Hacker News Reader

> Opinion pieces are strewn throughout regular news links, and that really cheapens the brand of news delivery they had.

We lost some real valuable metadata about news from the print era, opinion pieces were limited to Column 1 and the last few pages of section A in most major publications. They were sometimes even in a different font. You knew instinctively that the content you were reading was held to a different standard than the main content.

It would really help if we somehow bring that metadata back in a video and online environment.

I think this is why some people have made whole successful careers in sub-niches of curated news: John Oliver, Fareed Zakaria, etc. etc.

When you watch something that one of them makes, they (or someone connected to them) have creative control over the curation, and it gets attached to their reputation.

So, if I hear something on CNN, I have near zero indication about its quality. As a result, I don't read or watch CNN literally ever, unless some other curated source refers it to me for some reason.

But if I watch John Oliver or Fareed Zakaria, I know there's going to be a much higher than usual standard for quality of curation, analysis, interest/relevance, etc.

While I don't necessarily agree that either of those examples are free from having an agenda, I would absolutely agree that they present a clearer picture and are of a higher quality than CNN or most news outlets in their comprehensiveness.

What I find concerning is the way, through omission or contrivance, these 'full picture' opinion news media organizations can manipulate the storyline for their agenda and also leave you feeling fully informed. Zakaria and Oliver being in reality organizations and not a sole, independent report. NPR being the most notable version with a distinct slant on the news. To the extent that through a day's listening, a recognizable story arc is defined. Often with tension and resolution, so that the audience feels they have challenged their beliefs, but have ultimately been proven correct in their presuppositions.

Fascinating and terrible things.

Oh, I just reread what I wrote. I didn't mean to suggest they were neutral sources! Just that they were examples of when you watch something they make, you know what you're getting! That was supposed to be analogous to the opinion section in a newspaper or something.

> To the extent that through a day's listening, a recognizable story arc is defined. Often with tension and resolution, so that the audience feels they have challenged their beliefs, but have ultimately been proven correct in their presuppositions.

Good observation. Even if there's nothing nefarious going on, this is not a great situation.

I like the FT's color cues: opinion pieces are marked with blue quotation marks on the homepages, the author's name in blue for shorter links (contrasting with the dark red category label used for regular articles), and a blue header with the author's photo on the article itself.

"held to a different standard"

Not just that, the newspaper edutorial staff might strongly disagree with the content on those pages. They published it as someone's opinion, not necessarily their opinion.

That seems to be a lost art. When Tom Cotton wrote an opinion piece for the NYT, the editor who ran it was gone in a few days. Yikes.

>Their pages are overrun by ads and even pop-ups now and that makes them really look like a tabloid.

True, true! But some engineer there still maintains https://lite.cnn.com/ :-) Also relevant: https://text.npr.org/ https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news

CNN’s is the worse of the three, with respect to switching from the full site to the text version. With NPR and CBC, you look at both URLs for the same story and what needs to change is clear. With CNN’s, no clue.

> Opinion pieces are strewn throughout regular news links

Sometimes I wonder if some folks want news, or just something to confirm their biases.

Most political positions are really about group membership and we want to read things that re-affirm that we belong to those groups. The easiest way to do this is to attack some "other".

It's really just exploiting our biological tribal mentality. It'll never go away.

The most uncomfortable of ignored truths

This is a platitude that gets parroted way too often. It's like saying the highest function of humanity is eating and shitting

The point of a political position is catalyzing political change, developing consensus, and holding interest groups accountable. Reducing news or politics in general to sensationalism just encourages disengagement

Sometimes I wonder if folks want nutritious food, or just potato chips.

It's the same sort of thing, I think. There's what we say we want, and there's how we behave, but (what is often lost on advertisers) how we behave is not always an indication of what we actually want. I'll eat potato chips, but I really do want nutritious food.

It's funny, I would phrase it as I really want potato chips, but I'll eat nutritious food.

I swing violently between the two, and it has little bearing on what I actually eat.

99+% of news is useless or redundant to most people so it’s only really consumed as entertainment either way.

Imagine if they keep reusing headlines “Trump made a tweet that offended someone news at 11” could have been run hundreds of time slanted to the left or right but was it ever actually important for either side?

It used to not be this way...

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

Fairness doctrine made sense at the time because broadcast spectrum was a very scarce resource. When cable and Internet are available to disseminate a broad range of viewpoints, it's no longer necessary for the FCC to be involved in regulating speech.

That brings in the assumption that there will be a perfectly heterogeneous and broad range of viewpoints and not perhaps just a handful of viewpoints that serve to enrich a few people. Looking at the world today we really don't have that broad of viewpoints despite all of our connectivity. Comment sections play out identically when a given topic comes up on different forums. You can predict what the positions will be without even opening the thread, and if you offer an opinion that runs counter expect to be snuffed out by the majority opinions that have real marketing dollars fueling them.

> we really don't have that broad of viewpoints despite all of our connectivity

If anything, it is now easier to chop down any tall poppies or non conformists.

> When cable and Internet are available to disseminate a broad range of viewpoints, it's no longer necessary for the FCC to be involved in regulating speech.

