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Comment by volak | Hacker News Reader

Fox News dominates ratings on TV so its not surprising they'd be #1 - there's also the fact this is "engagements" and not click-throughs. I'd wager good 15% of these are probably people clicking "Angry" not actually engaging.

If you look at "content with the most shares" not surprisingly Reuters and Patch tops the list.

OP's headline presumes any algorithm should achieve left/right balance - this is just impossible.

There was a good tweet the other day something along the lines of

If I Google a headline the results are:

* New York Times: Your number of free articles is 0

* Wall Street Journal: Subscription needed

* Bloomberg: See this article for $1

* Fox News: Completely free

* Breitbart: Completely free

Seeing this its no stretch to understand why media struggles

View on HN

>I'd wager good 15% of these are probably people clicking "Angry" not actually engaging.

Only 15%? I'd guess it's way, way more. Like 90%.

News today is primarily headline-driven. You don't have to sit down and watch the evening newscast anymore, you can just scroll through Facebook and see headlines and comments, which almost always drop context and nuance in a way that's engineered to make people upset.

In a way, it's probably the most irresponsible aspect of journalism today. The media's ethical priorities are incredibly outdated: if a writer makes a mistake twelve paragraphs into a fifteen paragraph article, it's a major problem requiring a correction. But if an editor appends a headline that actively misleads 100x as many people, no one has any problem with it.

The news, in this way, probably misinforms as much as it informs. This is why you get the wildly divergent realities on the right and the left. There's simply no professional awareness of the unbelievably damaging power of headlines that--from a consequentialist perspective--are frequently abject lies.

The correction will come when the News Orgs are limited/disconnected from the engagement feedback loop.

News orgs are basically functioning as info amplification nodes on the network. The talking heads have assumed greater importance, than the journos who are painstakingly digging up info. This needs to be revered.

The metrics (likes/clicks/views/retweets/upvotes) that drive this behavior of the news orgs have to be rethought.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit etc could get together and propose a standard of what metrics are optimal to cause that reversal and then put them into effect.

> There's simply no professional awareness of the unbelievably damaging power of headlines

Some would say this is by design and not just on the part of newsmakers but actual politicians on both sides of the spectrum. For the system to work as efficiently as it does a bimodal distribution is probably the best way to achieve that. Every one may be better off at the end thinking both they have a voice, someone taking care of their issues, and elected representatives don't have to struggle to satisfy a never ending range of diversely opinionated electorates.

"For the system to work as efficiently as it does"

I doubt the efficiency of this system.

I suggest that the incentives are mostly politically oriented, in the sense that editorial staff truly feel aligned with something they feel important to them, in addition to the 'money' incentive, which is severe in the world of news; they are always going out of business, and in a constant fight for ratings / viewers. There's a very serious and existential push to 'make money or die'.

Both of those elements combine to create a market orientation. If you consider news to be simply a product like any other, then you have 'customers' within specific 'demographics' and the editorialists to be 'product managers' with a 'P&L' ... when then they are incented to hustle the kind of information that fires those customers up and gets them clicking.

Taking a completely culturally secular view, one could argue the papers are just carving out their customer segments, just as any competing brands would.

> News today is primarily headline-driven.

It always was. Newspapers were sold off the newstands via the headline. That's why headlines were large - so passersby could see them. That's why newsboys would yell out the headlines.

I think this is the tweet: https://twitter.com/RogueNotary/status/1101179117574279168

BTW, I think it is not unreasonable to expect that different models of funding or engagement are differently represented on the left and right sides of politics. Contrary to certain views, the left and the right are not two equal, symmetric, graceful wings of a bird, keeping society in balance: they're two different worldviews and sets of fears and priorities. It's not inherently surprising that one would find their business more profitable with a smaller pool of paying customers, and the other finds more profit in a larger pool of casual visitors to whom to show ads, or that one finds more funding from the rich, or that one's worldview requires deeper and more nuanced storytelling than the other to support its conclusions.

