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Comment by drocer88 | Hacker News Reader

If you're getting your "news" from CNN/Fox/MSNBC, or "gathering evidence" to promote one the two permitted narratives, that's your problem. This is stuff is low effort "Presidential Level Politics" 24x7. Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story so that the Associated Press or United Press International picked it up and made it available to the varied local newspapers of America, both liberal and conservative. The old CNN that actually did news, not talk show shenanigans reminiscent of old school Howard Stern, is missed.

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Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft than actually finding, or learning about, facts. Tribalism at it's finest.

The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings and original sources.

But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and straight forward source of a summary. And it takes a lot of time. And doesn't always end in rewarding information (lies/bias in original sources exist too - eg: watching hours upon hours of live impeachment hearings was full of lies/half-truths/obfuscation coming from all sides).

I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes, but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed curation algos.

Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to:

- Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course)

- Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and other stores long before it was in common use and the value of masks had been acknowledged

- Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was broadly acknowledged

Agreed. I’d also add selling stocks when they were hitting highs.

It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information, but like you I've been increasingly relying on it for news. I'm not sure where else you can collect so many different perspectives on any given piece of news. Overtime, you learn how many grains of salt to take with each person in your timeline, and you get a sense of their personal biases. And if you can brush off the trolls, it's instructive to read the arguments that happen in the replies.

The way I use twitter, it serves the same purpose as hacker news, but with a much broader scope.

> It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information

My feeling has been there are nuggets of really good and really up-to-date information there, and there are some threads that are extremely informative, but signal-to-noise ratio is in general extremely close to zero and the hostility of the surrounding environment is unbelievably terrible.

A BIG advantage of Twitter is that get to hear from the persons themselves totally without filtering by the media. Maybe you do or don't like what some public figure who posts on Twitter says, but at least DO get just what THEY said.

This. The slanted editorializing and purposefully misconstrued out-of-context quoting by the media long ago turned me off.

My response some years ago was just to turn the mainstream media (MSM) off. On paper they can't compete with Charmin, and on the Internet they are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. Some of their material is worse than just misleading and down to manipulative, deceptive, dangerous, and even destructive. I don't want even to hear the MSM and, then, have to debunk them or risk being influenced. I hope the Internet enables some replacements, many more outlets but focused on smaller audiences.

I've resisted Twitter for a long time, but this would be the only reason I could see myself becoming a user.

In the past I've had a hard time finding people to follow with a high enough signal to noise ratio (or who don't flood my feed with a new tweet about their cat every 5 mins). Do you have any tips for picking sources? Or choosing when to fill them? And how do you stay on top of the flood of information?

For covid-19 I've curated this list:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489

All the people on it are serious experts. I've also left out some people who are worth listening to, but have a political bias or express a lot of emotion (it's hard not to be angry).

I spend way too much time getting up to speed, but (a) there's a lot of stuff I find interesting (I studied molecular and cell bio a bit during my Masters), and (b) would rather err on the side of over-learning than being misinformed.

If you want secondary sources rather than primary, try STAT news. They've been excellent.

The quality of discussion in other fora (including HN) has been quite disappointing.

Thank you so much for this! I recently got into Twitter and following local news in an effort to stay informed but boy do the comments enrage/scare me. It’s just crazy how tribal things have gotten. Is there any end of this sort of division in sight? Every year I think it will get better but it doesn’t.

Would you mind sharing the twitter handles you recommend following?

> Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team

Indeed, what’s being provided is infotainment / soft news. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infotainment

I’ve been sorting reddit comments by controversial. There’s a lot of junk sure, but it’s you also get away from people parroting the standard lines and sometimes get some unique insight.

That's an interesting idea. I need to try this too!

Oh I didn't know you could do that! In the old days when I used to visit another site, I gave bonus points to Flamebait and read at +4. As other p said, a lot of crap, but also a lot of insight. (I also took a point off "Insightful", since +4 Insightful was usually more like "a good but well known perspective which you have probably encountered before". The genuine insightful stuff was always +5.)

I kinda miss the ability to make my own comment thread. My social media was much more efficient back then.

My approach is to include one or two news sources from the "other team" in my daily news diet.

It adds a nice grain of salt for when I read "my team's" news.

