When was the last time you read a news article about a topic where you are an expert, and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic?
Journalism is a bit of a personal frustration of mine. It's so important to the function of our society to have an informed population, but we don't, and it's because of the consistent lying that is done by journalists that we don't. Maybe not solely, but the news is one of our primary sense organs, and it's currently broken, or perhaps worse: it's currently on psychadelic drugs and is telling us things that aren't real. If it goes on long enough, we're going to end up schitzophrenic as a society. I think that at the very least we are in the middle of a metaphorical psychotic break. I hope we recover from it, and I really wish that the journalists would at least try to help us, instead of blatantly trying fuel it.
And while we're at it: shut down twitter. It's the drug dealer give our sensemaking organs the drugs.
Journalists are stuck to doing the whims of owners and advertisers. We don't have a funding model purely for journalism as a mainstream practice. We do have federal funding grants for certain journalistic practices, and that journalism tends to be excellent and also completely ignored, such as focused reporting on the intersection of indigenous nationhood and the USA court system. (If that reporting were more widely known, for example, we wouldn't have had the supreme court of the united states questioning whether or not native people are capable of managing cities or what happens to criminals when discussing whether or not half of Oklahoma is native land. These are well-trod reporting subjects by specialist journalists who are highly knowledgeable in the field.)
Investigative journalism still provides excellent explanations- The New York Times reporting on Clearview AI helped explain effects of the algorithm to a layperson accurately.
I have been following some
News stories in depth recently and honestly you can find more neutral coverage and better analysis on some random YouTube video or reddit thread then you do on professional print / tv journalism (which given the sort of biased and selective reporting I see on both sides is either deliberately misleading or completely incompetent)
At this point I think the problem to solve isn’t “journalism“. The problem is the level of respect we as a society give to traditional journalism.
I think traditional journalism had 3 functions:
1. Spread Information
2. Curate Information
3. Conduct investigation/ long form analysis.
————
1. Has been made obsolete by the internet
2. Has been hijacked by algorithms that seek to maximize attention to ads, and therefore inadvertently outrage. I think there is some opportunity for a tech enabled disruption here.
3. Is tremendously valuable. I am not sure what the funding model looks like. But I think we will figure out a solution at some point.
I see no value in trying to save legacy journalism. The only reason we accord it so much prestige is due to social inertia from a bygone era.
Why I should give CNN or Fox any more credibility than I would give a TiKTok video at this point?
Or value a New York Times article on covid more than listening to a couple podcasts with subject matter experts and looking at the data online ?
I think we need to embrace the internet.
There are issues with curation, but possibly solutions as well.
For eg. Maybe we can empower users to choose their own social media curation algorithms and control their feed. Rather than trying to sell their attention to the highest bidder. We would need to find a different monetization model etc.
> When was the last time you read a news article about a topic where you are an expert, and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic?
You don't even need to be an expert. I recall reading about someone who was on trial for downloading terrorism related material, or something like that. The article talked about him using "encryption so powerful that even experts from GCHQ couldn't crack it". I know very little about cryptography, but I do understand the whole point is that nobody can crack it.
I think this kind of low-level misinformation is particularly damaging. It's not even an incorrect statement, technically. But it has the effect of making the guy seem like much more of a mastermind than he really was, and spreading fear about this terrifying "encryption" thing that we all use every day, whether we realise it or not.
And then we all turn the page and read the next story...
So to answer your question...25 years ago? But while explanatory journalism is interesting and useful if the author is knowledgeable, it isn't the sort of reporting that people think about when they consider newspapers in the context of an informed electorate.
Investigative reporting involves uncovering an issue which the journalist believes should be corrected. The journalist's goal is to convince people that the issue exists, and to explain why it needs correcting. They don't necessarily need to be an expert on the topic to do that, especially if they can present convincing documentation of the alleged wrongdoing. For example, Glenn Greenwald was able to report on the USA's surveillance of its own citizens without being an expert on how the United States' intelligence agencies operated, because Edward Snowden leaked him a myriad of internal documents describing their programs.
