How come 95% of news articles on Bitcoins have major misconceptions in them?

[15_year_old_blonde]

if not completely wrong on most concepts?

is bitcoins really that hard for journalists?

[1714940264]

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[Dude65535]

Read news articles about anything complicated you have in-depth knowledge of and you will see the same thing. Bitcoin is no different than any other complex subject.

[Steve]

It is simply because most people don't understand what money really is...look at the history of every major innovation that has ever happened...it doesn't surprise me at all that many people don't get it, or that many people are even hostile toward it.  It's to be expected.

[RodeoX]

Perhaps 95% of news articles in general have misconceptions in them?

[Crystal Excursion]

It is simply because most people don't understand what money really is...look at the history of every major innovation that has ever happened...it doesn't surprise me at all that many people don't get it, or that many people are even hostile toward it.  It's to be expected.

Yep, Your right Steve. People don't Know what money really is... I'm not a super computer geeky kind of guy, but I know that the money concept thing has been distorted many, many generations ago. Discovering bitcoin is a lot like the allegory of the cave... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM

[MarketNeutral]

The disinfo illustrates the connection between mainstream media and financial/banking powers that feel threatened by bitcoin.

Decentralization makes control freak central bankers rage hard.

[hawks5999]

I was just going to post this link for the humor value and it fits here. BitCoin today = the Internet in 1995:

http://www.newsweek.com/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.print.html

The Internet? Bah!
Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana
by Clifford Stoll February 27, 1995
After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames—but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

[billyjoeallen]

You are probably too young to remember all the misconceptions about the Internet when it first came out. Reporters are vultures with no independent thought.  If there is a car accident, they pray for a high body count because it makes the story better. They frame everything within their own perspective, because they know that their real job is to entertain, not to inform.

[hawks5999]

You are probably too young to remember all the misconceptions about the Internet when it first came out. Reporters are vultures with no independent thought.  If there is a car accident, they pray for a high body count because it makes the story better. They frame everything within their own perspective, because they know that their real job is to entertain, not to inform.

I wish I were too young. I was on Compuserve in 1995 and remember discovering this Mosaic thing that took me outside the walls of Compuserve. Paying by the hour got expensive to be sure. And in 1994 I was sending email over 2400 baud modems from Belarus. How far we've come.

[bitcoinafrica]

Perhaps 95% of news articles in general have misconceptions in them?

This is dead on the money (money in BTC of course  ).

As someone who has had to deal with the media, they make mistakes, especially when reporting on topics that can be difficult to understand. And Bitcoin, frankly, is difficult to understand compared to most things of newsworthiness.

And as someone who has worked as a journalist, it can very VERY difficult to write about a topic you know nothing about, especially when you have to turn around a story in 5 hours or. Could anyone on this board turn around 500 words on a new technique of say, dollhouse furniture manufacturing in 5 hours? Probably, but there would probably be some mistakes that would be very obvious to dollhouse enthusiasts  .

There's very little that can be done when the journalist is going on research. But for the journalists who actually go out and interview people, as the bitcoin team gets more used to doing interviews, they will become better at "teaching" journalists about bitcoin. This, combined with more people getting into bitcoin, will cause the quality of articles to improve as time goes on.

I'm not saying every mistaken article out their is the result of journalistic flubbing, but the vast majority of them likely are.

[Stephen Gornick]

Video

[royalecraig]

An article that appears 95% factual but contains a few doubts will cause millions to remain sitting on the fence, State disinfo agents in the media can be very subtle.

[FreddyFender]

In a feat of reprehensible self-promotion, I have started a blog posting to deal with all the FUD.
Enjoy:
http://slightlyoffended.blogspot.com/

[jashan]

I was just going to post this link for the humor value and it fits here. BitCoin today = the Internet in 1995:

http://www.newsweek.com/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.print.html

Thank you for posting this - it was a really fun read. Will be fun to drag out those anti-Bitcoin articles in ... hm ... 5 years? 3 years? 1 year? We'll see how long it really takes, but certainly not 15 years ;-)

[just_someguy]

The articles aren't intentionally incorrect.

Imagine you have been given a deadline of a few hours to write an article on a complex subject you don't understand.
Maybe its some kind of new wonder drug that was just released that has all kinds of complex chemical and biological reactions.

Do you think you could write an article that chemists, biologists, and doctors wouldn't find either oversimplified or somewhat factually incorrect?

Most of the people who use bitcoin don't even understand all the technical ins and outs. I feel sorry for the reporters who have to make heads or tails of it without having the luxury of spending months studying it.

[hugolp]

if not completely wrong on most concepts?

Because its written by journalists. Its that simple. Read some newspaper articles about something technical that you know in depth. 95% of them will contain important errors.

[bcearl]

Perhaps 95% of news articles in general have misconceptions in them?

That's totally true. I don't know whether most journalists are just stupid or don't care to write rubbish. But most stories are pretty false. And I didn't even think of hidden intentions, just plain facts are often reported wrong.