Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

All of the ‘fake news’ discussion seems to be missing the forest for the trees. It also seems to be woefully unfamiliar with post-modern philosophy, e.g. Baudrillard.

The reality is we probably aren’t going back to a world with a predominate narrative. Contrary to the mainstream story, conspiracies aren’t just something stupid people latch on to. They often hide metaphorical truths, even if the actual details are exaggerated or false. This should be obvious to anyone paying attention to events in the past decade, e.g. Epstein. Combined with information overload, technological advancements like A.I. commenting and deepfakes, and political-financial incentives to frame events in biased ways, I expect the situation to only fracture more.

The only semi-solution, in my mind, would be a radically transparent nonprofit that is held to rigorous standards and isn’t dependent on advertising for income. It’s beyond me why the billionaire class hasn’t chipped in a few bucks to save the journalistic concept of truth - unless of course, they have no reason to.

The billionaire class in countries based on export of natural resources do not depend on a well-educated and civically competent citizenry. For example, in Russia only some 10 million people are needed to run the oil-and-gas economy, and the whole rest of the country has been termed "superfluous population" by some commentators. So, why would billionaires be interested in helping the average person out?

Well, the presumption is that some billionaires, in the West at least, have a minor interest in maintaining basic standards of civilization. A tall order, no doubt, but one can hope. Bezos seems content to push his biased viewpoint via WaPo, but one hopes that others are more civic-minded.

What's the point of being one of the useful ten million if you don't have a bigger superfluous population to lord over.

A major contribution by the billionaire class against journalism was the murder of Kashoggi. The unsolved car bomb that killed the Panama papers journalist was probably also sponsored by someone very well off.

Who are they held to rigorous standards by? There would need to be a another pure body to hold them to task, and so on indefinitely.

If billionaires were controlling the purse strings, it seems unlikely they would be as willing to report negatively on them or their businesses either.

I'm unconvinced there is any way to deliver reasonably unbiased 'truth' journalistically

Plenty of industries manage to self-regulate to an acceptable degree.

And my idea was more: get anonymous donors to put $10 billion in an untouchable trust that funds a nonprofit news source, which is itself policed and funded by a separate anonymous trust. Full public transparency for everything. The legal mechanisms are available, even if the decency isn’t.

>The only semi-solution, in my mind, would be a radically transparent nonprofit that is held to rigorous standards and isn’t dependent on advertising for income.

Why is the only solution a centralized one, for you?

I’m not committed to a centralized one, it just seemed like the best initial solution. Are you familiar with distributed solutions to squishy problems like journalistic truth? I don’t know any offhand.

Proper education (whether inside the family household or outside)? Critical thinking? Personal accountability? There might not be a need for one or more guaranteed sources like you describe.

Of course those things are also needed, but that wasn’t really what my comment is talking about. Nor are they mutually exclusive.

The issue I’m referring to is at the institutional level, not the individual one. As far as I’m concerned, when anyone with critical thinking skills analyzes the media, it all looks like propaganda. That doesn’t really help society get more accurate information.

Not to split hairs, you started out suggesting that the world is destined toward a future where an institutional source of journalistic truth no longer exists. Then you propose how to force one back in. More interesting to me is, how to live better in a world without one?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this myself, but to save the long explanation for another time, I’ll just say: I don’t think there is a solution, other than localism, or a highly transparent and rigorous centralized institution. The closer you are to a community and information, the better you can judge it for yourself. Not to mention the fact that most global news isn’t particularly relevant for most people.

What that means in practical terms, I’m not sure.

Historically, if you wanted good information, you paid for it. Whether that was a king's intelligence network, or a peasant's daily paper. However in today's world the consumers of media are not paying for it. The advertisers are. So we end up with incentives that lean away from journalistic truth. Could it be that simple?

If you want good information, you can still pay for it. Nation-states do this. Hedge funds do this. There is more data available on the open market than ever before. But the buy-side of that market has shifted considerably.

Much of the problem is memes shared by older people on Facebook who are 30+ years out of any kind of formal education, so even if we had an education magic wand the lead time is enormous, well into the "climate change has been decided one way or the other" era.

> Personal accountability?

What on earth does this look like? Going up to random punters buying the Sun, grabbing them by the lapels and asking "why are you reading this propaganda?"

Personal accountability doesn't refer to holding others accountable, yourself. LOL. It refers to the opposite - holding yourself accountable.

That would be fine if other people's interpretation of media was always harmless to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiTribune https://www.wikitribune.com/

It failed. Only large one I am familiar with.

I agree with you. It needs to be centralized because it has to be authoritative.

Let's not also forget that there are a substantial number of conspiracy (or crackpot) theories are true, like MKULTRA's existence, Tuskeegee Siphilis experiments, Government experimentation on populations (radioactive tracers over wichita, and red yeast over san francisco), politically orchestrated break-in and theft of DNC information (twice!), using a polio vaccination program as a front for CIA surveillance, black sites and extrajudicial renditions, etc etc etc...

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