Bonum Certa Men Certa

Dr. Richard Stallman on How He Judges News Stories

Originally published 9 years ago

Direct download as Ogg (12:12, 4.8 MB)



Summary: Relevant bit of an old interview series with Richard Stallman (2012)




Dr. Roy Schestowitz: How do you judge the reliability of a news source and which one or ones do you favour?

Richard StallmanDr. Richard Stallman: Well, how do I judge the reliability? To a large extent I look at the story, and I try to judge based on the other things I know whether this looks like it's bullshit or possible truth. Because there are news sources that I know often slant things, but that doesn't mean that I think that their statements of facts would wrong, because I expect that they would be caught if were wrong. I don't know of any news sources that I could say "that's a good one", because they all have their positions, they all want to say some things and not others. The question is, does it seem plausible that they would say falsehoods about facts? Because there is some embarrassment involved in getting caught in saying... in giving some news that wasn't true.

Many places are not likely to say things that are just false, but they may draw conclusions that don't really follow, or that reflect bias.

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Keywords: softwarepatents uspto monopoly gpl gplnext gnu fsf richardstallman

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