Mainstream Failure | Hacker News Reader

Mainstream Failure

tbray.org

188 pointsgvb57 comments

I don't know if I'm alone in this but I actually have a more positive view on nuclear power now than before Fukushima.

I grew up in Sweden not that far from Chernobyl. I have been taught that a nuclear disaster equals instant doom over a massive area.

Now I'm learning that even after having an earthquake equal to 30'000 Hiroshima bombs go off nearby and a 16 meter Tsunami wash over it, a somewhat old nuclear plant still doesn't do any more harm than what can be cleaned up - and it's only local damage.

I also learn that the confirmed deaths in cancer from Chernobyl was far fewer than I had thought.

Not even when the media writes about terrorism have I seen such a wide gap between what's on the front page and what the experts are saying.

At the same time we keep feeding oil money to crazy dictators. This is insane! We need more nuclear power, now! Let's just hope the damage done by mainstream media doesn't stop nuclear expansion.

That would be a true disaster.

At least in Germany, everything what the media says about this had a really huge effect. The 7 oldest reactors will be shut down now (temporarily) and the discussion is going on now wether this should be permanently and what should be done with the remaining 9 reactors.

Look at how coal is being used in Germany to produce energy. Nobody seems to complain about it. Coal is subsidized, because of fear of losing votes and strikes from coal miners.

+1.

Also, informing this is my last day at Hacker News as an active user. Will limit myself to see the feeds once on a while. Thank you.

This is the internet. Sometimes people pile on. Don't get too worked up over it! Here, I'll toss you an upvote.

+1.

Keep downgrading the comment, superusers. Someday you'll end up keeping the place clean, the Digg way, after users just left.

Downvoting vacuous commentary hasn't helped yet. What would you suggest?

You have too much time. By the way, define "vacuous". My first "+1" was frugal, never "vacuous". HN doesn't deserve me to share my nuclear knowledge anymore, after all this "superuser rage".

My comment was "frugal". But good. Definition of frugal: "Economical in the use or appropriation of resources; not wasteful or lavish; wise in the expenditure or application of force, materials, time, etc.; characterised by frugality; sparing; economical; saving; as, a frugal housekeeper; frugal of time."

So here it ends my last comment on HN.

I get so tired of comments blasting mainstream media. It's easy to do, and just counterproductive. The good stories about the tsunami are out there, you just have to stop watching 24 hour news channels. Read the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic.

Please stop complaining that good stories don't fall in your lap for free. Go find them, or build a better way to put important, un-sensationalized stories in front of millions of people while getting effectively compensated for your time.

Here's 10 minutes of checking top news sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/aftershocks-keep-japanes...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-earthquake-and-tsu...

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1104ap_as_japan_earthquake...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2011-03-21-japan-earthqua...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/22predict.html?ref...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-ag...

edit to add links

There are two quite different possible complaints.

1. "I want good journalism but can't find it."

2. "The general public is being fed a diet of bad journalism."

To someone who's making complaint 1, it's very reasonable to reply "It's out there, you're just looking in the wrong places" (assuming that's true, which seems plausible).

To someone who's making complaint 2 -- which is how I read Tim Bray here -- that doesn't seem like such a helpful response. Telling Tim to look for better news won't do anything to raise the overall level of journalism.

(Of course a good response to complaint 2 may be "This is an insoluble problem; people will watch and read what they want to watch and read, and it turns out they don't want what you consider good journalism".)

The second complaint seems to be complaining about Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap); historically, Sturgeon's law has been nearly as inviolable as conservation of angular momentum.

If anything, I suspect that mainstream journalism has never been orders of magnitude better than it is now. It's just that back in the day, we didn't have bloggers with photo essays showing us what we could be reading instead, so our standards were different.

I disagree with your second point in one sense - overall, journalism might be worse than in years past. However, the problem is that the editorial standards for journalism have been relaxed because the news organizations need to publish news stories 24/7 on tv and the Internet to compete.

There are still great journalists doing excellent work. However, their contribution has less impact because of the overall signal-to-noise ratio and also because we don't have enough great journalists to fill up a 24-hour news day.

It's similar to expansion in professional sports leagues. It's wonderful that new markets may get teams but that waters down the quality of the overall product because adding more teams doesn't mean you're adding more great players.

