Comment by XCabbage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by XCabbage | Hacker News Reader

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But is it equally unjustified?

I trust alternative media because they show me the primary sources they rely upon. Mainstream media basically never does this; gatekeeping access to knowledge is, for whatever reason, a key part of how they operate, noticeably imposed upon all their writers. The following things are, as far as I've witnessed, universally true of every mainstream media source out there:

* If they report on what's said in a new government report, they'll avoid including a link to it or even including its name, to avoid you Googling for it.

* If they attack a politician over a short snippet of a speech he gave, they'll only embed the snippet and won't link to a video showing the full context, thus ensuring you can't verify that the removal of context hasn't changed the meaning.

* If they report on an academic paper, they won't mention its title or link to it, nor report on any of the raw data or explain its methodology - they will report only the conclusion (or their spin on it)

The alternative media is more trustworthy, because it has links, which means you can independently verify its claims. The mainstream media is unique in having a strict standard of not permitting rigorous substantiation and referencing of claims made in its articles, maximising the difficulty of auditing them for truth. They deserve the distrust the public directs at them for that reason alone.

I think it is equally unjustified.

If people tended to do their due diligence about sources, then fake news wouldn't be a problem, and verifiably false and incredulous memes wouldn't have any social or political influence. But they do, because people mistake cynicism for intellectual rigor, and don't believe they need to check the sources for the alternative media, because it's enough to simply mistrust the mainstream and assume the alternative is probably correct, provided the story it tells is sufficiently cynical. As a result, any valid alternative criticisms by the alternative media are just drowned out by the racists and crackpots going on about QAnon and gay frogs.

Perhaps a lack of providing direct links to credible sources is a problem for the mainstream media, but that doesn't necessarily justify an implication that the mainstream media does so in order to protect attempts to mislead people with false information, and that, therefore, the degree of falsehood is on par between the mainstream and alternative media.

The alternative media, meanwhile, often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so. And voicing any opposition to the alternative narrative just gets you called a tool of the establishment, leading to exactly the sort of echo chamber mentality that it tends to criticize elsewhere.

I think breaking things down into "alternative" and "mainstream" is not productive. I see no particular reason to come in with an a priori assumption that the mainstream media should be given a default presumption of truthfulness until proven otherwise, and the alternative media should be presumed false unless proved otherwise. To me, they're all in the same category to start with, and each media source starts presumed false unless they prove themselves worthy of trust.

I mean, seriously... why should they be given a default presumption of truthfulness? Because they were... there? Because they were so honest before? But how do you know that? You can't just the honesty of a source if it's effectively the only source you have. (And in practice, despite there being "three news networks", they seem to have been the same source in practice. I can only remember minor sniping between the various sources every once in a while.) Why default to trusting them? I'd say it's basically just the availability heuristic at play, in a way. It's easy to see the availability of effectively a single source, and approximate that to honestly, but you have no rational basis to make that approximation.

If anything, after decades of fairly unquestioned and monolithic dominance, the simple heuristic of "unchecked power corrupts" suggests that the mainstream media is virtually 100% likely to be deeply corrupt. I find the idea that the media was allowed to operate in a state of highly ethical reporting for decades and it simply never occurred to any commercial, governmental, or intelligence entity that "Gee, golly, it sure would be useful to exert a lot of control over that" to be an idea that requires a degree of trust in commercial, governmental, and intelligence entities that I can find only marginal evidence in favor of and significant evidence against.

The media often actively seeks to manipulate and deceive, and provides biased and incredulous sources to do so, all the time.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to argue here. Your bullet points are equally applicable to "alternative" media outlets and "mainstream" media do often link out to government reports, sources, etc in their articles.

Maybe we're consuming different sets of MSM and alternative sources, but my experience is not only that they are not equally applicable, but that your suggestion that they are is completely ludicrous.

95%+ of MSM articles I read that reference an external document do not link to it. MSM articles are usually littered with links, but they're internal links to lists of other articles by the same MSM outlet about the topic. Meanwhile, the idea of a blogger or YouTuber doing this - just, say, declaring that the government has announced something without providing any corroboration - is basically unimaginable to me; I've never seen it happen as far as I can recall.

> the idea of a blogger or YouTuber doing this - just, say, declaring that the government has announced something without providing any corroboration

This is literally what Alex Jones does.

Does InfoWars count as "alternative media"? I mean, it's clearly not "mainstream", but the format - the medium - is no different to a mainstream news show. I wouldn't've thought it fell into either of the two categories we're discussing.

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