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Comment by thr0wawayf00 | Hacker News Reader

> I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything.

The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it.

It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.

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For those that have been alive long enough to witness the transition, the internet shift to clickbait is just continuing a trend that was ushered in by 24 hour news cycles.

News being "all the time" is the true villain here. When news was infrequent and on a schedule, stories had to compete for relevance and often wouldn't dominate airtime and our thoughts nearly as much as today.

Yep, “breaking news” used to mean “major disaster” or item of major import.

Now it just means “something we found out happening now and don’t have a lot of information about, but a couple of Tweeters “report” blah blah blah…

I'm of the belief that news networks shouldn't be legally allowed to call their channels "news" for 18 hours out of the day.

I disagree. I think that the 24-hour news cycle does contribute to the problem, absolutely. However, the critical aspect you're forgetting here is that the internet conditioned us to not pay for content because the ability to distribute content became commoditized. Once that happened, one of the largest sources of revenue for print publications disappeared, which forced print publications to rely more on ads, and therefore stories with headlines that drove more ad impressions (i.e. clickbait).

Newspapers were always funded mostly by ads. You could argue that internet ads are worse than print ads because tracking, but I don't see that argument here. Newspaper headlines, particularly on the front page, have always been designed to catch the eye. Cable news has many of the same features.

Classifieds were a big portion of income. Craigslist effectively killed that in the mid 90s. It's been a slow steady decline to stay solvent. They had to switch to the "print what your audience wants to read," type of infotainment. Emotion, particularly fear is very effective to keep asses in seats (and eyes on screens).

I occasionally like to go back 10 years or so and read some of the ridiculous fear mongering of the time, now that it's well out of context.

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...

I think you nailed it.

Everything was moving to this direction for a long time, but having 24 hours news let people optimize such headlines faster than before, and the internet made it possible to optimize millions of headlines.

This is a trend that’s been existing for a while, and since now we have better tools to experiment as a society the progress of this trend is accelerating.

Yup, they should all be abolished. We're not meant to know what is happening on the other side of the country. We don't need to, otherwise it takes up precious mind space. Being "well-informed" is a lie sold to us by these channels.

This is also my suspicion, although I've heard that NYT's subscriptions are doing as well as they've ever done and while I wouldn't describe NYT's journalism as "click-bait", they've certainly engaged in more than their share of overt ideological propagandism (which isn't unique to them, but part of a landscape shift away from aspirationally objective reporting).

> overt ideological propagandism

As an outsider watching from across the ocean, the 2016 election (the race itself and its media coverage, I'm not talking about the result) really hurt you guys.

The NYT still does world-class journalism, but not even a paper with that kind of rock-solid journalistic tradition fully recovered from the moralistic crusade it had become.

I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.

IDK if NYT has ever touched on a subject where you have insider knowledge, but it did to me. They framed and flavoured politically and event which was a result of purely technical decisions.

NYT has also published pieces about my country that I'd hardly could classify as any other thing than undisguised activism.

So I remain very skeptical. It seems to me that there's a wave of new journalism culture in all the west that it's not being challenged from the inside.

Here in Spain journalist make their ocassional reunions, interviews and stuff and they moan of the low consideration people have about them, then they go back to their seats to write or record what is basically political activism.

When I was in high school, I was near proximity to some kids that CNN did the same thing to. They took what would've been potentially a decent, local, investigative story and juiced it. How? They baited kids, who didn't know these other kids or the events they were involved in, directly outside of my high school into saying something for the news report. The average viewer would never know all those kids they interviewed had no knowledge of what they were talking about and it has since flavored how I receive these "nightly reports".

Same thing for me, except with the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Italian, I know full well what you're talking about, I have zero sympathy for "the public doesn't trust us" type of lamentations because, guess what, it's their own fault.

What I'm saying is that papers like the NYT were at least trying to separate facts from opinions in their reporting. It's just painful to see such a healthy tradition become overshadowed by the political trend du jour.

But are they? I dont read NYT often but everytime I do I'm able to identify the frame withouth much difficulty.

Journalists have to write about everything, and they arent experts at anything. My hypothesis is thqt the lazyiest of em just become activists and make this a way of life.

