Hacker News Reader

Comment by WesternWind | Hacker News Reader

It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead.

Journalists should be doing investigations and creating reports that put social and political issues in context. Yet so often these issues, real issues that affect lives, are treated as political theater or a public sport.

I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.

As a result, when I read the news I pay special attention to stories that are based on original investigations, public records requests, whistleblowers, or stories in which actual context is provided from multiple viewpoints that are informed by the facts, rather than merely by self interest.

View on HN

> It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed. Fact checking liars or misleading statements is tedious, and some politicians lie or mislead....

> I can't blame journalists for the politicians lying or misleading, but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed, instead of the hard ones they have to look for or put together.

It's worth noting that journalism in general has had its revenue streams decimated by Craigslist, clickbait, subscriber loss due to competing with free, etc. Except for very few prestige outlets, most media outlets have been forced to shrink their newsrooms, year after year, for a couple decades. Even though the prestige outlets are healthier, they're not so healthy as to be able to pick up all the slack.

It's easy to criticize someone for not doing as thorough a job as you'd like, but it's not very reasonable when that person is the last man standing from a team of ten, and the team's workload has increased in the meantime.

That's absolutely fair; I was overly harsh and blamed journalists instead of editors and owners. I'm sorry.

I also believe journalists, like a lot of middle class folks squeezed by changes in the economy, should be paid and funded better, and I try to spend or send some money towards that, even though I'm between jobs.

If that's not something whoever reads this does, $60 bucks is 5 dollars a month, and if you have a job or enough saved, you might invest in investigative reporting.

Here's a list of some non-profits that produce real journalism. Can't vouch for them all, but ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and Reveal are great.

https://mediablog.prnewswire.com/2018/01/17/non-profit-inves...

I think we are in a transitional period of journalism which is why it is so crazy right now.

Old type publications are competing with clickbait and a million other attention grabbing things online, and have to go down that route as well. The more outrageous the better. That incentive doesn't create good journalism.

In the meantime the market is correcting with things like substack, thank god people like Matt Taibbi and a few others can actually do quality journalism there. Something like substack I think will eventually win out in the quality journalism market.

But it takes time. A lot of people still believe big name publications like the NYT are where quality information comes from. It takes time for markets to change.

Why do you blame journalists rather than media owners? Do you believe this is a change brought about by journalists themselves?

Whether or not management has approved of or nudged this change it's clear from the rhetoric of journalists discussing journalism that over the last decade or two they have gone from thinking of themselves has having a duty to simply inform the public to having a duty to engage in discretionary inclusion/omission lest the public draw the wrong conclusion.

Journalism is reaping the "people are idiots, gotta protect them from themselves" ideology we've been actively sowing since at least the 1990s.

Managers manage. Nobody nudges a McDonalds fry chef into making you a burger with subtle hints of approval. They either do it of they are fired.

Journalists also do as they are told with the resources and time they are granted by capital.

It just turns out that once print newspapers died out it wasnt very profitable to engage in deep, thoughtful or investigative journalism so journalists rarely get paid for it - no matter how valuable it would be for the public.

Your comparison is ignorant of the realities of managing creative output (be it engineering or writing). There are only a few ways to cook a McDonalds Burger to spec. There are many ways to write passable articles or design passable widgets. Stuff like "don't publish stuff that embarrasses our investors" is easy to validate. Stuff like "can we focus more on leading readers to conclusions we like" is far more nebulous and requires either substantial and continuous effort or actual buy-in from the staff to make much effect. Considering that the conspiracy theories about big media trying to lead us down a particular path have been more or less unfounded the only option we're left with is that the changes in journalism are a reflection of the thousands of individual actors in that profession.

Have you ever talked to a journalist? You cant do much investigative journalism when you're doing the same number of beats 3 people did before and are pressured to produce the same output.

The economics of writing have changed. This was something done to journalists not by them.

> Whether or not management has approved of or nudged this change it's clear from the rhetoric of journalists discussing journalism that over the last decade or two they have gone from thinking of themselves has having a duty to simply inform the public to having a duty to engage in discretionary inclusion/omission lest the public draw the wrong conclusion.

A few years back, I had a coworker who was working his way though a journalism major express this attitude explicitly and uncritically as authoritative information passed to him in a class.

It was an eye opening moment for me, and had significant impacts for how I consumed media, and regarded higher education.

> It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed.

Journalists themselves do NO say that "keep the public informed" is their primary responsibility.

The dominant "why are you a journalist?" answer is "to change the world."

> It seems like many journalists are failing in their primary responsibilities to keep the public informed.

I would argue that that is not their primary responsibility. That is, in fact, to put food on the table.

Journalists are not well paid and, more importantly, are easily replaceable. "Real journalism" is hard, but makes no money, while pop-journalism is very easy and profitable. So media companies demand and pay for pop-journalism. And that can be done by far too many people.

So blaming them for doing what they need to do to get paid when doing "real journalism" will get them fired is... pointless.

> but I can blame them for so often going for the easy stories that they are fed

It's hard for me to blame anyone who needs to put food on the table. Journalism isn't a benevolent profession, people need to get paid. Until money gets disconnected from this profession, I don't think it's ever going to be fair to say "why can't these people be ethical?".

Surely that is true of all professions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com