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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

I think this could be extended to the mass media in general. Where do we get our information from? Journalists. What do journalists do? They write news articles. They don't actually do any of the things they write about, they only write. We very seldom (in comparison) get perspective from the people who are doing things - because they are too busy doing them to talk about it.

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You're getting downvoted here, but what you seem to be trying to refer to here is more commonly known as the Gell-Man Amnesia Effect. [1]

It states that whenever the press writes about something we know well, we scoff at how wrong they get it. Then we turn the page to a new story about something in which we lack expertise and believe every word of it.

[1] https://www.cjchilvers.com/blog/the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect

>We very seldom (in comparison) get perspective from the people who are doing things - because they are too busy doing them to talk about it.

Actually, journalists interview these people.

And that interview is filtered through the journalist's perspective.

You have a really odd idea of how journalism functions.

Could you elaborate? Is it not written by journalists?

It is written by PR people, wire services and politicos. The journalist simply assembles the ready-made components into the lowest energy configuration.

A lot of the time, it's not even sent to the journalist in question. It's just 'someone else reported on something, so every site in the same niche rewrites the story in their own words'.

That's why every single 'controversy' and news story ends up on every media site under the sun.

Love this comment, and based on my experience with tech journalists this is actually the case.

Yes, it's definitely the case for a large amount of stories. Paul Graham has written on the phenomenon and how taking advantage of it helped ViaWeb. [0]

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Journalists talk to those supposedly "too busy" people. You'll find plenty of experts quoted in your average news article.

Plenty of journalists have experience in the fields they cover (check out the SCOTUSblog's publisher's bio, for example: http://www.scotusblog.com/author/tom-goldstein/) and the longer they cover a particular beat the more info they get about the field they're covering.

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