If you have any doubt about this, write any of the most common names in major publications in google and try find their twitter.

Having good information is very difficult, and it typically involves paying for it, or accessing specialist publications, or niche ones.

It is one of those unconfortable truths.

2015-2016 was the breaking point for me. Not an ounce of impartial journalism, they just wore their political ideology on their sleeve with no shame and did everything they could to support their position. They weren't reporting news, they were just pushing whatever propaganda they needed to prop up their ideology. I haven't watched mainstream media a single time since sometime in 2016, and don't plan to again. They lost my trust and I assume it would be many years and would require fundamental changes before I'd consider listening to them again, they're completely corrupt at this point in my mind.

> I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.

Cheerleading the Iraq War did it, for me. Especially for the NYT, but media generally. I sincerely wish them all the worst.

Then again, journalists as stock characters in fiction have been morally grey at best for just about all of the 20th century, at least, and I think to a substantial degree before that, too. I'm not sure where the idea that journalists have typically been, or been regarded as, forthright and virtuous, in the past, came from. The whole thing seems like a fiction built on a very few examples from a narrow time period (Cronkite's usually cited, for example)

I hear a lot of variations of "the media was never perfect", which is true in a strict sense, but dishonesty comes in degrees and that's what we're debating. In particular, while I did grow up with the media cheerleading the Iraq War, mostly that was just citing "intelligence sources". Now the media overtly lies about the contents of publicly available content (e.g., the Damore "Google Memo" or the Covington Catholic video) or it has a journalist wearing a gas mask standing in front of a burning police station with a "Mostly Peaceful Protest" caption underneath.

Maybe my formative years were part of a relative anomaly in journalistic history--maybe journalists were always ideologically homogeneous propagandists and the last decade is naught but a return to form. In whichever case I know from experience it doesn't have to be that way and I emphatically reject the backslide.

2016 is when the majority of US news stopped trying to have any pretense of objectivity. I'd put the start of the slide closer to 2005 as a response to Bush winning re-election and calming of the post 9/11 fervor.

Shortly after Trump won, there was a round table interview with different journalists from various media on NPR. They essentially all agreed that it was their duty to make Trump look as bad as possible, though they worded it slightly less audaciously. I distinctly remember them saying that they should no longer be objective.

I think to those on the right the last few years really opened their eyes to how much bias there is in journalism. I wish more people on the left noticed it as well, though I’m sure some did.

Either way, I’m surprised nobody has taken the opportunity to start a news source that actually attempts to be objective. Maybe it’s impossible, or maybe people just don’t want it…but I do.

NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy.

And you wonder why taxpayers have to foot their bills.

IMO, NPR has drifted even farther leftward in the last decade. They used to be pretty middle-of-the-road liberal, but now they strike me as some woke variety of left-wing (a person's identity is paramount, tells you everything you need to know about their experiences, etc).

IMHO, the closest you'll find is 'Real Clear Politics'.

RCP prints outrageous stories from both sides of the aisle. They don't try to find the center, they give you both sides.

> there was a round table interview with different journalists from various media on NPR. They essentially all agreed that it was their duty to make Trump look as bad as possible, though they worded it slightly less audaciously. I distinctly remember them saying that they should no longer be objective.

Sorry but …you're gonna to have to back that up with pointer to some kind of records of this event .

I'd love to, but this was years ago and I wouldn't even know where to look.

I share your perspective about a ~2016 inflection point, but the cracks were showing even earlier. I remember in ~2014 things like the Michael Brown shooting coverage across the board parroted activists' talking points which were invariably and conclusively disproven by the evidence (MB wasn't shot in the back as he ran away, etc). This isn't a wider commentary on BLM, although I think BLM coverage provides a really interesting perspective on media coverage. This is all to say that the phenomenon isn't fully explained by Trump, although I think the phenomenon really accelerated as a result of Trump (I'm not positing a causal relationship, if I had to speculate I'd guess it's an intense feedback loop).

