Comment by acituan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acituan | Hacker News Reader

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> They have 1,600 journalists last year that were sent to 150 countries ... to gather facts around the world

Journalism is not our fact gathering apparatus. It is our sense making and relevance deciding apparatus based on those facts.

If we don't have good journalists providing those functions, we are left with the ersatz, AI based versions to decide what to pay attention to; twitter's, youtube's recommendation algorithms, google's ranking algorithms etc. None of which is good at saying "this is the most important thing we should pay attention right now as a society", "this is how you should approach this complex topic". Algorithms only serve one god and that is the god of engagement. But the amount of engagement they drive doesn't match their performance in affording us an ability to make sense of our world.

This is precisely what Weiss criticizes, that crucial human wisdom function is now subjugated by what those algorithms promote to be relevant; twitter being the worst offender. This makes us collectively foolish, and we see the results in our society with our inability to cohere and dialog as adults. Our collective intelligence approximates that of a tantrum throwing child, because our most used discourse engine that is twitter can only sustain that level of sophistication.

>Journalism is not our fact gathering apparatus.

Well then what is? I used to live next door to a journalist - by which I mean someone who went out into the world (haiti, israel/west bank, US immigration policy) and asked questions and collected facts. They didn't always get everything right, and their work seemed to encourage a deliberate sort of fence-sitting with respect to the issues and places that they covered, but they did work that nobody else is/was doing.

Those people on social media who appear to be the "fact gathering apparatus" ? they are just echoing the work of people like my old neighbor.

Without journalists, the ones we sometimes call reporters, we've got nothing to work with.

Now certainly, their job also extends into "sense making" and "relevance deciding". But the important ones - the reporters - are the ones gathering the material that the the rest of us - including the non-reporting journalists - are working with when we try to do the same thing.

Absolutely what your neighbor did is crucial, but it is not a waterfall process. The problem space of "gathering facts" is virtually infinite, means relevance decisions has to start while deciding on what to gather more facts on. It is an iterative process that says "based on these facts we found, we investigated for these further facts and here why it all was important to promote them to public attention".

Absolutely, but my point is the original claim of "journalism is not our fact gathering process" is just wrong.

Sure, there's a frame problem in journalism just as much as there is in AI, and sure, journalists play a (possibly outsized) role in finding contemporary suboptimal solutions for it. But even with that being the case, somebody has to go out and get information for us to talk about, argue about, rage about, call for more information about etc. etc.

That's what (good) journalists (reporters) do.

"Facts all come with points of view" (Talking Heads, early 1980s)

> my point is the original claim of "journalism is not our fact gathering process" is just wrong.

Allow me to reword; facts are necessary but not at all sufficient to constitute journalism, nor journalism can claim monopoly on fact gathering. E.g. we have other, more formal, fact gathering processes such as science or court of law, which cannot be substituted with journalism, damages of which we see to the extent it tries to.

The firehose of twitter, youtube etc feeds already give us facts to talk about, argue about, rage about, call for more information about. And we are not in better shape for it. We cannot sufficiently convert those facts into sense. Nor those facts are always the ones we should be interested in.

That's why it's critical not to reduce journalism to fact gathering.

I would broadly agree with that. I am not sure it is the job of journalism to "convert facts into sense", though it seems reasonable to posit that this is part of the role of journalism in contemporary society. It is certainly something that many journalists (particularly of the journal-ist variety aka op-ed writers) try to do. But it seems to me that if you're serious about trying to make sense of the facts/the world, you need to turn to much deeper analysis than journalism typically represents.

I completely disagree - the main purpose of the journal is to expose _facts_. It's, of course, impossible to dissociate those facts from opinions they are always written by people, and people will always hold an opinion over subjects, whether they want or not.

But the best journalists thrive to separate their opinion from facts and make it clear to readers when it's one or the other.

Weiss condemns groupthink, not algorithms.

Thats only one thing she is saying. The other thing she is saying is that there is no room for anyone who falls outside the orthodoxy of the new progressive religion.

She's politicizing a totally nonpolitical issue. She was totally fine until she live-tweeted public insults about her co workers during a company meeting. If it were not for her politicizing the issue she would be immediately fired.

You could have made that point if they had not just purged the leadership of the opinion section because they dared to publish some republicans opinion piece. When even international press criticise what they did at NY Times it you know you have a problem.

Firstly, the leader of the opinion section resigned, and secondly, it wasn't because of a republican opinion piece - of which there have been hundreds, but because the editorial standards of the Op-Ed section repeatedly fell short of the standards they claimed.

The one guy that got purged admitted to not reading an article before approving it for publication. That person would've been fired under any normal circumstance with great fanfare.

> She was totally fine until she live-tweeted public insults about her co workers during a company meeting.

Do you have a reference for this?

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