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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Why should MASS media be trusted? They exist to make money and they are free to use. How in the world they can be anything but a manipulation (which includes but not limited to, just simply a distraction)?

If you need real news, use Bloomberg, AP, Reuters... Yeah that's $1500 per month, and even more importantly, they are too boring to read for an average person, so they wouldn't be popular even if they were free. People who make actual decisions based on news, read them, for rest, there is this "newstainment" industry and it's no problem at all if it's not trustworthy.

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Your comment makes no sense.

On the one hand you blame "MASS media" (whatever that is to you) and on the other you advocate to use AP and Reuters, where most media outlets get large chunks of their news from. AP and Reuters exist so others, often smaller, media companies don't have to do intensive research into everyday news. If something is a target for manipulation, it's AP, Reuters, and similar.

NPR, PBS, BBC, AustralianBC, CanadianBC, etc are not for profit and exist in the public interest. These are an important subset of the mass media in English.

We need to make sure these organs hold to the public interest principle, and also that they can maintain reliable funding.

Well, they're supposed to exist in the public interest, but it seems like it could be true that they're vehemently opposed by at least half of the populations they're supposed to be serving.

So are the COVID vaccines[1]. Lack of universal popularity doesn't make something bad, wrong or unworthy of enthusiastic support.

[1] I exaggerate the proportion, but maybe you did too.

Well, my point is that if we're going to make people pay for things they don't like because we know better than they do what's good for them, let's try to do that equally. That's not happening on, say, the BBC, where for a while they were paying a black transwoman to promote racial hatred against whites.

And for a much longer while - about 20 years - they ran the Black and White Minstrel show. The answer is not to represent everyone's dumb ideas equally.

https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/people-nation...

I don’t know about the international organizations but I can tell you for the US-based “publicly funded” ones they are considered just as untrustworthy, for the same reasons as fox, CNN, NYT, etc.

What are these same reasons? NPR and Fox are similarly untrustworthy because what?

The article spells it out rather nicely: 18% of republicans trust the news. While 43% of Democrats don’t.

Most of this mistrust is coming from the right, despite what many ppl like to claim, NPR isn’t objective or impartial they’re fairly solidly left. All the “institutions” that many like to think are giants in the media are really pretty much just mouth pieces for one side’s politics, the right has Fox News and the left has NPR, NYT, etc. They’re both distrusted by opposing sides for the same reason: they don’t report the news.

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