If someone writes about things they think will happen, but those things never materialize, they shouldn’t just get to brush it under the rug and act like they never said it. You’ve made millions of people worried over literally nothing. That should come with reputational consequences - not just for the journalist, but also for the platform that amplified their speculation.
Now obviously, there are things worth writing about even when many unknowns remain. But in those cases, acknowledge the uncertainty - lay out the improbable worst-case scenario, the more likely outcome, and the possibility that the whole issue might just fade away. Just don’t present speculation as certainty when you can’t possibly know, or if you do then own it.
All the tools are in place already to make sure journalists/platforms get punished (i.e. stop reading their crap.) Problem is people that only read and hear what they want to believe.
Thinking about this from a technical standpoint, it would be interesting and useful if the platforms that host online articles provided some mechanisms to (1) explicitly recognize when an article is making predictions and (2) allow/remind the author or readers to follow-up and rate the accuracy of the predictions over time. This would allow all sorts of meta analysis on the accuracy of a particular author’s predictions, on particular types of predictions, on trends in positive or negative predictions, etc.
I’ve been saying this for years. News is news, but media is media. And just like the difference between an artistic nude and pornography, you know what it is when you see it.
I don’t think that news organizations should be allowed to broadcast Propaganda media without consequence, At the very least, they should be required to be transparent when they are not reporting what they believe to be factual truth.
Yeah, I just don’t know how society would go about enforcing this. I feel like there should be some kind of “This We Were Wrong About” tab or a way to look up individual journalists and see their track record. That way, if someone makes big claims, you could check whether they have a history of doing so and what their success rate has been.
It would work both ways too - if someone frequently makes bold predictions but has been right many times before, maybe their views should carry more weight.
That should come with reputational consequences - not just for the journalist, but also for the platform that amplified their speculation
This is already true though? At least for respectable sources.
Anyway reputation is socially enforced. You can’t make a law about it