I never consume or discuss things in the mainstream media. I got my news coverage of 9/11 entirely from the Onion. But distortions about this topic are far too damaging to our future to go unchallenged. Energy policy failure is the only credible existential threat to post-Malthusian society I can think of.

If people are complaining about #2, it doesn't make any sense to give credit to people who produce good work but don't manage to get their work widely read.

How is it counterproductive? By what mechanism does complaining about the mainstream media actually make it worse? Complaining about the mainstream media may indeed fail to improve it, but saying nothing will certainly have no effect.

Complaining about mainstream media on mainstream media would be fine. Complaining about mainstream media on alternate media pollutes the alternate media with the problems of the mainstream.

> but saying nothing will certainly have no effect.

Of course it will. Don't consume it.

Part of our frustration probably stems from the reality that the large media businesses will get by just fine without the readership of the elite clientèle of YC. [eye roll]

However, most of us probably do tend to influence the opinion of a few others. A little complaining (in a constructive way) might be useful, albeit in an indirect way.

I like to think of preaching to the choir (or disagreeing with them) as being a way of polishing one's persuasion prior to the full congregation (or converting the masses).

The New York Times front page story has been a poor source of information since this crisis began, basically being a disjointed summery of "who said what" with a sensationalist headline. When radiation levels were falling (according to other sources), the Times headline stood as "nuclear meltdown near imminent" or something to that effect.

IMO,!f you came looking for realistic analysis or summarization of the facts as known, you had to scour both mainstream and non-mainstream sources and piece it together above the melodrama.

I agree. Cable news is horrendous. On the other hand, the photos of the tsunami devestation published by the Boston Globe alone tell a story that is deeper and richer than anything else I've seen or read on the matter.

Agree entirely. It's never been for the news consumer; my mind boggles when I read opinions like this, things like criticism of techcrunch. With today's high competition, countless aggregation services and worldwide audience, _you no longer are stuck with reading mainstream media from your country!_

I get my daily news from Al Jazeera, BBC, Guardian, and a host of US daily and weekly news sites. Tech news is aggragated for me by HN and techmeme. Niche topics are read in my google reader. I can send all these sources to my ebook reader for later comsumption. Read something of which I question the veracity? I'm a google search away from differing opinions, original sources, intelligent discussion and critique. We have sites like wikileaks, governmental websites, Guardian's 'Data Is Free' and others putting out free datasets to enable anyone to dig deeper and find the stories.

How awesome is all this! And the vast majority is free!

One of the things that annoys me slightly is that while our news is loaded with the nuclear accidents, I haven't heard any mainstream media talk about this refinery fire caused by earthquake which had been raging for 10 days, putting who knows how much pollution in the air.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/21/japan-refinery-idU...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/enciclopediapt/5523005370/

Nuclear accidents are scary because people don't understand reactors, they don't understand the actual dangers and there, frankly, haven't been a whole lot of them, so FUD can snowball.

On the other hand, mine collapses, refinery fires, oil spills, explosions -- the causes of the day to day death toll of the fossil fuel supply chain (to say nothing of its use) is familiar, understandable and all too common.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/25-oth... (25 fossil fuel energy disasters from 2010, claiming 668 lives)

indeed: when people clamor that everyone should re-think nuclear power, we should actually look at the human cost of the current alternatives. For example, the news is happy to report that China will be building 50 reactors in the future. (One even said that that's almost as many as there are in the rest of the world; completely untrue). But should China really stay with coal mines? How many people do they think die from coal mining every year, to say nothing of the refinery and pollution? 2631 in 2009, 3215 in 2008, nearly 7000 in 2002.

I understand nuclear power generation on layman level (3 semesters of university physics), but am opposed to it. Allow me to point out flaws in your narrative:

- people could have had bad first-hand experience with nuclear accidents. I lived 200km downwind from Chernobyl and had to run for cover when it rained first few months. My brother-in-law had his thyroid gland treated when he was 9. Sanitary food inspections still include contamination spot checks, 25 years later.

- Oil spills are largely non-argument. Oil is used primarily for gasoline production and has only fringe role in energy production.