It is a shame that nobody seems to do good investigative journalism anymore; the last good example I remember in the US was the WSJ's reporting on Theranos. But to be fair, if your country's citizens simply do not care about huge and glaring problems which barely need to be explained, why bother with investigative journalism? It's no longer an effective way to correct social issues.
I'm not sure that 'news' has ever been anything other than what we see today.
The only exception is the breadth of journalism and news.
Look at the roots of yellow journalism [0]. The issues about headlines over substance are the exact same issues that we have toady with Twitter and the like. Only now, there isn't a fold to worry about.
Look at the Jefferson v Adams 1800 election [1]. It was nasty. The mudslinging, theft, and accusations feel right at home with today's political press. Such 'news' isn't much different than today, maybe with the exceptions of Benjamin Franklin running the presses.
Look at Cicero after the Social War [2]. He took on explicitly political cases and his life was on the line for doing so. Roman politics is cut-throat, for sure, but this just shows how humans do or do not change. The rumors, oration, and 'news' of those pre-printing press times sure sounds a lot like any talking-head cable news show. Though I imagine that the Latin is somewhat lost in translation.
The point is: News and journalism has always been like this. The technology is sure a lot different. You can get endless front-pages from every hamlet on the globe. But the underlying mechanism, that of yellow-journalism, rage, emotion, etc. That is an underlying part of us and is likely to remain so.
One book I love about the deep-down mechanics is John Quincy Adam's Rhetoric and Oratory [3]. It's a great dive into the nuts and bolts of getting an audience to listen to you.
Virtually all technical reporting by The Intercept. Most of that is reporting about technology for journalists by journalists. So maybe the exception that proves the rule?
I see two orthogonal problems within journalism. Ability and intent.
Ability is due to Journalism being seen as a profession in and of itself. It is very similar to generic MBAs, in that their skills are entirely useless in isolation. They only gain value, when paired with domain knowledge within a certain niche. When journalists without the pre-requisite knowledge of a niche report on it, they inevitably report incorrect information.
Intent is largely a result of the twitter/social-media driven world, where clicks and ads drive money. Some of the best creators/media-sources today are largely subscription driven, and their relative independence allows them to bring relatively neutral news, that is not help captive by advertisers, twitter-cancel-culture or corporate overlords.
> When was the last time you read a news article about a topic where you are an expert, and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic?
If you really think there's such a clear connection between your prompt and the claim that follows it, put your money where your mouth is.
On any news article posted here on HN that's outside your field, post a response that the article should not be trusted. Cite as evidence a different article from that news organization that is in your own field where you found glaring errors.
Then judge from the responses and up/downvotes how much HN values your analysis.
Every democracy should have a government funded independent news organization, and most do. The major exception being the US. The solution is tried and true but the political will is lacking.
> and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic?
I read a number of articles on the Oracle v Google case that explained the technical aspects of the case and why it had important implications for ordinary people -- why it wasn't just a slap fight between large companies. I am also regularly impressed by the technical coverage in ArsTechnica on a wide variety of topics.
The problem isn't that there's no good reporting, it's that if you're not an expert it's difficult to tell which reporting is good and bad. As a gamedev, I've seen some fantastic articles from tech journalists and games journalists on everything from game modding/emulation, to game design and theme, to the development process behind games, to consumer reviews that really get at the heart of what makes a game special or flawed. I've also seen some really sophomoric content on those same subjects that leaves me feeling unbelievably frustrated. And they come from the same publications.
So it's not as simple as just saying, "here's a good news source, trust what they say." The quality of a given publication can vary wildly. But it's also not as simple as saying, "every journalist is terrible at their job." There's some good content out there.
To add to that, I also kind of agree with this section of the article:
> journalism also has its own weird ideology that doesn’t match up with a party or movement. [...] But those values are rarely the actual reason anyone likes us, or the direction in which praise pulls us.