That reminds me of how maps can distort information about populations because one side tends to live in smaller high-density urban centers while the other has a much lower density over a larger land area.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/ is a pretty good example of that. A version of the fourth map on that page ("Here is a map of US counties...") is hanging somewhere in the West Wing; one of the ones at the bottom is perhaps more accurate.

https://xkcd.com/1138/

The US Senate makes those maps meaningful.

For every other aspect of government, it’s one man one vote. For the Senate, Wyoming has the same representation as New York, even though the population is less than the Rochester metro area.

That's a really good point about the cost to view. If subscription revenue is paltry, and ad revenue is heading the same way, and public funding is out of the question, then patronage is the only option remaining - and patronage means vulnerability to influence by the patron. So some folks rage about ad-based revenue models, then rage about the outcomes they helped create. They're as dopamine-addicted as anyone.

Another problem with the article is that it’s missing the data from before the change. To reach a conclusion about a change, we need to look at the data before the change and the actual trend.

So people tell me Breitbart is a propaganda machine financed by political manipulators, but Fox is certainly run like a business. What is Fox doing to make their content free that NYT and WSJ can't t?

People believe that paying higher costs for something mean it is of higher value than that which is free. "You get what you pay for." But if you disagree with the content of a site, why would you pay for it in the first place?

paywalls probably a huge part of it. I dont click paywalled sites

Being owned and funded by right-wing billionaires.

Breitbart's staffing seems also incredibly small. I don't think they produce more than 10 stories per day, with most of them just rewrites of other stories and putting their ideological spin to it. You can do this with maybe 3-5 editors and some freelancers. I suspect they are highly profitable.

Running an extremely profitable cable news channel. Their content isn't free, their web content is free and is paid for by their cable channel.

I don't know whether Breitbart is propaganda or not. I've only read a handful of articles from it, but from the few I've seen, I like that they source their statements with hyperlinks. Take this one for example: https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/03/15/italy...

When the text says that Reuters published an article about a topic they actually link to it. I wish other news sites did the same.

Paying journalists to research and report the truth...

News is basically a loss leader for Fox. Their actual business purpose is something else entirely.

If I said what that was, it would appear that I was trying to start a political flame war on HN, so I won't. But most people here know what it is anyway.

Eventually, Bezos, Slim, and the Sulzbergers will have to decide what business they're in, just as Murdoch already has. Paywalls are not going to play a role in that business, and I frankly don't understand why they're bothering with them now.

Disney is acquiring Fox News effective within a month.

That was spun off, and not sold to Disney

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Corporation

Surely anything that is not simply ignoring a post is an engagement as far as the algorithm is concerned. Which would include likes and angry etc. Perhaps they get weighted less than a reshare or comment, but I'm sure they're in there.

You reacted, however trivially, so you'll now get more of it. You'll get more of it even if you reshare with a comment along the lines of "this is complete rubbish".

So the more outrageous rises to the top.

One could also see that as evidence that traditional media outlets are holding on to an out of date business model and have at the same time lost the middle-right/right audience. The only media catering to their frame of looking at news are Fox or digital-only news services that fully embrace the free-news experience.

I’d still be surprised because cable news is dominated by the 55+ demographic. IIRC, less than 20% of viewers are 15-54.

Facebook doesn’t sell catheters and old people scooters, so I would guess that their audiences are more diverse.

* New York Times: Your number of free articles is 0 ...

The Washington Post recently tightened up their paywall, too.

I understand the economics of course but it seems obvious to me that if real newspapers charge then propaganda and anger porn will rule discourse.

If you want some more on the list for balance there are plenty of left wing Breitbarts you could add. Those are free too.

BTW I think fear porn / anger porn is an appropriate term. It releases brain chemicals that can be addictive just like sex porn. This explains some of its virality.

There are left wing Breitbarts just like there's MSNBC for TV. The issue then becomes why these are far less popular.

Its not because of a FB algorithm - that's for certain.

