Opinion: Remember reading the paper?

The title "Restricted access to accurate news accountable for political divide" is utterly misleading. First, it's not the title of the linked article, which is an opinion piece. There is zero research or data in the linked piece to support the conclusion in the title, and I highly doubt that if the NY Times or Washington Post did away with their pay walls that the political divide would go away.

A perceived decline of quality in Newsweek certainly intersected with my grandparents' turn towards Fox News in the late '90s. But there's a lot more to it. I spent years on the tail end of that shift trying to convince them that NPR was relatively even-handed only for NPR to doom that effort right when it started to take hold with goofy scandals and a stream of new programming that embraced being perspective-centric. (Inability to report with an objective and even hand about guns didn't help NPR, either. They say news stories about things you're familiar with always seem atrocious. I've definitely witnessed it with tech stories in mainstream news. But it tends to be extra atrocious with guns, I guess because a lot of folks find the topic rather visceral.)

I also have found that otherwise relatively interesting writing in all kinds of sources has become less family shareable over the years as edginess and expletives have penetrated more and more quarters. I wish people would write more opinion pieces to be shareable with grandma instead of raising hackles for the sake of it.

I feel like the real problem is that the lines between editorials (opinion pieces) and hard news has been blurred to such a significant enough degree that I think many people fail to even realize the difference anymore.

Interestingly, this is on NPR, a publicly funded source. I think that would go a long way towards alleviating this problem (perhaps through taxes on those giant corporations that have locked down local and national media), though of course needing strict separation from the source. I don't think that would be the hard part so much as the will to do it, or more likely the will to overcome the lobbying and big money in this arena.

I cannot physically force people to read or listen to real, accurate information. And rarely would a news outlet ever be referenced as an accurate, authoritative source.

A lack of lived experience is the reason for the divide. Journalists are all upper class and largely clueless what it takes to survive as a blue collar worker. You don't trust people who get the basics wrong constantly to get anything else right.

What really kills me about the news paywalls is that there's still ads behind them!

I subscribe to the Boston Globe and every article has unrelated low rent scam ads for junk on them. Just let pay the extra 50¢ or whatever those ads are worth.

Honesty just paying for stuff would make so much of the internet better.

Title probably needs a tweak - "policial"?

I read the news on a government funded news website a few times a week. They're great, as both "sides" of politics argue they're a biased source for the other side, so they're probably fairly neutral.

This was an opinion piece, not really hard news, and it begs the question as it were by assuming that some news sources are "accurate" and other are not. I think that a more easily verified test of quality -- or perhaps worthiness of my attention, anyway -- is this: Does a purported news organization have a journalistic code of ethics (don't pay sources, &c.), a history of enforcing that code, and an easy-to-find corrections page on the Web? I want my media diet coming from those sources that admit error, publish corrections, and hold their reporters accountable to a standard. And from those that do appear to do these things, I can make selections that seem to support an empirical approach to the truth and an abhorrence of patent nonsense. (Do they have a science denier on their op-ed page, like the NYT? Do they sponsor events featuring Deepak Chopra, like the Atlantic? No thanks.)

It is also amusing that NPR is not behind a paywall.

This posted by an organization that restricts access to facts in order to make its news match a desired narrative. How delightfully ironic.

It's food for thought that perhaps quality journalism is found behind paywalls but we all know how to get past the paywalls. Yet perhaps this has lowered competition? Needs more work at depth to discover here.

Let's look at the facts:

Fox news during the Hanity/oreilly era was pretty awful. They saw this criticism and worked at fixing their journalistic failures. Today on the otherhand you have people like Tucker carlsen who bring their guest on and basically shut their mouth(well not in tucker's case, kind of hangs open) but they dont talk over or cut anyone off. Look at that reddit antiwork stuff, they just let the idiot mod talk to their own grave. That's what journalists are supposed to do. You can have your monologues but if you bring a guest on, let the guest talk.

Flipside, now you have CNN people like don lemon who cut the mic on people all the time. Don lemon is basically operating like Oreilly and it's pathetic. Overall just proving what we already know, those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.

Yet I use a few examples, but those don't explain the industry. We have clearly re-entered yellow journalism recently. Lots of clickbait and fake news was a thing but only recently did we really transition to yellow journalism. CNN and MSNBC used to have great reputations but not today. Which is a huge problem because journalism's only quality assurance is their reputation.

Setting aside all of the other issues with this opinion piece's thesis, it is odd that it is coming from NPR, one of several news sources funded by public donation that are free to listen to/browse to/watch. Are they saying NPR doesn't count as accurate news?

Any idea presented here is lost in their biased world view: Only the "rich" who are "left-leaning" can afford "accurate information". While the poor conservatives, who once were able to use their "pocket change" to buy tabloids, are now relegated to free "disinformation".

For me, the problem isn't the paywalls, I can easily devtools my way around those. The problem is that the "accurate news" has gone completely off the deep end. Since around 2013, the traditional news sources, NPR included, have decided to adopt a highly race-based viewpoint, obsessively injecting race into every conceivable topic. Feel free to take a look at the charts, it's indisputable fact: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

It wasn't always like this - I remember a time when the internet was a far more peaceful place, before all this crap started getting shoveled in peoples faces. The polarization since 2013, and Trump, is a direct result of this change in my view. Only god knows what the hell happened to these organizations, but until they hold back on the ridiculous race bait, the political divide will only get worse and worse.

My measure for a "good source" has changed over time:

1. No news outlet is without bias, but the very least I expect is for them to address other popular points of view (irrespective of what I or others think about them).

2. At least the text version can be accessed without a pay wall. A pay wall is not the proper model for monetization, it prevent discoverability and organic growth.

3. They do original investigative journalism, and not just read tweets. If the news article is reporting on social media, they should make the effort to reach out for comment.

4. Does not use standard pieces of news that are mass published without transformation. I should not be able to search for the headline and find 20+ identical articles - it shows zero effort went into processing the material.

5. Does not have a conflict of interest between their investors and the news they report on. You cannot trust the news companies owned by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, etc, to report on the people that fund them.

6. Does not politicize individuals who are not publicly known. A random person who makes a bad tweet does not deserve to be mobbed on the national/international scale.

7. Does not defame or add framing further than what is obvious (or at least minimizes it).

Maybe there are some others I forget.

Some smaller non-mainstream news sources that come close (in my opinion) are Spiked [1] and Quillette [2]. They generally tend to be critical of all positions and range somewhere around the centralist position on most topics.

[1] https://www.spiked-online.com/

[2] https://quillette.com/

I started paying for New York Times and Bloomberg - using devtools to circumvent paywalls doesn't work when using phones - I really enjoy the quality and depth of reporting. But I am sad that they're "likely" left-only views on all topics, which means its not that useful for many topics to be shared with many people. Even trying to share non-political topics that I simply enjoyed can have an issue when the publication is New York Times.

Its the same reaction I would likely have to someone sharing a random no-name conservative blog or even Fox News.

So I wish there were more news sources with a history of being reputable that also didn't accumulate partisan baggage when they got afraid that the other side would get power. It seems irreconcilable since New York publications and capital have such a long head start on reach and growth and relationships.

ESH

There was always a political divide.

What’s new is Americans killing each other over it.

The polarization is extreme in part because news sources now need clicks to survive, and Outrage gets more clicks than reason.

End result is some Americans become so outraged they loot and burn cities and in some cases, kill. And seemingly, their peer pole finds the mayhem understandable.

That’s what’s new.