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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism. We want it to be free which means ads. NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model. But to be clear, they are surely not immune. They are still run by people who are judged by views and reach and other eyeball metrics. We don't really want news anymore. We want our preconceived notions affirmed (we like to be "right") and we want to be entertained. Unfortunately, we get what we've asked for.

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NPR's science reporting has been abysmal for the past few years. Maybe they don't have the click-bait problem (debatable), but they routinely report everything one side of the political spectrum says as scientific fact. They also fall victim to the "experts say..." and "scientific consensus is..." tropes. Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter.

I say this as someone on that side of the political spectrum.

>"Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter."

That's probably where the journalists find people to interview, likely because a large majority of journalists are active on Twitter.

This definitely isn't the only place, because there are free services like SciLine by the AAAS (source: https://www.sciline.org) and many others for connecting journalists to researchers. Many universities also have their own expert directories set up, and journalists can also find papers and contact their authors.

However, for many journalists on deadline, it's just far less effort to message vocal professors on Twitter, so this may be a reason for this effect if it's true. The people who market their research more on Twitter may be more likely to get covered in the press, and thus interviewed.

What really sucks is some funders are becoming interested in metrics that track social media engagement and other forms of attention, rewarding Twitter punditry.

Twitter influence is now a not-insignificant leg up in faculty hiring and academic politics. It’s becoming really hard to take academic science seriously.

> Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism.

I'm not buying it. Science reporting from university press departments is just as bad if not worse, and they are funded by the university not advertising (tuition, grants, alumni donations, etc..)

University press departments are (indirectly) funded by grant agencies. Thus, it is strongly in their interests to convey to those agencies that their institution is doing groundbreaking work.

IMO: People that write well are not jumping at the chance to write science articles for universities. Writing is hard and science is hard, and being passionate about both is rare.

You would be surprised. Universities pay substantially better than newspapers (likely with better job security), and writing jobs are typically hard to find and low-paying in general. Many former experienced journalists end up working at university press departments because of the better working conditions.

From an enjoyment side, writing is hard, but for a lot of people, it's much easier than research. There are fewer credentials needed for a career in science journalism versus scientific research (a Bachelor's only versus a PhD for many senior scientist positions). I know a lot of people who have a natural skill at writing who decided to major in a science field for one reason or another, performed okay-ish at their courses, and tried to get back to writing work.

The end result is also similar writing for a magazine/newspaper versus a university. A university may have higher standards for accuracy and precision (especially if an interviewed scientist wants to review it, while a newspaper/magazine may have a policy to avoid sharing drafts to avoid bias in the article). However, higher-end magazines (like the New Yorker) have more prestige. There is also far less room at universities for dissent (e.g. presenting an opposing scientific view or publishing investigative work).

It's not that rare, but the problem is that a lot of people who are outsiders, yet who truly understand science and then write about it, often end up becoming quite sceptical of it. Just like how journalists who understand politics end up sceptical. The difference is, journalists holding politicians to account is well understood to be a critical part of democracy, but for science it's the opposite. If journalists start asking tough questions they're immediately evicted from the best known institutions because scientists (academics) have done a great job of convincing those in power that doubting scientists in any way is immoral and dangerous.

So what you get is worthless fanboy journalism in which those who are smart enough to ask tough questions get removed, and those who are left just want to copy paste university press releases.

In turn that beds general scepticism amongst the population because they can sense that nobody is challenging the "experts".

It would help if journalists would hold anyone's feet to the fire these days. Science journalism is so bad at this that it seems to drive scientists to create low-quality studies.

Retraction Watch (source: https://retractionwatch.com) and independent consultants like Elisabeth Bik (article about her in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01363-z) are good for this, though they aren't really traditional media. ProPublica and large newspapers (e.g. The New York Times occasionally) do publish investigative work on science topics sometimes too.

This is not a proof. In logic, you can't say A and C => D is wrong just because B and C => D is wrong.

An example, "My uncle became blind because of diabetes", similar answer: "I don't buy it, my father is diabetic and never got blind". Doesn't work.

In other words, the reason why scientific journalism in non-university press could be bad for various different reason than university press.

Well first off, this is an informal discussion. Secondly:

> It is ALL about click bait to drive digital advertising

(Emphasis my own.) Science reporting is still crap even when it isn't funded by advertising, so there's obviously more going on than the funding model making things shit. The BBC and CBC both have crappy science reporting too, as do university press departments. These counter-examples refute the claim which was stated too strongly (I do think advertising plays some role in it, but obviously not all.)

> It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism.

It's not about people not wanting to pay, it's that the value of a single article is too small to charge money for. A single article is maybe worth a hundredth of a cent to me. There's no viable mechanism for me to pay a hundredth of a cent to a writer, just transaction fees will be more than the amount transacted.

