An Airline Geek Trying to Build a Media Giant with No Reporters
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All I've ever seen from citizen journalists (on Reddit/Twitter/etc.) is a bunch of typically wrong rumors, data and analysis. Every once in a while they get it right, but that's the rare exception. The reason people watch CNN et al is because biases or not, they're somewhat trusted to at least get the majority of their facts correct (and see below as to why I think all of these wishy washy adjectives).
I think this goes back into the curse of the 24 hour news cycle. It creates demand for sensationalism, "breaking" news. The speed that these news networks feel that they have to be have the exclusive does lead to errors, which leads to less trustworthiness in their reporting.
I just don't see the necessity of constant up to the minute news reporting. I consider myself a news junkie, but to me the important questions are usually answered after the fact anyways: "Why did this happen and what does it mean?"
I also have to wonder if this is part of our Constantly Connected Culture. People have to have their smart phone and be connected to every event constantly. I don't know if these phenomenon are somehow connected, but I would guess they are.
But again, are people that impatient about facts?
That last point has had the largest impact on my life.
By not starting my day with what inevitably ends up being something negative (Oh Joy, what industry am I as a millennial ruining today and how many times has the president tweeted about it?), I quickly noticed that my morning mood had improved. First I started reading the news once I got out of my room making breakfast, then that became reading it after breakfast and eventually that became catching up on the news after lunch.
About 3 months later, I was catching up on the world around me later on in the day, and in smaller bits. I was also noticeably happier. While I'm all for carefully examining causul vs correlation, and am keenly aware of the biases, it didn't take a lot of reading a couple papers to see that, surprise surprise, the news is depressing.
Then I had a realization when hanging out with my grandpa, who frankly, is all out of fucks to give. While extremely well read, he gets all of his news from the few magazines he is subscribed to (The Economist, Bloomberg and Maclean’s) and therefore only hears things sometimes two weeks after they happen. And it didn't matter. He's just as well read on world events, he's not living in a cave or under a rock, he just isn't stuck in this cycle of fear of missing out on being in the know. He doesn't care.
So three months ago, I quit reading the news. I set a couple of redirects on my computer so that whenever I tried to visit a few of the places I used to frequent, I was redirected to either here, HN, where I enjoy the comments, or to Pocket. Every Sunday since then, I take the time to sit down in the morning, and read through The Economist, which I am a subscriber to.
That's it.
That is my only source of news - well, that and what I read on here or twitter. Sure I still hear about major events (and unfortunately, school shootings tend to make their rounds on twitter). I am keenly aware that like all news sources, the economist is biased. I try to balance that out by following a few tweet-happy people with opposing views. But let me tell you, being unplugged from the Breaking News! cycle and the continuous back and forth between the talking heads is the most refreshing thing I've ever done for my mental health. It may not be for everyone, and I may not do it forever, but for now, I have no intentions on going back to reading the news.
They're going after the immediate dopamine hit that you get from little tiny updates of new information. [1] So, yes, many (most?) people actually do need it, or they will suffer withdrawal symptoms from the lack of dopamine.
If you're a news channel without frequent updates, then you get lost in the dust, apparently. Interestingly (from my perspective at least), it seems that the info doesn't even have to be correct, but just what I call "gap-filler" (think of all the talking heads who speculate on things endlessly before the facts start to come in), and you can still make money - you just have to have information (no matter how irrelevant it is).
To me it surely looks like a lost cause unless we can start to wake up out of this trance. Where's Wesley Crusher when we need him? [2]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/exploitin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
But are they looking at the news? While I see people surfing on their phones, when I do see their screens they're texting, looking at Facebook, playing a game -- they aren't on CNN (or some other news site).
Other than breaking news, how often does the news get updated on a newspaper's web site? While FoxNews updates articles throughout the day (or at least moves them around); I don't see a lot of new articles on "The Washington Post" web site throughout the day.
Something's gotta give. Right now, it's all hard about narrative. It's not information, it's all shaping and characterization these days. Of course Trump doesn't help the cause, but to watch the news contort itself in an effort to "counter" has lead to its demise as a semi trusted fourth estate.
[1]money.cnn.com/2018/05/23/technology/elon-musk-media/index.html
Not sure resurrecting Pravda is the best way to ascertain the veracity of facts with authority. Pravda was a joke.
That said, the unfortunate reality is that ALL of these proposals are predicated on trust. Do you trust whatever news source you are consuming? Do you trust whatever news source rating platform you are consuming? Etc etc.
Nowadays, it's probably best just to accept that every article or comment you see on the internet is possibly part of a well tuned professional manipulation campaign. This goes DOUBLY for any article or comment that is even remotely political. Including this comment, your comment, and every other comment on this thread.