I think it's unfair for people to look at a culture that has generally shifted towards an attitude of "arguments/sources as soldiers" and say that the reason everything is broken is just because journalists lie. Journalists are part of a vicious cycle that encompasses how we approach education, the way we talk about politics, the way we fund our news sources, the way we conduct elections, and the way we consolidate newsrooms and talk about media antitrust. Journalists are one single part of a very large, complicated problem.
And just like everyone else, journalists respond to the incentives that they're given. The average person on the street doesn't necessarily always want an informed, balanced media source. They want a media source that they can use as a soldier in their political arguments. And in a Capitalist society, their spending habits and viewing habits help to make sure that the news sources that cater to their wants are consistently better funded than the ones that don't.
> and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic?
I read a number of articles on the Oracle v Google case that explained the technical aspects of the case and why it had important implications for ordinary people -- why it wasn't just a slap fight between large companies. I am also regularly impressed by the technical coverage in ArsTechnica on a wide variety of topics.
The problem isn't that there's no good reporting, it's that if you're not an expert it's difficult to tell which reporting is good and bad. As a gamedev, I've seen some fantastic articles from tech journalists and games journalists on everything from game modding/emulation, to game design and theme, to the development process behind games, to consumer reviews that really get at the heart of what makes a game special or flawed. I've also seen some really sophomoric content on those same subjects that leaves me feeling unbelievably frustrated. And they come from the same publications.
So it's not as simple as just saying, "here's a good news source, trust what they say." The quality of a given publication can vary wildly. But it's also not as simple as saying, "every journalist is terrible at their job." There's some good content out there.
To add to that, I also kind of agree with this section of the article:
> journalism also has its own weird ideology that doesn’t match up with a party or movement. [...] But those values are rarely the actual reason anyone likes us, or the direction in which praise pulls us.
I think it's unfair for people to look at a culture that has generally shifted towards an attitude of "arguments/sources as soldiers" and say that the reason everything is broken is just because journalists lie. Journalists are part of a vicious cycle that encompasses how we approach education, the way we talk about politics, the way we fund our news sources, the way we conduct elections, and the way we consolidate newsrooms and talk about media antitrust. Journalists are one single part of a very large, complicated problem.
And just like everyone else, journalists respond to the incentives that they're given. The average person on the street doesn't necessarily always want an informed, balanced media source. They want a media source that they can use as a soldier in their political arguments. And in a Capitalist society, their spending habits and viewing habits help to make sure that the news sources that cater to their wants are consistently better funded than the ones that don't.
We won't be able to "fix" journalism without fixing the surrounding culture and attitudes of ordinary citizens. Bad journalism is a symptom of that problem. People read and fund the news sources that they want to see.
> And while we're at it: shut down twitter. It's the drug dealer give our sensemaking organs the drugs.
If there is one drug dealer it is Facebook. I mean, of course Trump uses Twitter as a megaphone, but your grandparents won't use it. They all use Facebook to stay in contact with relatives and friends, and then get conspiracy theories, xenophobia and other propaganda in their feeds.
I think the point is that journalists use twitter, not Trump or grandparents. That Facebook is the drug dealer for grandparents is a distinct problem, pointing it out doesn't negate the harm of twitter.
> I think the point is that journalists use twitter
Which is not a problem in itself. If Twitter has done anything it is lower the distance between journalists and the general population, especially minorities, and it allowed "grassroots journalism" to exist in the first place.
Yes, ordinary blogging existed before Twitter, but only Twitter has the advantage of "going viral".
In other words journalism is great if it tells your preferred version of the truth and narrative. It is being disingenuous to disparage centralised journalism and at the same time complain about internet platforms with reduced gatekeeping.
> It's so important to the function of our society to have an informed population, but we don't, and it's because of the consistent lying that is done by journalists that we don't.
Are you sure it's that important to have an informed citizenry? I'd say we've never had one, anywhere. We've had some people being informed, sure, but the masses have never been informed well. They've been lead and entertained. If it's that important, how have we made it this far?
