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Comment by white-flame | Hacker News Reader

> It's a time when we need to rely on trusted news sources

That's the rub, isn't it? Who's a "trusted" new source? All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation. Lots of people therefore consider some fly-by-night facebook feed that says what the majors don't to be more "trusted" in response.

We shouldn't "rely" on single points of perceived trust, especially in this massive for-profit, for-power media industry. We need to be broadly informed from various angles to have a better chance of piecing together a reasonable sense of what's going on.

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The problem lies in the motive. News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit. Breaking even is not enough. Doing well is not enough. Improving profit drastically quarter over quarter is the goal.

To do that, you cannot simply "provide news" anymore. You need conflict. You need confirmation bias. You need to create a wild, screaming echo chamber that induces panic and fear. You need conflict, even if you have to fudge the details to get it. You need to focus on some things and ignore others to increase it.

It's no longer a partisan issue. I'm 40 years old. I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news. Do this yourself: go back and look at newsreels from the 80s and 90s. It's almost surreal. They were still biased, but presented information in a factual manner and then tossed in some emotional stuff. Many of them even... showed both sides of the argument. It's weird to watch now.

A news network simply cannot run with this format in 2018. Fox News was the leader, they were using bias, fearmongering, and propaganda almost from the start. They enjoyed very high ratings because of it. Now the other side has caught up. Because they had to.

It's a mess, but one thing is for sure: we can't trust any of them anymore. Not 100%.

As a political radio host I used to listen to once said (on air, paraphrased from a memory from the early 2000s): "You should doubt and check everything I say. My job is not to inform you or tell you the truth. My job is to keep you listening so advertisers will pay my employer to run their ads."

> News organizations are (not surprisingly) entirely motivated by profit.

That's an over-simplication.

Sure, Jeff Bezos probably wants to make a profit with his purchase of the Washington Post. But the profits there are probably not his main objective as they are too small to make much of a difference to a person of Bezo's wealth.

Bezo's goal is to have a mouthpiece to push his agendas, such as pushing Amazon and trashing Musk properties. So you say that the purpose in doing that is to make more money. But the problem with that line of thinking is that you could reduce almost any action to "profit". You could reach further back and go a level lower and say that making profit is motivated by reproductive fitness, and thus "News organizations are entirely motivated by sex". But at some point you have to let go of the circuitous route from action to final motivation and focus on the immediate drivers of an action.

Politics, money, sex, job security, prestige, etc all all motivations for news organizations, as well as many other organizations.

Thinking that Bezos wanted WaPo to advocate for Amazon and trash Musk is to treat him as a rich person, not the wealthy person that he actually is.

Could you explain what you mean by the difference in a person who is "rich" vs. "wealthy"? I don't think that's coming through in your comment.

It’s a question of mindset, but often correlated with scale. A rich person is a successful car dealership owner who has a net worth of $50 million, drives a Lamborghini on the weekends, lives in an 10,000 square foot mansion, has a sweet private movie theater, and owns a 60 foot powerboat. His economic activity is focused on consumption. He wants to leave his kids enough money to be rich for life. I can’t give many examples because these people are soon forgotten, but Donald Trump was almost one of these guys until he got some new ideas late in life.

A wealthy person has a net worth of $100 billion, is driven around in a Mercedes S600, has a 120 foot sailboat, goes to private parties at Sundance, values their time above everything else, and is focused on his legacy and place in history. His economic activity is focused on investment. He wants to leave his kids with enough money, connections, and capabilities to become among the great American families, shaping policy and public life for centuries. Think Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates.

> I remember when you had to really pay attention to catch bias in the news.

I wonder about this. Part of the reason you had to pay attention was that there were far fewer information sources to check against. No one was reporting on Martin Luther King's affairs, and no one was reporting on the FBI's attempts to get MLK to commit suicide over them either.

That strikes me as some sort of backwards reasoning, people had to literally break into FBI offices and steal documents so that those things would come to be known. You can't really fault the news for not reporting on something they had, unless I'm mistaken, absolutely no way of knowing unless they were to, y'know, infiltrate the FBI.

The burglary was in 1971, and the MLK letter didn't get published until much later. These days the documents would get uploaded to Mega or sent to Wikileaks, and dozens of people would pore over them.

Go back even further and pretty much every news source was a propaganda machine. Most of the major "trusted" new sources today started primarily in yellow journalism and political attack ads. Pulitzer was not a particularly nice man. Neither was Hearst.

It was a brief modern period when news sources decided to take themselves seriously and rise up ethically and appear "unbiased" to the public. It made the landscape more consolidated and monolithic, but it also drove sources to present relatively whole stories with what limited bandwidth they had to the largest population possible.

That being said, at the same time, radio hosts quite willingly went into the base-pandering and echo chambers. Conservative Talk Radio didn't crop up in the 2000s. They arrived after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine from the FCC in 1987.