- There is a great, clean fossil fuel in form of natural gas. It is indeed widely used, in some countries in Europe it accounts for 95% of energy production. Coal vs. nuclear is false dichotomy and mostly serves as rhetorical device of proponents of nuclear.

- Safety record of fossil fuel would be much, much higher if as much was invested for safety per TWh as for nuclear. That said, natural gas is still on par with nuclear w.r.t. safety.

- With mass adoption of nuclear, which is now mostly concentrated in places with high safety culture, the number and scale of disasters is bound to catch up. Extrapolate the accident trend for growth up to 50% energy share, and it would be more than simply linear.

- Waste management. Enough said.

- Overall attitude to opponents from nuclear advocates is off-putting. Just because someone has a different view on energy policy does not mean he is a simpleton, a fear-monger or illiterate.

Having a different view is always welcome. Having a different view due concerns not supported by the evidence, inequal standards and emotional arguments is not.

Nuclear is not a silver bullet. Fossil fuel is not all bad.

You seem to be arguing against something other than what I wrote.

Nowadays I have trouble looking at any mainstream news sites without being incredibly disappointed.

I'd be willing to give actual money to an organization that a) actually understood what they were reporting and b) reported facts rather than PR, hyperbole and human interest angles but I haven't been able to find one.

I'd be willing to give actual money to an organization that a) actually understood what they were reporting and b) reported facts rather than PR, hyperbole and human interest angles

The New York Times would be happy to take that money off your hands. For all of their failings, I'd argue that they generally meet both of your criteria.

I have been consistently impressed by the reporting done by propublica: http://propublica.org

One reassuring datapoint: renowned eco-cheerleader Geroge Monbiot has a piece thats garnering huge attention at the Guardian entitled "Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nucl...

He even links the xkcd diagram.

Another good resource is the Japan Subculture Research Center by Jake Adelstein (American journalist who spent 12 years in Japan on the crime beat for the Yomiuri Shinbun).

Sample post: the yakuza's role in relief efforts -- http://www.japansubculture.com/2011/03/the-worst-of-times-ca...

PS. Off-topic, but calling Stross a "pop-sci-fi author" is an injustice! Kevin Anderson and Orson Scott Card are pop-sci-fi authors. Stross writes hard science fiction.

Thanks for the link to Randall Munroe's chart, that was very interesting.

I agree, nytimes.com has been insanely frantic. I can't figure out if they are rabid anti-nuclear or they simply hate Japan. I recently stopped looking at the site. But where does one go for well-written, in-depth news?

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html has decent info on the reactors. Not sure who's doing good reporting on the human side of the disaster.

I actually disagree with the author's point about the "main story". The main story for me, and I'd wager for some of the other people on this board too, is the story of the engineers who are still working to keep Fukushima under some semblance of control. I really want to hear their story.

The critical piece of info I wanted to know that was missing from the XKCD chart is where do the engineers working on Fukushima fall on his chart, and what will be the impact on their lives.

I'm not a nuclear expert at all, and don't pretend to be - I'm a web developer, but I still want to know if they could already be falling ill due to radiation poisoning. To me, their story is the one that's the most compelling and scary.

I think he may be referring to "main story" as in what the big story will be when we look at this event years from now: 1) the deaths of ~10,000 people and widespread destruction, or 2) a nuclear reactor incident in which the reaction was bungled at first but ultimately was not a catastrophe for the larger nation or world.

It should be noted that unlike the USSR disaster those who are manning the Japan Nuclear control efforts at the damaged plants are being closely monitored and taken off that duty before any level of getting ill is being reached. That not only includes nuclear workers but the emergency firemen, etc.

Tim has it exactly right. Searching some of the mainstream media sites in my area of the world -- Fairfax (smh.com.au) and Fox (news.com.au) -- shows up no results for 'tsunami' in their front page and world news section aside from badly informed reports about the nuclear reactors.

That's a really sad indictment of the state of our media organisations and where their focus lies.

Big list of independent Australian media: http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/dw95o/big_list_of...

Really it's a sad indictment of what sells.

I think the main cause of what Tim describes here is not so much just general media mediocrity (although that is relevant also), but the fact that most people simply do not understand what radiation is, how it works, or even the distinction between "safe" levels, "slightly higher than normal" levels, and "dangerous" levels.