I'm not going to pay a subscription to a site I might not ever visit again. I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while. Advertising ends up being the only viable way to "charge" a tiny fraction of a cent to readers.

> I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while.

What if the site was consistenly putting decent articles? I think one of the argument is that you would see more of those decent articles if people were more enclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers.

>"you would see more of those decent articles if people were more inclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers."

I think this argument holds up. For example, publications like the Scientific American and The Scientist tend to be very high quality in terms of accuracy (usually with unobtrusive citations, if I recall correctly). It's too bad their subscriptions prices are so high; they were hundreds of dollars a year if I remember correctly, versus less than 50 dollars a year for other magazines.

Ii'm not sure about how financially successful they are, but I found myself struggling to justify such a subscription price, when the purpose was essentially edu-tainment. The publications that can more easily get people to pay more, in my view, ostensibly help people make more money or find career success, which is why industry publications like STAT for biotech/medicine (and more generally, publications like the WSJ/Bloomberg) tend to be more financially successful.

> NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model.

This is an interesting hypothesis, because PBS is near the top of my quality ranking for news orgs while NPR is near the bottom (obviously excluding the long-tail of sources I don't often encounter, like breitbart). I don't see much of a correlation with manner of funding.

NPR used to be my main news source until around 2016. Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning donors), they put out a lot of important stories that criticized both sides of the aisle. Then they got a serious case of TDS.

> Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning donors)

Despite? Or because of it? Left leaning politics need trust worthy news to advance, right leaning politics don't as their goal is to maintain tradition and the status quo. If nobody mobilises the right wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create apathy, apathy is the bread of the status quo.

This is a highly simplistic and an ideologically-flattering (it's pretty obvious you subscribe to left wing views) picture you paint of the situation. Here's a mirror image of it your alternate right wing self might be saying on another HN in another universe:

?>>>? Right leaning politics need trust worthy news to survive, left leaning politics don't as their goal is to upset tradition and revolt on the status quo. If nobody maintains the status quo the left wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create chaos, choas is the bread of revolution and malcontent.

As you can see, this sort of "I define my side to be the more accurate view of reality" is highly malleable and can be used to support any side with semi-convincing "just so" stories.

And you're not actually describing the left-wing/right-wing divide here (itself a highly simplistic and outdated view of politics and economics dating from more than a century), you're describing the conservative/progressive divide, which tends to correlate with the left/right divide in the US, which might be where you are from. But even there the correlation is not perfect, Trump for example was fairly 'progressive' in his populist politics, his extensive engagement with the public on Twitter was a very novel form of presidential press releases that upseted many traditions and angered many political conservatives. See how conservative/progressive is multi-dimensional ?, you're just too used to a few dominant dimensions being coorelated with a left\right slant.

Furthermore, even accepting the dubious renaming of conservative\progressive to right-wing\left-wing, it's still a leap of faith from here to assuming that the progressive side always benefits from representing truth and reality as it is. In fact, this is almost gauranteed to be false, because even if conservatives are randomly guessing, they would still get roughly 50% of the world right, and since progressives always oppose conservatives in this hyper-polarized political climate, they are gauranteed to be wrong that 50% of the time. This seems to be supported by reality as being a progressive is associated with a higher chance of believing there are 700 genders and that biological males are women, so there must be at least some situations where progressives ("Left-Wing" in your parlance) benefit from a mis-representation of reality.

> If nobody maintains the status quo the left wing polices win by default

Can you elaborate on this? Society has inertia, history has inertia, how is this "nobody mantains status quo" work?

Not at all, tradition and status quo needs maintaining just as much as revolution needs mobilising. The 'inertia' metaphor is misleading: humans die, if nobody educates\indoctrinates (depending on your view) the new generation then tradition dies off. Furthermore, the world keeps changing, constantly putting tradition and the status quo on the defensive, if nobody expends energy to constantly reinvent and adapt traditions, they will gradually become irrelevant.

What does TDS mean. Google is no help :(

TDS = Trump derangement syndrome

It refers to when a media outlet thinks that everything the Trump admin does is an unprecedented terrible action, even when that thing is humanitarian aid or peace treaties in the middle east.

It is not "largely our own fault", this situation has been engineered by the billionaires and the rest of the media and political power brokers specifically to create anxiety and confusion in the general public. Perfect preparation for eternal political divisions and whatever distracting whims they choose: War in Russia? Celebrity divorce! Planet on fire? Race on commercializing space! How's about an official Olympics digital coin and NFT series? Why not?

There's a bunch of millionaires who have broken off from legacy news to make written and/or podcast style news content. We're willing to pay for quality work, but the legacy news isn't creating it.

Who pays for podcasts?

Patreon created a whole industry around facilitating people paying for podcasts and other content.

I agree except for the implication that it used to be different.

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