The local news crisis is deepening America's divides | Hacker News Reader

The local news crisis is deepening America's divides

axios.com

296 pointssamizdis418 comments

The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic. We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values. Even the notion of “blue America” and “red America” is misleading. What would be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in Baltimore.

I noticed this acutely living in Atlanta for the better part of a decade. Politics was not a big deal when I lived there. Atlanta was “blue” and the rest of the state was “red” but politics was forward looking and productive. The mayor when I was there, Shirley Franklin, was truly put the city above partisanship. A Democrat, she endorsed Mary Norwood, an independent, in 2017, because the Democratic candidate was a protege of a mayor she believed to have been corrupt: https://www.wabe.org/former-atlanta-mayor-shirley-franklin-e.... She waved aside criticism suggesting that she (a Black woman) should have endorsed the Black Democratic candidate instead of Norwood, a white woman.

Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia’s governor’s race became the subject of national attention. The state became a battleground in a proxy war between New York and Mississippi. Racialist rhetoric reached a fever pitch in the New York Times and Washington Post (but notably, the Atlanta Journal Constitution was far more prudent). They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater, instead of a state that’s the destination for huge numbers of Black residents leaving California, Illinois, and New York, attracted by plentiful jobs, low taxes, and an excellent public university system. The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.

As a citizen of Portland, OR, I can verify that national news outlets heavily distort reality to draw eyeballs.

I’m not sure local news is a whole lot better, but at least you can count on readers to call bullshit.

I'm tired of people saying Chicago is like John Wick and Mad Max had a violence baby.

Can't count how many times the people saying this live in rural areas that have, per capita, higher violent crime rates than Chicago.

The city has its problems, as all American cities do, but it is a wonderful place with amazing people and a ton to offer. Except for the winters. Those are awful.

A while back I had some of my relatives ask me if we were doing OK with all the rapes happening in California. I had no clue what the hell they were talking about.

This has happened to me numerous times based on prejudices people have about other countries or regions. But the funniest thing is that it even happens when you travel from one small town to the next small town, as has been parodied in comedies from The Simpsons to Corner Gas. I think it's a fairly basic fear to see places you don't visit often as threatening. For some reason it doesn't seem to be quelled by the easily verifiable fact that plenty of people live perfectly adequate lives in the other place.

"Oh, that? We just turn the radio up and it doesn't bother us."

I’ve visited Chicago a few times (not in winter, though), and I loved it. Maybe my favorite American big city. Great people, fascinating architecture, middle finger to TFG tower along the river. Also, I never got crimed.

Best summer city in the world, in my not so humble opinion on the matter.

Fall is pretty fun too.

Winter is a definite meh.

Unfortunately this didn't age well.

I sincerely hope you're not referring to the Highland Park active shooter.

First off, not Chicago. Highland Park is almost 20 miles outside of the city.

With a median household income of $100k and a violent crime rate 4x lower than the rest of Illinois and nationwide.

Your comment is unnecessary.

I'm not from Chicago, but all I ever hear about is the murder rate being higher than most countries. It's like that is the only thing people do in Chicago: go out and murder each other.

Because the US murder rate is so much higher than most countries. Chicago isn't in the top 10 for murders per capita in the US. It's not even top 20.

Chicago is #28.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-ci...

Granted it's way too high, but ask yourself why we don't take about Little Rock or Chattanooga or Richmond this way.

I'm asking myself, but I don't know why. Only have a theory Koch brothers something something fairness in reporting act something something...

I think it's going to be my life's work to get people to stop making these comparisons. The difference in the size of city limits makes them meaningless. Chicago is geographically huge and includes a large swath of suburbs. Other city limits are much smaller and include all of the bad areas without the suburbs to dilute the per capita numbers.

yeah the general impression of chicago must be so inaccurate after today

Once again, not relevant. Reposting:

First off, not Chicago. Highland Park is almost 20 miles outside of the city. With a median household income of $100k and a violent crime rate 4x lower than the rest of Illinois and nationwide. Your comment is unnecessary.

The only point to be made here is about the US having a unique problem with mass shooters. Which has nothing to do with Chicago's general crime rate.

I feel like People experience or learn about a place once and that paints their view of it for years to come.

Someone else in this thread mentioned the Simpsons and I can't help think about the episode where Homer was vehemently against going to New York, because he had been there in the 70s when it was at its worst.

The Chicago thing isn't from experience, it's from people who've never lived in Chicago repeating it over and over again.

The victims of violence in Chicago are not the white people citing it on TV.

The Chicago thing is because every summer the national media see fit to report on local crime news from Chicago every time they have an eyepopping number of homicides a week, which is most weeks. I've never lived in Chicago and I don't care about their crime, but the national media won't shut up about it.

There are parts of Chicago that are really nice, but also parts that are notably worse than the “bad” part of most cities. A lot of the area around UChicago itself was very sketchy compared to any other university area I’ve been to. This was about 5-10 years ago. Maybe it’s improved since although I’d be surprised. It’s not random happenstance that people who have never been are more likely to be afraid of Chicago than New York nowadays.

That was my impression. Beautiful city, shining buildings, and then you walk a few blocks too far in any direction and you're in a very rough, very rundown poor-seeming neighborhood. There was a very clear line demarcating the areas. As opposed to, say, New York, which is nice but a little grimy everywhere.

Or San Francisco, which is, you know.

Oakland, CA has more violent crime than Chicago - and never gets national news coverage. Why?

"Crime in Chicago" is a rightwing racist dog-whistle now, and so common that is a reliable standby they use now when wanting to fearmonger.

It was less than an hour after today's events when right-wing Twitter was saying "LOL, Chicago" when Highland Park is the polar opposite of the Chicago they love to blame.

Yep. I've been in PDX for 22 years. Back during the BLM protests, my FOX-loving family back east would call me and see if I was OK whenever FOX ran some bullshit story about the city burning.

Once you step outside Portland, it is terrifyingly red. Jefferson Secessionists are the scariest. I've been harassed in small towns outside PDX when I go camping and they see the PSU parking stickers on my car. Heck, I met a guy at a bar in Plush, Ore., who was telling me how he and his buddies made sure no black people ever set foot in his town. And this was in 2018.

Also, KATU news is owned by Sinclair Media. Even OregonLive is dubious. Willamette Week, The Mercury, and OPB are reasonable, IMHO.

Maybe the biggest BLM protest in the country rallied almost daily at the park in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I'd take my kids to play there in the morning and you'd never know anything had happened the evening before.

Yep. My elderly parents have listened to Rush religiously for decades now. Fox news is on constantly.

They repeatedly contacted me in a panic wanting to arrange for a change of locks n my house, security cameras, etc. They honest to god thought BLM protestors were randomly invading homes in Portland because of these trash news outlets.

And then the bigger national media outlets do their "both sides means we pretend bullshit is worth taking seriously" nonsense and make the lunatic positions seem less fringe.

It's maddening that my own family is convinced they understand what is happening in front of my porch and downtown at protests I literally attended, better than I do. And it's all because of these news outlets selling a cravenly dishonest narrative that BLM protestors demanding police reform are actually some sort of race war against white people.

Leaving the extremely uhhh paisley/tie-died Oregon Country Fair and returning to WA on the backroads was wild. Stopped to get gas a says away and got out of the car wearing tie-dye, etc... Was immediately approached by two locals who got into the whole thing - hippies killing people, breaking into people's houses, raping and drugging kids. (This was before Trump, there was still the satanic baby abuse thing. Not that one, the one before!)

As a disguise because I live in rural WA which is Red and dangerous I had a complete set of typical "rigging/logging" clothes which I do wear working in the woods. I was talking to them, changing my clothes to logger jeans, ripped stained hickory shirt suspenders, the lot. They were very confused

If i was talking to a man at a petrol station and he took his trousers off, i would also be confused.

We can't pump our own gas in Oregon. Got to do something to pass the time. :)

The media misrepresentation is a two-way street. The area around my wife’s office in DC was boarded up and dead for a year because of the BLM protests. Didn’t see anything about that on CNN.

> The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic.

This. I read it somewhere a while ago that prior to information revolution of late 90s onwards news travelled very slowly. Which meant people consumed more news of happenings around 50KM-100KM radius of their living place. And this reduced exponentially with increased radius. I could totally related to this as when I was in school (late 80s, early 90s) I read physical news paper that carried mostly my district and state news. Once a week I would be exposed to national news and maybe once a month to international news.

But now it's exactly reverse. I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war which is half way across the world but have no clue about local politics. The net result being I get more enraged/impacted about happenings on which I have close to zero control but totally oblivious to things that I have control over such as reasons why there are so many broken roads in my vicinity.

Agree. With 330 million people I'm pretty sure you can find at least a few bad ones every. single. day.

I'm glad we give them air time.

Exactly. Let's find a few adults behaving badly, and amplify it. Do we really need to hear about every shooting or robbery, day after day? Can't be good for our mental health. But apparently there is a market for it.

I guarantee that corporate news is one of the top factors for Americans mental health crisis.

Unfortunately, there's not many people willing to pay to advertise that fact.

> apparently there is a market for it

There are/were markets for many dangerous and exploitative things that are illegal and/or regulated.

Allowing syndicated news-anchors to fuck with Americans en masse is more dangerous and more harmful than is properly acknowledged (at least, I haven't heard that view on the news since they last let Chomsky on).

Makes me think about those wise statements Elon Musk shared in the video of him at the Twitter All Hands zoom meeting. It was there that he contemplated the value of side stepping news outlets and avoiding their negative filters. He also questioned the reach of the negative social impact that receiving such negative news has on our wider society and the costs these news outlets place on us with their distorted focus.

Of course he'd be saying something like that, he creates negative news about himself every few weeks (And often throws a bit of a tantrum over it.)

Very much a 'any publicity is good publicity' mindset.

>>I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war

Worse than that, you get multiple often conflicting minute updates on on-goings <<insert current event of interest>> often filled with less and less facts and more sensationalism chasing maximum number of clicks, follows, thumb ups, likes, etc.

This is true if it is random person, small organization, a non-profit, or a "trusted source" main stream media outlet

> Worse than that, you get multiple often conflicting minute updates on on-goings

And, strangely enough, that multiplier is usually exactly 2.

There should be serious scientific studies done as to why the magic American news constant is always 2. Then again, I'm sure people would claim those studies are biased and then complain about their funding.

I don't understand the term "American news constant".

I'm assuming this means number of sides in a debate? Like the left/right divide for example and no other sides exist?

I dont know what you mean by "multiplier is usually exactly 2"

in the context I would assume you are attempting to claim everything is a Republican or Democrat bent in a American political context, I would disagree with that.

but honestly there are more than 2 multiplies to read your comment so the irony is very dripping, but any story of any significance of popularity I can generally find all kind of angles, reports and "facts" about the event, be it war, an historical event, a mass shooting or a Supreme Court Opinion.

For example I read probably 10 different accounts for what the Dobbs ruling of the supreme court was, only a few of which was factually accurate and of those only a few of the accurate ones were "trusted sources"

I think they mean that American news tend to reduce everything down to exactly two sides. Is X a Good Thing or Bad Thing. Are you For or Against Y. Etc.

In the race to own digital media, we've effectively replaced subscription fees and stable advertising revenue with the crumbs of said clicks, follows, likes, etc. The internet adage that "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" is apt here because outlets benefit more from being first than being right. This is a fundamental problem with digital journalism.

I wonder if the fact that the local population has a murkier view of local events also has its beneficiaries.

I remember stories about local corrupt politicians trying to silence local outlets of uncomfortable news. Now they likely don't even have to.

It's not only the media but also the political campaign industry. Some inner city council person somewhere says they hate Jewish people and suddenly their opponent for city council has nationwide fundraising support. Same for some small town mayor saying they don't want "those people" in his town. Now there's money flooding in nationwide for his opponent in the election. In a country of 330 million, there's always a politician somewhere saying something reprehensible. Political parties and their fundraising wings love finding these incidents and then making money off of them.

It seems doubtful people are leaving California due to jobs, taxes, and public universities, but I would certainly believe it was due to cost of living. CA is the world's 5th largest economy, the universities are world-class, and most people are unwilling to give up their family, friends and life to establish something new simply to save a few percent on taxes.

I would put taxes in the cost of living column.

Offset by quality of life represented by the spending of the tax dollars.

Does quality of life, at least among the 50 U.S. states, really track the state taxation level?

If you are poor or go to public school, yes.

Yes, possibly, but a typical HN commenter will probably be middle class and his/her decisions won't be based on the same concerns.

Taxes are only paid to the extent that you're making money. Cost of living hits you equally no matter how much you make. If you're making money, when it rises, you consider whether you'd rather be living in a different place for that price. If you're not making money, you leave (or the bailiffs drag you out.)

Does it not depend on how progressive / regressive the tax system is, and how much money the government is spending on things that do not benefit you?

COL[1] doesn't really hit anyone directly. It's an abstraction based on some fictional "standard of living" and its costs in an area.

That said, common knowledge is that it's cheaper to be rich than poor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_living

But “most people” aren’t leaving California, you need to look at the margin. A marginal mover might very well be swayed by high taxes to a significant degree. For example, when I was moving to the States, one major factor for choice of Washington over California was exactly state taxes. I also have friends who are planning their move out of California to Texas, and for them taxes also play a significant role in their choice. It’s not only taxes that made them decide to move, but it’s rarely only a single factor that makes people move.

But taxes are trivial compared to cost of living.

For example median rent in Austin is $1360 vs $4150 for San Francisco. Over 300% higher.

On the other hand, how much higher are taxes in SF? Like 10% higher at most. Completely trivial.

I get your point about marginal costs, but I think in general SF taxes contribute to making the city a more developed and attractive place to live and ultimately make people more, not less likely to move there. If the rent was the same nearly everyone would choose California over Texas.

If you’re a senior software engineer, moving from SF to Seattle will immediately increase your after tax income by $30k, even if you ignore difference in cost of living. This means effectively increasing your after tax income by 15%. That’s a huge raise.

If you make $500k, you pay ~$50k in state income taxes in CA.

That's ~$4200 per month, which does not seem trivial compared to $0 in TX, FL, NV, WA, etc.

That could very well make up a decent portion of your entire spending bill in those states - allowing you to save / invest maybe another 10-20%. This (combined with the lower cost state) could help you retire a decade earlier.

Compared to <$2k per month in GA / Atlanta, it seems like something one might consider.

> That's ~$4200 per month, which does not seem trivial compared to $0 in TX, FL, NV, WA, etc.

But you'll have a much harder time finding that 500K job in TX, FL, NV, WA.

Not if you can take your current job remote to TX, FL, NV, or WA...

If you can, without a pay cut, do it. You'll live like a king with $500K in FL.

I actually have a coworker moving to California for their university system. Like taking his sophomore daughter and 4th grader and moving there.

The university system may still be world-class, but the public schools are definitely not. CA isn’t a great place to live, if you are blue collar.

This is a big oversimplification the same way that the national news is a big oversimplification.

