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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

I’m fairly convinced it’s not remotely limited to Der Spiegel. If primary sources aren’t cited in downloadable attachments, it’s just best to assume the thing is a pure work of fiction.

I have absolutely zero respect for “journalism” at this time. It is, as far as I’m concerned, an entirely dead art, all life sucked from it by the great destroyer we call the Internet.

This network we created, and in particular most of the shiny things at L7, is not healthy for even an above average psyche. It attenuates all feedback loops that our bodies require to form empathy, while amplifying the worst parts of us through appeals to fame, fortune, and notoriety.

I don’t even hold this particular journalist in particular disregard. The sooner we recognize that he was so outmatched by the construct that he didn’t even have a chance, the better.

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I'm inclined to agree and the sad part is, journalism is an essential NGO organ of civil society.

The 4th Estate is a very important thing for us all.

Watching Cable News these days is crazy because you can watch journalists, spin, lie and misrepresent ... but at the very same time they are presenting facts that do matter.

Go take a look at 'waybackmacine' and click some links from even 10 years go - the news was not nearly as crazy and clickbaity.

I truly hope that things can settle down a bit maybe in the next political cycle.

Finally - I should say that almost all MSM left and right completely misrepresent middle America. The reality in Cleveland, rural Ohio, Utah, Houston, Alabama ... it's just not anywhere to be found on the news unless something terrible that happens where the press wants to use that piece of information to construct a narrative.

Edit: I should add that there is a very real financial pressure right now for journos - newspapapers are falling apart everywhere, this is a real thing. Individual journos are not natural capitalists. We used to pay for the news we don't now, and we still haven't figured out a model. This is a major factor.

I'd be interested to hear how you describe the current situation in Cleveland. I just finished my first semester at a school nearby but spent no time in Cleveland aside from the airport, so even though I've been nearby, I really haven't been exposed.

Cleveland is just an example.

I currently live in Canada and get the local news from Vermont. It's sublime and cathartic: local girls basketball team highlights. Interviews with part-time stat reps who also run the local store. No clickbait language between state reps, governor etc.. No culture war.

The national news is a circus, with each clown playing a part. It's ideological, clickbait, narrative-driven and parsed to remove anything that could upset corporate sponsors.

'Normal' is simply too boring for television.

"Ideological" and "parsed to remove anything that could upset sponsors" are incompatible goals.

Blaming the internet is absolutely unfair. Before, it was really hard to expose bad journalism, that's the foundation of the myth about times of good journalism.

Duranty was awarded with Pulitzer for blatant lies in the first half of XX century, and it took more than 60 years for this to be widely revealed. It wouldn't be that easy for him nowadays.

The Internet has at the very least not bettered the conditions for journalism because the advantages it brought are completely drowned out by new mechanism of consumption and its subsequent fights for readers.

It changed conditions for media business as much as for many other industries, making things economically worse for some and better for others. It didn't make journalism worse, for sure.

Media has been always flourishing on sensationalism, propaganda, pushing somebody's interests, and manipulating social strivings. And I mean it - it happened to me to talk to a historian who worked with first European newspapers which appeared soon after press (as a mechanism) became a common thing - most of them were exactly like modern clickbaity news, it's just that it was easier to amuse a reader back then, so their sensations look a bit naïve by modern standards. You can re-read Mark Twain for very recognizable patterns of political reporting of later times, then came mafia influence, revolutionary preachers, liars, and useful idiots. Bribery, business interests, gov't intrusions, political biases. And then internet appeared, and broke the beauty of journalism :-) The phenomenon of US press as being generally useful as whole (compared to USSR, or eve Europe) is because of its diversity - ensured by freedom of speech - call it a really big choice of distortions. And the internet made this choice even wider, actually. "Good journalism" which is impartial, and correct, and truth-loving is a romantic myth, and always been.

Assuming everything is made up seems sensible.

But your assertion “journalism is an entirely dead art” is far too broad to possibly be true.

Surely there are some people doing proper journalism. I don’t see how you could stand by your claim.

If I have to approach every "news" story with the assumption that it's fiction, then the bad apples have indeed spoiled the bunch.

If we must inoculate ourselves against being informed by news, then news loses its ability to inform.

It's like a solipsism.

I see it as an arms race. Your previous approach, “blind trust” stopped working because it has been exploited. Now you need to take a sample of facts to check to decide which journalists can be trusted.

That can be exploited too, but the exploit won’t be necessary until that sampling process is automated and widespread. At that point you will need to escalate further.

But your alternative—believe nothing you read—is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you stop reading nonfiction you will be seriously hampering your ability to compete.

That was around way before the internet, before radio even. The printing press has been used to spread outright works of fiction as reality. To be frank it is more a human nature thing.

> zero respect for “journalism” at this time.

unfortunately too many journalists have demoted themselves to "copywriters based on things you find online", whatever the things are. I m frankly not surprised this guy ended up writing fiction: when you only look at the world through a glass, it stops being real to you.

it is becoming almost impossible to find eyewitness journalists. OTOH, connected journalism can only be useful in extraordinary cases that can be verified via online channels or which involve anonymity (E.g. snowden case)

Is that the natural endgame of journalism? who knows

They have become narrative creators. They create a number of narratives, and people attach to the one that fits their preconceptions. Reality doesn't matter that much.

> I don’t even hold this particular journalist in particular disregard. The sooner we recognize that he was so outmatched by the construct that he didn’t even have a chance, the better.

Sorry, but huh?

My translation: don’t blame the player, blame the game. I say blame both.

It makes no sense to blame a game, that always seemed like an even shittier variant of "just following orders" to me. A game only exists because people play it, and only for so long as they do. It doesn't have agency, or consciousness, or responsibility, or anything. Let's say I "blame the game". Okay, then what? What does that even mean? The "game" is an abstract idea, so how do I punish it, how do I reason with it, how do I anything at all with it? I can't, so I don't.

