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Canadian military backs F-35 while Spain and India reject the U.S. fighter jet (ottawacitizen.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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[–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The Reuters story was actually posted a couple days ago (by me, in fact!) and as far as I remember, it didn't include the additional context of other countries rejecting the deals, or the info about one of the European companies offering to let Canada build their jets here.

This article has worthwhile information in it, as well as links to sources. Perhaps it could have used an extra pass on the editing for readability's sake, but it's hardly just a summary of another article, and doesn't read like AI slop to me.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Swiss politicians also called Thursday for cancelling that country’s F-35 purchase after Trump hit their country with 39 per cent tariffs.

    You don't think the grammar on that sentence is insane? It's either AI slop or a human that's really bad at writing.

    Also it's very important to give sources for where a news organization is getting information from. Which Swiss politicians?

    Postmedia is saying just "Canadian military" which suggests it's official, while Reuters (a real news source) indicates it's "sources familiar with the matter" which indicates it's not official yet.

    The Reuters story was actually posted a couple days ago (by me, in fact!) and as far as I remember, it didn’t include the additional context of other countries rejecting the deals, or the info about one of the European companies offering to let Canada build their jets here.

    According to Reuters, the article was published on Aug 7 and last updated on Aug 7. A good news organization would indicate what was changed at the end of the article if they changed something, and there's nothing there indicating the article changed. The Postmedia article was published Aug 8 and updated "1 day ago" but don't indicate what they changed because it's Postmedia and they're not real journalists.

    Sorry if I'm sounding mean, just think it's important to recognize the indicators of quality journalism when choosing news sources since there's so much misinformation and disinformation out there. For example this is a pretty good article about what the "Swiss politicians also called Thursday" is about: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politicians-push-to-cancel-f-35-fighter-jet-deal-after-us-tariffs/89796985 Sources are indicated, and the article was edited after publishing and it's noted what was changed. This can be trusted because if Bloomberg lied in their quoting of the named people there would be liability issues for them. "Sources familiar" is something I know not to trust 100% but Reuters has a good reputation so there's a high probability it's true, though not as high as it would be if they could name their sources.

    Compare these to the postmedia article, and it's obvious the postmedia article it complete garbage. It's just "Somebody said something in Switzerland and the military likes the F-35 and stuff." They're cheaping out because while they could license the Reuters article and put it on their page, instead they reworded it poorly to save some money.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I'm not going to address every part of your response because frankly I do not have the time to spend on debunking everything you've said here.

    But yes, that sentence you quote was indeed why I suggested that another editing pass would have been good, but you've also taken it out of context; the previous sentence mentioned the U.S., so the author clearly was trying to not repeat the same country name.

    Anyway the point is that this article is not merely a rephrasing of another one, and does in fact add additional context. I don't like PostMedia either, but this thought-terminating cliche of blanket mistrust is ridiculous. Grain of salt, absolutely. But I rarely hear people complain when an article aligns with their existing political bias.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a news organization to do their jobs and have basic journalistic standards. And when they fail to do so, there's no reason to to share their content when there's articles available on the same subject from news organizations that do have journalistic standards. We're in an era of misinformation and distinformation and articles like the postmedia one just promotes a general ignorance of media literacy. People think it's normal for news articles to not indicate where they're getting their information from and think discrepancies between media sources is due to political bias. If we demand all media sources indicate something about their sources then the scammy click bait crap not doing so will be more likely to trigger alarm bells for not doing any due diligence.

    Postmedia's laziness is just normalizing the degradation of journalistic standards and that creates distrust in media. Their unwillingness to pay real journalists or pay licensing fees to wire services like Reuters (who will pay real journalists) is siphoning off scarce funds away from journalism. They're a cancer on news journalism.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    As I noted in my initial response: the article has links in it.

    Anyway putting all that aside, I'd be interested to know what you think we should do regarding the F-35s. Would you be upset if Carney went ahead with the purchase?

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