TV and print news only later realized if you insert just enough bias to make their viewers feel comfortable and to differentiate from their peers, they could make a WHOLE lot more money. And with the creation of a lot more time to sell news via 24hr channels and the Internet, you had to room to add in fluff, opinion, and other material.

It's not even a question of partisan bias; it's a question of sensationalism. It doesn't begin and end with how news organizations cover events; it begins with what events they choose to cover.

Turning 40 this year, so I remember the same media you do. As the Internet grew and options proliferated, I always wanted a particular kind of news that I haven't seen crop up yet. Just a feed. No commentary, no talking heads discussing what something might mean. Just a network which shows video of news events happening. If something is happening in the legislature, I want to watch the legislators doing it. I can get the interpretation and more information about what's going on somewhere else. But the bare "this is what happened" without the fluff just isn't something you can really get. And sure, there's still editorial influence in what they would choose to show and how its shown and other such things, but a countless number of times I've just wanted to see the thing that actually happened.

We have known for centuries that who says a thing cannot influence its truth. How a thing is expressed can't affect it either. An untreated schizophrenic hobo screaming into the street can be telling the truth, and an esteemed professor reporting on new findings in his field can be a liar. It has always been inadvisable to do anything other than analyze claims critically, and I suppose if deepfaking becomes widespread, that will have to be relied upon more than ever.

Instead of your hypothetical ideal online news feed, we get the opposite: headlines which now attempt to directly program the reader's attitude about the thesis of the article, because nobody reads the article anyways these days (in this information economy), just the headlines. Thus, the body of the article is increasingly useless as a persuasion tool, especially compared to the headline, so the result--the headline which tells you the thesis of the article and how to feel about it in the same breath--is only the logical conclusion to what social media is doing to our brains, and to society.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=and+that%27s+a+good+thing

https://www.bing.com/search?q=and+that%27s+a+bad+thing

You're right that it's for profit and sensationalism, but it's worse than that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suFzznCHjko

Awesome interview, thanks for the link. The end of the interview where Chomsky describes the Internet as a double-edged sword and (correctly) suggests that it could turn into "a home-marketing service, and a way of marginalizing people even further" is particularly interesting.

https://youtu.be/suFzznCHjko?t=27m7s

> All the major players have shown biases, corruption, and manipulation.

Bunching those together feels disingenuous. Do the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, etc etc all have their own perspectives? Sure. That's bias, to an extent. But when have they been corrupt? When have they manipulated their reporting?

To put it simply: if a reputable outlet was caught modifying a video of Trump to put words in his mouth it would be a publication-ending scandal. The same is not the case for Infowars. I agree with you that everyone should have as diverse a media diet as they can, but suggesting that every company is as bad as each other is simply inaccurate.

The magnitude of incorrectness/malicousness in reporting is irrelevant to this: No single source will leave you with a broadly-informed understanding, even if by simple way of time/space constraints in their output.

Even the simplest of biases affects editorial decisions as to which content to prefer over others. Omissions of viewpoints or of counterpoint example stories means you don't get the big picture, even without some massive media scandal. People scream distrust at media channels for leaving out information they view as critical, and go elsewhere to find those details (for better or worse).

>>But when have they been corrupt? When have they manipulated their reporting?

I think this is your bias showing if you believe the New York Times, Washington Post, and WSJ are not just a manipulative in their reporting as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Do they outright lie, of course not, but they omit things, they choose not to run some stories that do not fit their narrative, they choose to "expose" the most extreme version of the story.

The Current Gun Rights debate highlights this nicely for all of them.

I think CNN was clearly corrupt in the last election cycle. That's pretty well documented (especially helping Hillary against Bernie). It wasn't just "manipulative in their reporting". It was out-and-out helping a campaign win.

Are the NYT, WP, and WSJ biased? Sure. Are they corrupt in the sense that CNN was? I haven't seen evidence of it.

If anything the Washington Post was worse than CNN. They ran 16 anti-Bernie stories in 16 hours [1]. Their outright complete support of Hillary was very obvious.

[1] https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...

NY Times often used spurious polling and statistics to push Hillary. They messaged that Hillary was in the lead before primaries even began based on predicted super delegate numbers. They claimed with over 90% certainty that Hillary would win the election on election day, even when it was obvious to casual observers such as myself that that number was totally wrong. They were trying to manufacture consent.

> They messaged that Hillary was in the lead before primaries even began based on predicted super delegate numbers.

Which was true.

> They claimed with over 90% certainty that Hillary would win the election on election day, even when it was obvious to casual observers such as myself that that number was totally wrong.

Even election day doesn't necessarily prove that "wrong". 90% chance of Hillary winning means a 10% chance of Trump winning. If I draw a red ace of clubs out of a deck of cards, I don't go "that's statistically unlikely, fake news!"

It appears that 538's model was better, in hindsight, as he appears to have been correct to give more credence to the chances of a multi-state polling miss. It's not clear the NYT's model was necessarily wrong, through.

