Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story. It's usually the "which truths get picked and which not" part that gets tricky. Wikipedia makes its own compilation, so citing facts out of newspapers doesn't sound too bad.
More concretely, a newspaper (or other media) will use facts like "Police Media Officer Jones stated that ....". It is factually correct that Officer Jones stated "....". Whether Media Officer Jones' statement is correct and comprehensive, that is another matter.
Feel free to substitute "Officer Jones" for any other occupation.
A very large fraction of news comes from media relations people at the organizations being reported on. Good news agencies will get context from another organization.
Great news agencies will sometimes do the kind of digging that makes leaders of large organizations uncomfortable. The costs in time, money, and reputation (even when you get it right) mean that even the very best news agencies can only report a small fraction of stories in depth.
You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.
I think you are missing a few things about crime in a big city. People don't want to be victims of crime. So when crime rises, people adapt their behavior to adjust for that. People will stop going out at night in certain neighborhoods for example. They also stop reporting certain types of crime, like property crime.
So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.
I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.
Transportation crime fear is compounded by another issue: "scary people." I've personally never witnessed a crime. But I've seen plenty of people that raised my hackles, usually they seem intoxicated or are exhibiting some kind behavior that may indicate mental illness. Are they going to get up and stab me? Probably not, but it sure seems like it could happen, and it sometimes (though rarely in terms of transite miles) does happen. I can intellectually dismiss other low prevalence issues in a way that it is hard to do with public transit, viscerally.
I know you meant "became wary" when you wrote "raised my hackles", but that phrase means "to (visibly) upset or arouse one's anger," which I'm sure is not what you meant. But it does speak to a large part of the problem: people becoming overly engaged with something that they should probably just acknowledge and be aware of, without changing their behavior significantly.
Crime hysteria seems like it gets people, who are unlikely to be victims of crimes but more likely to have outsize political influence, involved in law enforcement policy. Without being forced to dogfood the results of their own advocacy, you end up with policing rules written by people who rarely are forced to interact with police, and who are very scared of crime that never happens to them.
One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.
For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.
Match my experience as well. For every event I've been part of that's also been reported in the news, I've found the news wildly wrong. Not innacurate, wrong.
And lately, on top of that I've also had the terrifying experience of wikipedia opting for the wrong reported news and dismissing several objections from people actually involved in the actual events.
The worse is that it's oftentime not even attributable to some malicious agenda, or gross incompetence of someone in particular. It's just how this industry functions.
Someone down the thread is asking "what's the alternative".
The alternative is to admit that you are not informed beyond your immediate horrizon.
Not reading news that doesn't have a significant impact on your life is entirely reasonable.
The guy who got arrested in the other state for hacking into the DOD? It's totally reasonable not to bother knowing about it.
> I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives
Ha! I was a news junkie in the Bush/Obama era. Getting busy in life finally cured me of that scourge, but I learned a lot of lessons. Long before Trump came on the scene I was an advocate of "There's no middle ground with the news - either go all in (time consuming) or mostly all out" - and while I didn't shout "Fake news!", it was my sentiment - you really can't trust much, and learning what you can trust will take years of aggressively analyzing the news and how it works - time most people don't have.
It was disconcerting that the person who got people to distrust the news was Trump.
Anyway, in case people think I'm advocating never trusting news: It ain't so. As I think I said elsewhere - one can find quality articles and quality journalists. You just can't do it as a casual hobby.
And my mission is to let people know they don't need 95% of the information they think they do.
But if they really need information about a particular topic/domain, they should put in the hours to find ways to verify what they read, and start ranking journalists by accuracy and integrity.
> Also, this attitude allows suffering to occur as long as it doesn't affect the majority of the people.
You're not wrong.
The flip side is that casual news reading allows quite a bit of suffering because people have a flawed model of the world due to their news perusals.
In fact, that's what this submission and many comments are pointing out. How much money is spent to fight terrorism (including invading countries to protect us from terrorists) vs heart disease prevention? Why do people believe the former is more worthy of spending money? If the news provided proportional coverage, we'd likely have spent a lot less money on the former.
I think you and I have had wildly different experiences.
If I know something about what is in the paper, it’s rare that the paper is correct. It’s almost always missing some critical piece of information, or wildly misrepresenting the situation to attempt to simplify it to the point your average person will read the article.
That is the technicality here. Bullshit is getting spewed, but in most cases, direct falsehoods aren't gett reported. If you quote someone saying something untrue, the paper didn't present a falsehood, same with bias, omission, emphasis and misleading narratives or framings. If you avoid stating facts and just cite sources, you can maintain, that the media outlet didn't lie. But only in the limited technical sense of direct commission.
