No, that's not verification
Headline from Economist:

Fake news: you ain’t seen nothing yet: Generating convincing audio and video of fake events

I can't get through the paywall, but the gist seems to be that "journalism" will be impossible to verify after digital graphics becomes even better.

No, that's NOT the problem.

Verifying the news from the printed or displayed output has never worked, and you shouldn't expect it to work.

Verification has always required BEING THERE, either at the scene of the current event or in a similar situation. If you're in the area of the tornado, you can verify the report. If you've been in a tornado, you can tell whether the report is plausible. If you've worked in a motel, you can tell whether a report about a motel robbery makes sense. When you've been reading RT or SputnikNews, and when you know something about how NSA and CIA operate, you can verify that WaPo's (and CNN and CIA and everybody else's) account of RUSSIANMEDDLING is totally false. All of the assumptions and "facts" and motivations and hardware and software are perfectly wrong.

= = = = =

Journalism AS A BUSINESS has always required surface fakery. Shocking headlines, misleading pictures. The Extry Extry newsboy deliberately made the headlines hard to understand. The first newsreels by Pathe in 1895 were completely staged.

If you want to grab and hold people's attention, you can't simply narrate what happened.



Good example from previous item: The front page of the Lawrence Republican on statehood day. Just the NEWS, not journalism. A direct copy of the Congressional Record, showing when Kansas was officially statized. Mechanical and dull. Because the event was already dramatic to Kansans, the paper could get away with it for one day.

Better example: The Spokane News facebook page. This is ACTUAL NEWS with BUILT-IN VERIFICATION. Exact opposite of journalism. People are describing real events in real time in their own words and their own pictures. Most of the events are undramatic to outsiders, but intensely interesting to people who live near the vandalism or fire. Sometimes life-or-death interesting. So there's no need to gin up interest with fakery. If you're near the event, you can verify. If you've been robbed by the same Gypsy or crashed at the same intersection, you know the report is likely to be true.

Labels: Metrology

  ¶ 10:29 AM