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Comment by gerland | Hacker News Reader

The point is that we often overlook the things that really shape our reality. What every ideological and/or political movement knows is that no one will fight the ideology if it's fed in very small increments. We will simply overlook it as insignificant. If you try to nitpick on small things then you're sure to become the laughing stock. It's the same mechanism, but for once it works in our favor.

I was a bit sad when I saw the initial downvotes, since this account was already 4 times below zero points in total and I don't think there was anything that broke the rules in that comment. I guess I was looking down on NYT, but at this point the collapse of journalism is not an opinion, but a measurable truth. You can just measure it by average salary in the domain. I don't think there are any sources lately that you can trust 100%.

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I hear you. One nitpick if you don't mind.

>I don't think there are any sources lately that you can trust 100%.

That is exactly backwards. The journalism never was truthful; instead it was full of lies by omission, manipulation to push a narrative, and plain mistakes made in the rush to be the first to publish.

What changed[1] is the seasoned staff is now largely gone and replaced with low-paid youth fresh off of the school. It's through the lacking experience and missing professionalism that the mask slips, and we now get to see how the sausage is made.

Paradoxically now that we get to see how bad it gets at times, the spotty trustworthiness becomes a known quantity, and so we can handle it better.

[1] aside of the amusing tools like "NewsDiffs" (https://twitter.com/newsdiffs), or https://archive.is/

I mostly agree, but I think there was a bit of a difference in quality up until about 15 years ago.

This was due to the nature of the competition between news outlets. It you have only few suppliers in any domain, then a possibility of a "price war" is relatively small. It's much easier to predict how our counterparts will behave and dumping prices hurts all the participants. It forces the competition to move to different areas - like marketing and quality of service.

Once there were more competitors, due to the internet being a thing, all bets were off. No one could hold to their position just because he was considered more reliable by a marginal degree.

>I think there was a bit of a difference in quality up until about 15 years ago.

Going by those excellent charts[1], there were two distinct "kinks" in intensity of change; around 2000 and around 2015.

>the internet

The best explainer I've seen thus far is that loading articles with keywords improves searchability and readership metrics. My far fetched hypothesis is that it is a side effect of the present form of search - dominated by one vertical that has strayed far, far away from the original Page Rank idea.

[1] use of progressive keywords in newspapers, a thread https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133441085118853120

[1.1] more terms, NYT https://i.imgur.com/CZfsLsk.jpg

You've been paying a man to warn you if there are tigers on the main street. Every day for the last 10 years he's been telling you there are no tigers on the main street and you've taken the main street or he's told you there are tigers there and you've taken the side street. Today he said that there was a tiger on the main street but you took it anyway and didn't see the tiger. Has his trustworthiness collapsed or was he always scamming you?

>and [you] didn't see the tiger

Of course; a tiger keeps hidden and attacks humans from behind.

Jokes aside, your fable is excellent and I hope to use it in the future.

Other than that, I have no useful answer beyond re-iterating my earlier assertion: the media was always bad. Now we can see it better than before.

Perhaps the tiger was a red herring all along. There just might be a fat cat getting fatter in the city hall that we were too distracted to pay attention to.

Does it really matter? It sounds like a philosophical question without any real meaning to me. I can overtake the turtle even though he moves. I can tell that I should not trust this particular man from this point on. It's very easy to lose reputation and very hard to build it.

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