Many of the nation's best public high schools [1] are in the Bay Area - Saratoga (#16), Gunn [Palo Alto] (#18), Lynbrook [San Jose] (#33), Paly [Palo Alto] (#34), Monta Vista [Cupertino] (#46), Lowell [SF] (#59), Los Altos (#85), Mission San Jose [San Jose] (#89), San Ramon (#96), Homestead [Sunnyvale] (#101), Cupertino (#105), Amador Valley [Pleasanton] (#112), Miramonte [Moraga] (#114), Mountain View (#121), Piedmont (#127), Foothill [Pleasanton] (#164), and this is just the top 170 out of 17,000 (1%). That's a huge portion of the region. SF & Oakland get a bad rep because a lot of their schools have legit problems and they're lottery assignment, so there's no way to avoid them other than going private. But outside of lower Manhattan, Silicon Valley probably has the greatest density of top-ranked public schools in the country, beating out even traditional powerhouses like suburban Boston and Westchester County NY.

And yes, the region is a terrible place to live if you are blue collar, but that's because blue collar people can't afford to live in the region.

[1] https://www.niche.com/k12/search/college-prep-public-high-sc...

That famous blue collar of Silicon Valley. If you're blue collar you couldn't afford to live in a mailbox in any of those towns. I don't know what you think has been oversimplified.

Thank you for putting that together!

I’m somewhat surprised that the highest rated were only #16 and #18.

Virtually all of those are in elite districts. Gunn, I think, has a household income of $200K.

Only a couple of miles away is the East Palo Alto high school (a charter school!), where only 12% are proficient in math and 52% in reading[0]. That’s where the service workers live.

Overall, California ranks poorly, around #44 [1], while the New England states are in the top ten, except for the ringer Maine at #16 [1]

Blue collar can’t afford to live on the coast, but they can elsewhere.

[0] https://www.niche.com/k12/east-palo-alto-academy-east-palo-a...

[1] https://scholaroo.com/state-education-rankings/

It's nationwide rankings, so #16 & #18 out of 17,000+ is pretty good.

It's also worth looking at who's ahead of them. The listing includes charter & magnet schools which can select their student body. If you take them out, the only ones left are #3 (High Tech High School, Lincroft NJ), #4 (Stuyvesant), and #9 (Bronx High). Those also are magnet schools, which for some reason are not flagged as such in Niche's database. Saratoga and Gunn are the #1 and #2 general-admission high schools in the U.S, at least insofar as you can have $2M home prices and still be "general admission". #3 is Canyon Crest in San Diego. The next 3 are magnet schools in NYC, then there's University High in Irvine (#32), Lynbrook (#33), and Paly (#34). Take out magnet schools and all of the 6 top general-admission public schools in the U.S. are in California.

California uses housing policy as a weapon. It substitutes for border walls, charter schools, vouchers, militarized police, and a lot of other policies that the Right espouses but most of California finds abhorrent. If most social ills stem from being poor, one simple way to avoid them is to ensure that poor people cannot afford to live in your community.

Your analysis somewhat conspicuously omits the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted. Is it reasonable to expect local news and politics to be insulated from such dramatic national shifts?

I've lived in Atlanta for over two decades. What's happened in Atlanta politics tracks with what's happened nationwide. It is not strictly a function of media or a random, spontaneous racialization.

Nor do I know anyone who feels we've been characterized as an "unreformed Confederate backwater". The idea that we've been so maligned is itself a media narrative. In fact, I live in an area that is staunchly conservative, majority white, and upper-middle class. The people I speak with abhor Trump and the style of politics he represents (which have been noted as favorable to your "unreformed Confederates"). This was visible in their repudiation of him in 2020, even while they voted GOP down balllot. It was visible again in the recent primary wherein the candidates Trump endorsed were largely shellacked.

So, it's somehat ironic that you're bemoaning the media's role in mischaracterizing Georgia politics, when you seem to be a victim of the same, and repeating certain narratives.

Likewise with your comment that black people are leaving blue states in droves to come to Atlanta, as if this is some recent phenomenon. That is simply a new right-wing media narrative that seeks to malign blue states and peel off support. But, black people have long sought Atlanta as a mecca, which has featured black political power for decades now and was even labeled an ascendant "Chocolate City" in a Parliament song of 1975.

Perhaps there was some national media painting of Georgia. After all, narratives do sell. But your analysis here is somewhat superficial and features its own skewed media-driven narratives.

> the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted.

This never happened. What happened is that Democrats started to center the far-right in order to scare their constituents into voting, and Republicans stopped resisting Trump, who they were only against because he was an outsider to their patronage networks. The far-right haven't risen, the Democrats just spend all their time doing PR for them and trying to associate them with Trump to attract centrist Republican voters.

>This never happened. What happened is that Democrats started to center the far-right

That's a pretty remarkable statement. Trump is the far right. Are you arguing there hasn't been a hard right shift in the GOP since Trump?

BTW, your statement that Dems falsely centered the far right is actually true in the reverse. Republicans center folks they consider "far left", like AOC and "The Gang" as representative of some sort of scary communist takeover of Democrats. This is, of course, silly on its face. They have virtually no power to drive policy in the party. And, of course, they are not communists in any case.

Add to that, Dems rejected even Bernie to nominate grandfatherly ol' Joe...the most moderate Dem around who, quaintly, still believes in bipartisanship.

Other than Bernie and The Gang, the only "far left" I've seen is so-called "Antifa", which has no membership, but magically self-assembles and appears during election cycles to scare Republican voters to the polls before mysteriously dissolving again.

Still, GOP ads feature ominous threats about the far left and communism.

I get that things tend to appear mirrored from the other side, but there are facts. On 1/6, elements of the far right, to include actual militia members, did Trump's bidding. Their ongoing affinity for one another is no coincidence. He represents their interests and they clearly know it.

>Trump is the far right

The guy was a Democrat for most of his life.

>The guy was a Democrat for most of his life.

Well, he's not now, is he?

> Trump is the far right

Trump never was the hard/far right. He just used them for his own self-aggrandisement. And more and more of them are realising this, and turning against him in response.

After the Parkland school shooting, he came out supporting a modest tightening of federal gun laws (restricting gun access for under 21s), only to abandon the idea in the face of pressure from the gun lobby. [0] His initial response to "bathroom" laws was to oppose them, only later being talked into supporting them. [1] While publicly he welcomed SCOTUS overturning Roe v Wade, reports claim that in private, he is very worried that it will damage his chances in 2024 by costing him the votes of suburban women; [2] it seems unlikely he has any genuine personal moral objection to abortion. Trump has always been pro-COVID vaccine, unlike many of his supporters. [3] The list goes on. His personal instincts on many social issues are moderate/centrist; a significant chunk of his conservatism was always just a put-on to convince conservatives to vote for him.

Given Trump never really believed in many of his own right-wing talking points, it is rather unsurprising that on many issues people on the hard right perceive him as having been "all talk but no action"–they wanted him to wage war against progressives in the federal bureaucracy, instead he sat in the White House shouting at cable TV. Stacking SCOTUS with conservatives was one of the occasional exceptions to that generalisation, but something which required no real effort on his part, he just did whatever his advisers told him to do. That's why many on the American right are now flocking to DeSantis, who appears to actually believe what he says far more often than Trump does, and who shows signs of being far more effective at delivery too.

> Are you arguing there hasn't been a hard right shift in the GOP since Trump?

Has the GOP base actually moved that much? I think the main thing that has happened, is that Trump single-handedly destroyed most of the GOP establishment's ability to control their own base – they'd grown used to being the tail that wags the dog, Trump just helped the dog to remember who's really in charge.

[0] https://www.grid.news/story/politics/2022/05/27/trump-propos...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/23/p...

[2] https://www.salon.com/2022/06/25/initially-said-ending-roe-v...

[3] https://time.com/6146907/donald-trump-covid-19-vaccines-base...

You've trotted out a few traditional social conservative issues as evidence that Trump is not far right, but it's pretty obvious that "far right" means something entirely different than simple social conservatism. It includes traditional right-wing beliefs in social hiearchies, extending to ethno-nationalism and frank "fascist-adjacent" beliefs.

>"Has the GOP base actually moved that much?"

Of course they have, and your very next lines explain it. That Trump destroyed the GOP establishment's ability to control some of its constituents is the first tell. How was the establishment able to maintain control pre-Trump and what was the impact on the party once those constituents were unleashed?

Further, this wasn't the base. These were always Tea-partiers and Freedom Caucus members who were in the vocal minority. Trump centered them, lurching the entire party sharply rightward.

>Trump never was the hard/far right. He just used them

This is a distinction without a difference. If he ran and governed to appease the far right and is beholden to them, then that's sufficient to classify him as such. And, there's a reason he chose to align with this faction in American politics. He didn't flip a coin.

Beyond that, you've trotted out a few traditional social conservative issues as evidence that Trump is not far right, but "far right" means something entirely different than simple social conservatism. For example, it includes traditional right-wing beliefs in social hiearchies, taken to an extreme of ethno-nationalism and frank "fascist-adjacent" beliefs. These beliefs express themselves in far more politically classifying ways, such as immigration policy.

>"Has the GOP base actually moved that much?"

Of course it has, and your very next lines acknowledge it.

First, the group that was unleashed wasn't the base. They were Tea-partiers and Freedom Caucus members who were highly vocal, but in the minority. Trump centered them, lurching the entire party sharply rightward.

If they were the actual base, then Trump would not have had to "destroy the establishment" to empower them.

So, that Trump destroyed the GOP establishment's ability to control these constituents is the smoking gun. The former establishment had held back these impulses among its fringe, which kept the party more moderate. Those former establishment officials who opposed Trump are now beholden to him and the "new base".

Are you suggesting there was zero impact on the party once the establishment was destroyed and formerly constrained constituents were unleashed?

What exactly does "far right" mean in this context? Where do we draw the boundary between "soft right", "hard right", "far right", etc? I'm not sure if you and I would draw those lines in the same places.

You speak of "ethno-nationalism" in association with the "far right" – do you mean to say that ethno-nationalism is "far right", or only "extreme" forms of it?

Does appeasing a group, or being beholden to them, make you a member? Neville Chamberlain famously sought to appease Hitler – while I think his appeasement of Nazism deserves severe criticism, he was no Nazi himself. von Hindenburg and von Papen made Hitler Chancellor because they thought they could manipulate him, only to find out too late that it was really Hitler who was manipulating them – but neither man was a Nazi at the point of making that foolish decision (although von Papen later became one)

You talk about Trump "centering" the "minority" of the Republican base to become the new majority of it – my impressions differ somewhat from yours, but I wonder if there is any objective way to decide whose impressions are more accurate? Is there any objective measure of what constitutes the minority or majority of the "base" at any given time? Any relevant survey data or other quantitative measures?

>What exactly does "far right" mean in this context?...I'm not sure if you and I would draw those lines in the same places

This is an invitation to murky waters, wherein it is impossible to have a discussion. I don't think figuring out where to draw the lines terminology-wise is as important as the fact that there has objectively been a hard rightward shift in the GOP.

>do you mean to say that ethno-nationalism is "far right", or only "extreme" forms of it?

Again, it is not as important to make this semantic distinction as it is to note that there's been a decisive shift towards ethno-nationalism in the GOP, and that sentiment is associated with right-wing politics. So this is further evidence of their rightward shift.

>Neville Chamberlain famously sought to appease Hitler

Neither did Nixon going to China make him a Communist. That would be a silly assertion, right? But, of course, the correct analogy here would be Chamberlain courting and appeasing a faction of Nazi sympathizers within his own country for political game.

>Trump "centering" the "minority" of the Republican base to

Yes that's part of it. There was also a rightward push of more moderate constituents, which is of course what happens in these lurches.

>Any relevant survey data or other quantitative measures?

Yes. Everywhere.

Like the other commenter said, the current Republican framing of "it's not us that changed, it's liberals!" is revisionist nonsense. All of the previous most popular Republicans in the last 15 years, Bush Jr (president), Romney, McCain (presidential nominees) all despised Trump, the current direction of the far right usurping the party, and are/were basically voting Democrat now because they're scared of the far right's threat far more than centrist Obama/Biden positions. FFS, Republican cheerleader #1 Tucker has been praising Russia: https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1497035201196617733

> They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater:

Electing Marjorie Greene Taylor and the coverup attempt around this killing might have contributed.

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

Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in being unreformed Confederate backwaters.

Georgia elected Marjorie Greene Taylor and Raphael Warnock. States aren't red or blue; it is a divisive over simplification. To paraphrase that parent comment, What would be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in much of the rest of California.

Georgia didn't elect Marjorie Taylor Greene. A tiny subset did. She received 230,000 votes in a rural district.

Raphael Warnock won a statewide election with 2,280,000 votes.

To be more accurate, Georgia elected Warnock, and a particular congressional district within Georgia elected Magic The Gathering.

I've pointed this out before but after the 2016 election after the Democrats lost their dangerous gamble to put the wife of a previous president in the Whitehouse. I looked at the hyper local results.

Yeah there aren't red and blue states. There are states where either rural or city votes dominate. Both the tiny cities in Montana and the huge metro's in Texas vote blue.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.

Majorie Taylor Greene was elected in 2021. She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.

As to Ahmed Aubury, it’s an unfortunate fact that police fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn’t portraying the Uvalde police department’s efforts to cover things up as an indictment of the whole community? Do you think it has nothing to do with the community being 80% Hispanic in addition to the police chief? If the community and shooter had been white, we would have been treated to story after story about how “mass shootings are a manifestation of white supremacy.”

As someone with family from the Dalton area, I would warn against trivializing the difference between Greene's district (NW corner of the state) and places where sane people tend to congregate in larger numbers. People I love have lived there, but it's exactly the kind of place where three out of four people would think voting for Marjorie Taylor Greene is a good idea.

Marietta is a cultural Mecca, comparatively, not to mention Atlanta.

> Marietta is a cultural Mecca,

Whose culture?

For someone who claims to have lived in Atlanta, you should be able to answer this one.

Carpetbaggers?

Seriously, though. I love Atlanta. But OP's implication that MGT's district lacks a "culture" is exactly the sort of rhetoric that got her elected. That sort of talk makes people mad and justifiably so.

> But OP's implication that MGT's district lacks a "culture" is exactly the sort of rhetoric that got her elected. That sort of talk makes people mad and justifiably so.

The notion that the people in that district did not have it in them to elect a right-wing conspiracy theorist prior to some sort of recent national culture war / media phenomenon is entirely mistaken.

edit: that's not to trivialize some of the other stuff that's going on nationally... I suspect the national culture warriors actually do explain why MGT's campaigns are funded as well as they are.

Politics isn’t about what people “have in them.” It’s about everyone pursing their perceived self interest.

If you attack a group of people, they will consolidate ranks and fight back. And they will throw their weight behind leaders that they perceive as fighters. This is especially true of honor cultures like in the American south.

I’m reminded about the speech George W. Bush gave after 9/11: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20.... I think liberals don’t fully understand the genius of this speech. He wasn’t just moralizing to Americans to tell them not to take out their anger on Muslims. He was giving Muslim Americans an opportunity to reaffirm their Muslim identity while giving them a vocabulary to talk about the ones who did evil in the name of Islam.

Contrast this against the rhetoric the media in New York uses against people in the rural south anytime something bad happens there. They portray it as a confirmation of the bad things that New Yorkers already believed about southern culture.

My initial objection was about the culture you experienced further south vs the culture in MTG's district, which always struck me as a pretty culturally unique place (in addition to being the carpet capital of the world). You riffed on the part of my comment that was a joke (re: Marietta and ATL).

