Worth posting Scott's civil and thoughtful take on this subject:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

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And now for my less civil and less thoughtful rant:

This is why I think journalism and media is one of the biggest thing that's turning the world to shit. The key observation from the article:

> 3. The narrative told by the media in step 2 is considered reality.

Every time they lie - and they lie often, regardless whether you want to call it "bias" or "agenda", it's done on purpose; you can't not notice that level of intellectual dishonesty - every time they lie, people believe them. And no, lying in headline and "correcting" it in the middle of the article doesn't cut it, almost nobody reads the damn article. People go on believing what they read, and then they demand changes accordingly, and then they vote accordingly, and stupid policies get instituted and people get hurt.

As the good old LW quote goes[0], "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires." Except in case of media it's really sabotage. It can take your job, your career or your home at a whim. It changes national and international policies.

Take Europe and the immigration crisis. You know what's actually the problem there? It's not just immigrants, and it's not just xenophobia. It's media feeding off each other, causing outrage after outrage, overblowing the issue to the point of turning half of otherwise sane people into aggressive xenophobes, and the other half into high-horse riding apologists.

I tend to get strange looks when I say there's a problem with media, because Free Media is obviously a Key Element to the Democratic Process (and Democratic = Good). But you know what also is free to do whatever the fuck it wants? Cancer. And it doesn't end well for the host organism. So maybe we need to reevaluate what do we really gain from having this feedback loop running unchecked.

I'm not saying, get rid of media. I ask only one thing, I ask it from editors and from journalists: have some fucking integrity. Don't publish blatant lies.

And yes, I know that's in a way not your fault, Moloch - "the abstracted spirit of discoordination and flailing response to incentives" - publishes whatever he wants. But if you want to stand up to him, I'm willing to join. I'd be happy to pay for a news source whose primary goal would be to present facts and just facts, the way they are. No spin, no lies, no reporting scientific papers as if they proved the opposite of what they actually do - just the raw truth.

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Another thing. It used to be that the best way to filter out lies and propaganda was to run articles through Reddit and/or Hacker News - lots of people with random biases, combined with quite a good chance of there being a person directly involved with the thing described, was usually enough to sanitize the news story. But I'm worried this is slowly stopping to work too. Outrage is exactly what's eating us. I've seen too many times HN jumping to conclusions. Hell, I've personally been guilty of this myself far more than I'm willing to admit. And don't even get me started on Reddit.

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/uy/dark_side_epistemology/