Good headline, no? I saw the headline scrolling Reddit and had to read the article (albeit a week or two later). The headline was so good, I found myself referencing the article before I read the content. “The Truth is Paywalled, But the Lies Are Free.”
Let it sink in.
The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free. It’s intuitively true and validated daily. Too often, I see a Google news alert with an urgent headline such as “Tokyo Now Has Transparent Public Toilets. Let Us Explain” but when I try to learn more and become an informed citizen, I’m blocked by a paywall.
The article didn’t live up to the title. At the beginning of the article, the author makes a few excellent points related to online articles:
- Journalism and research are expensive to do well
- Fabrication and plagiarism cost very little to produce
- The compensation structure of production benefits those that can produce quickly and spur engagement
Unfortunately the author uses those points, which merit discussion, as a springboard to propose a world with perfect information through a free-to-access online Utopia:
In fact, to see just how much human potential is being squandered by having knowledge dispensed by the “free market,” let us briefly picture what “totally democratic and accessible knowledge” would look like. Let’s imagine that instead of having to use privatized research services like Google Scholar and EBSCO, there was a single public search database containing every newspaper article, every magazine article, every academic journal article, every court record, every government document, every website, every piece of software, every film, song, photograph, television show, and video clip, and every book in existence.
I’ll save my analysis of this utopia, it isn’t relevant to my post. In the pivot from an analysis of why it is hard for citizens to remain informed to a takedown of US copyright law and research funding, the author lost the second half of the title: The lies are free.
What a waste of a headline. The author spends one short paragraph on the impact of pervasive inaccurate news. US politics have been shaped over the last four years over which news sources are trustworthy. The President’s use of the term “fake news” has been so frequent and effective that exposure to the phrase dampens the public’s ability to discern real from fraudulent news. The author of the article that inspired this post used only conservative sources when highlighting the prevalence of lies in internet reporting.
“The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free.” In this climate, the author should use this title to help readers navigate a politicized news landscape. It’s clear to me that the Financial Times would be an excellent source of news, but I don’t have FT money. Instead I’m stuck with Financial Buzz and Forbes. Every few hours Google pushes me toward an article from an unknown guy in a van, and I’m stuck trying to determine what I can consider fact and what deserves additional scrutiny. A few tips to help readers determine which news is real after an analysis of the publishing landscape would be a perfect use of a perfect title.
I have a few tips that I’ve found to help me determine if I can trust what I am reading:
- Biased news is not necessarily inaccurate news
- A true fact can be reported many ways. If a news story has an obvious bent, I shouldn’t assume it is false because of the bias.
- If I have an emotional connection with a story (strong positive or negative) I should verify my understanding with another source.
- If the story comes from a reputable news source, it is probably factually correct to a large extent.
- A story from an unknown news source is not necessarily less trustworthy, but should be validated with other sources.
- If the site does not differentiate news and editorial/opinion pieces, I should verify the facts with a different, credible source.
- If the article does not include a byline, and the source is not traditionally respected (e.g. The Economist) I should verify the facts with a different, credible source.
- The harder a story is to find, the more I should doubt its accuracy
- This point is relatively controversial due to the politicized environment. The premise is that if the facts can’t be verified or if the story has not been circulated.
- If I only have access to the headline and nut graf, I have not read enough context to judge the story in full.
I will continue to be tricked or misread articles in future. And when I am gated from a compelling story, I’m sure I will continue to use the phase “The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free.” But like a great single on a bad album, I’ll forget where I originally heard it and never recommend the rest of the work to anyone.
Polly Wanna Math 