I disagree with you less than might have been obvious, particularly because I've had relatives make the move north and experience some discrimination.

I can assure you there are many people who reside in MTG's district and find her deplorable, reprehensible, and an embarrassment--both locally and nationally.

Source: I live in her district. And work for an outstanding software company that's headquartered there.

Indeed, and I try to remember not to needlessly give people too much crap about their representatives because I realize that as much as I dislike them, it's quite possible they dislike them in a much more personal way.

There's plenty of consolation to be found in that state right now, I would think. In the same election you guys voted in a black pastor and a Jewish journalist to the US Senate. I wish my father could have seen that.

> As to Ahmed Aubury, it’s an unfortunate fact that police fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn’t portraying the Uvalde police department’s efforts to cover things up as an indictment of the whole community?

The difference is that in Ahmed Aubury’s case, there was clear evidence of corruption along racial lines amongst local leaders, and which there is a long history of in the area Aubury was murdered in.

Obviously, this was not the case in Uvalde and so it would not be portrayed as such.

> Obviously, this was not the case in Uvalde and so it would not be portrayed as such.

Jeffrey Epstein was obviously killed. What’s obvious to one group of people is not obvious to others. There are a great many people to whom it is obvious that the median journalist is more like Taylor Lorenz than them and hates people like them and has no compunction about lying if it makes hurting them easier.

> She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.

Tribalism and reactions to attacks from outside might explain why she won the general election.

But before she got to the general election she had to win the primary. That was Republican only and there were 8 other candidates.

I haven't been able to find biographies on all of them, but the 7 I did find seemed to be normal Republicans, several of which had held state elected or appointed offices in the past, rather than promoters of QAnon and various antisemitic, white supremacist, and 9/11 (and many other) false conspiracy theories.

Getting to the runoff could be explained by all the reasonable candidates splitting the vote, but how to you explain her winning the runoff?

When a community is attacked from the outside, they will put aside their internal disagreements and coalesce around someone who promises to "fight," as opposed to reasonable folks who take a conciliatory approach.

But they picked someone to "fight" who doesn't fight to show that the outsiders were wrong about the community. They instead picked someone who illustrates the outsider's points.

It's like if the fraternities at a college are asked to send a representative to a committee that is addressing accusations that the frats are rife with excessive drinking and sexual harassment, and the frats pick someone from Animal House, or like if Clowns of America International needed a spokesman to fight the image many people have that clowns are creepy and scary and dangerous, and they picked John Wayne Gacy.

Maybe there is a Pied Piper strategy where influence is being used to promote the worst in ones enemies so they’re easy to beat later on. Sometimes it can backfire though.

> When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.

"The Left got a little too PC so I changed all of my opinions about the economy, social issues, systemic racism, health care, and history."

If someone criticizing you for being racist makes you act out in a racist way, then you're not really proving to anyone how not racist you are.

You're instead proving that the criticisms were valid.

Replace racist with gun-obsessed, conspiracy-minded, uneducated, psychotic, or whatever other associations you want to build with "deplorable".

Also.

> Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.

Rural areas are more friendly and cordial than urban areas. They have more time to do so. This isn't news.

The real question is not whether they'll be nice to you at a checkout register, or let you borrow their car.

The real question is how would they feel if you were actually Muslim and started discussing your respective religions - or lack thereof if you were atheist.

Ask them how they would feel about you marrying their daughter, then tell me if they are still nice.

This is the text version of this comic[1].

[1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-Y...

>She’s a reaction to national media efforts...

This comment goes a long way to rationalize your initial assertion that "it's the media's fault".

You're essentially saying that MTG's constituents voted for her out of their resentment over the media believing they were ignorant enough to vote for her.

Could it be that they actually voted for her because they like her? How are you so sure that's not the case?

>an indictment of the whole community

Again, I actually live in GA and there was largely no such indictment of the overall community. That indictment was overwhelmingly reserved for the police department and the perpetrators. And, yes, there was some discussion around systems and conditions that produce such perpetrators and coverups.

You seem to be picking up these threads that just don't exist here and forcing them into a frame of media blame. Of course, you must be getting these ideas from...the media.

In other words, you're railing on about false media narratives and the entire basis for your claims seems to rest on false media narratives.

>story after story about how “mass shootings are a manifestation of white supremacy"

The only instances of this I've seen were in the cases that involved actual manifestos or other evidence directly espousing white supremacist beliefs.

Do you have evidence to the contrary?

I believe your explanation is more unlikely because the animosity of their political opponents is very transparent and also media reinforcing narratives that either increase condemnation or defensiveness depending on political party. Mostly a business incentive for media instead of rigid believes perhaps but the results are measurable.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...

The developments are interesting especially for the different demographic of voters.

> Do you have evidence to the contrary?

The believe in white supremacy playing a significant role is dogmatism and religious. It is also disinformation spread by intelligence agencies for political purposes. If I would ask for evidence people fall back to systemic white supremacy and it further collapses from there. Because even that is based on very questionable metrics.

The article you linked is an odd mix of critiquing both opinions (e.g. editorials) and facts reported by certain media outlets. On the opinion side, it asks that we pretend there are no countervailing opinions from the other side with which they are contending.

Factually, it asks that we believe that everything reported is simply false; that, for instance, there is not such a construct as systemic racism nor a legacy of same with which to contend. To "support" this, it conflates improvement in some areas as absolute proof and commits to other such fallacious reasoning.

In short, it employs the recently favored right-wing redirection tactic of identifying or reporting racism as itself racist.

>I would ask for evidence people fall back to systemic white supremacy

No. I'm asking OP (and now you) for specific instances wherein "the media" blamed a mass shooting on white supremacy, absent a manifesto from the shooter, online habits, or other such evidence supporting it.

Because those are the only instances I've seen media report white supremacy to any significant degree. There have been enough shootings where you or OP should be able to point to copious evidence demonstrating conduct to the contrary by the media. We don't need to rely on your hypotheticals. Just point us to some of the many articles in mainstream media that falsely charged white supremacy for shootings, without evidence.

And, on the other side of that, are you actually claiming that there have not been a significant number of shooters who did evidence influence from white supremacist ideology?

> People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.

That is a piss-poor excuse for electing the worst representative instead of the best.

Folks are nicer to everyone anywhere than in NYC or DC. Your anecdote doesn’t tell us anything for or against South Georgia.

As for Uvalde, you’re straw-manning like mad. White communities have had school shootings and were not represented as w.s. stories.

Everyone who cast a vote for MTG should feel shame. Everyone who can vote for MTG should be getting involved in a way that results in a much more sane election result.

You're missing the whole picture. They banded together to elect the best representative in their eyes, not yours.

> I’ve spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.

I won't dare to tell you your experience but I will say that the southerners I've known (about half of my extended family and their friends) are very friendly to your face while capable of hating your existence just under the surface. They say "Bless your heart" instead of the NYC or DC person simply saying "Fuck you!"

> coverup attempt around this killing might have contributed. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery

Did a quick search through the article, can't find a mention of any attempt to cover up the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, can you elaborate? Is there an ongoing investigation into this and is there some way we can help? It is insane that in 2022 the authorities in America are still complicit in lynchings and that nobody does anything, it disgusts me. How long will this indiscriminate murder of BIPOC continue, why can't America do better? What is it about Americans that drive them to murder BIPOC?

The whole second paragraph describes how no arrests were made, and the only reason anyone was punished was because one of the murderers ordered his attorney to send the video of the murder to the news.

>Former Brunswick District Attorney Jackie Johnson was indicted in September 2021 for "showing favor and affection" to Gregory (her former subordinate) during the investigation, and for obstructing law enforcement by directing that Travis not be arrested.[42][43] I

I see, forgive my English, I guess because I'm not a native speaker I miss the nuances of how what you quoted at all matches the definition of cover up, thanks for explaining. I will listen and learn, and I hope Americans can listen and learn to not murder BIPOC and that BIPOC lives matter, but I guess with the poor schooling system there is no funding for this, and likely even if there was funding to teach children that BIPOC lives mattered the US supreme court will ban it.

Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in being unreformed Confederate backwaters.

Fucking true. People think hicks are unique to the South and are oblivious to the hordes of hicks living in eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, and northern California. In fact, they're even more extremist over in the west because they don't feel like they're represented at all.

There wasn’t much of a coverup. The tastemakers happened to have some convenient video to work with and used the opportunity to fabricate a myth that a petty criminal was a hero. It’s a testament to the power of media and gullible minds in great numbers.

Ahmaud Arbery was the one who was murdered by three dudes while out jogging. "Petty criminal"?

>>We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.>>

This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true - I think it's manufactured (I assume due to all mass communication being a large ad server that requires a quick and easy way to stimulate engagement - but that could be wrong too, I don't know). I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values. Where we're apart is a) facts, and b) the tactical approach to getting our society as a whole to express those values (eg. trusting that if left alone the society will be "good" vs. trusting that codifying the "good" in law will genuinely reach the same end).

>>We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.

> This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true

My personal experience is of a diverse USA. In the late 90s I toured the states, a gig in a different city each night then back to the tour bus and off to the next one by daybreak. Okay, not a great sampling of ordinary life because on the road you mostly meet audiences, people in bars, diner waitresses etc. But while I recall how the USA looks superficially similar (giant cars on giant roads and the same brand logos in every city) it's not. I saw quite a range of poverty and wealth, segregation and integration, friendliness and aloofness, dense cities and wide open country. Much like travelling around Europe.

Maybe we're working off of different overloads for the word "values". While there is no doubt a great diversity of experience per all the things you mentioned, to me "values" is a very small set of first principles that maps closely (or is identical) to ethics. I believe there is little to no diversity in that regard.

That's an easy thing to say if you reduce "values" to lowest common denominator ethical abstractions that are pretty much shared among all human beings.

If you include e.g. "not wearing shoes in the house", "treating animals well", "Buddhist supremacy", or "proper lawn care" as values, however, things diverge quickly.

Half of your examples pertain to habits rather than values.

Whether something is a value or not is itself subjective. It might be a habit to you while also being a value to some community.

Habits and values go hand in hand. You make habit, what you value. If not, then you didn't value it much...

I think the recent SCOTUS changes are all about core values, whether it's bodily autonomy, separation of church and state, indigenous rights, right of a suspect to know their rights, or the double-speak of states' rights when it comes to states limiting violent crime.

At least some of that probably touches on your core values, however you state them.

The partisan court has shown us how clearly the country is split along partisan lines. We are not the same.

And I am neither of those two partisan factions.

Unfortunately, one side wants to destroy our democracy while the other is completely feeble and inept at even pushing back against them. You still need to pick a side in our first past the post elections. Sitting independently in the middle is to sit and watch the world burn.

  > Unfortunately, one side wants to destroy our democracy while the other is completely feeble and inept at even pushing back against them

you know whats interesting (and im not an advocate of this view point at all but) thats exactly what i hear from people who watch fox/tucker/daily wire/oan all day...

i hear alot of things like: we are being oppressed, they (leftists) control all the media, the dems took our election (democracy) away,big-tech are communists that want to destroy america...

they are very motivated because of those points...

Exactly. The objection to and the definition of unfairness is the same. What differs is the facts which allow us to agree on who is being unfair to who. To me, the former is values, the latter is not.

yep, facts that are different on different sides, and this makes it extremely hard to find what is really going on for a lot of people...

its why these media machines are so damaging; people cant/dont talk to each other and discern what is real and what isnt... they just get it stovepiped to them in one direction.

I need to think about that. Maybe you're right. Not wishing to insult Americans with generalisations I'll just say I didn't get to know their values at a deep level.

> I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that we are remarkably together on values.

I don’t think that’s true any more. Major schisms have been opening up over the past couple of decades. For example, a significant portion of the elite is now opposed to color blindness. That’s a fundamental thing to disagree about in an increasingly multi-ethnic society. The same people also oppose the “melting pot” ideal of American immigration. The Democratic Party’s “safe, legal, and rare” has turned , in NYC at least, into “abortion until the moment of birth,” at least in NYC. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/05/23/....

When my family came to this country in 1989, Carter Democrats and Reagan Republicans didn’t disagree on the fundamental notions of a good life. You got educated, got married, had 2.5 kids and a white picket fence, etc. They both venerated the founders and the history of America, and agreed on what qualities of that historical America led to the prosperity that Americans enjoy today. They disagreed on the role of government in achieving that ideal, on economics, on a few social issues at the edges.

Why link to an opinion piece by an author with a known right-wing bias? The article was paywalled but the fact that it is an opinion peace and the biased reputation of the author makes it suspect.

Abolish the electoral college and people in NY will stop giving a shit about what happens in Georgia immediately.

And that’s why the founders set up the electoral college. We are a federal republic of states.

The federal government was supposed to be small, because the founders understood the downside of a large federal government.

But I don't like being a federation. Having 50 states each infighting, competing to race to the bottom and attract business from each other, like 50 tiny nations, it's not what I want.

Well, that’s the direction it’s been going for 100 years, so you should be happy

Well your government has reached the point that it cannot govern at the federal level or reasonably receive strong mandates to deal with issues. Faith in democratic institutions is tanking.

This is what it looks like before the system breaks entirely. The buffers can't buffer anymore.

"competing to race to the bottom"

Looking at the US in the last 200 years, it has grown enormously rich, while many ossified systems in the world around it have collapsed. It seems that the competition you dislike does not turn individual Americans into paupers. An average American's living standard is so high that it is actually ecologically unsustainable.

The US was excellent at not being in Europe during WWII, and really great at accumulating a massive negative balance of payments for 40 years after the juice from that ran out.

"Not having your factories being bombed" has huge economic upsides.

"Having your factories bombed" is, ironically, a huge motivator too. At the end of the war, Germans had better and more modern industrial equipment than the British, mostly hidden in improvised underground factories. What really suffered was the civilian housing stock, but the average German industrial machine was less than 5 years old - to a surprise of the Allied occupation authorities.

Both Germany and Japan rebuilt their industrial bases to become export juggernauts. And fairly quickly so. Experience with forced improvisation helped.

I’m assuming the Soviets packed it all up

From the former DDR and territories that went to Poland, yes, they took quite a lot, but the German industrial heartland around the rivers Rhein and Ruhr is located in the West and it was divided between American and British sectors. No Soviets there.

This reeks of recency bias: 100 years ago, a british gentleman likely said the same about the superiority of the British Empire as proved by its lasting power - now it's a pale shadow of itself, with Brexit sealing its fate.

200 years is a fairly long "recency".

Also, the UK is still a nice place to live, probably nicer than it used to be at the height of the empire - just witness how many people are trying to move there, even ilegally. Large parts of the empire were money sinks, as was the huge navy needed to protect it.

That of course applies to the US too. Its current system of empire has its own money sinks

> 200 years is a fairly long "recency".

..and yet Pax Americana isn't 200 years old; and would be very lucky to get there. Which is exactly my point: just because it happened recently doesn't make it particularly notable/superior/longer-lasting conpared to other empires.

Then set up a Constitutional Convention. People in NH view life differently than those in CA, and don’t appreciate the idea of one way for everyone, as determined by the folk in the large blue cities.

Having a small federal government has no relationship with eliminating the Electoral College.

The "land votes, not people" scheme of the US is a holdover from appeasing wealthy landowners and slavers. We need at least one branch of the federal government that is directly democratic.