> Which was true.

Except that it was not. Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

You seem to be defending the news coverage. Do you also want to respond to the WP Bernie posts, or are you going to conveniently ignore that one?

> Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

So? We consider "x is likely to happen" to be legitimate things to cover everywhere else. We knew which way the superdelegates were likely to break, just as we often know which way the Supreme Court is likely to rule.

> Do you also want to respond to the WP Bernie posts, or are you going to conveniently ignore that one?

Lacking information on the max negative-per-day re: Trump and Hillary, and lacking information on the max overall posts in a day, I have no useful information to evaluate that one. I'd suspect both Trump and Hillary have had more than 16 negative WaPo headlines in a day.

Media coverage is pretty much the only input that most people have when making a decision on who to vote for. It's a well known phenomenon that people vote for winners. Portraying someone as a winner will heavily bias the population to vote for them. It would be complete denial of reality or intellectually dishonest to claim that media doesn't heavily influence the vote. Why else would billions be spent on media campaigns?

And I can tell you that I recognized the anti-Bernie coverage before I ever saw that FAIR post. I specifically looked for negative Hillary coverage on the WP around that time and was hard pressed to find more than one slightly negative article every other day. I eventually googled on WP being slanted against Bernie and found that FAIR article.

>>Portraying someone as a winner will heavily bias the population to vote for them. It would be complete denial of reality or intellectually dishonest to claim that media doesn't heavily influence the vote

While that is sometimes true, and I think the media was hoping that would be true it back fried in 2016, because very few people voted for Trump, they voted against Clinton.

The media claiming every day that Clinton was the for gone winner made people that desperately wanted anyone but Clinton to win to come out to vote in droves. And no it was not because she was a women, it was because she was a terrible candidate the has Elitism poring out of every word she uttered.

//For the Record I never vote R or D, I always vote a 3rd party, 2016 was Libertarian Party.

Sure, sometimes these media campaigns backfire. I do think Hillary got more support than she would have without the billion dollar push, but it was still a poorly executed campaign and doesn't negate the fact that media campaigns can change people's perceptions.

> Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

The superdelegates were always going to vote for Hillary. Everyone involved, Bernie included, knew this. You might say that's very unfair and I'd agree with you, but surely the problem here is the Democratic party's delegate system? It seems very odd to blame the media when they were simply reporting the accurate facts on the ground. Should they also refrain from reporting polling numbers? After all, those too can change in time.

If the media didn't report the super delegates as in the bag, and didn't surreptitiously do everything they could to bias their coverage toward Hillary, and Bernie won the primaries in a landslide, do you really think the super delegates would still cast their votes for Hillary? Do you not see the flaw in this logic?

Yes, in fact. Many of the superdelegates had already said so publicly. Their votes are, by design, not bound by practicality. All media coverage combined had negligible effect on superdelegate votes, if any at all.

The Democratic party did wrong by Bernie Sanders, unquestionably.

The media generally made errors in their coverage of the entire election cycle. But there are reasons for the media's inability to understand the dynamics at play, and acting as if the media were complicit with the Democratic party is assuming facts not in evidence.

Meanwhile, direct comparisons between the Washington Post and Fox News is a false equivalence.

> the media were complicit with the Democratic party

But the were. There is plenty of evidence. In fact CNN was caught red-handed giving Hillary town hall questions in advance.

And who said anything about Fox news? What are you talking about?

BTW what do you think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLuO1qDkoNg

> To put it simply: if a reputable outlet was caught modifying a video of Trump to put words in his mouth it would be a publication-ending scandal.

Caught how? You could show people the original video, but the reputable outlet and its allies would be pushing the narrative that the so-called "original" video is a deep fake produced and pushed by conspiracy theorists. After all, our outlet would never lie, would they?

I suspect the scandal would be less publication-ending than you think.

I don't trust any mainstream media source because their biases are so obvious by what they choose and choose not to report.

You are correct that all sources have bias. It's difficult for readers to check every article for this and gauge their credibility. So my startup, CivikOwl, built a Chrome extension that makes it easy to check the quality of citations in an article and scores it based on this and other signals.

If you're interested check it out: http://www.civikowl.com. Feedback welcome (If you want to check out beta mobile app hit me up: arjunm at civikowl dot com)

(There's also a whole business model behind this that helps news orgs move away from reliance on ads but that's a longer discussion).

I think we will need to increasingly rely on cryptographic certifications of authenticity.

Instead of disproving what is fake it will be about proving what is real

What does that mean? That my camera will embed a cryptographic certification into the video?

I suspect people would be able to disassemble a camera and cause it to certify video that originated in a fake news studio.

Yes, the requirement isn't that a piece of media came from some digitally signed hardware, but the process of recording involved (idk) sampling from a real world source.

I don't know how you would do that in the absence of the real world source, since the recording event would no longer exist.

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