I was a news junkie for several years (now cured).
I was mildly obsessive about fact checking. And oh wow, it is bad.
My takeaway was that people who casually read the news (e.g. newspaper, scanning headlines on their favorite news site, etc) are the most misinformed.[1] The one who doesn't follow the news knows he is ignorant and doesn't know the inaccurate information. The one who follows it heavily, and with an eye towards gaining knowledge (and not following a tribe) will develop the skill to sift through the crap.
[1] Well, OK - those who obsessively follow only the news in their bubble are probably worse.
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”
"The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
In a discussion of an article about encouraging fact-checking in writing, I wish you would have made your quotes informative by replacing "many wise people" with the actual names of who said them.
For everyone else: the first paragraph appears to be a quote of C.S. Lewis around 1945 [0], and the second, of Thomas Jefferson in 1807 [1].
A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper.
[1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.
Even if the heyday of profitable journalism fact checkers were a magazine thing. Newspapers generally did not use them, they moved too quickly for that and had too much space (newsprint between the ads) to fill.
On the other hand, in that era a much higher proportion of the news in a paper was directly reported by the journalists - things they physically saw, people they physically talked to or called. They weren’t using some half baked thing from the internet because there as no internet. Although they might run something dodgy from another newspaper or wire service, but that was pretty rare, at least outside of the celebrity gossip and film columns (which were, sexist-ly, considered women’s news and thus not held to the same standards).
A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop.
Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there.
We have to acknowledge what has changed in our world and why things are the way that they are. Perhaps daily news is simply not profitable enough to provide us with quality information, and our economic incentives (namely advertising dollars from websites, YouTube, TikTok and the like) are having an adverse effect on quality.
> A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop.
> Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there.
Also, if any news orgs are listening: when you are regurgitating a press release about, say, a report or scientific paper, please make it your house style to hyperlink to the report or paper. That way I can see your sources and judge the claims for myself.
Also, people who write reports or papers and then make press releases: please upload them to your own damn websites, and make them easily findable by the public. Don't just email the press release to your pals in the media, and not put your words anywhere else.
B2B magazines and websites are full of churnalism. They are unreadable.
The issue here is that for every journalist there are 6 to 7 PR people. (There approx. 45,000 journalists but 297,000 PR people in the USA. PR agencies employ 114,000 ppl.)
But there are good newspapers just like they are good <any category of thing>.
Although good newspapers still have bias, but as a reader, you can correct for bias. You can’t correct for sloppy fact checking.
Like in archery, if you always land in the same spot, you can “reverse bias” the result back to bullseye. If you land all over the place, there’s nothing you can do.
The only problem is that good newspapers cost some money.
In this conversation I keep seeing comments about good newspapers. I'd be interested in seeing a more specific discussion that debates which newspapers qualify as good. Everyone has their own opinion, but maybe a consensus would emerge.
Is it as easy as NYT? Or Economist? Or is that still slop and ProPublica is the standard? But even then, something like ProPublica is great for investigative journalism but less useful as a general source of information.
I'm happy to pay for a good source of news. But finding something that doesn't just look good, but is in fact actually good, that's my problem.
I really like the economist for their various data points/graphs and such. Always very useful and quality in my experience. They are very good at displaying the data used to inform their pieces. It’s the analysis that can be all over the place depending on the topic at hand.
As others have mentioned I would consider ProPublica probably the gold standard right now
A good newspaper to me is one that regularly does their due diligence (fact checking, possibly considering things from several angles, giving background information) and has a consistent but reasonable bias. NYT and The Economist are very good ones.
It’s extremely hard suggesting newspapers to an online audience. People don’t easily separate bias and accuracy — they think they are correlated.
Bias and accuracy are unrelated to each other.
If I suggest The Economist, people think I’m for liberalism (The Economist has a major liberalism slant), but really, they tend to make factual statements and then turn to liberalism as a solution, which a regular reader can be like “okay the facts and your background introduction to the topic are good. I don’t necessarily agree with your solution but I get your viewpoint.”
When people ask for suggestions, they often want a simple news source that is unbiased. And I have nothing to give them because I don’t read unbiased news sources.
I think a much smaller percentage of smart high school seniors want to go into journalism at all. And if they do they'll probably just start a TikTok debating people
Perhaps there's also less stringent editing on the "Showbiz & TV" or "Culture" sections of the paper than the "News" section. I mean, papers in general are working leaner than they should. Hopefully, they put the editing focus on what's most important, but still, being lazy even in a lighter section does reflect poorly on the entire publication.
Curious that the Wikipedia article seemingly editorializes the quote. The article displays:
> 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 economics than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
But in fact Crichton's quote was:
> 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. [0]
Why they felt the need to edit Palestine out of the quote is unclear.
Because it distracts from the general point, I imagine. The quote isn't about whatever is going on in Palestine at the moment (which is usually something spectacular, terrible, and highly polarizing), but about accuracy in news reporting.
Editing the quote without using "..." or similar indications was, of course, unacceptable.
There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.