Out of curiosity, and because I'm a Canadian out of the loop with respect to American news networks, how can there be news being at ends with each other? That's something I have difficulty putting into perspective (referring to the Team CNN vs Team Fox comparison)

This is just my hypothesis: news networks discovered that they can cater to 30% of the population with an extreme message and get more viewership than they would have catering to 50% or 100%. A side effect is that the permissible extremity increases over time as radical becomes the new norm. Both sides can play off each other's increasingly radical messages.

two comments:

1) the american TV news industry has slowly blurred, then obliterated, the line between straight news and editorial opinion. they're now often intermixed, with slanted analysis weaved throughout reporting. things like those news panel shows are particularly bad about this.

many people don't like to admit it because it challenges their centrist pretensions, but in the modern era, fox news started it and the remaining TV news outlets followed suit over the years.

2) but more fundamentally, there is probably no such thing as truly unbiased straight news reporting. the choosing of which facts to present is itself still an editorial process subject to human prejudice.

You're forgetting the most important point. There's no law requiring a "news" agency to report the facts. In fact there's no laws requiring them to not lie about everything they say. It seems crazy to admit, because news is suppose to be useful and factual information surrounding current events, but in America it doesn't have to be and it stopped being that way when they realize that sensational and entertaining stories got better ratings.

If you read the Globe and Mail (Liberal) and National Post (Conservative), you'll see a similar -- though not quite as extreme -- phenomenon.

I think the Tory/Labor division that existed in the newspapers, and the way that dynamic changed in the Rupert Murdoch era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Activities_in_t...) should be studied in light of emerging polarization you're discussing in the US. Creates a self-reinforcing news duopoly that is very persistent and harmful. I suspect that as people look back on the end of Great Britain that we are living through and how it has fallen as a global power it will be interesting to see how media driven internal division was a factor.

There are still plenty of real news outlets, they just aren't on TV. You can pull up the Reuters web site, spend a few minutes reading the front page, and come out with more actual information than somebody who spent all day watching CNN.

I don’t think “real news” has ever died - it was always dead. The term “Yellow Journalism” has been around since the late 1800s.

I don’t think news that tries to push a narrative is useless. You just have to understand the viewpoint that they’re providing. By reading several different conflicting sources, and trying to understand each viewpoint and why they disagree, you can become informed on the issue.

The problem is, many people would rather take the easy route and treat every issue as if it were black and white. This opinion is right, that opinion is wrong. This news outlet is right, this news outlet is wrong.

Reading different sources doesn't help if all news is biased towards trying to report a coherent and easily understood narrative if the world is complicated and nuanced. In which case all you'll get is, to steal an expression, "the nearest common cliche" to the truth.

WaitButWhy's "The Story of Us" (https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html), in particular "The Sick Giant" (https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html), provides a really good explanation of what might be going on here.

It's the effects of the free market on journalism. The drive for profit means boosting ad revenue which in turns requires drawing an audience... actual journalism isn't profitable enough.

Each day, you have to read CNN, Fox, Reuters, the Economist, the Center for Disease Control, and some of the better local newspaper sites to figure out what's going on. Ignore what they choose to put on the home page. Even Fox News is not totally out of touch with reality once you get off the home page and ignore the opinion section.

Even Noam Chomsky, who co-authored Manufacturing Consent, practices this method. Read and dissect a wide range of sources.

> Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story

Or stopped fact-checking--you know, doing your homework. Real journalists used to interview one person at a time, ask them direct questions, call them on their bullshit, and fact check them in real-time. Nowadays what passes as journalism is to put two people from different "sides" on at the same time and watch them fling crap at each other. Or put two people from the same "side" on to have them take turns ripping someone else to shreds.

Frankly, it's disgusting. I have literally felt myself close to vomiting while watching TV these days. The fact the people on TV new wears suits and business attire is the worst irony; all they do is fling mudwrestling now. Just another one of the present debasement of all things past good and wholesome.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUDP6e5N9gw

If anything, with the rise of targeted advertising and paywalls, this kind of thing was encouraged. Why write articles hoping they get picked up on their merits when you can just pitch partisan articles to partisan people and get the desired home-run every single time?

You're right. And I'd add that modern journalism has effectively become activist journalism across the board. Modern journalists are primarily ideologues - and that is the origin of the partisan spin on almost every single news outlet, especially online.

This is also why credibility in media is at all time lows. Most people are politically moderate and they're waking up to the inescapable spin. This behavior is also dangerous because it provides some justification for the infamous "enemy of the people" quote. But I think partisan reporting has become so commonplace in the industry that most journalists don't realise what they're doing - either that or they believe the end justifies the means. But when the means back away at the credibility that reporting must be based on, you are destroying your institution and possibly taking society with you.

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