What's more important for a nation than the media informing people is the media being on the same page and projecting a similar image. Of course, you want them to not report that aliens have landed when they haven't, but you certainly don't want only half of them reporting it. I don't believe that the facts really matter that much overall. But if you lose the "shared reality", you're losing cohesion.
Misinformation is another thing entirely. The media shouldn't publish lies.
But if half the population reads "here's all the ways these guys are ruining the country", and other half reads "here's all the ways those guys are ruining the country", it's not obvious to me that's an improvement over reading nothing at all. Consumers of both outlets are being informed, but they're being informed in a toxic way which won't help them or anyone else.
Well, yes. I mean, we've had that in a more sophisticated way for the longest time via press agencies. They deliver the news to the media companies, the editors rewrite it a bit to match their audience's taste and add a bit of opinion, but the basic facts are the same. Sinclair was probably just too cheap to spend the extra few bucks to hire somebody to write 20 scripts that have the same content but aren't worded the same.
> So you'd rather live in a made up fantasy world as long as we all share the same made up fantasy world?
I'd prefer if we all shared reality. But we have a terrible hard time finding out what reality even is, and if you read any kind of media, you're certainly not learning about reality, you're just learning about whatever reality the media thinks is real (or wants you to think is real). And in that case, yeah, a shared fantasy is better than many fantasies. You can communicate about a shared fantasy reality. You'll have a hard time communicating when you don't share reality.
Unfortunately, unless you can see out of my eyes and think my thoughts, you and I, as well as you and everyone else will not share reality.
That's what being human is, we all live in our own reality.
>You'll have a hard time communicating when you don't share reality.
It's worked for thousands of years. You don't need to share reality to communicate with people, you need to be able to stop and see their reality for a bit, understand it's different than yours and be ok with this.
I just want to seriously ask, on a planet with 7 billion people scattered around the world how can you possibly expect everyone to share the same reality?
How is the reality of people from two completely different places in the world ever going to be the same?
I think it has, but not the way you put it. Rather: we've shared reality for thousands of years, and that's why it worked. We've had the occasional lunatic who didn't share our reality, but they ran into a mammoth or tried to pet a sable tooth tiger. For the rest of us, it was easier. When you said "three mammoths behind the forest", I had a pretty good idea about what you were talking about.
> I just want to seriously ask, on a planet with 7 billion people scattered around the world how can you possibly expect everyone to share the same reality?
We don't need literally everyone anywhere on earth to share the same reality. We need a shared reality mostly with those we come in contact with, for practical reasons I'd say in a nation, but probably also in political blocs (though the details can very well get more fuzzy the further away somebody is). Can't have Europe think the Soviets are great while the US thinks they're terrible, that won't work in an alliance.
And we don't need to have everyone share it either, a super majority is enough. It's not an issue if you have 1% of people believing that reptilians are running the government and looking for politicians blinking sideways on TV. It starts to become a problem when you get larger groups that don't share reality. A small group of 1% will get carried away by the flow. That's much different with a group of 10, 20 or 30 percent.
> How is the reality of people from two completely different places in the world ever going to be the same?
It's not, but then again, even here on the internet, you're mostly speaking to people from your part of the world (geographically, but even more so culturally). It really doesn't matter whether you share reality with somebody you have no points of contact with. And, I think, it's much easier to even accept that somebody perceives reality differently when they're very clearly not like you. There might be a bit of a condescending tone of "oh, of course, they fell for the propaganda their government put out... well, that couldn't happen to me", but it's much more acceptable for a Chinese person to have a drastically different world view than for your neighbor.
No, what I'm saying is that you're now seeing what happens when it's not 1984. Similar to this whole human microphone thing they did a few years back at Occupy Wall Street. It works great when all the repeaters repeat the message and do so in sync. It doesn't work at all when they all just yell whatever it is they think is best.
