audible sigh. no, this is not evidence of how "media has been hacked".
the wikipedia summary of the information could be clearer, as it leaves room for me to make an inference on the statements provided -- but those inferences are based on my own biases and my own fuzzy stupid human brain thing filling in the blanks.
which is exactly why there are links to the underlying source material. so I can go and dive in deeper to see that, actually, my brain filled in the blanks wrong. it's my brain filling in the blanks. no-one else's brain is doing it for me. no-one is "hacking" my perspective. I screwed up by reading into something wrong and making assumptions out of fear. It is my personal responsibility to verify and challenge my own assumptions, especially those based on fears and worries.
basically, it's my own damn fault. please don't blame someone else for something that is my own damn fault.
there are plenty of badly poorly edited wikipedia articles out there -- i was reading one last night which literally had an entire paragraph that consisted of "The BBC released a timeline of events on their website". That was the whole paragraph. No reference for that statement either! This is part of the nature of community based, a.k.a. amateur, created notes. Oh look, an argument for professional fact checking and copy editing appears out of nowhere.
I don't mean "hacked" as in some malicious individual planned to mislead you. I mean we've screwed up our brain's information processing with the constant flow of urgency (for eyeballs). We're basically unable to pay attention to anything that isn't immediate. The bias you mention in compounded by others biases as the information is shared with each individual's bias. I also suspect that there can be bad actors in the chain, who intentionally mislead, often for pretty banal reasons (protecting their own perceptions).
I recently read about how Trump is "crashing" the stock market, and I was like oh crap, but when I checked it was only down a few points. Not only will I now ignore this source, but it's also probably nudged my overall distrust a little bit. Possibly the person writing the article figured it was important enough to warrant notice (it is) but realized no one would pay attention if it didn't sound urgent, so they gussied it up a lot... Imagine how much more dire it was after it got shared a few more times. If I got my news from Facebook then I might have thought democracy had collapsed and roving bands of gun toting anarchists had taken over.
> "Trump is "crashing" the stock market, and I was like oh crap, but when I checked it was only down a few points"
Forbes has a page "realtime billionaires list"[1] where they track the day to day wealth changes. Musk lost $12.5 billion today, Larry Ellison lost $2.8 billion today, Mark Zuckerberg gained $820M today.
When a few points means billions to the people who fund and own media outlets, who are also famously competitive and willing to do anything to make the numbers go up, it becomes more clear why we hear of the market "crashing" but it doesn't seem much different to us. (and that's outside the usual political complaining about everything the 'other' party does, whatever it is).
You're very intelligently jumping through hoops to justify and defend the media and how the system as a whole operated here. On aggregate, this kind of "something" that happened, whether relying on readers filling in blanks, omissions, downright lying, even the choice of photo on a wiki page, etc, they all have a net-effect which steers the conversation and effort in a very specific direction.
Let's not pretend like this stuff doesn't have some sort of effect on the conversation, or our ability to have the conversation, or to debate it rationally and from first-principles. At the very least, we are here arguing pedantic minor points whilst the real issues are left un-debated. The purpose of the media should be to distill, enlighten, inform, and definitely not mislead with a very specific agenda which it very clearly does. You point me to any news article from any news outlet, including Reuters and I will show you how they twist literal facts into bias. At this point, I see them as no different than politicians.
Unfortunately for the left-wing intelligentsia, the media, and their allies - the average day to day people are waking up and the general opinion floating around more and more is having the effect of exposing the MO of how the media pushes an agenda (whether purposefully or not).
the wikipedia summary of the information could be clearer, as it leaves room for me to make an inference on the statements provided -- but those inferences are based on my own biases and my own fuzzy stupid human brain thing filling in the blanks.
which is exactly why there are links to the underlying source material. so I can go and dive in deeper to see that, actually, my brain filled in the blanks wrong. it's my brain filling in the blanks. no-one else's brain is doing it for me. no-one is "hacking" my perspective. I screwed up by reading into something wrong and making assumptions out of fear. It is my personal responsibility to verify and challenge my own assumptions, especially those based on fears and worries.
basically, it's my own damn fault. please don't blame someone else for something that is my own damn fault.
there are plenty of badly poorly edited wikipedia articles out there -- i was reading one last night which literally had an entire paragraph that consisted of "The BBC released a timeline of events on their website". That was the whole paragraph. No reference for that statement either! This is part of the nature of community based, a.k.a. amateur, created notes. Oh look, an argument for professional fact checking and copy editing appears out of nowhere.