And a stopped clock is right twice a day. So all the stopped clock merchant has to do is wait for the clock to line up, then shout from the rooftops that they have the right time.
It's not enough to be correct by coincidence, process matters. We see this often enough in scientific papers where the statistics come into question. News process is different, especially given how sources work. Not everyone is willing to be recorded, and recordings are increasingly untrustworthy anyway, so at some point you have to start believing that the reporter heard person X say Y.
The worst part of the whole fake news fiasco has been people using the (very real) problems of the established media as an excuse to switch to consuming total nonsense from fabricated sources.
Interestingly, time itself is a social construct. Not just in the sense of relativistic time, but in the sense of how we came to move from individual local clocks ("decentralised time") to using time from the communication network which had to coordinate internally ("railway time").
Clocks are a great analogy. As pointed out, the problem is in verification. Say everyone has a clock and they're all showing different time. How do you actually get to the ground truth? Observe and measure planetary motion? That's too much hassle. This is where the analogy cracks a bit (or does it?). What you want is for your clock to show the same time as others' clocks do, so you join a group where you synchronize your watches. Other people join groups too, possibly with different synchronizations. Fact has become convention, subordinate to localized social utility.
Indeed they are, and in no small measure because everyone is convinced that they know what clocks do and nearly everyone is wrong. Everyone thinks that clocks measure time. They don't. They measure the space-time interval between events, but when you try to explain that to people their eyes glaze over and they start mentally fitting you for a nice padded cell. But this actually matters if, for example, you want to understand the details of how GPS works.
Fake news is the same way. Most of the time it really doesn't matter, e.g. the person working the register at the grocery store can believe that aliens have kidnapped their pet hamster and it won't impact their ability to ring up your order. So most people go through life believing crazy things it never matters, until when it finally does their thought processes are so deeply entrenched that the actual truth sounds completely insane to them (c.f. "clocks don't measure time.")
Truth is constant, lies are variable. With news, you need to look at stories that use different sources and find out the consistencies. The problem on the web is that so many articles are plagiarized or paraphrased from an original source like the AP.
Is truth really constant though? The answer would probably depend on the domain being considered. Many things change over time and truth can change with them.
So perhaps the core problem is that multiple contradictory “truths” can exist depending on ones point of view and ones point in time.
This would be separate from intentional misinformation which does tie into the debate. It seems likely that the modern problem of multiple clocks could just be a representation of different points of view.
Let's make a distinction between universal truths as you described and local truths that are defined as an accurate retelling of the events that unfolded at a certain time at a given place. That cannot change with time as its already been "recorded"
Things always happen a particular way, regardless of peoples memory of that event. Case in point, a video camera can sometimes give an accurate retelling of the events at a particular place at a particular time.
A video is closer to the event than a textual retelling, but is still only a proxy. The choice of camera positioning can significantly change the viewer's perception of the event, and the narrative formed.
Ok then let the accurate retelling be defined as the view from all angles. One need not interpret events that transpired before to interpret the action because thats where bias in news comes from. It comes from trying to infer meaning and deduce reasoning with no factual proof. Actions speak louder than words so its more important to describe the action than the intent
It's not enough to be correct by coincidence, process matters. We see this often enough in scientific papers where the statistics come into question. News process is different, especially given how sources work. Not everyone is willing to be recorded, and recordings are increasingly untrustworthy anyway, so at some point you have to start believing that the reporter heard person X say Y.
The worst part of the whole fake news fiasco has been people using the (very real) problems of the established media as an excuse to switch to consuming total nonsense from fabricated sources.
Interestingly, time itself is a social construct. Not just in the sense of relativistic time, but in the sense of how we came to move from individual local clocks ("decentralised time") to using time from the communication network which had to coordinate internally ("railway time").