Then the audience isn't getting the actual message, and many parts of the audience aren't even getting the same message as their neighbors. Some hear "go left", others hear "go right", some get "we should all stay here" and the rest gets some kind of talk about why soup is better than sandwiches. Needless to say that they won't get anything done that way.
Media are reality-mirrors. It's fine if your mirror is a bit dirty, dull or not hung perfectly flat (it's distorting reality, but it's close enough to be useful as a mirror), but if your mirror consists of six different fun house mirrors that are also moving about, it's a shitty mirror and it doesn't work as a mirror.
> No, what I'm saying is that you're now seeing what happens when it's not 1984.
So 1984 is better than what we have now?
> Then the audience isn't getting the actual message, and many parts of the audience aren't even getting the same message as their neighbors. Some hear "go left", others hear "go right", some get "we should all stay here" and the rest gets some kind of talk about why soup is better than sandwiches. Needless to say that they won't get anything done that way.
People choosing their own filter bubbles is orthogonal to the issue of the media. Just because someone chooses to ignore alternate perspectives, doesn't mean they don't exist.
> Media are reality-mirrors. It's fine if your mirror is a bit dirty, dull or not hung perfectly flat (it's distorting reality, but it's close enough to be useful as a mirror), but if your mirror consists of six different fun house mirrors that are also moving about, it's a shitty mirror and it doesn't work as a mirror.
I don't think _most_ of the current media would be a "fun house mirror". I would argue most of it are mirrors from different perspectives, so you can get a bigger picture by looking in multiple.
The dystopian version? No, I don't think so. I'm also not talking about anything else but shared reality. "We've always been at war with Eastasia" is a problem itself, but it's less problematic for the country than half of the country believing we're at war with Eastasia and the other half believing we're at war with Eurasia, and both halves actively waging their wars.
> Just because someone chooses to ignore alternate perspectives, doesn't mean they don't exist.
Of course, but they're not choosing, and they don't exist for them. That's perfectly fine as long as you don't need people from multiple realities to work together, which we kind of need.
I want to start by saying that I saw this comment this morning, and have been thinking about it all day. Thank you for commenting this, and sticking around to defend your point.
I do have a couple of comments.
First, a system like you are describing is going to be highly efficient. However, this is not always a good thing. As you increase efficiency, in almost any system you will decrease robustness [0]. While this may be fine in a startup or some software project, for a society, this seems extremely dangerous.
Second, I disagree with the concept of everyone having their own reality. Everyone has their own perception of reality, and may or may not be able to perceive/conceive the reality of someone else's perception, but there is still only one authoritative, physical truth (Well, at least on a scale macro enough for this conversation).
Third, even if you control all of the media (via government for example), you still will not be able to control everyone's perception of reality. See for example China or North Korea, which I believe are the two systems closest to control of the media in the manner you are describing. In China. Despite their total control of the media, there are still citizens who think differently and have a different perception of reality. The only reason that these citizens follow along with the common goal, is because of the threat of force against them or their families if they don't.
For the fourth, I'm going to borrow your war example. If half the country believes in the war in Eurasia and carries it out, and half the country believes in the war in Eastasia and carries it out, are not both sides partially correct? In that case, would they not be better served by seeing the entire truth of the situation, instead of being limited to news sources that serve only one of the stories?
Of course, I do believe that the news should consist of facts, and possibly the interpretation thereof. However, this cannot be trusted to enforcement by government. In addition, since there is no way to stop news organizations from interpreting the facts, would we not be better served by having multiple organizations each provide individual interpretations? That way, we can see multiple possible "realities/perceptions" and chose which we think is the most accurate.
> For the fourth, I'm going to borrow your war example. If half the country believes in the war in Eurasia and carries it out, and half the country believes in the war in Eastasia and carries it out, are not both sides partially correct? In that case, would they not be better served by seeing the entire truth of the situation, instead of being limited to news sources that serve only one of the stories?
Just realized, I dropped half of this.
The other half is that each of these news sources should have different perspectives on these wars. Perhaps one should go over why the war's are a bad idea, and another should go over why they are necessary. However, the only way to make a good choice is to make sure that all information and multiple perspectives are available.