From some articles I've read[1], and discussions I've had (aka mostly anecdata) I really think that it's because views among journalists are changing. They view "just the facts" as potentially misleading because just the facts can lead to incorrect conclusions. Adding in color words that have a touch of opinion/speculation in them is ok if it helps the reader to reach the correct conclusion. Tis is also coupled with a strong sense of moral obligation on the part of journalists to lead people to the right conclusions.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-...

But that requires that the journalist knows what the right conclusions are. They're skeptical about other peoples' claims; they're not nearly skeptical enough about their own positions.

2016 was an inflection point because we had a particular candidate that built a movement that weaponized disinformation and falsehoods. Legacy media continually boosted Trump's profile as a curiosity, and was hesitant to outright call these falsehoods what they were, attempting to stick to outmoded journalistic norms that worked for politicians who only perform relatively minor deceptions.

The reckoning was indeed severe, but it was deserved.

Not sure why you were downvoted. What you said is absolutely true. Washington Post kept a lie tally for Trump and when he left office, the tally was close to 30K lies[1].

Also completely agree that the "both sides" coverage did not work as intended.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-fa...

Can't speak for others, but I downvoted because the OP's explanation is absurd. Yes, Trump's absolutely a liar, but the absurdity lies in the claim that the media's "outmoded norms" (i.e., honesty, objectivity, neutrality, etc) inhibited it from calling out Trump's lies is ridiculous. Honesty doesn't inhibit an institution from pointing out one side's lies, on the contrary, honesty demands it. However, honesty also demands pointing out the other side's lies, and therein lies the rub.

Apparently the NYT grew by 400% during Trump's presidency. They fully took advantage of the opportunity.

Correction: they actually tripled their subscribers and hired more staff from 2016-2020, not quadrupled.

> “The NYT still does world-class journalism…”

that’s ambiguously overstated. perhaps 1% of nyt journalism is “world-class”, meaning well-researched, investigative, and impactful. 99% is of the “moralistic crusade” kind of journalism, trying to influence the popular sentiment, rather than reporting on it.

and while 2016 was an inflection point, it’s certainly been on a longer slide, observable during the 2008 financial crisis and somewhat before that.

The best sign of click bait is posting obviously false, inflammatory articles and then silently putting out a retraction days later after the clicks have come in.

The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.

I think we have different notions of "clickbait". Personally I think NYT's particular brand of dishonesty is a bit more subtle than what I normally think of as "clickbait", but I won't argue the point. They are certainly and frequently guilty of publishing overt falsehoods and then quietly retracting (or even stealth-editing) days or weeks later.

Did they publish falsehoods knowingly? Every news source is going to make mistakes and retracting the story is normal.

Yes. The example that springs to mind (and I get downvoted without explanation every time I mention this, so goodbye Internet Points) was the Covington Catholic affair--the still photo of the kid in a MAGA hat apparently smugly smirking at a Native American elder (the media reported that he was a Vietnam veteran which was an outright falsehood). The whole of the media developed the same narrative around the still photo which was directly contradicted by a widely-circulated, publicly available 2 hour video. The narrative was that some racist white kids disrespected a Native American elder while the 2 hour video makes it clear that kids had been subjected to a lengthy racist and homophobic tirade.

I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:

>Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial.

and then a link to an article from the very next day[2] explaining what happened in fuller detail after more videos came out.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-hig... [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...

I'm not sure what point you're making. Your observations are all consistent with the "overt falsehood followed by quiet retraction" claim. Are you quibbling about "days later" versus "day later" with respect to the retraction?

> I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is:

That was added later, hence the italics.

Perhaps the avid reader would say that they are most disappointed in papers like the NYT. You cannot really be disappointed by FOX or CNN. Different medium, but I think it still applies.

This is all true, but the key point here is that NYT is one of, if not the most, valuable brand in US print media. They had the money to hire a world-class engineering team to pioneer the print news experience online (the creator of D3js and Svelte have both held engineering positions there), but the vast majority of print publications did not. It's not really accurate to extrapolate NYT's digital success across print media as a whole.

>The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines.

Nah anyone old enough knows this shift happened with cable news and a shift to 24/7 news. You cannot find enough content to make that interesting without filling it full of sensationalist bs. This was an issue far before the internet was a ever a major news source.

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