This opinion is more modern than the legacy "ill listen to any news even if it offends me"

FCC Fairness in boardcasting was not regulating speech by the way, it is closer to defining guidelines for the meaning of libel in the context of authoritative news broadcast on airwaves that at the time were federally regulated.

Human attention is still a scarce resource.

To be honest, the fairness doctrine mostly meant that:

1. Every issue had exactly two sides (same as current dogma).

2. Every "bad" take from the "wrong" side would be aired to nobody, in the middle of the night.

It was a political weapon just as much as removing it was a political weapon.

Way back then there tended to be the same news, more or less, on every channel. Sure, you might prefer or avoid Walter Cronkite's "unhinged" op-eds on Vietnam, but that was about as different as it got.

Here's a liberal view of Cronkite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCdXVWsTpSM

There is plenty of news that is relevant and important. It's just that people simply don't care. How many people here know the name of their state representatives or city councillors, let alone what they vote for? I certainly don't.

> I certainly don't.

Are you a physicist? Because surely you're joking.

Dear downvoter: Your book collection sucks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!

If people don't care, then by definition it's not relevant...to them. This lack of interest may not be in their best interest, but that's on them.

I'm not anti-news but at the same time acknowledge that you can ignore 99% of news without it directly affecting your life. Even if you'd go on this news diet, anything of real importance will find its way to you anyway.

Then there's also what's readily and apparently available to us... We know we don't want potato chips all the time, but we only have one store, and it offers two brands of potato chips, and no other food.

So not only can we choose to eat potato chips while saying we want better, but we can be forced to either eat it or starve.

This is a great analogy. I'd like to unnecessarily add that the store then tells us that potato chips are from potatoes, which is a vegetable and therefore healthy. It's important to stay informed! (with our product). Democracy dies in darkness! (buy our product to prevent democracy from dying?!).

I think this is the difference between two kinds of "wanting", the id kind and the superego kind. We want the chips because they taste good. We want the nutritious food because we understand on a conceptual level that it is healthy. What we choose to eat in the end depends on how we balance these desires in the moment.

Insert analogies for the news as appropriate.

A lot of advertising and AI would just soon as believe that behavior is all that matters, and that akrasia doesn't exist.

True and what we want is in part conditioned by what is produced.

To complicate things further, CNN customers are not necessarily a cross section of "folks". So what works for CNN may not work for Fox may not work for the Wall Street Journal may not work for your local news.

Actually, I think the real reason there are so many opinion pieces is because they're much cheaper. They don't require resources for discovering the story. Personally I skip right past opinion pieces that are labeled as such, but I find so much of CNN's stories are so slanted they all read as opinion pieces.

I don't watch CNN much, but the format typically is, "story story story," (this is ok), then it's followed by, "here's so and so for more information." (this is a cut to opinion right after the story). I stop there.

>> Opinion pieces are strewn throughout regular news links

> Sometimes I wonder if some folks want news, or just something to confirm their biases.

Many people just want their biases confirmed, which is pretty clear if you ever take a look at newspaper comment sections.

Well if it confirmed someone else's biases it wouldn't be news, would it? It would be "propaganda."

Cable news rots brains. CNN, FOX, MSNBC, OAN... trash in, trash out. Personally I'd like to see the fairness doctrine reinstated. You don't get call yourself news when you're really an entertainment faux outrage machine.

The fairness doctrine never applied to cable in the first place, and would be fairly likely to be held as violating the First Amendment if you tried to expand it to do so (it would be a reasonably likely outcome merely from bringing back the old broadcast-only one, too).

> Personally I'd like to see the fairness doctrine reinstated

That's not going to help at all with online media as that's only broadcast licenses which to my knowledge only affects operators of a broadcast TV, Audio Radio (as in AM/FM/SSB/etc), or other radio station - meaning the internet, cable, and satellite (not sure how satellite broadcast licensing works) are unaffected by this. Also it only affects the holder - ie DishTV - not the channels themselves that DishTV is transmitting

And I have no idea how you adapt this for the internet - broadcast licenses were relatively hard to get, relatively expensive to operate, and generally unavailable to most people, edit: and had limited availability. With the internet anyone can make a blog for free in 5 minutes.

EDIT: I think you'll have a lot of 1st amendment problems here. To be honest I'm not sure how the FCC was allowed to do it. To my knowledge the FCC cannot enforce this for cable/internet - I think that would have to be the FTC. But I really doubt this be found to not violate the 1st amendment with the internet.

EDIT 2: > The courts reasoned that the scarcity of the broadcast spectrum, which limited the opportunity for access to the airwaves, created a need for the doctrine.

It looks like the supreme court at the time ruled that because of the limited number of broadcast stations it made sense for the FCC to regulate it in this manor. Because of the lack of scarcity of resources for the internet, I highly doubt the FTC would be allowed to do the same.

> EDIT: I think you'll have a lot of 1st amendment problems here.

> To be honest I'm not sure how the FCC was allowed to do it.

Amateur Radio Extra here. I have a tiny bit of insight into this.