> We've had some people being informed, sure, but the masses have never been informed well. They've been lead and entertained. If it's that important, how have we made it this far?
Your whole comment isn't exactly wrong, but what's worked in the past does not constitute a guaranteed path forward. We've also never had a populous with such ready access to information, both raw and interpreted, before.
That's true, but I'm not sure that that's different from before either. As technology and wealth progressed, that has likely been true plenty of times. I'm not convinced that anything has fundamentally changed, and I don't think that the population made decisions by being informed. Instead, they were being informed and that formed their decision.
Does it matter that we now have 8000 TV channels readily available? Is that meaningfully different from having 50? Sure, we now have the internet which is theoretically a two-way-medium (but for most users, it's one-way), and that may change some things and make the whole system more fragile, because it's much harder to control a narrative and suppress information now, but I don't see it changing the basic relationship between citizenry and media (at least not yet).
Can you recommend primers, explainers, autobiographies, collection of war stories? Something accessible to laypersons like me?
After my own unsuccessful efforts, I started collecting books and articles about lawmaking (legislation). It'd be really great to have similar resources for investigative journalism.
Trump mentions Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, all the time. But of course journalists themselves also have power. The power to decide what information reaches their readers, how it is presented - that is power. Not bossing around mail clerks.
But journalists do not typically have that power. What stories reach readers and how it is presented is power of the editors and board, like the parent pointed out.
If your bosses don't want a story covered (in a specific way), it's not going in the newspaper.
The software engineers, the police, the journalists etc.
Meanwhile the puppeteers sit behind the curtains pulling the strings creating the system for everyone to be at each other's throats and no one even questions them.
Personal opinion: I think it was around 2004 when the media slowly stopped being the journalists that protect our democracy, and instead corporations and individuals with political agendas. Sure there were plenty of newspapers and outlets that leaned one way or the other, but it was never so blatantly partisan, to the point of suspect. Journalists are not the enemy of the people, but the media of today certainly doesn't act like it.
A year or two before that you had Judith Miller at the New York Times uncritically helping the American government start a war on false pretexts. And more than a century before then, American newspapers were hard at work starting the Spanish-American War for bullshit reasons.
In all seriousness, the press has always been the friend of the powerful - whether moneyed interests, politicians, academics and so on. You don't write for the NYT or WP or Fox News or whatever you want unless your beliefs align with the interests of their owners, their advertisers, their lobby groups etc. And even if you may write for them, you'll absolutely not be editing for them unless your beliefs align with all of the above.
It's not some massive conspiracy or anything like that - it's just the way people and organizations work. No manager will hire or promote (or continue paying) someone whose opinions significantly disagree with their own, and the same is true of the manager's manager and so on.
Much of this is also highly related to the owners of the media outlet. There have been historical examples of moguls buying newspapers and requiring gushing reviews of any of their businesses, and vitriolic attacks of their competitors - political partisanship is a step down from that as freedom of the press goes.
This has always been the case. Thomas Jefferson called newspapers a “polluted vehicle.” Hearst and yellow journalism. Mcarthy is
was not a high point in journalistic integrity - the press propelled him before Murrow took him down.
Thank you for many pointing out that I'm off by a century or two, please allow me to clarify: The growth of the internet and corporate controlled media may have made the problem significantly worse, and more encompassing of the nation. I had completely forgotten about Judith Millar, thank you for point that out. I guess I remember a time when there were newspapers, and journalists were above the fray of politics. Something dragged the entire profession of journalism into the dregs and I'm at a loss to pinpoint exactly what that is.
> Personal opinion: I think it was around 2004 when the media slowly stopped being the journalists that protect our democracy, and instead corporations and individuals with political agendas.
It's literally always been that way.
For a while in the late 20th Century US, the alignment of the propaganda interests of the major US media was such that it spoke with almost a single voice, but the homogeneity wasn't some kind of virtuous objectivity.
