Hacker News Reader

Comment by neurobot123 | Hacker News Reader

The polarization is mostly between those who trust mainstream media and those who don’t.

Not sure what can be done with media pushing disinformation for political reasons, any regulation there would risk violating the 1st amendment.

View on HN

>> any regulation there would risk violating the 1st amendment.

Perhaps, but its a risk the US took for decades (1938 - 1985) and the political climate was less divisive during that period. You can't say "nothing can be done" when things can and have been done that we don't do anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

What is interesting is the loss of the "commons," here. Even if we brought back the fairness doctrine, in practice the fragmentation of the media landscape would still drive a different style of discourse. We aren't going to go back to 3 national news broadcasts.

And the justification for the doctrine extended the same way. It didn't regulate newspapers for example. Because the airways aren't privately owned, but rather leased from the public, the doctrine was considered more a regulation of this common space, than a regulation on speech on general.

The Fairness Doctrine existed only because broadcast spectrum was finite. It never applied to other types of media.

You are right. But there is still a finite radio broadcast spectrum we don't apply this to, and a finite number of cable channels, a finite number of social media platforms, search engines or browsers with a million users, etc.

I am not saying something like that is a good idea. I am saying that to throw your hands up and say nothing can be done is not accurate. A lot of times people say you can't regulate a thing because you can't regulate every possible instance. But by that logic we shouldn't have stop signs because people run through them everyday. Yet stop signs are important.

There is no limit on the number of cable channels, social media platforms, search engines, or browsers. Anyone can create more. Unlike with RF spectrum there are no fundamental physical limits.

Sure, go start a browser or a cable channel and tell me how that goes.

> The polarization is mostly between those who trust mainstream media and those who don’t.

I don't think your statement is complete.

The polarisation is about truth. Is science true? Is what $Politician says true? Is $NewsReport true?

A common standard for honesty, education -- and maybe even decency -- seems to have disappeared.

The only real brake on some people's behaviour appears to be when they suffer socio-economic consequences. But being part of a large faction is an effective buffer.

The mainstream media is very much part of the problem. For example, both the idea that the US could've avoided a substantial proportion of those pandemic-related deaths and people's beliefs about how it could've done so are the result of systematic, partisan misinformation by trusted publications like the New York Times about how the US compares to other countries, what those other countries have been doing, how well it works, the actual evidence for stuff like vaccines and masks, and so on. (One thing that stood out to me lately is that their readers evidently think Europe did much better, from the comments section - and it's obvious why, because pretty much the only comparisons with Europe the NYT publishes are ones that make the US look bad, and if they flip the other way it stops publishing them.)

Some of this unfortunately leaked into the narrative here in the UK, like the stupid idea that the reason we were failing was because our incompetent government couldn't achieve South Korean levels of mass testing - something which the media kept pushing even after their actual level of Covid testing fell massively behind the US and UK, and even after it became clear that their test and trace wasn't nearly as effective at controlling Covid as the media spin claimed.

What are the measures by which the US is doing better than continental Europe? What are some things the NYT was publishing but stopped publishing when they didn't fit the defeatist storyline?

I don't doubt that partisan propaganda spread as news is among the chief reasons the US is at war with itself right now, but you lose me when you pick the NYT as the chief culprit.

Overall, the US seems to be doing about as well as continental Europe in ways that actually matter, like deaths. What the NYT did was cherry-picking figures - for example, for a while last winter they kept comparing Spanish cases to Florida cases to downplay the Spanish wave as less bad, even though the trajectory of the Spanish outbreak was much scarier, and then suddenly forgot about that comparison when Spain passed them. (The Spanish press pointed out that their outbreak was worse than the US based on the NYT's metric and described it as such, which is partly how I noticed it happen.) I think that was a replacement for some other, broader comparison between the US and Europe they dropped earlier on after it stopped making the US look bad. It was really blatant too - they kept on reusing the same comparisions week after week as the gap gradually narrowed, and then when it would've flipped poof that metric went away.

Similarly, they stopped comparing the actual per-capita level of Covid testing in South Korea and the USA when the US passed them and not only started using meaningless metrics like test postivity (the two countries had... very different ideas on who to test, which didn't include most people with symptoms in South Korea) but outright claimed it was a lie to say the US was now the country doing more Covid testing using the swapped metric. I'm pretty sure there were quite a few others too which I've forgotten about or just missed. Haven't really been following their reporting so much lately.

US compared to EU countries in CIVID deaths per capita [1].

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri...

The constant transitions in the narrative about Sweden are perhaps a good example.

At first it was "Sweden has become the world's cautionary tale", and "a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns".

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...

Then Sweden dropped to the bottom of the rankings in both Europe and the world for deaths. It did much better than the UK and America. Suddenly it's not got any lessons for the world anymore, and when it's mentioned at all it's only to tell us that for unclear reasons it can't be compared to anything except its direct neighbours. Then Baltic states did worse than Sweden so the narrative became, you can't compare to anything except a cherry-picked list of specifically Scandinavian states.

The media is a major, major driving force of political polarization everywhere, because it acts as a firehose of ideological propaganda. It's not even the stories you see that's the biggest problem. It's the things they know about but never tell you, in case it'd make you doubt your commitment to the journalist's ideology.

I can't recall if it was satirical news article, photoshopped meme, or real thing, but it went something like this:

> AMISH COMMUNITY UNAFFECTED BY COVID-19 > Reporters asked a local community member how they have avoided the deadly pandemic despite interacting with known carriers. The man responded, "We don't have Internet or TV."

> One thing that stood out to me lately is that their readers evidently think Europe did much better, from the comments section - and it's obvious why...

People who post in comments sections are a tiny unrepresentative subset of readers.

In my experience, the NYT comment section is mostly filled with garbage by partisans who cannot tolerate or process anything except that which fits their chosen perspective. For proof, just read comments attached to opinion articles by their token non-liberals. I don't think anything of value can be inferred from such a self-selected dysfunctional group.

I think you're projecting.

citation needed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com