The way things are going, an increasingly small minority of extremists will make decisions at the federal level, as we are starting to see now.

The Electoral College is a triviality that we get hung up on because every loser blames it for their loss.

The real undemocratic institution in the US is its most powerful, the US Senate. It should be directly democratic.

> because every loser blames it for their loss

No Republican loser has blamed it for their loss because it hasn't hurt any of them in the modern era. When you get 6 million more votes than your opponent and still lose, that's a subversion of democracy.

I don't see how that's any different than the Senate. With direct democracy, we would've had a more popular president with more popular policies for an additional 8 of the last 22 years.

It is directly democratic. Two senators are elected by the voters of each state. (The Founders preferred that the two senators be elected by the legislatures of each state, but a constitutional amendment changed that.)

We are not one big representative democracy. We are a federation of states. It was not intended that the federal government run everything - it was concerned primarily with defense and relations with other countries. Originally.

"Originally" doesn't matter anymore. The Founders wanted us to write a new constitution before 1820. They also didn't let women, blacks, and non-landlords vote.

Do you know where the States come from? They aren't local cultures. They are a bunch of territory ruled by some aristocratic British dude.

Most of the states that exist are due to undemocratic compromises with monarchs and slaveholders.

Draw state boundaries around communities that want to be cohesive, and stop designing a nation around 18th Century concerns, and we can talk.

Each seat in the Senate is directly democratic, but the Senate as a whole is not.

The reason is that people in states with low populations have far more per-capita representation in the Senate than people in populous states.

The Senate is so powerful that this means that most federal decisions are determined by the minority of the country.

its the states that are bad in that.

splitting out all the related citites into their own states would make a more appropriate federation

Let me quote something the Founders wrote when they argued for replacing the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution:

"The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Deleware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration.

It may be objected to this, that not seven but nine States, or two thirds of the whole number, must consent to the most important resolutions; and it may be thence inferred that nine States would always comprehend a majority of the Union. But this does not obviate the impropriety of an equal vote between States of the most unequal dimensions and populousness; nor is the inference accurate in point of fact; for we can enumerate nine States which contain less than a majority of the people; and it is constitutionally possible that these nine may give the vote. Besides, there are matters of considerable moment determinable by a bare majority; and there are others, concerning which doubts have been entertained, which, if interpreted in favor of the sufficiency of a vote of seven States, would extend its operation to interests of the first magnitude. In addition to this, it is to be observed that there is a probability of an increase in the number of States, and no provision for a proportional augmentation of the ratio of votes.

But this is not all: what at first sight may seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison. To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser. Congress, from the nonattendance of a few States, have been frequently in the situation of a Polish diet, where a single VOTE has been sufficient to put a stop to all their movements. A sixtieth part of the Union, which is about the proportion of Delaware and Rhode Island, has several times been able to oppose an entire bar to its operations. This is one of those refinements which, in practice, has an effect the reverse of what is expected from it in theory. The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good. And yet, in such a system, it is even happy when such compromises can take place: for upon some occasions things will not admit of accommodation; and then the measures of government must be injuriously suspended, or fatally defeated. It is often, by the impracticability of obtaining the concurrence of the necessary number of votes, kept in a state of inaction. Its situation must always savor of weakness, sometimes border upon anarchy."

(https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed22.asp)

Sounds familiar?

Thing is, the Articles of Confederation was the only thing they could agree upon at the time, so it was better than nothing. And the Constitution, similarly, was the only thing they could agree upon at that time. Both were compromises guided by the unique circumstances of the time. When those circumstances change significantly, the compromise may no longer make sense for all the parties involved. I don't think that either EC or the Senate make sense for many states at this point; they merely tolerate them, but the more the minority uses those mechanisms to push its politics on the majority, the less that tolerance is going to be.

Keep doing this, and you'll find out that Constitution that not enough people believe in is, indeed, just a piece of paper.

  > It was not intended that the federal government run everything - it was concerned primarily with defense and relations with other countries. Originally.

what happened that necessitated a deviation from that?

> The real undemocratic institution in the US is its most powerful, the US Senate. It should be directly democratic.

I'm not qualified to vote on 95% of the stuff Congress has to deal with, so thanks for the offer, but no thanks. Direct democracy is a shitfest for anything much larger than a canton; representative democracy is much better for running large countries with a diverse set of serious matters to address.

I think you misunderstood what they meant.

The problem with the Senate is that tiny states like Wyoming have the same power as huge states like California.

That means that people living in rural areas (or just small states) have far more power and representation in the Senate than people in urban areas.

Well first off, the Senate is only part of Congress and the other half has more proportional representation. But more to the point, I was responding mostly to the remark about direct democracy. But it seems some people don't mean direct democracy when they say direct democracy. The voting for congresspeople in the House of Representatives is not direct democracy, that's representative democracy (isn't the name a clue?)

> I'm not qualified to vote on 95% of the stuff Congress has to deal with

But are they? We're constantly hearing how nobody reads the bills and nobody can be expected to really understand them.

It's not the only two options. You can have direct democratic assemblies at the lowest level, and then use the delegate system to form assemblies above them, scaling as high up as needed. It's still radically different from representative democracy as we practice it today, because delegates are delegates - they receive explicit instructions from the assemblies that send them on how to argue and how to vote, and they're instantly recallable if they disobey those instructions.

And yes, those systems do exist in real world. AANES (Rojava) has been operating under such a system for over 10 years now.

The electoral college is bad for the exact same reason the Senate is bad.

> The Electoral College is a triviality that we get hung up on because every loser blames it for their loss.

No, it's not a triviality, and no, they don't.

There have only been a few superficially EC-caused losses, and it's not at all common for others to be blamed on it, even though the fact of the undemocratic nature of the EC has wide ranging effects shaping elections beyond just the immediately obvious times it produces results at odds with the popular vote at the end, because it creates pressure that acts on all stages of the process, including candidate selection.

> The real undemocratic institution in the US is its most powerful, the US Senate. It

The Presidency is more powerful than the Senate, though slightly less undemocratic. But the undemocratic nature of the Presidency through the EC is directly tied to the even more undemocratic nature of the Senate.

The Senate isn't the most powerful US institution, but it is the most structurally anti-democratic, and through it's structure directly contributes to the undemocratic nature of institutions which depend on it or the allocation of seats to it.

I strongly disagee that the Senate is not the most powerful institution.

Ask yourself this question: who has made more important, far-reaching decisions for the country, Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama?

Repeat the same question with Trump or Biden if you want, even though they have left time in office than Obama.

> Ask yourself this question: who has made more important, far-reaching decisions for the country, Mitch McConnell or Barack Obama?

Oh, so you aren't asking which institution is more powerful, but which faction is better at using power, the currently dominant faction of the Democratic Party or the currently-dominant faction of the Republican Party?

> Repeat the same question with Trump or Biden if you want, even though they have left time in office than Obama.

Considering all four, considering impact and not positive/negative polarity, and considering that in some cases certain of the decisions at issue involved both institutions, and weighting for time in office since we are assessing the power of the institution not the power a person can exercise over their tenure in the institution, my initial impression is Trump > McConnell > Biden > Obama, though that might unfairly promoting McConnell and/or Biden.

The founders think they understood the downside of a large federal government.

The founders were not that homogenous, and plenty of them wanted to recreate the British government for the new United States.

> The federal government was supposed to be small, because the founders understood the downside of a large federal government.

Those that want to return to this need to start advocating to abolish freedom of movement and permit states to implement residency requirements to access services. That way State A can go ahead an implement locally the "large federal government" services like Medicare or Social Security, while State Z can choose not to. At the moment our constitutional rights mean State Z residents can freeload by moving to State A. This kind of problem simply wasn't conceivable when the country was founded.

This is sort of how it works in Canada; healthcare, disability, welfare and (some) pensions are all managed individually by each province. When you move, you have to jump through hoops to get access to those services in the new province. Still gets funded federally though and how money is transferred between provinces is huge point of contention.

Yeah, I think this is how it works for example in Australia too. You could conceive of this in the US just as easily, for example Medicaid (not Medicare) is a bit like that, run and jointly financed by the state and federal. But again that's "big government" to these states that want to reject healthcare.

What I would bet too is if you go and poll people on whether they like their "big government" program or what to get rid of it, most people would rather keep it, Medicare is big government I don't see seniors wanting rid of it. Social Security is big government. The military, I don't see anyone in these "small government" states saying they want rid of that.

That's why the homeless go to San Francisco or Maine. Better services.

The states are like incubators for different policies. The rest of us watch, and see what does work, and what doesn't work. For all I know, there are residency requirements for services in some places.

One of the things the Constitution protects is freedom of movement.

If a state wanted to implement something like Medicare for All, I think they could just do that.

If you don't like the laws in your state - change them.

If you live in California and you don't like the law in Alabama, what business of yours is that?

Supreme court determined a long time ago that a state cannot implement a residency requirement (e.g. 1 year minimum residency) before accessing that states benefits.

> If a state wanted to implement something like Medicare for All, I think they could just do that.

Yes. But for the problem explained. Also you can throw in issues such as states can't issue their own currencies or treasuries to finance things.

Really the USA is not set up for this kind of "confederation". We are a federation of states that have very limited powers and very stupidly drawn borders. If we want what it sounds like you're after then we need more a European Union style set up. Not separate states. But entirely separate countries. Basically we should decide if we're a country called the USA and are all American's first, or if we're all Kentuckians, Texans, Washingtonians, first and American's second.

Actually it was more about making sure slave states were represented. Not as noble of an idea as you're pitching.

Yeah because then the entire country will only have to care about what NY thinks

No. I don't even know how you get to this idea. First of all, there is only one national election, you still have your Representative and 2 Senators in addition to your State, County, and Local governments. Second of all, there are more Republicans in New York and California then in a significant amount of the middle states combined. The idea that NY or California has some singular voice that will be force upon you is just a ridiculous concept.

The country clearly leans slightly center left as a whole, but we are trending hard right right now and that is a recipe for disaster and the electoral college is in large part to blame.

It’s what I call the Democratic wobble.

We’ve been trending left for fifty years. Maybe it’s time to go the other way for awhile. And hand some power back to the states, where it belongs.

"We’ve been trending left for fifty years."

Depends on the topic. Gun rights, for example, have gone decidedly to the right. Few people now remember that Ronald Reagan signed some significant gun control legislation without losing support of his voters.

Not really. In the late '50s, when I was a teenager, I lived in a rural area. I had my own rifle, and so did my friends. I also bought a 22 revolver and carried it around the country in the early '60s and never thought twice about doing that.

In the '60s, high school students carried rifles on the NYC subway while going to target practice. Try doing that today.

So, I'd say there has been a lot of pressure to move the window on gun regulation to more restrictive over the last fifty years. I don't think it's done any good at all relative to reducing crime committed with guns. Law abiding gun owners have always had low incidence of gun infractions compared to, say, the police.

The real problem is not enforcing the gun laws we have had for years. Chicago is a prime example: very restrictive laws, but very few convictions for gun offenses, which are frequent. Why is that?

With all respect, the late '50s and early '60s are a long time ago. I was thinking about more recent developments.

As of today, there is almost half a billion of guns in civilian possession in the US, and the # of open carry and concealed carry jurisdictions has grown massively.

I would say that the lowest point for gun rights US-wide was around the Columbine school shootings, and that the trend changed quite decisively since them. Legislation like that has no chance of passing today.

We were talking about “trending left in the last fifty years”. 1972 was fifty years ago, so I was setting the stage by describing the situation in the preceding decade.

In the 60s, most Southern states were no-issue when it comes to concealed carry, and most of the rest were may-issue.

Even before the recent ruling, there were 8 states that were may-issue; the rest were shall-issue or no permit required.

Yes, and that was to keep guns away from blacks.

Justice Thomas has discussed this in his SCOTUS opinions. It’s quite revealing and well worth reading.

SCOTUS rulings are a lot more readable than you might think. They are often quite colorful. You quickly learn to skip by the boilerplate to find the dissenting opinions, which are near the end.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/

Gun rights/control didnt used to be a "right-wing" topic.

i can understand not wanting power to be centralized in the hands of a faraway federal govt. but i dont understand the fetish of states rights. why not city rights or county rights. or heaven forbid maybe even individual rights

It's a balancing act between individual rights and ability of the society to govern itself without disintegrating (at which point nobody would have any rights).

But, yes, states are just as artificial as US as a whole. Municipalities feel like they're the lowest level organization that is actually somewhat organic and interconnected.

Individual rights are far more likely to be recognized at a Federal level than at the State level. The whole "states rights" non-sense is about the ability to restrict what or how other folks live.

Do you have any basis for this assertion? I find that my state constitution is far better than the federal one in most regards.

And yet those rights cease to exist when you cross state lines.

And yes, the Civil Rights Act, the 14th Amendment, formally Roe vs Wade, Brown v. BoE, etc.

I will go a step further and say that ONLY the Federal government can secure your individual rights. If your rights can be erased by crossing a state line, then you don't have an individual right.

Your federal rights also "cease to exist" the moment you cross the national border. By the same logic, we should be striving for One World Government, and anything less than that is unacceptable.

As for the federal government securing my individual rights in general - considering the existing federal drug laws, and the very real possibility of a federal abortion ban coming in a few years, I'd say you're cherry-picking here.

Democratic wobble is about shifting political demographics. In other words, the majority of the country wobbles between center right and center left. This isn't that.

Sure it is, just in a longer time scale.

This is just ignoring basic math. As it is right now, it's drastically easier to win a national election with far fewer voters in the most populous states than it is to win a direct election - and in each of those populous states, with the electoral college you only need to win a plurality, meaning you can ignore up to half the state.

Consider it another way - to win the electoral college, you only need to win the 10 most populous states with a plurality. To win the popular vote, you still need to win basically the exact same set of 10 states but now you would need to win every vote in them (which is functionally impossible).

We also have to agree that even with the EC candidates don't care about the majority of the country. Any voter in a state that goes consistently opposite to them is made completely irrelevant, with no point to trying to reach out to them. If the EC was gone suddenly all those voters actually get a voice.

Basic math suggests that a place with more population would have an outsized say that overrides a place with lesser population (and generally with very different ideas of what is important to them). You want representatives to represent the populace, look no further than the House of Representatives. The Senate is disproportionately represented on purpose. It was designed this way, on purpose.

> Basic math suggests that a place with more population would have an outsized say that overrides a place with lesser population

Keep in mind we're talking about the EC, which makes the problem you're describing _worse_. Like I mentioned, the EC is still largely dependent upon state population, so it doesn't actually force you to win more states or even a substantially different set of states compared to the most populous ones. But since almost all states give out EC votes based on plurality vote, it means winning those population centers you talking about _does_ actually override the votes of the entire rest of the state. In NY, ~37% of the state voted for the Republican in 2020, but 100% of the EC votes went to the Democrat.

You're complaining that NY would get an outsized say if the EC was gone, but are ignored the fact that due to the EC cities like NYC are _already_ getting an outsized say in the presidential election. They benefit from getting to effectively control all the EC votes given to their state, even though a substantial portion of that population doesn't even agree with how they are proportioned. Same thing with California and various other states.

If your concern is instead just that small states won't get represented during the presidential election, then I hate to tell you that they're already completely ignored. I think switching to a direct vote could actually help them get more say, as the proportion of the vote you get from those states could be relevant.

