Comment by halfjoking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by halfjoking | Hacker News Reader

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I agree. The New Yorker or New York Times dances around topics, giving random human interest tidbits or anecdotes and never gets to the heart of any discussion. It's all fluff.

HackerNews comments in general are concise and to the point. Logical, well-reasoned arguments aren't a part of modern politics or journalism so to this writer it seems like some curious fantasy world. Luckily new online media like Young Turks, Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro have actual discussions instead of sound bites or roundabout intellectualism like the New Yorker. I'd take the recent hour-long Bernie Sanders interview with Joe Rogan over anything on CNN. Corporate media puts a spin on every discussion and it almost always makes things worse.

I would agree with you but think your examples are poor. Rogan generally lets his guests just talk about what they want to talk about without questioning them. Ben Shapiro sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but tends to pick debates with college students. Shapiro is full of platitudes, something which you seem to criticize the New York Times and New Yorker about interestingly. All of the people you mention, besides the Young Turks who I don't know anything about, lack self-awareness of their place in the world and the effect of their words on the general populace. I'd also argue that CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc have the same issues.

Also I'm not advocating for cable news, I think for profit news is generally terrible.

> Rogan generally lets his guests just talk about what they want to talk about without questioning them.

I actually love that: Rogan gives you the rare chance to observe his guests in a somewhat relaxed environment, at least more relaxed than the endless battlefields of Twitter, and slightly less fake than magazine interviews. If anything, I wish he would insert fewer of his own opinion.

I feel that questioning and defending opinions works much better in text form, anyway. I keep looking for good, honest debates on video, but usually it's just people trying to pwn each other with eloquence, with no time for fact-checks.

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