That's just the nature of the world in which we currently live. A sad reality is that, in the end, we'll all be effectively choosing the sources, the data and the stories we wish to believe. And those choices will be largely informed by our pre-existing biases.
From the reaction from some journos, it's clear some don't like the idea being accountable for their reporting.
Why? Surely what you'll actually get is one political faction dominating [parts of] the site and doing their utmost to downvote anything that contradicts their worldview to oblivion and (to a somewhat lesser extent) upvote probably false stuff that happens to support it. It's very much a winner-takes-all battle, because people that just want to read stuff or fact check aren't going to stick around if it obviously skews alt-right or far-left, and probably not even if it has an allegiance to one relatively moderate political coalition or another. If you want to know what a particular faction thinks are the important news stories of the day it probably has a subreddit anyway. The alternative to winner-takes-all is top-down curation, which is basically what the media does anyway, usually being more open about their partisanship, and I'm not sure write less unfavourable stuff about Elon Musk companies is the best starting point for curation.
And if your site is started with the premise that the media cannot be trusted, there's a good chance the people that choose to spend most of their time there will be those with even less regard for truth and objectivity. (Case in point: As soon as Elon posted about "who owns the press", his timeline became dominated by people arguing that he meant "the Jews" who certainly had the numbers to drown out any useful observations Elon might actually have wanted make on the subject)
Just today, we had someone from the NYT RT a picture of illegal immigrants during the Obama admin and pinned it on Trump --when people called it out, he re-framed the issue. Of course with Musk it's about misrepresenting statistics and making mountain out of mole hills from minor production issues. Then there is the whole aspect of using a small unverified studies to call for one type of action or another in favor of one group or another. News have become something akin to a rumour mill and echo chamber than an organ which diffuses unframed news.
See also: Todd & Claire.
How would a news ratings agency tell you that?
The only thing ratings agencies tell you, is how the public voted on news agencies. (Or if the ratings agencies don't allow the public to vote, then the only thing they tell you is what THEY feel is "true".)
Either way, they are no more worthy of our trust than the media outlets they purport to be "rating".
It's EXTREMELY likely that they'll be just another cog in the machinery of professional manipulation campaigns. (For all we know, it's likely a professional manipulation campaign that wants to start the "ratings agency" in the first place.) That's just the reality of the world we live in right now. You just have to be skeptical of everything you see like that.
As a global society we are starting to come to self-awareness, and confronting the need to distinguish between hallucinations and real sensory inputs. [1] We're in the situation of a person who has suddenly woken up after falling asleep while driving on the freeway. We have to clear away the cobwebs and dreamstuff, but quick, and get back in our lane and out of the way of that oncoming semi-truck.
The global AI is already here, and it has people for neurons. Katsuhiro Yoneshige's service functions like a close-to-primary-perception locus of attention, compared to most news services which are more like idle daydreams.
In this memetic evolutionary system, there's about to be a strong selective pressure towards fidelity in communications. (Cf. Musk's Pravda thrust.)
[1] "Anatomy of an online misinformation network" (plos.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173593 This is on Public Library of Science analyzing what, in psychological terms , could be considered a neurosis in the global human psyche.
I ask myself this sometimes.
NPR kind of exists off this mystique, although they are not neural, though many of their listeners believe that, they are closer to being neutral on at least some issues than many other sources. Some of their reporters are at least fair (@nrpgreene) although their ombudsman gets complaints from the left that NPR _leans_ _right!_ while most neutral people would tell you they are left _leaning_.
If we had more kinds of metadata publicly available -- "[person] trusts [person]", "[person] found [article] helpful for understanding [topic]", "[person] testifies that [person] wrote a good PhD dissertation on [topic]", etc. -- we could publicly experiment with algorithms like, "restrict results to people whose writings have been contradicted fewer times than they have been endorsed", or "to people trusted by people I trust," or "to persons X for whom at least 50 other persons Y testify that X helped them understand [topic]," or whatever.
Hypergraph databases (e.g. Grakn, HypergraphDb) and logic programming languages (e.g. Datalog) already let us express arbitrary metadata -- anything expressible, as far as I am aware.
Getting ordinary users to state their thoughts (and their search queries over those thoughts) in an easily machine-readable manner might be tough. For that purpose I wrote a language[1,2], extremely close to natural language, that allows such machine-readable expression of higher-order relationship information.
[1] Why use Hash: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...
[2] How to use Hash: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...
Sure sometimes there are errors but when multiple people are saying something it's got a pretty good chance of being right. But the national media gets things wrong as well. Often you're in the know thirty to sixty minutes ahead of national media and with more details - if that's important to you.
Maybe I’m reading too much Huffington Post