Back in WW1, the radio spectrum became the property of the US military and the DoD actually "leases" spectrum to the federal government through the FCC.

The Fairness Doctrine was a handshake agreement with the political parties of the day and enforced by FCC policy. The FCC is the regulatory body for airwaves.

So the spectrum is a public good in the sense that it is 100% owned by the US military for military purposes and it only grants radio spectrum to the rest of the FCC that it doesn't care about. You can actually go to prison for using radio spectrum that you're not allowed to use (I have never actually heard of it happening...but it is theoretically possible).

Edit: I should also add, that 1st amendment rights DO NOT APPLY on the airwaves. The FCC has 100% control of regulating what you can and cannot say or do on them.

Using reddit as a gauge of public opinion blows my mind, especially coming from CNN whose industry means they should know better. People in entertainment and marketing love reddit, but they will tell you flat out its not because of it being a measure of public opinion, but of it being an excellent marketing tool with many opportunities and successes. Its not hard to get a few posts viral in a niche interest subreddit, and have your product practically ordained by the community as a result. It's a marketers forum, and has been that way since the digg migration brought in plenty of fish, if not earlier.

> but in the age of social media,

I honestly doubt that social media has anything to do with it, but rather the consolidation of ownership of news sources over this same period of time and an ongoing desire to have very high ad sales rates while having rock bottom news room costs.

This is simply the result of that financial calculus playing out over the past two decades.

We don't want quality. We want dopamine.

Dopamine mattered less in the paper age, with the exception of the frontpage headline, but not even that mattered as most people had a subscription. Once this paper is in your possession, it frankly doesn't matter much which articles you decide to read, it's a package deal. Interestingly, and this behavior is important, you'd probably read a few articles you weren't super enticed to read, but you'll read them anyway since you paid for them. And thus your world view expands across topics, organically and almost accidentally.

That package deal is now cut up into tweet-like snacks, where each snack needs to entice you to read it. Unfortunately those playing on our weaknesses work best.

A cute cat performs better than a breakthrough paper on climate science.

Updates on the Kardashians outperform...anything.

Opinions outperform dry facts, both agreeable and disagreeable opinions.

Bad news outperforms good news.

Naturally, news adjusts to whatever people read the most. Which wasn't needed before (to this extreme degree), but it is now. Even very competent journalists that write excellent articles need to go on Twitter and with screenshots package the most triggering paragraph of the article, otherwise nobody will read it.

The other tragedy is the demise of truth or accuracy. As this doesn't matter on social media. The unreasonables always win and things move fast.

It's all part of the same attention economy dynamic that has infected every corner of digital media, from cable news to Web to mobile. It's a dopamine loop stuck on DEBILITATE

FYI, to your first point about ads and pop ups, you can use the lite version. It’s much faster.

https://lite.cnn.com/en

"Opinion pieces are strewn throughout regular news links"

This is one of my biggest pet peeves too.

I still only really enjoy reading the FT consistently overall, and The Hill for political news reporting (their op-ed section is 76978726435278 trash fires converging, but their actual journalism stays solid) and a handful of others sparingly, but every major cable news outlet (and certainly all the overtly partisan outlets like Breitbart and Palmer Report) I simply have avoided for years due to its insufferability.

> Opinion pieces are strewn throughout regular news links,

So, like that entertainment channel with "News" on the name that was on judicial record saying that, for one of their commentators, "his audience doesn’t expect him to report facts"?

But for some reason it's not seen as a negative there by its main audience? (whereas for CNN it is seen as more negative?)

just because someone doesn't explicitly say something is bad doesn't mean they think it's good, you are just assuming that for some reason. the thread is about CNN, so he commented on CNN.

Who's saying it's not seen as a negative? This is just whataboutism and it doesn't even make sense. We are talking about CNN

By the way, most opinion/commentator shows aren't expected to report facts. They are by design an opinion piece, where conjecture and "analysis" (as bad as it can be) are normal. It's just not the "own" you think it is, especially since it's a standard defense against claims of defamation.

Of all the things to criticize and dislike Fox News or Tucker Carlson for, this one just isn't it. I don't get why this "gotcha" in particular is so often used when there is no shortage of actually valid arguments against Fox News.

Reddit has been trying to go public, right? (or have they already?)

I guess the quality of the site will drop even lower at that point, probably past the threshold where they can even be misunderstood as being good for determining what is newsworthy.

>They regularly forgo important local and international stories unless they're comical or sensational ...

I don't know how to tell you this but that's probably because CNN targets an American audience and most Americans don't care about either of those things outside of very narrow circumstances (such as if they're funny or relevant to the individual's concerns). It's not a failing to focus on coverage people will read.

Great insight, thanks. Until they get to the heart of the matter and cut out the rot there, nothing will actually change.

>> They regularly forgo important local and international stories

Is there still a bifurcation between CNN and CNN International? It often felt very different to watch CNN in the US compared other countries when I actually watched any TV news (~1990-2005).

CNN had very bullish years for business with the Trump administration, now the times have changed and also people, many are exhausted, and want to feel less anxiety when reading and watching the news