Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caseysoftware | Hacker News Reader

> To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity.

This completely ignores the fact that - in the US at least - many newspapers started as organs of the local political parties. They always wanted to get their news out to their people. Then it went into full fledged "yellow journalism" that was all about the headline and engaging emotions vs objectivity.. which should sound familiar. And that was the late 1800s!

Around 50-60 years ago, as "mass market" became a thing and ad revenue exploded, newspapers and journalism as a whole veered towards objectivity because the local furniture store wanted to advertise to everyone not just one party. But if you read interviews, memoirs, notes, and the like of the journalists for that era, their stated goal for being a journalist was "to change the world." We can debate the specifics of what that means but it's not interchangeable with "neutral observer and reporter of facts."

Like many things, this appears to be a pendulum and it's swung from neutrality/objectivity back towards the opinion-based, light on facts approach for now.

How long we stay there and the consequences are yet to be determined..

Philosophically even truth is an opinion. There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from. Say you cover news about a certain group but don't cover news from another group. Or you report the facts only in the rhetoric of commonly held norms, like so and so nation committed atrocities, while our nation bombed insurgents backed by so and so and accidentally killed a bunch of children. You always report in frame even if done objectively, otherwise your journalism would be considered inflammatory and you would find yourself without a job. So yes there is pure propaganda, etc, but in general news is propaganda of stuff as they, whoever they may be, want you to know it.

If you want real news, then go to the country they are talking about and observe it for yourself. You will find things a lot more mundane than they are made out to be for the vast majority of people living there, until that passive propaganda gets them bombed or economic sanctions destroy their livelihoods. The justification of which is made in the objective reporting, even if journalists don't want to change they do so every time they report something. It's in the nature of the frame and the rhetoric they are writing from.

> There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from.

Nah.

“If someone tells you that there is no truth, they are telling you not to believe them. So don’t” - Idr who this is a quote from.

The claim that there is no truth is a pointless one. Well, it is pointless to believe*. There may be uses to making the claim.

*exception: if someone can observe your innermost beliefs and is threatening that if you don’t believe it, then they will do something you don’t want, then it could be worthwhile. But that’s true of any belief.

We're just meat bags with terrible sensory perception and reasoning skills. This is the reason I am more open to claims of "no reality" and the like. Plato's cave but no one sees the whole picture

The claim “we cannot ever know anything with absolute perfect certainty” is a quite different statement than “nothing is true”.

Even “we aren’t able to properly conceptualize any true statements” is, while not plausible, is still better than “nothing is true”. (It may be that many things we think are true are fundamentally confused/slightly-nonsensical in ways that we can’t correct by virtue of how our thought processes work, but I don’t consider it plausible that nothing we can believe is entirely true.)

> Philosophically even truth is an opinion. There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from.

This attitude is, at the bottom, responsible for the situation described in this article.

The truth is an ideal and when we pursue that ideal, things go well. When we stop pursuing it, we get "post-journalism".

> The truth is an ideal and when we pursue that ideal, things go well. When we stop pursuing it, we get "post-journalism".

My response to that is that this idea is subterfuge for resolving complicating political problems with propaganda rather than by proper system design. We are in this situation, because propaganda has lost its power over the masses after 100 years. We need better ways to resolve problems that appealing to ideals while a select elite push their agenda on the people who accept it unquestioningly. In many ways our methods of dealing with this has been akin to religion, which also appeals to religious ideals to gloss over real issues and silence them.

I don't think propaganda has lost its power. To me its more powerful than ever. For a different example, look at advertising. It as well is more successful than ever despite people knowing full well what it is, how it works and how it affects them.

The notion that we can replace ideals with "proper systems design" is called Positivism. We've tried it, and variants like Marxism. None of them work.

Humans are limited animals. Enlightenment ideals, which are (yes) secularized religions concepts, are the best we've been able to do so far. Maybe at some point in the future we'll be able to do better but I'm not holding my breath.

> None of them work.

Except when some humans which at the time were more backwards than the leaders of the world tried, they were simply shut down using propaganda and force. So as to deem what they were attempting to do completely feeble... mostly due to them being against this secular religion. It was in many ways a religious war in idealized secular terms. Therefore I would argue that no actual attempt has been made, because the power structure likes it this way. Their secular religious clergy does well for themselves in it and they don't want revolutions to change it. Not that it can't be done. No one has been allowed to actually try in good faith.

Everyone is talking around in circles here about what truth means and how journalists should handle bias. Truth in terms of journalism means, is this a story made of facts that would benefit the average citizen without regard to physical and social factors vs is this a story that skews or withholds facts for the benefit of a small group of elites with an outsized influence.

Average citizen of only your country belonging to the majority, I guess that's what you mean, because the content of the news these days could be very dangerous if you are not a citizen of the country doing the reporting. And if you belong to a minority from a country or an ethnicity that is not favoured it could be even more biased against people's perception of you as a person.

That's exactly right and journalistic standards have been a reflection of the zeitgeist, for better or worse. It's never tended to be fair to those who have no power at all. Historically, the fairness and honesty part has skewed more towards the white middle class, shifting to the upper white middle class. The window has been shifting more toward the upper end. It's almost in the realm of competing propaganda.

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