> You want representatives to represent the populace, look no further than the House of Representatives. The Senate is disproportionately represented on purpose. It was designed this way, on purpose.

Sure, but the comment above was specifically about the EC, as was mine. The EC is a completely different beast from the Senate, and arguably was not designed to work this way anyway.

This sounds like a great recipe for disintegration, Yugoslavia- or at best Spanish American empire - style.

If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people in the flyover land think, why not declare independence?

It is a small wonder that the US had, so far, only one secession and civil war crisis, and a testament to your resilient constitutional order.

Yeah, that right to bear arms against the tyranny of the state sure is working well . . .

I am not an American, but it is my impression that most American gun owners, if they carry their gun at all, have mostly defense against common crime in mind, and that the loud minority screaming slogans about the tree of liberty watered by blood of patriots and scoundrels is pretty tiny, much like most loud minorities online.

Eh, I'm older, but was taught the reason for the right to bear arms in grade school. It wasn't an idea among a fringe minority; it was just common knowledge. I'm sure it's not taught that way in most schools now, though.

> If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people in the flyover land think, why not declare independence?

The distant metropolis is rich enough to pay a lot of taxes to support a long war. Flyoverland is definitionally low density meaning it has relatively few people. All they have to fight the war is some extremely stubborn people. That can be enough but an awful lot of people are going to die. There’s a great deal of good on avoiding civil war.

> The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.

The national media everywhere is full of shit. That's the norm. It's the norm, because it works.

I agree with your remarks. Adding one aspect for thought:

> We’re one country but we don’t share a single set of values.

Problem is: from the perspective of massification efforts, we're all equal.

The same principles that make Facebook addictive to a person in San Francisco also govern the psychology and neuro-chemistry of a kid in Miami.

That holds not just to US citizens. Anywhere in the world it's like that.

You are all one people!

No!

That’s right—you are all either on Team Blue or Team Red!

Yes!

Amazing how widespread such dichotomies are.

> They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate backwater

They wouldn't be wrong. For example in April 2021 a black woman from Md was drummed out of a wealthy town in GA for the crime of being black and an educator[0]. This is the kind of thing that happens all the time in the south and west.

0. https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-schools-p...

>Cecelia Lewis was asked to apply for a Georgia school district’s first-ever administrator job devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion.

They disagreed with her politics.

She had no politics that they knew of. They disagreed with willful misrepresentations of politics that she had never expressed, and felt that they could get away with it because of race politics in Georgia.

And they did.

Being willing to be part of a DEI office is politics, just like choosing to be a commissar rather than an artillery officer is politics. It’s deeply unfortunate that Ms Lewis was unaware of that but it’s going to become clear over the next decade or two of backlash that DEI is a loser, politically. People are going to either attack it or dissociate from it.

Are you saying that being asked to apply for a job is a political act?

>At first, the scope of the role gave Lewis pause. In her current district, these responsibilities were split among several people, and she’d never held a position dedicated to anything as specific as that before. But she had served on the District Equity Leadership Team in her Maryland county and felt prepared for this new challenge. She believed the job would allow her, as she put it, to analyze the district’s “systemic and instructional practices” in order to better support “the whole child.”

She was drummed out of town because she was supporting DEI and CRT, not because she was black.

Did you read the article?

"This is not about the color of her skin. It’s what she’s going to bring into our district and what she’s going to teach our children"

Your statement suggests that you did not actually read the article.

She was drummed out of town because white radical Republicans made up positions that the educator in question did not hold and had never hold (that you can pretend to talk about CRT with respect to primary or secondary school is indicative that you have bought into the propaganda; it is a post-graduate law school concept, unless you’re a radical republican hell bent on fighting anything that does anything other than support a white supremacist distortion of history).

The reality is that the moment someone in Georgia says "this is not about the colour of her skin", it’s about the colour of her skin. Everything about what she was going to "bring into" the district was fabricated out of whole cloth and had nothing to do with either (a) anything the educator in question had said or (b) anything the educator in question had been hired for.

>She was drummed out of town because white radical Republicans made up positions that the educator in question did not hold and had never hold

Assuming that is true, that may or may not have to do with race. Please provide proof race had anything to do with this.

>that you can pretend to talk about CRT with respect to primary or secondary school is indicative that you have bought into the propaganda; it is a post-graduate law school concept, unless you’re a radical republican hell bent on fighting anything that does anything other than support a white supremacist distortion of history).

CRT is clearly being used as a generic term and not a college level idea. Maybe we should have two separate terms, but similar concepts are absolutely being taught.

>The reality is that the moment someone in Georgia says "this is not about the colour of her skin", it’s about the colour of her skin.

You are clearly bias and assume the worst in people you disagree with.

You are doing the very thing you accuse these Georgians of doing.

>Everything about what she was going to "bring into" the district was fabricated out of whole cloth and had nothing to do with either (a) anything the educator in question had said or (b) anything the educator in question had been hired for.

Maybe, but seeing how white people pushing this get yelled at and kicked out as well, assuming this has anything to do with race is nothing more than a theory.

If we ever want to solve racial tension, we need to stop calling everybody a racist when they disagree on policies.

If America ever wants to solve racial tension, it needs to stop pretending that racial problems are fixed. They’re not, and all the data that matters says that very clearly (compare health outcomes, relative poverty, educational outcomes, incarceration rates, etc. across racial groups in America, and Black Americans are consistently in the worst groups for each of those—this is indicative of systemic problems that the racists in power don’t want addressed).

> CRT is clearly being used as a generic term and not a college level idea. Maybe we should have two separate terms, but similar concepts are absolutely being taught.

This is utter bullshit on every level, and you should be ashamed of yourself for such intellectual dishonesty.

There are two different CRTs. There is the real thing (a graduate level law concept) and then there is whatever the Fox News Outrage Machine has created to argue against. What are they arguing against? Pretty much anything that indicates that America had a dependency on slave labour ("involuntary relocation", anyone?). Pretty much anything that says that the Civil War was about keeping that slave labour. Pretty much anything that says that there was and continues to be a white supremacy problem in America to the detriment of all groups in America (see the recent decision in Wisconsin to drop a book about order 9066, Japanese-American internment, and Korematsu).

Please, start thinking for yourself and stop repeating Fox News Outrage.

>If America ever wants to solve racial tension, it needs to stop pretending that racial problems are fixed.

I clearly never said that. Please stop suggesting it and actually address my points instead of dishonestly changing the topic. You are causing racial tensions to continue and are the problem not the solution.

You are doing the exact thing you are accusing others of doing. Denying racism is occurring.

> This is utter bullshit on every level, and you should be ashamed of yourself for such intellectual dishonesty.

Telling white kids they are bad is the generic CRT I am talking about. You cannot deny this is happening. There are multiple witnesses and audio recordings of multiple cases. You need to stop your dishonesty.

You are getting off topic, deliberately. It doesn't matter if some people deny slavery or whatever it is your are rambling about. There is a type of CRT that is occurring and that is just a fact. Instead of accusing somebody of being in a Fox News bubble (which I don't even watch) maybe you should expand your news sources since they are clearly not bringing up all these cases that are happening all the time.

If people are doing what you’re claiming, it isn’t CRT (which, remember stands for "critical race theory"). I personally have no reason to believe that people are doing what you’re claiming.

What’s more likely is that people are saying "white people owned slaves" (fact, although disputed by the BoE in Texas), "the American Civil War was fought over slavery" (again, fact, disputed by pretty much all of the Republican party in 2022), "even after the racists lost, they caused more than a century of terror and division" (once again, absolute fact), and "even though civil rights legislation was passed and upheld to end that terror and division, the Republican Party and Supreme Court have steadily been eroding all of the gains in civil rights" (fact).

There are parents and Fox News Ninnies that are seeing these or similar factual statements and other factual statements as stated in the 1619 project and are completely freaking the fuck out and calling it "CRT" because they heard that term one day from people who look like them and they don’t want to think that they should perhaps be ashamed of the Confederate "heritage" of which they claim to be so proud (remember, most statues of the Confederate traitors weren’t put up until the 1900s). There are people — way too many people, and way too many on HN itself — who don’t see any problem with advancing the completely debunked and grossly racist Replacement Theory.

Are you doing that? Nope.

But you’re sure as hell carrying their water by pretending that talking straight about systemic racism, historic racism, and ongoing racism and bias against minorities is itself racism.

White kids aren’t being told they are bad. White kids are being told that they are beneficiaries of undeserved bias in favour of them. They aren’t bad: society itself is bad, and there needs to be strong action against this. And this, like everything else that I’ve actually said in the threads here, is 100% indisputable fact.

This amounts to "so what if the people the KKK lynched just so happened to be black? this doesn't prove anything!"

You can't just claim somebody is racist because they don't like the policies of a black person. If that is a case then do I need to remind you what a large majority of people think of Clearance Thomas?

"The reality is that the moment someone in Georgia says "this is not about the colour of her skin", it’s about the colour of her skin."

Ironically, what you wrote is a very classical example of prejudice.

No, what I wrote is experience. Just because I don’t give you a detailed example of the history where I know what I wrote to be true does not make it less experiential.

White racism in Georgia is deep and has decades of experience in cloaking itself in plausible deniability to confuse the weak-minded.

Or have you never heard of Lee Atwater (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater)?

The same logic of experience drives police officers to draw their guns on 'suspicious' young black males. They are, after all, by far the most criminal demographic in the U.S., and most cops in racially mixed areas will have some bad prior experiences with them.

Are they justified doing so, in your opinion? Or if not, where is the line where experience should stop counting?

They are not the most criminal demographic in the U.S.

They are the most criminally profiled demographic in the U.S.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Police-and-minoritie...

There is absolutely no justification for the recent extrajudicial murder of an unarmed black motorist by cops who shot him 60 times.

There is absolutely no justification for the murder of Tamir Rice.

Black people in America are overpoliced. When presented with the same crime, Black people are routinely charged more often, charged more intensely (the number and severity of the charges are higher), and convicted more often.

Your ignorance on this matter is showing.

Young black males are massively overrepresented when it comes to murder convictions.

Are you suggesting that murders committed by other racial groups are routinely going unpunished, or that random blacks are framed for them instead of the real perpetrators?

Because if neither, your thesis about profiling does not hold water. You cannot "profile" people as murderers. They either did that or not.

I don't doubt that there are some false convictions for murder even today, but either:

a) blacks are really massively overrepresented among the murderers (and victims), or, if they are not,

b) there is a nationwide conspiracy either not to investigate and punish non-black murderers, or to frame innocent blacks for them, that reaches the level necessary for massive manipulation of U.S. crime stats.

B) would be an extraordinary claim that would need extraordinary evidence.

c) there is another correlation - poor people are more likely to be murderers and victims of murder, and there are other systems set up to push black people into poverty

It's crazy that you think Black people actually commit more crimes than white people.

One thing that makes this worse is the collapse of local information economies. Papers can no longer make money by acting as pay-to-post message boards for the communities they serve. Instead, the best way to make money is to convince people from outside your region to use your organization for their news needs. So now every paper writes news for a national audience and what determines the financial health of the paper is how effectively it can attract readers that aren't from its area.

> an excellent public university system

Why don’t you tell this to the several UGA math profs who quit recently (including an acquaintance of mine from high school) or the GA Tech faculty unhappy with state COVID policies

> The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330 million people is toxic.

The "nightly news" used to be a much more common experience that people shared: "Twenty-seven million to 29 million viewers, on average, tuned in every night to hear Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Today, though, the viewership of evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC combined is smaller than CBS' when Cronkite sat in the anchor's chair."

Today the most popular news channel is Republican propaganda. I don't use that term to be dramatic. I do not think there is a more accurate description.

The top cable news channels are propaganda for the two major political parties.

This isn't a "both sides" issue. FoxNews has markedly higher ratings and is overtly partisan. Republicans get their TV news more from FoxNews than Democrats with one particular news network.

Except it is. MSNBC and CNN are obviously heavily tied in with the DNC. This is only not visible if you are heavily invested into the DNC narrative yourself. Just as FOX news viewers are not aware of the insane bias of that network. They just think it's the "truth", same as democrats believe the tripe spewed by MSNBC and CNN.

330M is large, but not so large that national news stops making sense. Japan is roughly comparable - it has 126M people, and it was composed of competing (and sometimes warring) feudal lords until the Meiji Restoration (1868), a few years after the US civil war.

Yet go to Japan and suggest that it's toxic for people in Tokyo to care about what's happening in Fukuoka, and people will look at you as if you've grown another head.

I mean, what is a nation if not a group of people subscribing to the same central authority and sharing a rough idea of a society? On the face of it, saying that "nationalization of news and politics in a country is toxic" is so absurd that I'd like to see an argument for supporting that, instead of using it as a starting point of an argument.

If people in SF stop caring about what's happening in Atlanta (and vice versa), it won't bring peace. It will merely accelerate the disintegration of the USA as a single country.

yeah but the population density of japan is 10x that of america, and the distance between atlanta and los angeles is well over 3x that of tokyo to fukuoka.

I doubt GP was intending to speak strictly about population count itself.

I would argue that USA has already disintegrated as a single country with respect to its foundation, which is the society itself - basically, there's no single "American society" anymore. The only thing that still keeps the country together is the formalities of governance, and even that will only last for as long as people are willing to tolerate them (which is less and less with every passing year).

It might be possible to reboot it in more or less the same format as the original was way back when (i.e. by moving most political questions out of the federal level). But there needs to be some motivation to try to keep things together at least on some level. For the original colonies, it was clear that they would simply not survive on their own. But for many states today, they have numerous independent countries of similar size (in terms of territory, people, economy etc - you name it) as a showcase that it is possible.

idk, but in japan i get the sense that there is alot less money in politics and media, whereas in the us money == politics, so you get full-tilt media insanity which push people further and further apart

i really think the us needs serious campaign and media reform; there is just too much money sloshing around from all these donors and its creating all kinds of havoc

I've spent a ton of time in SF and Baltimore, wondering what specifically you had in mind? I think it's less socially acceptable to be right leaning in SF? Sure you would be looked at weird if you used a koozie or wore croakies in SF, or if you went up to people at a coffee shop to ask them to pitch their startup in Baltimore, but the differences feel cultural not political.

Thank you for an excellent example of a national narrative that does not match the true local flavor.

A few years ago my friends started call NYT "Pravda", saying that it's turned into the mouthpiece of the "party line".

Grudgingly, I had eventually to agree.

> Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia’s governor’s race became the subject of national attention.

Because local elections have national consequences.

Then in 2020, GA's special elections determined control of the US Senate, and therefore the fate of the Biden Admin.

Shouldn't the nation pay attention to GA? At least as much as say Iowa and New Hampshire?

> The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people in it to the rest of the country.

Nonwhite voters are systematically disenfranchised in GA. Enough so that in a straight up fight, Stacey Abrams would be governor.

Those "misrepresentations" of GA are packed with history. Slavery, Confederacy, Jim Crow, Southern Strategy, etc. Centuries of denying nonwhites their right to vote. Sure, white people feel resentful about being constantly reminded. For everyone else, it's present reality, not history.

If you're curious, I recommend the books These Truths, 1619 Project, and The Sum of Us.

> ...a state that’s the destination for huge numbers of Black residents...

That's the plan. Immigration back inland, to flip those reds states blue.

