Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

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>Constant articles and such with very little data. Very frustrating as a reader.

Very personal opinion ahead (and not tailored to this specific topic): that's most journalism for you. They're not here to "inform the citizen" as a noble mission. Most of the things the press publishes are greatly exaggerated and dramatic to evoke different emotions to the reader which are closely tied to an agenda. The fix is IMHO easy: stop consuming such media once you find such disparities instead of reading again and again about the same and other topics, because they'll most likely lie/exaggerate in everything else and at the end, you'll be happier and better informed by not filling your memory with bs.

Edit: typo with->which

I don't think that this is a particularly controversial opinion now. A decade ago, maybe. Half a century ago, certainly. But now, in 2022, I think that you could probably find even objective evidence that the median quality of journalism has significantly declined and moved from objective facts to cherry-picking emotionally-laden stories to push a narrative.

Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt "advocacy over reporting" models, where they don't aim to be journalists in the original source of the word, but paid propaganda subscriptions.

(yeah, yeah, there are economic incentives to do so - but there are also economic incentives to make shoddy, low-quality products and cheat your customers in other realms, and yet it's still wrong)

> Some news companies have even started to explicitly adopt "advocacy over reporting" models, where they don't aim to be journalists in the original source of the word, but paid propaganda subscriptions.

This is a positive development. The problem is when motives are concealed, as in "objective" journalism.

Is it reasonable to assume that if a publishing or media company is owned by a parent company, and that parent company has financial stakes in other industries, the parent company might pressure or incentivize a specific headline narrative to benefit their other financial stakes?

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