"Journalists used to have a monopoly on the news. This power bred restraint; whatever their private feelings, they avoided overt personal attacks. Now this power and the consequent restraint are both evaporating. Now they're just Twitter users."
Yeah, these words of, well, whatever they are, are both illogical and ahistorical - journalists have been making personal attacks since the dawn of the field.
It can. As anyone who's been in a leadership position can tell you, having formal power imposes informal but very real constraints on what you can say and do.
I think the prima facie case for journalists is incredibly strong, even for some of the more questionable types of journalism mentioned in the comments like explanatory journalism, narrative reporting and opinion.
I think a lot of the problem today has to do with media literacy: a lack of knowledge among casual readers/viewers about the purpose of journalism, and the difference between the various kinds (and what those kinds allow in an ethical/professional sense).
However, I don’t think the conversation ends there. Given that environment, institutions need to do a better job supporting journalism in a way that reflects that knowledge. I don’t know if it’s possible for a paper that calls itself “the paper of record” to include an opinion section, or even lifestyle reporting, and maintain its “objective” journalistic reputation.
Opinion, interpretative, and explanatory journalism is probably best life to the magazines, or websites that explicitly share a particular editorial viewpoint. The Economist is a great example of this type of institution.
Journalism is dying because the quality the average journalist produces is no better than what can be had for free from amateurs writing blogs and tweets. They are 100% responsible for their own downfall and the compromises it has forced on them.
We need better sources of news. It is somewhat happening already with the rise of individual 'reporters' on YouTube and other social media who amass followers and support themselves with patronage, advertising, merchandise, etc...
This from the people who created the standard of "According to an anonymous source familiar with his thinking".
If you want to convince me that journalists are NOT the enemy of the people, then stop donating money to political causes and then publishing damning reports to opponents of those causes sourced only from unverifiable anonymous sources.
I think they are the enemy of the people and our nation. Neither side can be trusted to deliver unbiased information and instead do their best to invoke feelings of fear, hostility, anger, hatred, but most of all fear in an effort to sell more commercial time/clicks/papers. And a large part of both sides look to their news outlet to confirm their bias and at the same time grow their bias based on the latest injustice/tragedy/incomprehensible outrage, further driving the (two) sides further apart, growing their hatred for the other side, fear that the other side is going to end their way of life, so on.
People still mostly believe what they watch and read, blindly. Especially when it coincides with their own views. And by making up more lies, more exaggerations, or making it seem like we are all going to die if Trump/Biden gets elected as the next God, they are perpetually making things worse with each story.
How hard is it to be honest and unbiased? Isn't that your job anyway?
I think it's unavoidable. With social media, the incentives simply aren't there to have a media that gives a balanced view of the story anymore. That doesn't sell.
Before, it used to be that you'd present side A and side B, without taking any stance. Now, people are starting to conflate neutrality with centrism. Even a 'neutral' news outlet is expected to take some sort of stance, and not to platform extremists.
If you want for something to spread, it's better for 100 people to really like it than for 1000 people to find it OK. That's the pattern we're seeing in the media right now.
Mr. Smith has a quaint notion of journalism, and one which is not shared by his publisher, who indeed see it as a reasonable endeavour to 'combat Donald Trump'.
I think that the future of media is to completely abandon the pretense of neutrality and to become blind cheerleaders for 'their side'; if you want the Republican coverage, you'll go to Fox or OAN, and hear the latest theories about how the President is morally infallible and how the libtards ought to be rounded up and shot. If you want the Democratic coverage, you'll go to CNN or the NY Times, and hear the latest theories about how the President is an evil man and how the fascists ought to be rounded up and thrown in prison.
I don't think this will be too bad. Before, you'd trust your neutral newspaper to give you both sides of the story. Now, you'll have to read two news outlets. But this isn't the end of the world, as long as people can adapt to the change.
> Before, it used to be that you'd present side A and side B, without taking any stance.
I feel that this era was a historical anomaly, brought on by the limited distribution of national TV networks, and the trust Americans had in institutions after the successes of WWII.