Fear of nuclear accidents and atom bombs has conditioned most people to react negatively to any mention of the word "radioactive" - as if it is an all or none situation. The general population has zero idea that you are exposed to radiation when eating a banana or flying internationally.

This isn't an excuse - the mainstream media could do a lot of educating here - but I have a feeling that those that work in the mainstream media don't even begin to have any clue about the science behind this either.

My favorite joke about this is, as a TV broadcaster, it's not in their interest to explain radiation.

CNN could correctly say, "living in California, you are exposed to more radiation watching TV on a CRT than from Japan". Then the viewers say "WTF? My TV is giving me radiation? click".

Have I missed the point? Seems he's a bit slow on the uptake... I started to realize how hopeless the mainstream media was in 2003, when Juan Cole was talking on his blog about how important Muqtada al-Sadr was going to be in the occupation of Iraq about 6 months before he showed up in mainstream coverage. What cemented it for me was the prescient discussion of the mortgage crisis on Calculated Risk and Roubini's blog, years before the crisis blew up, and in the face of strident mainstream opposition towards the end. These days I don't rely on any mainstream outlet as a regular source of news, though I read their stuff when the blogs I read link to them.

The problem is not nuclear disaster or nuclear alarmism. Stop shooting from the hip! For DNDers, that's how you critically miss.

We should debate nuclear power on its merits and contingency planning, not just its risk profile. Do you remember how many people used the argument that deep water offshore drilling was safe because we used space age technology to prevent spills PRIOR TO the great Gulf spill?

We should improve plant designs and reprocessing technology or else we're just wasting money. We must continue improving testing and safety procedures or we're simply trigger happy screwups, not engineers.

I suppose this is why more and more people that I know (in the US) are turning to Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera for their news.

der spiegel lost a LOT of credibility due to its blatant anti-nuclear messaging right from the beginning of the fukushima reports.

instead of explaining what the hell was happening, they started chernobyl discussions and simply forgot about the actual disaster.

the media in german speaking countries went full retard of fukushima.

the media in german speaking countries went full retard of fukushima

I can confirm this for Austria. The country has always had a somewhat schizophrenic relationship with nuclear energy[1], and the media (even supposedly reputable papers like Die Presse) have gone into multi-page "OMG second Chernobyl" hysteria mode. I sampled some articles - the amount of factual errors is staggering. I've stopped reading any local news media as a result; I have to assume I'm being fed propaganda the rest of the time, too.

[1] There is one nuclear power plant in the country. It never went into operation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plant There is however, an operational research reactor. Anti-nuclear-energy-sentiment is widespread (large majority); the fact that the energy imported from neighbouring countries is largely generated by nuclear plants is conveniently ignored; in fact, there are longstanding campaigns to pressure the neighbouring countries to shut their plants down. I also find it amusing that the IAEA is headquartered here.

lost credibility with whom?

In Germany, it's been no more anti-nuclear than the rest of the German media, politics and public opinion. It's not losing credibility here.

Outside Germany? One of the main reasons to read news from different places is to get a sense of the range of arguments being made. If Der Spiegel just parroted the view in the USA, it would be far less valuable.

Agreed. I currently have a hard time finding _any_ usuable information in German. I quickly turned away from all media here, following the "Why I'm not worried.." and its follow-up submissions on this site instead.

Spiegel et al failed. The whole media message over here is "nuclear power is far too dangerous, look at Japan" and nothing more.

Interesting. I was not aware of that. Would you say that Der Spiegel's news is generally credible?

I've been less than impressed with AJE's coverage of this. The general pattern has been 2/3rd of article devoted to the one nuclear site, 1/3rd to the rest of the country, with a town or two namechecked with a couple of data points per article. The last Japan-related headline in their main AJE feed which didn't mention the plant was early morning of the 21st. Oh and the lead always mentions the plant.

Tim wins for delightful (and insightful) quote of the day: "There have been many reports about the people fleeing Tokyo. None of these narratives have paused to consider whether the exodus constitutes chickenshit stupidity. I suggest it maybe does."

"Don't hate the media, become the media."

I for one can't ever trust anything reported by any Western 'news' outlet again, from Fox News to NPR. What's surprised me the most is the very poor quality of the BBC reporting which is apparently worse than most American companies.

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