Compare this to MSNBC and Fox News whose business models are really the same: cater to their viewers’ dogma/bubble and reinforce biases, and don’t try to introduce new ideas because it is bad for their business.
Usually print media is considered higher quality journalism than TV media. There are numerous studies that show reading print media leads to people being more informed than just watching TV news. Whether this is correlation or causation I can’t really say.
My understanding of both Fox and MSNBC is they are entertainment programs, not so much news programs. I’m not sure it’s fair to compare those to anything in print, nor do I think it’s entirely possible.
A good news article might present both sides of a story, but try to fact-check claims by both sides, and bring in supporting evidence. That’s the key differentiating factor of quality journalism - helping bring facts to the forefront rather than let people on either side spin the facts for their purposes.
I'd like to see a news app that has the facts and sensationalism separated, and then a reference to a more relevant fact/story that relates more directly to what a particular spin was getting at. So I guess feed their bubble with more accurate stories.
TV on the other hand is like SaaS - continious integration and deployment. Release first and apologize later if needed.
Doesn't CI rely on robust testing to ensure buggy software doesn't make it into production? I'm not sure the fire-and-forget of the 24/7 news cycle lends itself to a comparison to continuous deployment, as there is a strong bias to 'deliver now' given competition to break the news first, and it's hard to build in 'automated testing' (vetting?) of content.
No, maybe to you, but to vast amounts of people, millions of people, they watch a singular source for news and to them, that is the news.
In the US, since you’re referring to them, the news legally used to have to allow all sides of an issues to present their views. In the 1980s, the laws changed, and that is how news became so one-side.
My point is that the majority of people actually watching these news outlets see it as news, not entertainment or propaganda.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America#Smith–Mundt_A...
—- EDIT: Reviewed your CML link from spring of 1990, interesting read, but really fails to do critical analysis of the specific regulatory changes by name, what impact changes had, etc. Beyond that, stating obvious, it fails to cover all the material events since 1990.
The question is 'How far can you go?'
For example does it make sense to present advocates for science and pseudo-science on the same level, with equal weight?
Putting a Biologist who explains Evolution on the same pedestal on equal time as a Priest who believes in Intelligent Design creates a false sense of balance between these viewpoints, even though these viewpoints are fundamentally different in their very basic quality.
You can spin this further to illustrate this point: racism, religion, false promises, lies, mental illnesses.
And even more importantly do you realize that in such world it's far more likely that only a priest will get invited to a TV show, not the biologist? Because that's the "how far" that I'm afraid of, fundamentalism that believes that the only way is to force "the truth" upon people, and it's of course always their truth.
For example: Given two commentators, if one is arguing that TV boards and government committees are supposed to be populated by and representative of the general population and the other arguing that TV boards and government committees are populated by crab people secretly supporting the illuminati; the discussion should be about how effectively TV boards and government committees are being filled by the general population and how effective they are at articulating societal consensus related to important issues.
In the "gotta hear both sides" world, rational discussion is dragged off the table by the notion that every issue has two equally valid sides no matter how absurd one "side" might be.
But were revealing a more fundamental issue here: Where are the checks and balances of the media?
As it stands now, we've got two possible solutions:
1. Censorship, which I find dangerous and shortsighted. 2. The media itself, which results in a 'who yells the loudest' kind of culture.
This issue bleeds into all kind of problems with propaganda, advertising, fake-news, bias, ideology, lies, scams, click-bait and other kind of bullshit.
In this discussion we've been talking as if there was some kind of sane regulation of these things. But there isn't really.
All of this stuff erodes trust and creates trenches. Sometimes it feels like it is getting worse. People have been talking about how Google Search is getting weaker on this site. There is so much more noise and bullshit today than there ever was, because we're accreting information w/o distinction.
There are projects, which try to make fact-checking easier for example, new kind of platforms and ideas to foster real debate. But those things are still on the fringe.
This is a massive, important and unsolved problem I think.