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Newspapers sometimes include facts amongst their fiction to help make it more believable. Some of us prefer to ignore the fiction and would rather fish out the facts.
This news service will contain the same fictodrivel as other newspapers, apart from verified facts will be in black, unverified facts
will be in white, and fiction proved to be fiction will be in red.
"Gordon Brown, in his speech to the house today, told of his great belief in honesty, transparency and equality"
Would be rendered as:
[black]Gordon Brown, in[/black] [red]his[/red] [black]speech to the house today, told of his[/black] [white]great[/white] [black]belief in[/black] [red]honesty, transparency and equality[/red].
The decision about colour coding would be made on the basis that everything starts in white until proven otherwise. Needless to say; the background colour is also white and so there can be no news until what's being claimed has actually been checked; and either assigned to proven (black) or lies (red).
'How to lie with statistics'
http://en.wikipedia...Lie_with_Statistics
The classic modern text on the subject [pertinax, Nov 26 2007]
[link]
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Without something to disentangle the semantics from the syntax, this will just make an illegible mess. |
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Given that news publishers will go out of business if there's nothing to read or if it is unintelligible, I believe the industry will solve these problems itself. |
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If something is printed in white, what colour are these newspapers going to be? |
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At this rate, the only viable newspaper will be the Financial Times - which probably prints more than enough factual material already. |
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Plus, you can normally already tell the reliability of a (British) newspaper by how much red it has on the front cover. |
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Similarly, in some newspapers in the UK one can presume the theme of a paragraph by its preceeding single-word bold sub-heading, although sometimes the headings can be a little misleading. |
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Despite their lack of consistency and their complete absence of useful meaning, these headings apparently assist the common man in reading a news story with added coherence. |
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This is, of course, a bunch of arse. |
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I'm intrigued but dont see a way how this can be implemented without it falling prey to going back to square one -- being mislead yet again. It would be tough to separate the pieces as pertinax pointed out. I'm giving you a {+] regardless because i think there's something there but isn't quite being said (and i can't figure it out). |
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Another problem with this, which I think will be fatal to it, is that very few deceptions in newspapers involve direct offenses against fact. Most of them rely on the ancient black arts of 'suppressio veri' and 'suggestio falsi', which use use genuine facts, but selectively. |
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In your example, Brown's speech really is his, in the sense that it was written for him and he has taken ownership of him, in the same sense that my computer is mine even though I didn't design and construct it myself. |
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Furthermore, even if Brown doesn't have any beliefs, the statement that he talked about his beliefs can still be true. If I talk about a unicorn, then you can truthfully report that I talked about a unicorn, even what I said about the unicorn (e.g., that it exists) is untrue. |
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Still further, it is entirely possible that Brown genuinely has, or once had, the beliefs alluded to, and his speech simply failed to mention the pressing reasons why he tends to ignore those beliefs in day-to-day decision-making. |
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Deception without lying! You get the idea? |
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Good point, [boysparks], - but I think that tends not to apply so much to 'big' stories, about things like national politics. I think what you describe applies more to the 'human interest' stories, where the humans involved don't have the time or resources to fight back. |
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