h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I go with the BBC and the New York Times plus Channel 4 news.

I take the BBC news with a pinch of salt (hell, they've even given up on correct spelling and grammar), and compare with German or French news sites. After the Falklands war, where I noticed discrepancies between the coverage in the different countries, it became clear to me that someone, somewhere, is telling the BBC what to report and what not to report.

Isn't the Huffington Post supposed to be becoming more reputable?

HuffPo is best described as variable.

Remember, at heart HuffPo is basically a forum for bloggers. Some HuffPo articles are quite well written, sourced, and fact checked. Others are none of these. The more sensational the story on HuffPo, the more I look for corroboration elsewhere. Or the more likely I am to simply dismiss it.


I do highly recommend subscribing to the fact checkers like Politifact and Snopes.

I have seen that graphic before, but I thought the Independent was on it. Maybe I was thinking of the Guardian.

I've recently checked out a couple articles in the New Yorker, looks like in addition to those things there's also some in-depth reporting. They've been advertising heavily on FB lately, I caved and got a trial subscription so we'll see how it goes.

That's cool.

I've always loved "The New Yorker." There is really nothing else like it.

Isn't Snopes the new evil Sith Lord in the Star Wars universe?

Not quite, but to many garden variety conservatives, who get their news from limited sources like Fox, they've been convinced that Snopes is nothing but liberal lies funded by George Soros. This is patently untrue of course. Snopes is serious about being apolitical and linking to their sources for readers to verify on their own if they are still leery. I point out to those who claim this perceived bias that I see many liberal lies debunked on Snopes constantly. But to be honest there does seem to be a preponderance of conservative fallacies. As Stephen Colbert quipped, the truth has a liberal bias.

John Oliver's first episode of Last Week Tonight this year dives into Lord Dampnut's battle with the truth. A particularly important point he makes is regarding Trump and his team of belligerobots (See Stephen Miller's recent performance on George Stephanopoulos' show http://youtu.be/L9wo9DAVtko ) insisting that 3 million illegal aliens voted in the election. This entire concept is based on one unsubstantiated tweet that was then picked up by InfoWars and then spouted by Trump himself. Once he repeated it, it was picked up by other conservative sources, who still didn't fact check, and then it was repeated by legions of conservative followers. Now Trump maintains that this is true because millions of people now believe it's true. If this doesn't make your head explodey, it sure does mine.

http://youtu.be/xecEV4dSAXE

It's kind of hard to avoid Godwin in such times is it not

Yeah, I'm now adding Ad Hitlerinem attack to my vocabulary.

Yeah, but the couple that runs snopes.com also runs a network of spam servers that start many of those forwarded stories in the first place. It's true, I read it somewhere.
http://xkcd.com/250/

That's absurd.

Besides, it's been debunked by...

Oh, my god!



http://www.snopes.com/info/notes/politics.asp
http://www.snopes.com/frequently-asked-questions/

The BBC sometimes raises an eyebrow. Take this "fact checking" piece.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38385259

A Tory MP said "there is a gender gap in part-time earnings, with men earning less than women."

The BBC blogger said " Women who work between 10 and 30 hours a week receive a higher hourly rate than men. But in all other categories of part-time and full-time work, men earn more than women and if part-time and full-time work is taken together, men on average earn 18% more per hour than women."

So the answer should have been "Yes, the statement that men earn less than women in part time jobs is true"

However, we get loads of stuff about full time pay rates which wasn't the point under discussion. There's a blizzard of statistics that fail to take into account all the known factors that affect wages (such as length of employment, average hours worked etc) before the blogger signs off with a flourish -

"So, although it is true that men in part-time work of 10 to 30 hours per week earn less than women working the same number of hours, the reality is that women, on average, still get paid less than men per hour of work done."

Very poor journalism in a so called fact checking section of the BBC.

I would trust Channel 4 News in the UK, Jon Snow and the team.
http://www.channel4.com/news/
http://hello.channel4.com/webApp/snowmail