Low quality reporting in "alternative" news outlets
It’s an unfortunate fact that mainstream news organizations like CNN, the NY Times, and others have been purveyors of lies and deliberate disinformation for decades.
For people recently realizing this, I’d like to point out that this started at least a century ago when the NY Times famously lied and concealed the extent of Stalin’s crimes in the Ukraine, where he starved millions of people to death in a deliberate genocide, and the NY Times’ reporter Walter Duranty deliberately covered it up and later even went onto win a Pulitzer award for his “reporting”.
The idea that the corporate news in the U.S. has only recently turned to supporting communists is laughably incorrect.
Yet in recent years, the audacity of these corporations to print libel and lies about political opponents or organizations they dislike (e.g. the whole Trump saga) has been growing to the point that they have lost almost all credibility.
This has been a great boon to alternative news organizations, which thrive on the largely open internet; but unfortunately, just because it’s not the mainstream news, doesn’t make the reporting have any shred of truth.
Case in point, I was reading this dramatic article on shtfplan.com (a website with ridiculously over-the-top fear-mongering styling and adverts, which nonetheless occasionally contains useful tidbits of information).
Wow, that sounds pretty serious, right? I clicked on the article and was hoping to find some data. Some kind of chart of the collapsing insect populations perhaps. But I couldn’t find anything.
So I decided to follow the link to the original article, posted on Natural News, a notoriously unreliable website, also full of fear-mongering which, unsurprisingly, tries to sell you miraculous vitamins and supplements.
The first paragraph makes it sound like someone nefarious is trying to hide this information from you.
“Buried beneath headlines about congressional treason and wars and rumors of war is a disturbing new report from the World Entomology Body (WEB) showing that the world's insect populations are plummeting.”
I scroll down and, once again, see no data.
I decide to click on the link to the report, which takes me to yet another article (I’m 3 articles deep at this point).
The article references a World Entomology Board (WEB) report, but, again, does not provide any sort of links. I start searching for the organization and realize pretty quickly that the World Entomology Board simply doesn’t exist.
I go back to the original source of information, scroll down to the bottom, and look what I find:
“For those of you savvy CleanTechnica readers, you’ve been watching the date today — April 1 — and wondering which of our cast of writers would grab onto the opportunity to poke a bit of fun while making a social point. Yes, this is one of our April Fool’s articles. We’re lucky that the world’s insect pollinator population has not evaporated as written here.”
The report, and all the news articles that it had spawned conveying drama and fear to thousands of readers - was based on an April fool’s joke!
What that means is that none of the people who summarized or re-posted this article actually did any research to verify the data (basic journalism work!) or even read the original article in its entirety which mentions the April fool’s joke at the bottom, or worse, they did, and decided to deliberately spread fear and disinformation anyway!
All this does is:
Discredits alternative news sites which are already struggling with their credibility due to the often-outlandish (but sometimes true) nature of their reporting, and
Makes people not take environmental threats seriously. There really have been incidents in which massive amounts of bees have died, likely from landing on crops with neurotoxic pesticides on them. And yet, as the Wikipedia article writes, overall bee populations have been increasing worldwide, and while these environmental issues are concerning, they do not spell the end of the world, nor does that kind of thinking help empower us to actually resolve these problems. I bet they sell those supplements though!
My advice? Spend a couple of minutes verifying the authenticity of information you read or hear, whether it comes from the government, mainstream news, or alternative news. Nobody has a monopoly on truth, and bad and dishonest reporters are unfortunately the rule now, and not the exception.