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Comment by throwarayes | Hacker News Reader

I think there are speech issues involved here, but before you go too far down the road of comparing it to your idyllic childhood, remember the media context of the 80s and 90s. Specifically that National News controlled by professional journalistic outlets which set the tone and heavily moderated what the public saw.

In other words we replaced a pretty gatekept national media environment with one that was a civil liberties free for all on social media. Now the pendulum is perhaps feeling like it’s going back the other way where Major social media now will be more moderated around what’s considered a core set of values and facts, a little closer in feel to the boring 6:30 news of our childhood.

I don’t say that to draw judgment either way, but only to give context.

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There were also magazines--lots and lots of magazines. Those could get pretty wild, with many a lot less journalistic than the major newspapers or the national news networks.

I think that a big difference back then was that it was very expensive to get your message available to a large national or even statewide audience, and even if you did it was harder to keep that audience if your message was too untruthful.

Now it is much cheaper on the distribution end, and once you get someone's attention the social media newsfeed algorithms note that and prioritize giving them more of your content or similar content, and deprioritize content that disagrees with yours. And because social media optimizes for engagement those people spend more time there and less reading/watching other source further reducing the chances they will see counterarguments to your content.

My perception, as a child of the 90s, is that the quality of mainstream news has dropped a lot since then, especially in the last ten years or so. I wonder if that’s really true though, or if its just the product of my own age and the availability of other sources of information.

Money has been sucked out of broadcast and printed media as ads have migrated online. It costs real money to support investigative journalism. Fewer ads = fewer dollars = lower quality.

I can definitely see that being a factor, but to my eye the NYT in particular seems worse, and I think I’ve heard they made tons of money during the last few years. You definitely do see some great pieces that couldn’t be done without the resources of an institution like the Times, but it seems to be surrounded by a lot of schlock.

There is more high quality investigative journalism than in any other time in history. There is also a more rapid and sensationalistic news cycle, with non-stop coverage of “breaking news” and talking heads who contribute nothing.

By analogy, the bigger the library the harder it is to find really great books.

The investigative journalism is true at the national level, but locally it seems there’s not nearly as much as there used to be, with the void being filled with social media and activists

It's probably a bit of both. I'm not sure if the best print newspapers and magazines with global brands (NYT and WSJ in the US, The Economist in the UK) are obviously worse than they were a decade or decades back. But TV journalism is mostly a shadow its former self, the US weekly news magazines are basically gone, the local newspaper scene is mostly a shambles, etc. And, as you say, there are lots of other information sources that are far deeper on specific topics than mainstream journalism ever was.

It has. Watch, for example, German national news and it's like we had 20 years ago. And they have issues similar to ours over there too, but certain kinds of trust are still (more) intact.

Specifically that National News controlled by professional journalistic outlets which set the tone and heavily moderated what the public saw.

I have been watching a lot of TV news lately. As far as I know, professional journalists haven't deplatformed Trump.

You make a great point but I can't help feeling that its cowardly big Tech cosying up to the new president after years of being cosy with the outgoing one.

Many times journalists live on TV have cut away from the President when he’s devolved into lying during press conferences. Is that not deplatforming?

Is it though? News organizations have always chosen which portions of presidents' speeches/conferences to broadcast. They've always made editorial decisions as to which parts they consider important. This is just seems like another dimension to that sort of consideration.

How often did CNN cut-off a live transmission of POTUS speech to interject that POTUS is literally lying before Trump came along?

> How often did CNN cut-off a live transmission of POTUS speech to interject that POTUS is literally lying before Trump came along?

How often has CNN's editorial staff found presidents to repeat what CNN considers to be blatant provable lies in the past? I mean what are they supposed to do?

I agree that this sort of thing is unprecedented, but in many ways Trump is unprecedented.

There’s a base assertion in your comment that all Presidents should be treated equally. If one President lies by an order of magnitude more than other Presidents, shouldn’t they be treated differently?

I was listening to a live interview (with a political analyst, about trump) on the radio when Trump made his final tweet. They mentioned that he'd tweeted, but said "we're not going to read that right away," and after a little bit they read an excerpt prepared by a producer.

Remember his Four Seasons (Landscaping) presser? There was a lot of news about it but the event itself didn't get much play. Even Fox News has been cutting away from his fact-free tirades.

> I can't help feeling that its cowardly big Tech cosying up to the new president

If that was how it worked, wouldn't they have done it before Wednesday, and wouldn't they have done similar after the previous election?

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