There are sides to a story, and then there's false information. But on the lines of what you're saying, I think that education should probably train students in that style of media literacy: reading both sides of an issue from neutral, partisan and extremist perspectives, and reasoning about how to synthesize them.
I don't think there's any meaningful distinction between the two. You can take facts which are not wrong and use them to argue any point, no matter how ridiculous. If that's grotesque enough, it's misconduct already, even if you're not technically lying.
>If you want the Democratic coverage, you'll go to CNN or the NY Times...
* MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, Wash Post, LA Times, PBS, NPR, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Spotify..
As the Arthashastra ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24388952 , 2nd or 3rd century) recommends spreading fake news, it naturally also recommends not trusting any intelligence reports that haven't been verified by at least three independent sets of spies.
If one is reliant on news outlets for personal G-2 intelligence work, a similar metric ought to be applied.
With the increasing polarization, there will have to be some point. For example, right now, Fox News at least mention negative news relating to the president, and the NY Times at least acknowledge Trump's existence.
In the future, I predict the newspapers will be naked propagandists. If they judge that some thing someone says or does is going to be bad for their party, they will just ignore it outright or lie about it.
In 2016, Fox News had people criticizing Trump, and CNN were (unintentionally) signal-boosting him by letting him dominate the news coverage. In say 2024, I think that Fox News will fire anyone who says anything bad about the Republican nominee, and CNN will not mention them by name on air.
You're taking what the media already does for the powerful in aggregate, and predicting it will be applied to particular parties as well. I think that the dynamic is different there, and the amount of polarization in the media will depend strongly on the polarization between the parties.
If the democrats and republicans will start getting along better, you'll start seeing more balanced news. Otherwise, we may well see what you're describing.
> In the future, I predict the newspapers will be naked propagandists. If they judge that some thing someone says or does is going to be bad for their party, they will just ignore it outright or lie about it.
You're not getting this. Today this is a great description of the status quo.
No, the system has not yet been perfected. CNN and Fox News both did things that were not perfectly politically expedient. We are seeing the beginning of that transformation, though.
Just look at the Covington High School fiasco. Or look at YouTube for 'The Walls are closing in'. Or look how long the Russiagate narrative dominated the headlines, only to dissolve in a day.
> Or look how long the Russiagate narrative dominated the headlines, only to dissolve in a day.
I've heard that the word "impeachment" was not mentioned once during the Democratic convention. Six months after the trial that we were told over and over again the evidence was so, so, so convincing toward a guilty verdict!
Journalism is not as important as journalist want us to think. Reporting is important. Clear, unbaised reporting gives us what we need to be informed. Nobody asks for story driven reporting, that is a fabrication.
A journalist is a reporter who wants to be Real Writer. Which is to say that they want to do more than give us the facts, they want us to know it via the filter of their experience and analysis. It is a self important profession, all the moereso because universities degree it. Who gets a degree in mere reporting?
At the end of the day, they're just another competitor in the Attention Economy. Their coverage of Big Tech for example makes a ton more sense if you view it as going after your competitors, rather than some high-minded Truth Seeking.
I mean, it's not all bullshit, every participant has some differentiating angle they believe in, like Googles Organizing the World's Information, Facebook's Connecting People, NY Times' Paper of Record etc.
Journalism is a bit of a personal frustration of mine. It's so important to the function of our society to have an informed population, but we don't, and it's because of the consistent lying that is done by journalists that we don't. Maybe not solely, but the news is one of our primary sense organs, and it's currently broken, or perhaps worse: it's currently on psychadelic drugs and is telling us things that aren't real. If it goes on long enough, we're going to end up schitzophrenic as a society. I think that at the very least we are in the middle of a metaphorical psychotic break. I hope we recover from it, and I really wish that the journalists would at least try to help us, instead of blatantly trying fuel it.
And while we're at it: shut down twitter. It's the drug dealer give our sensemaking organs the drugs.