Were their any progressive do-gooder billionaires, they'd be paying people to move inland. To start farms, businesses, families.

You sound like somebody who hasn't waited in line for many hours because you live in a Black neighborhood in Georgia.

Axios is expanding into local news coverage. This is their PR and wow the bullet point approach sometimes really just doesn't do it for me.

For a more involved take of the underlying topic, consider _News for the Rich, White, and Blue_ by Nikki Usher. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/news-for-the-rich-white-and-blu...

I don't agree with all of Usher's takeaways but there's a lot of good stuff in there. And as to the headline – yeah, sure, the "local news crisis" is partly causative in the polarization sure but lazy and biased coverage can compound all sorts of nasty dynamics.

While I'm here, Mark Lamont-Hill and Todd Brewster's _Seen and Unseen_ would be my pick for a recent media read. Lots of great history, recent and less so, as well as analysis: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seen-and-Unseen/Marc-...

If, like me, you read "Axios" as that js library, and PR as Pull Request, you too, my friend, need to take a break.

Not a word about why media antitrust is important... even though the article casually mentions that "Newspapers continue to be consolidated by hedge funds and private investment firms that believe they can wring more profits from the papers through synergies as the industry declines."

> "Axios is owned by Axios Media, whose investors include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Greycroft, and NBC News. NBC doubles up as Axios’ media partner."

https://marketrealist.com/p/who-owns-axios/

Not only that, people employed by today's media conglomerates are increasingly drawn from the 'wealthy liberal coastal elite' sector and are typically filtered through an unpaid internship process before getting hired, leading to non-representative 'journalists', which is probably doing as much damage (i.e pushing the populist perception of news media as a symbol of out-of-touch elitism) as the corporate consolidation is.

Another side effect of this trend is the death of investigative journalism, which generally upsets the state and corporate power centers who are increasingly joined at the hip. For example, the last Washington Post investigative series of note was "Top Secret America" from about a decade ago, and now that Jeff Bezos owns the paper and AWS is actively seeking CIA and NSA contracts, forget about anything else like that.

Investigative, independent, long form, good journalism still exists, you have to pay for it though and it isn’t as popular as mainstream.

I used to be an avid Economist reader, but even they are increasingly moving away from long form non opinionated journalism towards more bite-sized, clearly biased takes on the world.

They have made it know they clearly believe Brexit was a mistake and now they have made a point to go "see I told you so" more often than not.

I don't know much, if anything, about Brexit — but certainly Economist isn't the only publication that's been bearish on Brexit. I'm interested in reading someone that's bullish. Is there coverage of Brexit that you prefer?

It's the same in the UK, by and large. We have a small group of <strikeout>advertisement sellers</strikeout> news media companies that absorb local papers and churn out overly-similar content with different newspaper names on the front page. The online versions of these are sooooo bad - practically no actual written content with any depth, interspersed with video "articles" which incorporate more ads. Then try and find the actual news in among the clickbait links. Want better access? "Simply register and answer some suspiciously personal questions"...

I tried to do some research recently: could I consult their archives? "Nothing older than a couple of years", so no. Photographers? "If you have photos or videos please upload them to us". Timely coverage of local issues? "You won't believe what British Seniors aged 55-plus are buying today!!"

As far as I'm concerned they can crash and burn, and maybe groups of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local newspapers, albeit online only.

>groups of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local newspapers

Social media is the killer, because in a perfect world it would serve precisely this purpose. But instead of replicating the means of production for each locality, you share one globally - which also helps concerned readers from different geographies pool their resources. A fine vision, and its true, but we see now how severe the downside is: the dissociation of reader from event is the wiggle room in which professional rhetoricians can form new and exciting memetic viruses. And virtually no-one has the psychic immune system to wade through it on a daily basis and not get infected with something. These viruses are designed to serve a narrow aim, and the side-effects are ignored, and this is what leads to the meltdown we have now.

Of course, a simple behavior change can help: pay attention to news in proportion to its physical proximity to you! The knee-jerk reaction to see a national or global trend when anything bad happens is bad for the soul. We should be open to seeing trends, of course, but only slightly. At least a little bit of stubborn resistance to inferring a trend from two anecdotes is good for the soul, I think.

My local news site has byline titles including 'Multimedia Reporter' and 'SEO Journalist'.

Is it even "local news" when it's owned by some corporation like Sinclair?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

The article is about local newspapers, not TV stations

We’re allowed to have knowledge outside of the specific thing being discussed in an article.

Also, if two local newspapers close every week, then where else will people turn if not to their local Sinclair station?

> if two local newspapers close every week, then where else will people turn if not to their local Sinclair station?

This is a questionable substitution. Local TV news is heavily watched by 55+ Americans, with over a third of 18 to 34-year olds having never watched it [1].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/742221/frequency-of-watc...

Could you link a screenshot as Statista are paywalling / registration-walling that content?

Thanks.

I can't share a screenshot of the statistics due to copyright restrictions, but I can confirm that what user JumpCrisscross said (about the statistics) is true.

Fair use / fair dealing.

Almost never applies to 100% of a work.

You're being both specious and incorrect.

The test is fourfold.

This thread is boring.

Clearly, you won't ask as requested. Thats' sufficient to know.

So replace Sinclair with Gannett, Same problem

Pretty sure "local news-ness" and ownership are separate qualities.

Are they though? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/media/sinclair-n...

Pretty sure they're not.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo

They're not. I worked in a local news station's news room (and grew up working in them alongside my dad). I would pull stories off an Associated Press feed [1], copy the scripts verbatim, and throw them into the rundown. It's one gigantic feed trough. People deny it because they want to feel like they're in control, but they're not. They're cattle.

[1] https://www.ap.org/media-solutions/enps/

I feel like, in some ways, Nextdoor has stepped into this void. I’ve even noticed that the local city government uses Nextdoor to try to get messages out. However, most of the content on Nextdoor is a dumpster fire: what were those police sirens for? What was that loud noise? Look at this ring doorbell video of this person that was trying my doorknob at 3am! Our car was stolen at 5am! These homeless camps are really driving down our property values! I saw coyotes walking down the street! These fireworks are upsetting Snookums!

>Look at this ring doorbell video of this person that was trying my doorknob at 3am! Our car was stolen at 5am!

Both of those seem relevant to me if they're in my neighborhood or nearby. Crime is low where I live but when it happens, it tends to happen in sprees when one person or a small group of people get away with one thing and suddenly decide they can get away with it repeatedly. If there's a pattern of activity going on, I'd like to know about.

Yeah, we used nextdoor to get back some stuff taken from our car. Apparently they walked across our small city and took/left stuff as they went along.

I don’t understand why whose types of nextdoor posts are a dumpster fire? Those seem like exactly the kind of things people actually care about. If I hear a car crash down the street I’m gonna go take a look.

Well for one thing, all of the things GP mentioned are fear-based posts. Furthermore, they attract the worst types of responses, which then sucks in empathetic posters who unwittingly respond to trolls and leads pretty directly to arguments. At least that’s what I’ve witnessed the few times I’ve logged in to check on things of local interest.

I agree those examples are bad. I usually see something like "weird car I don't recognize is in the neighborhood!!!!", And ofc the explanation cant be something simple, like visiting friends or family, someone checking out homes for sale, someone got a new car, etc. It's obviously a cunning criminal staking out the place in broad daylight.

I can't imagine having the level of paranoia as Nextdoor posters, that shit would break me.

On the other hand ,I find myself not doing certain things I'd like to do, like evening walks around the neighborhood because some shut in might call the cops on me.

Attempted entry at 3am, grand theft auto, homeless camps, and coyotes? These are your examples of NextDoor toxicity?

These are downright useful things to know. I’ve seen comical behavior on NextDoor. If it was just people warming me about coyotes I’d still have the app installed.

Nextdoor posts about crime almost always contain a reaction that normalizes it in one horrific way or another. Like if people complain about their car being broken into, someone always says that they should just leave their doors unlocked.

If someone complains about their political signs being stolen it results in someone condemning the content of their stolen sign or complaints like, "yeah but signs on (opposite side of issue) get stolen all the time and you don't see us complaining about it!" So even on the local level it turns into neighbor versus neighbor easily despite careful moderation.

The source material makes a weak case for the causation (rather than simply correlation) claimed in the title.

Here’s a link to the actual report, for some reason it’s buried 3 or 4 levels deep from the article: https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-...

Notice the headline (clickbait?) topic is not the primary theme of the report. The report is primarily about the state of the newspaper business. In the key findings, “news deserts” causing a divide is only mentioned in one of the last points.

I’m not trying to disagree necessarily, but they need to provide better support for the tie-in.

Agreed, this article provides clear evidence that the industry is declining but no evidence of it being linked to a growing divide. I’m sad, but not surprised, to see so few comments engaging with the contents of the article itself.

Not sure I agree. I live in New York City and my family is scattered in suburban towns all over the south. They constantly ask me about the “violence in NYC” and whether it’s safe.

The important issue here isn’t whether NYC is safe or violent. The issue is why are they reading about NYC? That’s the question we should be asking.

Why and where is my mother finding out about a random act of subway violence? Social media. Why is this content being pushed to her? Why do social media companies get to decide the type of content you see and also skirt publisher laws?

The problem isn’t a lack of local news. The problem is the nationalization of local news and algorithm driven 24/7 fear mongering on social media.

Take a 30 day break from social media and the news and the world feels safer. Gee, I wonder why. Did the world change?

> Why do social media companies get to decide the type of content you see and also skirt publisher laws?

There should be laws telling media companies what to publish? So people don't read FUDy articles that people always seem to seek out and demand? And these laws exist for other mediums?

When I was a kid our nightly news broadcast was full of crime and moral-panics news clips, people eat that stuff up always. I doubt it was much different in terms of gossip and social conversations.

We don’t need any new laws. We just need to apply existing publisher laws to social media companies which are outright acting as publishers.

They are subject to an intense propaganda campaign. NYC is viewed as democratic, and so the propaganda attacks it by amplifying any problem or just fabricating them.

You can see the top stories your parents are exposed to on FB, https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en

The top ones are often propaganda outlets who feed them the lies.

Exactly, what divide are we talking about? Divide me (please!) from para-military loons.

Of much greater importance--why would media from NYC become absolutely obsessed with a trivial event in, say, Ferguson, Missouri? Why not concern themselves with the incredible violence of places like...NYC? Why not look deep into the actual statistics around violence, rather than amplifying particular incidents from irrelevant places? Bad faith question, of course. They do it because they have to travel far and wide to find things that match the narrative. Outside their window, in the streets which their own politicians control, the narrative is a little different.

To answer your own question for the sake of contrast, it's not strange that provincials would know about the events in NYC. It is a large, important city.

Ferguson was publicized heavily because of massive demonstrations because police everywhere should know that their brother in blue makes their jobs more dangerous. Police killings undermine trust in police which is crucial for their safety.

John Oliver did a good "writeup" about Ferguson and why it mattered back in 2014. You should watch it, and see if you think it wasn't notable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUdHIatS36A

You’re asking the same question, but in a leading way. I’m not even sure what you’re trying to imply here.

>To answer your own question for the sake of contrast, it's not strange that provincials would know about the events in NYC. It is a large, important city.

NYC is the financial capital of the US so of course important news out of NYC may be important elsewhere. However, a random act of subway violence is not important national news. Given the volume of subway riders I would argue that it is not even important local news.

In research on effects of local news, there is one really tricky part.

We don't yet know what precisely the "local" benefit is. Many of the relevant studies investigate the effects of local newspapers closing (or opening, rarely). But they imply that there is something special about local reporting that can't be supplied by national news.

The best answer comes from a ~10 year old study [1] that suggests there is a mutual reinforcing effect of local news, community embedding (i.e. social capital) and social engagement (i.e. volunteering etc.)

I wish there was a better model of (1) what it is in particular in local news that is beneficial and (2) how it affects people (positively and negatively).

[1] Rojas, H., Shah, D. V., & Friedland, L. A. (2011). A communicative approach to social capital. Journal of Communication, 61(4), 689–712.

Isn’t it simply based on experiencing reality? Local news is directly experienced, and when all news was within the sphere of experienced events, it was good. Modernity has stretched the sphere of news to events that are not directly experienced in reality and thus lead to here-say and bias to authority vs conviction of certainty through direct experience.

That's one possibility. But you can always construct a scenario where the opposite holds.

I.e. your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local polarization.

In other words, access to local news may help some people realize how little they connection feel towards their neighbors.

> your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local polarization

It cannot possibly be worse than localized social media like Nextdoor.

>your local paper may cater to a part of the community whose perspective you don't share

Local papers are usually both barely profitable and locally funded. Local businesses, similarly, are usually scraping by. A local paper that alienates a significant fraction of the community doesn't usually survive. Local reporting is usually straightforward and factual, therefore.

That's the other reason local reporting is important, because it can't afford biases. It's where journalists learn to be impartial.

Said another way, it seems clear that conflict between people has been becoming more extreme as a consequence of news shifting to a belief based system due to the lower probability that any news source heard is something that can be directly experienced.

I believe local news tends to be a more 'news' and a bit less 'narrative'.

I also believe that the more local the news is, the more relatable.

From Canada, I can get PBS/NPR Vermont, and the sheer quaintness of the local issues from Burlington Vt. I mean it feels like going back in time but in a good way. 'The New Playhouse' opened up, the 'Fireworks Display Will Be Here' etc. - it's the complete opposite of Cable news and Twitter, which is incendiary and ideological.

National narrative news satisfied an ostensible intellectual aspect of our orientation, but I'm not sure it's useful in the magnitude we consume it.

There are a number of studies showing what is beneficial specifically about local news:

- "Academic studies suggest that a lack of local media coverage is associated with less informed voters, lower voter turnouts, and less engaged local politicians." [0]

- "We examine how local newspaper closures affect public finance outcomes for local governments. Following a newspaper closure, municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points, costing the municipality an additional $650 thousand per issue." [1]

Without local news people don't vote as much, are less informed about the issues, and politicians have less oversight. Local news fills a very important role in society.

[0] https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/public-finance-loc... [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555

> There are a number of studies showing what is beneficial specifically about local news:

keyword here is "associated".

Does lack of local media coverage cause "less informed voters, lower voter turnouts, and less engaged local politicians", or is it the reverse? It certainly seems plausible. If you don't care about politics at all, you're probably happy sitting at home watching daytime national TV rather than reading the local paper.

The same applies to newspaper closures being associated with higher borrowing costs. Towns that are on a downward spiral would cause higher borrowing costs (who wants to borrow to a town with a dwindling tax base?) as well as causing local media establishments to shut down.

There are so many mundane things that happen in local communities that I'm not sure you need research to show how invaluable it is to local readers. Yet, is noise to everyone else.

I could think of a few, new businesses opening up, or worse, shutting down, or changes to government policies that affect residents. Maybe you're in a farming community and there's a big corporate buyout that's going to make your life more difficult, or something to celebrate. What about new parks opening up, or changes to traffic flow, or even, a new stop light being added at a dangerous intersection.

These are all things people locally care about, and true, they probably wouldn't actively seek them out, but having it on the front page of their news source would definitely be interesting enough to read.

I keep thinking this is a ripe space for a startup. I could see it being, "Infrastructure for local news" or perhaps "Local news in a box."