In the same way that most actual games won't let a player declare victory by fiat whenever they want, people in a social system (like "journalism" or "politics" or an open-source software project) can't always do the right thing, even if they want to. Economic constraints, or opportunity costs, or the time required to establish consensus all put limits on what people can do, and often require people to do nothing, or even negative things (like writing clickbait articles or supporting unpopular policies) so they'll have more resources to pour into the positive things they really care about later.

"blaming the game" in this context means understanding that such constraints exist, and as for "then what": work to change the economics of that situation. Give money to support organisations doing proper investigative journalism, educate yourself on political issues and educate your friends so fewer voters will be swayed by populist rhetoric, volunteer to do some menial task so resources can be put towards longer-term goals.

> people in a social system

People interacting with other people. Which is why good things to do are, as you said

> Give money to support organisations doing proper investigative journalism, educate yourself on political issues and educate your friends so fewer voters will be swayed by populist rhetoric, volunteer to do some menial task so resources can be put towards longer-term goals.

because that's kinda interacting as a molecule, with the other molecules of the social system -- not "the body as a whole", which is more an idea than anything one could do in practice.

> Economic constraints, or opportunity costs, or the time required to establish consensus all put limits on what people can do, and often require people to do nothing, or even negative things

That's absolutely not the case for Relotius. Jörg Thadeusz is actually pretty pissed off at those excuses, he says they need to end and I agree.

https://www.welt.de/kultur/medien/article185920966/Podcast-W...

For every excuse, you can often find dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of people who are in the same or worse situation as the excusee, but have not resorted to what they're excusing.

> Give money to support organisations doing proper investigative journalism

IMO that's a completely different game.

"Don't blame the game, blame the player" seems an apt summary of the TV series, "The Wire", in which cops and drug dealers and teachers and politicians are seen as being cyclically screwed by systemic failure.

So "blaming the game" ostensibly says that we should focus on fixing the system, and not blaming its individual "players" who are incentivized or even forced to fail/act wrongly. I'm sure you're aware that every professional sport has had in its history a number of rule changes to make the game safer or more well-run, and these rule changes have had far more systemic effect than just penalizing players and coaches.

> So "blaming the game" ostensibly says that we should focus on fixing the system,

Which is people interacting with people, and calling some of that "system". I asked, now what, what does it mean in practice... actually unpack these abstractions, and think through what those abstract words mean in practive step by step: it's all just people dealing with people. When the rules in a sport change, that means people discuss with others, maybe write stuff down, then referees learn their job based on those agreements, and actively enforce the rules.

> these rule changes have had far more systemic effect than just penalizing players and coaches.

That's like saying a beach has more of a systemic effect than the grains of sands it consists of. When "the rules get changed", that boils down to nothing but interaction between rule committees (or whatever the mechanism may be), refs, players and coaches.

seems more likely it's always been bullshit, but now with the internet, we get to find out.

“It attenuates all feedback loops that our bodies require to form empathy”

Care to elaborate?

Also, what do you mean by “L7”?

L7 = layer 7 of the OSI model, ie where the stuff most humans care about lies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

I think more accurately it’s L8.

This is exactly right. And this decay is in no small part responsible for the lunatic, polarized times we live in. It is impossible to come together if we do even have shared facts to reason with.

I disagree with blaming the internet.

These forms of schmalz the journalist at hand fed his employer also fed into a cherished world-view. Cherished by co-workers and by the dozens or so jurors and organizations that plastered him with awards. All of this happened before the dominance of internet in German journalism as well. But most importantly, you don't need the internet present for those things to happen. What you need is a deep bias.

e.g. at Der Spiegel

- a left-leaning political stance is commonly held; in 1987 they in a successful attempt to derail the campaign of an conservative politician, stirred up what became to be known as the Barschel-Affair [1]. It ended with the suicide of the conservative politician and the social democratic successor stepping down a couple of years later, when in the affair's aftermath his own corrupt doings were laid bare.

- From 2000-2007, when the "national socialist underground" committed their serial-killings against immigrants (and a police officer) Der Spiegel was at the forefront portraying them as "Döner-Murders"; that the killings were all part of the inner workings of the Turkish mafia.

- an "Israel critical" stance is somewhat commonly held; in 2010 you could get away with articles with complete made up facts about orthodox jews in Jerusalem (hint: bad people that don't use cell-phones etc.) [2]

- In 2016 a court ordered Der Spiegel to redact 14 claims it made against an investigative journalist [3] and subsequently agreed to redact the whole piece.

- In 2018 at another publication, Die Zeit, in a prime example of biasedness, its editors-in-chief publicly smeared one of their own inhouse journalists after she in one of her articles dared to pose the question whether the NGOs cruising the Mediterranean Sea to rescue refugees were always helpful or whether they might increase the human toll after all (since smugglers counting on those NGOs to pick up "their slack" started to massively lower the quality of vessels used to transport the refugees) [4]

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barschel-Aff%C3%A4re#Berichte_...

[2] http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/ultraorthodoxe-juden-m...

[3] https://www.ksta.de/kultur/rechtsstreit-um--schmaehartikel--...

[4] http://schmid.welt.de/2018/07/19/liberalitas-hammoniae-die-z...

It is absurd to describe rhe magazines political stance as „left leaning“. If anything, It is neoliberal. It had destroyed the campaigns of left leaning politicians at least as as those of conservatives.

No it’s not.

I’m sorry to tell you, „left leaning“ is not something you define, but rather something that gets being „left“ by comparison of what is considered the opposite of left.

In that sense, Spiegel was always left-leaning. Most certainly so, when campaigning against a 1980s conservative.

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