Suing media

Semi-serious cause area suggestion: making it legal to sue news companies for terrible articles.

Example: https://qz.com/749443/being-vegan-isnt-as-environmentally-friendly-as-you-think/?utm_source=atlfb

Several obvious counters to the example:

  1. News sites are bad at reporting truth. Claims are wildly over-exaggerated from what the study actually says.

  2. They still found the vegan diet to be much better than the standard American diet. Even if every claim in the article were true, given that other people eat so much meat/dairy, the land that “can’t” be used by veganism is already being used, so veganism would still be the best way to have the most impact.

  3. It’s a single non-empirical study. Don’t trust it too much.

  4. Study has questionable assumptions, as you might expect. This is true of all single non-empirical studies, which is why you don’t rely on a single one to form opinions. If I modeled students as studying hard one week before the exam (pretty reasonable), would it then be reasonable to conclude that college professors are irresponsible for not having exams every week?