For example, what would it take to have something like Berkleyside[1] for every small town in the country? Or what about something like Block Club[2]

If anyone wants to spit ball ideas for this, I'd love to riff: https://calendly.com/evan-arnold/riff-on-local-news?month=20...

[1]https://www.berkeleyside.org/ [2]https://blockclubchicago.org/

Who pays for local news? You need to have actual journalists sitting in boring local council meetings and reading boring reports to generate "news" stories. That is not free. Local news competes for attention with national news, global news, and a billion types of non-news entertainment. Ad money is probably too thin to cover the expensive legwork needed for local coverage.

I’d say to question those assumptions. Open source software exists but the congenital wisdom that engineers would never do work for free.

You’d be surprised what people will volunteer for. Some people are already attending those things and perhaps they’d be willing to report back.

It's a lot harder to get unbiased news if you solely rely on volunteers.

Can you imagine getting your news from a version of Richard Stallman.

I do in fact read his RSS feed from time to time...

There is no such thing as "unbiased" and there is nothing wrong with biased news as long as the reader is aware of the bias.

There is nothing wrong about biased news if there is a variety of biases available. I think for local news the risk is very high that a small group of volunteers can capture almost all reporting and push only their biases.

I think there are a couple interesting angles on this.

The two websites I linked above are donation based, and both are growing. I think this is a reasonably viable model for larger metropolitan neighborhoods and wealthier suburbs. Although frankly, I'd like to find a way to spread local news to all parts of the country.

The second angle would be some sort of aggregation play around local desires (e.g. a riff on Ben Thompson and Aggregator Theory). Google/Facebook allow you to target ads by geography and interest, which obviously eviscerates a lot of local ad revenue. But could there be another way to bundle & slice interests plus content? For example, you do local, irl interest (cycling clubs? garden walks?). Or perhaps you do an emphasize on privacy + irl experience? I don't have a great idea here (yet?) - but I refuse to believe there isn't something.

One tendril of the problem is that online delivery enables organizations to track engagement at a more granular level than "which articles generated lots of letters to the editor?"

I suspect it takes a lot of integrity, stubbornness, or stupidity to continually plow resources into reporting out, writing, and editing eat-your-vegetables articles instead of reallocating those resources towards the content people engage with.

One answer to that is to go to a weekly format. I think the economics work out a lot better than for a daily.

Around Tompkins County we still have the Ithaca Journal but each edition seems a little thinner than the one before.

There is a civic-minded weekly, Tompkins Weekly which is mostly newspaper-length stories and makes it to public meetings, and also the weekly Ithaca Times which covers serious issues, often with stories a bit longer than newspaper stories. There are also some publications focused on arts and entertainment.

Patch [1] seems to be exactly what you’re describing — “local news in a box”:

> What is Patch? > > Patch is an innovative way to find out about, and participate in, what's going on near you.

My Connecticut hometown had a Patch site. As other commenters have pointed out, apps don’t address a dearth of local journalists (Patch appears to encourage community participation, which sounds good, but is not journalism), funding for local news (though I would expect it to reduce operating costs), etc.

[1] https://patch.com/about

Oh, neat! Thanks for sharing this.

If you mean startup as in VC backed super growth oriented companies. Then this set of incentives is exactly what got us here. I don't see anyway local news framework make big money without devolving to the attention grabbing mindless beasts we have now.

But newspapers have always been in the business of grabbing attention. Tim Wu has written about this extensively.[1] The issue for me is that in the past, this generated a lot of positive by-products (i.e. local news reporting on corrupt politicians resulting in them being kicked out of office; local news reporting on polluted water supply resulting in it being cleaned, etc.). With Google/Facebook news, and a focus on national stories, you loose this side benefit.

[1] https://bookshop.org/books/the-attention-merchants-the-epic-...

This has been tried a lot with very little to show for it.

The problem is running a real newsroom that actually has the capabilities to do serious coverage is shockingly expensive.

So you need a revenue model. Being local, it can't pursue scale like WaPo or Dotdash-Meredith, so programmatic isn't going to work for you with. National advertisers want more scale and more specific demographics than you're able to offer, and besides, why should they deal with you when they can target the same people on Facebook?

So you're left with a few local advertisers, who may be willing to spend some money, but the metro papers have tried that for the last decade and it's not enough.

Which leaves subscriptions.

And here's the question: Newspapers were never actually in the political coverage business, they're in the Information Business, and local politics and news are loss-leaders inside that. In the old days, their offering included sports, real estate, classifieds, jobs, shopping, movie times and various other near monopolies that are now scattered to the winds of the internet.

So that leaves two questions:

1. What is a local information product that's good enough for a sizeable percentage of the community to pay for?

2. At what price point?

3. How big does that community need to be in order to make it work?

Can this be done? Actually, I think there's a shot if the right person tried it in the right place. I have some ideas, but odds are long, and I don't think anyone without a deep grasp of both the local community they plan to serve and the business they're going into has a chance.

It's expensive and risky. Telling truth to power invites power to fight back, and power has the means to fight.

A major unrecognised role of publishers is in providing legal shield to authors and reporters. Though some publishers are ducking out on that responsibility, see Cory Doctorow's take, "Reasonable Agreement":

https://doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed...

Alt (paywall / regwall / JS): https://scribe.rip/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed7

Can’t honestly say I know anyone outside of my parents who reads the newspaper. Sounds like the newspaper is dying, not local news that has shifted to be digital.

>local news that has shifted to be digital.

Our local newspaper has a few actual journalists reporting on what is happening in government at city, county and state level. Just a few since all the layoffs. Sports is hanging on, but has been taken over by The Athletic.

Real journalism concerning business, arts and suburb cities is gone. The only time it is legitimately covered is if it is being covered elsewhere by local TV stations.

The newspaper website is a malignant entity infecting everyone with trackers and ads.

They are attempting video, but it lacks the content and production of even a mildly successful youtube creator.

I still subscribe to the digital product to help support the remaining journalists.

Still need journalists though, even for digital.

A big issue is major corporations buying up lots of local news stations too.

I found this video extremely eye opening. Worth a watch if you haven’t seen it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q_hGKT5FI78

I assume they do that because local news isn't profitable and is always on the risk of failing?

Nobody else to blame but the newspaper industry themselves. Failure to begin modernizing/digitizing their systems in the 1990s caused them to make very hasty decisions in the mid 2000s and 2010s (such as relying on advertising models created by Google/Facebook).

The local newspapers failed, yes. But that's normal. Had there been a healthy market for local news, they'd have been replaced.

What actually happened is that the revenue available to local news got consolidated. Classifieds and local ads got rolled up by Craigslist/Google/Facebook. None of these companies have an interest in local news.

There's not much of a fix for this. Until we come up with a better way to pay for local news, there's no choice the "newspaper industry" could have made to thrive. Fighting consolidation is a good idea, though, and might help a new model emerge.

Citation needed? How would digitizing their systems have saved the industry from all three of its primary revenue streams being hoovered up by free online classifieds, free debundled online news, and online advertising?

If you're going to blame the industry, it seems weird to claim it's because of strategic mistakes made in the 2 decades after peak circulation and not the moment ad revenue became indispensable?

Here is the full report from the original source, along with the methodology used.

https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-...

Younger generations need to pay for news. Local news is important for democracy since local news feeds alerts national news.

Ad networks by providing news for free is destroying democracy.

How does one incentivize this? Because younger generations ain't gonna do it for charity reasons; they don't have surplus income to donate to charity.

Bring back pay per newspaper vending machines? They were awful and broken all the time before, and now they’re just free. If it’s cheap entertainment, I’d rather pay for that than iTunes movies.

If people were willing to pay for them, why would they have been made free in the first place?

Probably because it’s cheaper to give them away than to keep repairing haphazardly designed vending machines. Maybe they should just make them like the snack vending machines.

Based on the fact that newspaper businesses had many, many decades to come up with a better machine, I would assume the cost of developing this machine is not worth it.

That’s sort of ex-post-facto reasoning though. By that logic, there’s nothing that could save the newspapers, because they had decades to do it and they didn’t.

That is not the reasoning.

The reasoning is for decades, newspapers sold many papers and made a decent amount of money, compared to today.

Therefore, the incentive to create better machines that allow them to sell more and prevent theft was higher then than today, and yet they did not.

Either the technology did not exist back then, or more likely, it simply was not worth the cost of better machines for the additional revenue.

Therefore, if it was not worth it back when newspapers were in high demand, why would it be worth developing today at a fraction of the demand?

The money makers for newspapers were always ads and classifieds. Paying for the paper was just to hopefully cover printing and distribution.

> How does one incentivize this?

"Local influencers" needs to become a thing, if it isn't already. That's the answer to the local news problem. If you want to know how to become a successful influencer just ask the popular kids at a school. Yes quality of content matters, but there's a mystical charisma component at the center of it.

Once local influencers have been established in an area then quality can gradually take on more of a role. Those who provide sensationalistic news will get their crowd, but some (hopefully those with citations, less sensationalism, and less bias) will eventually gain the status of "trustworthy". And over time some will gain enough popularity to start looking more like a normal business again, with local sponsorships and the whole thing.

This may seem a bit depressing at first but it's completely normal. As publication relies less and less on expensive machinery and elaborate organizations it will naturally gravitate toward individuals. Conglomerates like Sinclair only exist to pick on the carcasses of dead mediums.

> "Local influencers" needs to become a thing, if it isn't already. That's the answer to the local news problem

If that's the answer, then I hope the whole industry curls up and dies now. If you want me to pay a single cent for trash like that, you'd have to stick a gun in my face.

I'm just being a realist, and I'm not suggesting people will pay. I realize "influencer" is a trigger word, but not all of them are Tik Tok dancers and vapid teens. I lump people like YouTubers in here. They've learned how to make money from sponsorships, and maybe that sort of thing can happen at a local level too. And hopefully with written media of some sort (written, not printed... so blogs).

The problem is, many of our generation can't afford to pay for local news that we barely have the time and the mental energy to consume after working 10 or more hours and then commuting. No, cutting our Netflix and switching it to some local paper won't work either, because we don't need to engage our brains with some random Netflix stuff.

In contrast, pensioners have more than enough free time to read the news and vote - as evidenced by just about every voter turnout statistic.

Want to fix politics? Make it possible for young people to actually engage with democracy again.

> In contrast, pensioners have more than enough free time to read the news and vote

Not with that attitude. I'm reading a newspaper since I was 14. If they don't make time to read a newspaper, they're just not interested. Don't try to sugarcoat it with some pointless victimization.

How many hours did you have to work to afford a place to live, back then? Did that change somehow?

If so, how can that affect the time left to entertain oneself and read about the news? Also, how was the news back then? Was it all about making marketing profile and click-baiting?

We already have enough youthful political activists that are 100% disconnected from the real world.

Why would we want the youngest, least experienced, most ideological, and frequently petulant to elect leaders?

More youth voters won't fix a thing. It will, in fact, make things a lot worse.

Worse for whom?

Everyone

Instead we should elect geriatrics, who can barely speak up half the time, or look like they're about to collapse from good old American heart disease any minute.

No, not geriatrics. 40 to 60 year old men and women who have accomplished something other than lie well enough to get elected a dozen times. Each should only serve a max of 8 years before another is voted in.

>Make it possible for young people to actually engage with democracy again.

Is this really that much more difficult now than in the past? I would think it'd be easier now given that information is easier to obtain and workers rights are at an all time high

Not local really but I bit the bullet on NY Times, WSJ, Bloomberg

I miiight do LA Times (doubt)

Paywall circumvention doesnt work well/at all on mobile

I agree that ad bombing eyeball news is very low quality in comparison to subscription news. Its a night and day difference. Its distressing that nobody else I know can really see or access these articles, being pulled by every clickbait version of an event

Do you live in NY or DC? Otherwise this is pretty much the opposite of supporting local news.

Yes the opposite of local but congruent with paying at all

Paying for twitter screenshots?

>Younger generations need to pay for news.

Add it to the list of things that younger generations are somehow required to purchase.

https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-killing-list...

Sometimes I walk by the TV while my mother is watching the local news. It seems to always just be reporting about thefts/gunshots downtown, then some new product available, followed by 15 minutes of weather and sports. I don't find much value in any of that information.

Among the interesting developments is the growing set of non-profit newsrooms.

There are the venerable institutions of PBS and NPR in the US, broadcasting on television and radio respectively, as well as increasingly online through video and podcasts.

ProPublica is probably the best known of the recent arrivals, providing investigative journalism at a national level.

I'd submitted a couple of items on Chicago's public radio station, WBEZ, acquiring one of the city's two remaining daily print papers, the Sun Times.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/1/18/22890454/chicago-sun-...

The other, the Tribune, was acquired by the vampire-capital firm Alden Capital somewhat over a year ago and has been emitting coronal mass ejections of reporters, columnists, and staff, since, though many curiously remain on the paper's masthead...).

WBEZ didn't pay for the acquisition, it was paid to take over the paper. Which might tell you something of the market for print news media presently.

Another notable example is the Baltimore Banner, which officially launched two weeks ago on June 14. It's another non-profit, is looking to expand to 70 journalists. It is online-only.

https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-banner-offic...

But both the Sun Times and the Banner are big-city papers. They're not papers reaching into small towns and rural areas, in which the news desert truly exists.

I see two possible paths forward. One is for news-as-public-good, in which jouranlism is publicly (and preferably locally) supported. Another is a return to the partisan press of the past, notably the 19th and early 20th centuries. Given the dominance of right-wing talk radio, Fox, OANN, Breitbart, and similar organisations, it seems at least one political party is already largely there.

We also enjoy a local not-for-profit news organization called Cityside which covers Oakland and Berkeley, which together is a city about the same size as Baltimore. "Local reporters" who are on the staff of the SF Chronicle and Bay Area News Group, the local legacy newspaper organizations, are always whining on Twitter about how locals don't support news any more, but the existence of these successful, award-winning nonprofit news outlets shows that people will support good reporting, but they won't support more of the same thing the big newspapers have been doing for decades.

In SF there was briefly something called The Bay Citizen that was funded by Warren Hellman.

> The Bay Citizen was a non-profit news organization covering the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded as the Bay Area News Project in January 2010 with money provided by Warren Hellman's Hellman Family Foundation. On May 26, 2010 the organization launched the website, baycitizen.org.

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

But he passed away and it merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting.

> The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California.[1] It was founded in 1977 as the nation’s first nonprofit investigative journalism organization, and has since grown into a multi-platform newsroom, with investigations published on the Reveal website, public radio show and podcast, video pieces and documentaries and social media platforms, reaching over a million people weekly.

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

I really think that anything started by a bazillionaire as an instant nonprofit enterprise is bound to fail. It goes for Warren Hellman and Mitch Kapor and the rest of them. Those that start with an immediately sustainable business model, like Cityside, seem to persist.

The success rate of startups isn't exactly spectacular either.

Growing slowly and organically isn't sexy, but it tends to build some degree of robustness and resilience.

Well, arguably the Bay Citizen didn't fail, they merged with CIR, which is a decent exit IMO. They didn't run out of money, their patron died.

I don't really know, but presumably a bazillionaire would set up a trust that then generates the funds to pay for the project from stable investments (or whatever, I really have no idea.) It's not a business model but it would be sustainable.

I figure failure would be if they folded due to lack of reader interest, but I don't think that was the case.