I can ask everyone in my family if they've heard of Breitbart and 99% will say yes. If I ask if they've heard of Rachael Maddow.. maybe 40%? This is despite both of them engaging heavily in anger porn

That's not really a valid comparison. Rachel Maddow is an anchor on MSNBC, which my guess is everyone has heard of. I know what Breitbart is but I don't know any of their writers by name.

Also, Rachel Maddow is probably the best example on air of non-fear-based programming. She usually spends the first 10 or so minutes of her show putting the forthcoming topic in historical context, and then proceeds with a rational, calm, and thoughtful examination of the topic. This oftentimes involves verbatim reading of court transcripts for 20 minutes. The majority of her show is a fixed camera on her with a static background graphic behind her. The rest of her show proceeds with interviews of a single guest with relevant topical experience (prosecutors, congresspeople, attorneys etc.) It's what you'd expect from a Rhodes Scholar and Oxford Ph.D. I never leave her program feeling angry, only ever informed.

Contrast this with Fox News, where the last time I tuned in to that channel 3 angry people were screaming across a table at each other about how liberals are going to outlaw hamburgers. The camera is flying around like a sportscast, and there's graphics and animations blaring in the background. The people in the room seem to have no relevant credentials as to the topic at hand. Are there any environmental experts at the table? Food science experts? No, there's just "political analysts" and "strategists".

I don't watch her, but I'm told she pushes a lot of Russian conspiracy theories.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted.

Have a gander at comedian Jimmy Dore's take on Rachel Maddow:

https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTComedy/search?query=Rachel+M...

Jimmy is a Bernie guy by the way, not a Trump guy. I recommend any Democrat who is confident in their beliefs to spend some time watching him to see if your information feed might be overlooking some information or perspectives.

EDIT: it's interesting, although not surprising, that simply offering an alternative perspective results in downvotes.

This is an environment filled with people who believe adding a prefix or suffix to Capitalism somehow makes a good Capitalism. Thinking outside of boxes only happens offline, contrary to everything the cult believes.

i definitely agree you should not be downvoted for offering an alternative perspective

If you don't read the second paragraph, it seems 100% obviously a case of sarcasm. For some reason, sarcasm goes over badly on HackerNews. Given the second paragraph though, and prior post history... I think it was serious. OMG.

Do you actually have anything to add to the diacussion though? I contrasted Rachel Maddow and Fox News with examples. You just want to shake your head and downvote, fine, but don't add a comment like this with absolutely no substance.

Not sure why you need to be downvoted.

I think the commonality is that Rachel Maddow and the talking heads at Fox News aren't journalists. They spend their time telling their audiences how to think. They just do it differently.

If you want the news rather than someone telling you how to think you don't need either.

Btw Glenn Greenwald has reported about the biases of Rachel Maddow quite a number of times.

Greenwald has also been complicit with Assange and Wikileaks. He shouldn’t be the torchbearer around reporting biases.

The only reason I don't watch her show anymore is the endless drug company ads.

The las time I watched Maddow was when there was some news coming out about Trump's possible hotel deal in Moscow, and how it ostensibly was canned in Aug 2017 and not April.

She was spinning a huge web of conspiratorial possibilities.

She's a brilliant advocate, well informed, and never 'crosses the line' - but she's definitely an advocate.

I'd listen to her more if she moved over to NPR or something along those lines.

What about NPR? BBC? Those are free and fairly unbiased.

BBC has a well-documented centre-right status quo stance. They're pretty consistent about it, so at least you can mentally adjust for it.

"* New York Times: Your number of free articles is 0

* Wall Street Journal: Subscription needed

* Bloomberg: See this article for $1

* Fox News: Completely free

* Breitbart: Completely free"

But BBC, Huffpo, CNN, NBC/MSNBC et. al. are free, and they actually dominate the list, i.e. those entities and a few others add up to something considerably bigger than Fox. Or Fox + the Mail + Breitbart, for the most part.

I think the headline was unnecessarily biased to the extent it doesn't paint the picture we see presented in the actual data, which is actually interesting and not quite so black and white.

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