.
> If a story fits your ideological narrative perfectly, you should be twice as skeptical
That's exactly what Richard Bradley said (first prominent person I know of who publicly doubted the Rolling Stone UVA story; he was Stephen Glass's editor at George magazine)
On another forum I was on, there was a guy with the handle Japhy who coined Japhy's Law: that which you most want to be true is that which you should be most skeptical of.
It came up all the time in political discussions as various participants would pull in sources showing how their side was right, but would crumble when subjected to the slightest examination.
I doubt anyone here believed it. The rest of the Internet? All bets are off.
Look at how many Buzzfeedy hoaxes get passed around like wildfire on Facebook, week after week, often by the same people in your circle. Some people -- and by "some," I mean a disappointingly large proportion of people -- don't think critically about what they encounter on the web. For them, it's not about the article. It's about the headline, and how the headline makes them feel about themselves, about the world, or about their friends. By the time they see a catchy or feel-good headline, they're already racing out to share it with everybody. If they actually get around to reading the article attached to the headline, the reading is incidental.
In my opinion the VAST majority of people never fact check, and most of the remaining people don't fact check unless the reporter's views strongly conflict with their own. In the current case being discussed, some embarrassment, and probably some figurative spanking are the aftermath.
In other more serious cases (crime, armed conflict, group terrorism, state terrorism) the aftermath of such a pattern is much more dramatic.
The hard truth is that media outlets need money to survive, to get that money they do two things: publish News/views that won't upset people paying for ads; and publish scoops that sell. No one is going to read a magazine or news "paper" that is broke.
But the hard question is: how do you effectively encourage properly done objective journalism? Is there a Reddit style karma scheme for news outlets? I imagine this will be effective if taken into account as an SEO signal.
I don't understand why anybody would be blaming them. This is 100% on the author of the story and NY Mag. They published the story, it's their responsibility to fact-check it. I for one think it's hilarious that they got this story run at all, although I can understand the stress of being at the center of a hoax and all of the attention it brings.
People enjoy pretending hard journalism is the rule rather than the exception. Having the internet & cable news destroy it is just another part of the fantasy TV shows like The Newsroom enjoy telling.
Is there anything in place to ensure accountably of news releases in news organizations? I'm pretty sure that if enough of this happens; the reputation of the news organization will suffer.
>Is there anything in place to ensure accountably of news releases in news organizations?
News organisations are in the business of shaping public opinion and/or providing public entertainment. They're not in the business of encouraging informed debate - which is a minority interest at best, and bad for business at worst.
So - no. There is no accountability in journalism or in media ownership.
Say I'm a news Agency with multiple broadcast mechanisms and I continually post incorrect information that in turn ends up destroying private citizens lives; Is there any recourse that private citizens can take against the organization?
For example, can you take legal action for defamation of character?
Not that this is the case here, but crisis PR firms would love the publicity from an event like this and many would be willing to take this on pro bono. If you think about it, this is a really easy case for the PR firm that brings huge amounts of publicity, so they're really getting their bang for their buck. The clients in this case are just high school "kids" whose story got taken out of context and exaggerated by the manipulative "media". Any wrong doing can really be swept under the rug with a sincere apology. Who can't relate to the follies of youth, esp when there's powerful media enterprise trying to exploit them?
I'd be really interested to know if the New York Magazine is footing the bill for the PR firm, it already looks quite bad on them and it could make sense for them to do so just to save face.
This feels slightly "Black Mirror" but, to me, it's inevitable. It's a charismatic story. It's somewhat of an advertorial, not just for a person, but for an idea: that someone at Stuyvesant (which is full of high-talent, mostly middle-class, students because the truly wealthy go to schools like Dalton that deliver Harvard if you show up for class, and Stanford as a consolation prize) can make $72 million on his wits alone. I would want to believe it, were I not knowledgeable enough on finance to smell the bullshit.
The current corporate world is built on lies, repeated often enough until they become truth (reputation, prestige, credibility). There are facts, and occasionally those hit back against an aggressive lie; but most of what drives economic life (especially at the individual level) is brand and reputation and social proof. How many corporate executives got there without lying about their CVs, polishing their career histories and accomplishments, and generally manicuring their reputations using a number of tools including deceit? Probably zero. Occasionally, some corporate executive gets caught in a lie and is scapegoated, usually because he was stupid and lied about something easily refutable like where he went to college... even though they all do it.
The sad thing here is that we're talking about a teenager who (a) stood to gain next to nothing and (b) probably didn't intend for any of this to happen at all. The disgusting thing is that, if he takes a fall for this, then he'll have fallen not because of any deception but because of social class. A middle-class kid makes the middle-class mistake of (possibly) lying about something that can be refuted, and gets burned. An upper-class kid gets a $5 million seed round on parental connections and Stanford Welfare (a more pernicious lie, because it looks like merit) and gets away with it, being allowed to play CEO for years until "adult supervision" is brought in to administer a company that he still owns.
Whoa, slow down there. Your post is littered with assumptions.
Probably zero
How do you know this, exactly?
even though they all do it
Again, how do you know this?
An upper-class kid gets a $5 million seed round on parental connections and Stanford Welfare (a more pernicious lie, because it looks like merit) and gets away with it
Simply making up a hypothetical scenario does not support whatever point you are attempting to make here. Is there a specific example you are referring to? And besides, what exactly is this hypothetical upper-class kid "getting away with"?
He pulled numbers out of thin air to artificially inflate returns and paint a rosy picture of his personal economy? I'm sure the US Federal Reserve is already actively recruiting him.
The reporter claims she saw "bank statements"...the validity of which seem to be in question if the boy has recanted everything. I wonder if she got taken in by the good-ol edit-the-HTML-of-official-documents-with-the-Web-inspector trick?
On the upside, at least this teenager doesn't have to bear eternal Internet shame for being part of a public prank/lie. His name is pretty much Google-proof, or at least as Google-proof as someone named "Jesus Christian" would be. That said...I just Googled "Mohammed Islam" and was pretty surprised to see all the top results relating to the young man at hand. I would've thought that Google's algorithm would've associated such a query with Islam the religion and the prophet Muhammad.