(I only heard of them because I interviewed there once, and I only remember the interview because it was the first time I encountered fizzbuzz. I thought they were putting me on, the interviewer had to convince me they were serious. Anyway, they seemed like they had their act together, although they passed on hiring me, which is a warning sign. ;P Maybe I'm too arrogant and full of myself?)

In my city, the local chamber of commerce put together a plan for a nonprofit local news website, something that is truly needed for the reasons cited in TFA. However, while the virtual masthead proclaims "Independent. Accurate. Unbiased." the board of directors is made up mostly of wealthy property developers and people connected with the local real estate industry. There's no way they won't put their thumbs on the scale when it comes to vetting the chief editor, providing coverage of community meetings around development, and endorsing candidates for mayor and city council.

You have the same problem with commercial newspapers, though. The L.A. Times is nothing more than a 100-year-long real estate pump and dump. Almost every newspaper in America relies on car dealer ads, and will therefore never say anything even slightly negative about cars. Cars and real estate have had their thumbs and the rest of their hand on the scale for a long time.

Look especially to the Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler eras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times#Otis_era

Or other papers / publishers --- William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane wasn't just whistling Dixie), or Robert McCormick and the Chicago Tribune.

The Baltimore Banner's first few stories have been absolutely amazing.

I work in non-profit media and it's really tough. Getting funds from membership is an uphill battle. Executive comp is much lower than private media, but at the same time it's relentlessly criticized for being too high because the numbers are disclosed. The Baltimore Banner exists based on the personal largesse of one person who tried and failed to buy the Baltimore Sun so it's going to have a hard time maintaining impartiality or surviving in a competitive market.

Largely agreed, known, and understood. See also my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981720

Non-profits are funded by people (possibly lots of people with a little money, but far more usually a couple of people with a lot of money) who have interests, or by foundations that are funded directly and completely by government. They are not news-as-public-good.

Non-profit doesn't mean "benevolent charity."

This is true, though the point is more that news organisation don't seem to be possible to run as for-profit entities in the long run.

I'm well aware of issues with not-for-profit / NGO organisation and charity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31493135

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28044444

And specifically addressing information / publishing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27802315

I think a local news publication could be done as a non profit with mostly volunteers. Kind of like an open source project.

There are enough people that enjoy sharing what’s going on and writing that it could be workable.

Maybe someone here could set up a sort of franchise that makes it easier for local communities to get set up.

(Idea for a ycombinator startup?)

For me, the biggest problem is that news media is allowed to control the narrative by injecting bias into the coverage. We all know language choice has a strong power to manipulate and shift people's perspectives on what needs to be raw facts.

Everything is a crisis, everything is a Watergate, everything is leading up to WW3.

In a journalism course I took at university, the "hello world" assignment is to write an article without bias. They teach journalists that writing emotionally was considered amateur and unprofessional. This is basic stuff that all these hundreds of thousands of professionals know on day one.

Yet, here we are, we're now in a world where the more bias you can inject into the news, the better the ratings, and the deeper the divide goes.

Its worth subscribing to (yes Paying!) a local newspaper or two if you can find any that are decent. Especially local politicians really need some journalists to investigate and report on what they're up to.

To me it seems like this is the symptom of a dying industry, the newspaper industry. I can't think of many people who are willing to pay for newspapers or news websites, let alone watch their ads(!). Eventually these papers are for-profit businesses so it's either go bankrupt, or find a way to make money no matter what. It seems that those who survived so far, are picking the latter, each to its own extent.

Hopefully, there'd be a new, sensible way of earning money for decent free press, and this is just a limbo stage.

People want gossip, blood, and vitriol. We created platforms where you can get a stream of it any time, day or night. The best (worst) of it, aggregated from around the world. People were free to choose, and chose that instead of waiting for the paper to arrive in the morning. They could in theory have done both, but they clearly only wanted the one thing. So that's what we have now. I don't understand this ritual where we blame corporations for giving us what we tell them we want.

>I don't understand this ritual where we blame corporations for giving us what we tell them we want.

It's hard to convince people to take responsibility when they cherish their freedom more than anything. We emphasize freedom so much that consequences are a barricade to us

One thing I have never understood is why Local news (both print and TV) web properties are soo terrible. I am they are objectively some of the worst designed sites on the internet,

I want to consume my local news, they make it painful for me to consume their content online, that is the primary reason local news it dead, they are clinging to their obsolete distribution model of Over the Air Video, and Dead Trees Print.

In the US it might help if the FCC got off its rear and opened a new license application window for Low Power FM (LPFM) radio stations. They gave out a few thousand licenses in 2013 and have not allowed any more licenses since then, despite a law from Congress.

Yet no mention of Operation Mockingbird!

The what?

Are the towns busted because they no longer have propagandists? Or, did the propagandists move on after the towns had already been bled dry, & were no longer worth the effort?

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

I'm old and from the city. The newspaper has always been a puppet of hospitals, real estate brokerages, & car dealerships. Part of how these companies get away with murder is by putting the entirety of local media, print & broadcast, in their back pockets.

Unless you're paying something in the ballpark of Bloomberg terminal prices, you're the product.

For New Yorkers: Hell Gate[1] is a new group, focusing on local news and intrigue. I don’t believe they’re accepting money yet, but they’ve done some excellent local investigating.

[1]: https://www.hellgatenyc.com/

How did this whole article manage to avoid mentioning that Axios itself has local news?

I was wondering this same thing! And honestly, I've found Axios's approach to be kind of inspirational.

Who watches or reads local news? I haven't watched for years. Close to two decades. My guess is specific demographics. It’s selection bias.

How do you figure out what’s going on around you then? Word of mouth (online or otherwise)?

I use local newspaper articles online and Reddit, but I mostly don't figure out what's going on around me. :D

For me word of mouth I suppose. If I don't hear about it from somebody else, it probably wasn't worth knowing.

I think all this "news" people read/watch is mostly useless filler. I don't miss any of it.

Wait, i thought "Nextdoor" etc were filling that niche with neighborhood vigilance and "my neighbor's sunflower is spying on me" posts. Also recall lots of words about how "filter bubbles" are bad and all forums must be acceptable to all society so that "badthink" doesn't grow.

There's real, local and or interest focus forums still; I'm sure. Those enjoying them aren't gonna wanna talk about them much for fear they get ruined by strangers who "know whats best."

Those enjoying them aren't gonna wanna talk about them much for fear they get ruined by strangers who "know whats best."

This is absolutely a thing. I have servers hosted on my local tiny ISP that only permit my local ISP's CIDR blocks as there is really no need for others to access them. It's literally for the local community. I might set up a VPN endpoint for people that travel some day.

It's tempting to blame journalism for the ideological divide we're seeing in the US. But the very best headlines are the ones with a 50/50 split of public opinion (the most controversial). This is also where politicians gain the strongest foothold to push their agendas (wedge issues).

Unfortunately, under capitalism there is tremendous pressure on investigative journalism to make rent. Which tends to push stories towards the divisive and cynical end of the spectrum. And politicians towards negative campaigning and mud slinging.

I feel that Ronald Reagan abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in the 80s and Newt Gingrich legitimizing alternative facts and the glorification of ignorance in the 90s are what put us on this alternate timeline we find ourselves on today. We could add in the selection of GW Bush over Al Gore by the Supreme Court in the 2000s, which solidified moneyed/authoritarian interests and corruption over democracy for at least the next 2 decades, but looking like 3 now.

Local news is one detail in this. But really I think the divide is about the transfer of power from the previous generation to young people. We're witnessing a fourth turning and even a flipping of the parties around certain issues, which is why they're acting crazier and crazier in their denial. Looking at popular news channels and public officials, I can't help but wonder where the adults are.

It's called Operation Mockingbird, which is coordinated at the yearly Billionaire's Summer Camp, A.K.A. the Sun Valley Conference, in Ketchum Idaho. This conference is where all the heads of the media companies come to get there marching orders and to further consolidate the media industry (See Disney). Parasites like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Peter Theil, and many others attend this meeting.

FYI - Ketchum Idaho is a small Ski resort community that sits in a very tight box canyon. 8 Bigs rigs could barricade the entire town, just by blocking a few bridges, or alternatively those points could be used by peaceful protestors to haze and voice there discontent to the very parasites that have destroyed this country and enslaved the minds of the masses. The weapons grade psychological warfare they conduct on us is being ignored by the politicians in Washington (both parties) because they also use those techniques to keep themselves in power.

Now is the time to rise up against the lies and deceit. Please come join me in Sun Valley on July 6th, to shine some truth on the cretins that have buried us in disinformation and war propaganda.

>"This is a crisis for our democracy and our society," said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and primary author of the report, in a statement.

Why is everything a crisis now? The crying of wolf gets tiresome and it makes it easy to tune out, probably to the detriment of local newspapers.

Media doesn't make the divide. Ideology makes the divide.

People don't drive around urban in massive trucks rolling coal and/or own a dozen guns because of their news source, their news source is because of what their "world view" is.

Not everyone can be right. Without the media to tell people that they are right, how else will they know?

The reinforcement and advertising loops are real and effective at creating and expanding the divide.

Perhaps you don't recall a time before there was such a thing as Fox News. Back when the hardest new choice was: Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, or Tom Brokaw?

>Not everyone can be right. Without the media to tell people that they are right, how else will they know?

Not every media corporation can be right.

I totally agree with this, and I don't know why you are getting so many downvotes. When Fox news called Arizona for Biden, many of their viewers were mad and there were anti fox news protests because their typical audience was mad they weren't being told what they wanted to hear.

In a capitalist nation where supply and demand is everything, some people treat the news and facts and information like a product, and when people hear things they don't like they'll find someone else to give them stories they want to hear like Trump won massively and this election was stolen.

Why is the closure of local news considered spurred by the pandemic though??

I personally stopped reading news outlets after the first Trump year. Every single news outlet was full of exactly the same Trump vitriol ( I lean left so, not strange ). And to make it worse, I am not even american in the US.

Why read the exact same opEd in the local and the state news?? At least in my home country, since about 1 year after Trump I pretty much scaled from maybe 5 outlets to 2. Since covid times I read one left and one right ( I used to only read left ) and then subscribe to weekly papers that support investigative journalism. Honestly I feel local news shot themselves in the foot with Trump hysteria.

Or maybe it was already in decline and Trump times just made it that much more evident.

> Or maybe it was already in decline and Trump times just made it that much more evident.

I think it's this one. Local news has been in a death spiral for 20 years at least, I distinctly remember adults in the late 90s and early 00s bemoaning the demise of all the local papers, with one left standing but also dying. During Trump times they latched onto reporting about national news instead of local in a desperate bid for relevancy, but obviously couldn't compete with national news.

Is there a point where Americans will give up on the Union or will it take a Yugoslavia war?

If part of the country tried to split off, who'd go fight to take it back? I'm happy my successful state sends money to some of the less successful ones, because I think every American deserves their share of the pot, but I'm not going to go die for the privilege of sending it.

My bet is that this education ratio issue has existed since the dawn of time.

Not very relevant to the topic but maybe not all is lost for the print media.

I have switched away from online news to the print ones in the last few months because:

- this way i can avoid popups, jumping pieces of content intentionally distracting me so i pay attention to ads

- ads are not as stupid there (i don't live in the U.S. and i see US-centric ads which are totally, completely out of relevance to my demographic - from "senior living homes" to private jet flights - with every kind of crazy shit in between but nothing i ever buy or can think of buying)

- content itself is a lot better edited, not clickbait-y (because you can't fucking click on paper!) and overall seems to be written by actually literate people, not some peasants that seem to write online news pieces recently

All in all, it dawns at me that at least for now, the Internet has been a failure. It failed to deliver any positive life changes we've been promised 25 years ago, and brought about many negative ones. There are only two online resources relevant to me that seem to make any positive value: Tinder and Upwork. Even of them, Upwork seems to be a detriment to developed nations (including U.S. that created it), serving mostly as a vehicle of scams for fraudsters from the poor ones.

Buying tickets online? It killed the airline industry. I can't fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i can't afford. This is directly because of Internet facilitating price comparison, and people "optimising" airlines by price alone down to the drain.

Trading stocks online? Only brought about day traders - one more form of gambling. I'd be more than happy to go to the bank and buy a paper mutual fund certificate, and lock it up in my safe.

News online brought "targeting" and "optimisation" through search bubbles and as a result, a society destroyed by political divisions.

Taxis online? Only a benefit in poor countries or in terribly terribly overregulated ones in rich countries (think NYC). They killed livelihoods of millions of people and killed quality of service elsewhere.

The list goes on. Internet seems to be more than just a failure - it is a pure evil. It confronted us with ourselves (as opposed to some polished, educated, even if overly rigid, central authority that served as an interface before), and we turned out to be monsters we had no idea we were.

And because this thing has no way out of it, i am terrified at the realisation that only thing that can save us may be some form of communism, where the State will simply ban or mandate so many things it will not be a market economy anymore.

Including, most probably, a ban on free speech. I can't see a way for free speech to work in a world of search bubbles and online anonymity. Craziest conspiracy theories will inevitably replace reality for a vast majority of people - who vote - this way.

And democracy without free speech is a joke.

>I have switched away from online news to the print ones in the last few months because:

>- content itself is a lot better edited, not clickbait-y (because you can't fucking click on paper!) and overall seems to be written by actually literate people, not some peasants that seem to write online news pieces recently

clickbait might not be a thing, but attention grabbing headlines to get you to read/buy the paper is still a thing. Besides, most (all?) major news publications have an online presence, and they're they're probably sharing stories/headlines between the print/online formats so I doubt there would be any difference in quality.

>There are only two online resources relevant to me that seem to make any positive value: Tinder and Upwork.

Not wikipedia, google maps, or e-commerce? It seems like many of the things that the internet provides have been so integral to your life that you've forgotten about them.

>Buying tickets online? It killed the airline industry. I can't fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i can't afford. This is directly because of Internet facilitating price comparison, and people "optimising" airlines by price alone down to the drain.

1. Google flights provides legroom in addition to prices. you're free to compare on price and comfort here.

2. I'm not sure how the alternative (not having comparison shopping) is any better. Are you just hoping that the benevolent airlines would always put customer comfort above profits?

>Trading stocks online? Only brought about day traders - one more form of gambling. I'd be more than happy to go to the bank and buy a paper mutual fund certificate, and lock it up in my safe.

Disagree. Now I can buy ETFs with management fees in the single basis points (eg. 0.03% for VTI) with zero trading fees. In the past I'd either have to contend with mutual funds with exorbitant management fees (1-2%), or pay $50-$100 per trade.

>Not wikipedia, google maps, or e-commerce?

Google maps yes. You got me on that. Wikipedia, well, sort of, yes... it had a good beginning but is losing trustworthiness as it's being exploited more and more, it's surely a good source of info, still. e-commerce - i bought stuff online maybe 3-4x in my life (rare items that are never stocked in shops). Food delivery apps are a particularly notorious kind of evil, killing good businesses first.

Flights - it's not just the legroom. Because people started picking on the price, airlines had to get rid of business class or make it very flexible in size (meaning - use crappy "transformer" seats that can switch back to economy when needed). Or just simply leave middle seat empty and call it business. When price wasn't the only variable people chose tickets by, airlines could be a lot more comfortable with their costs and tried to sell premium product first - which is natural for every other normal business, premium product by definition brings higher margins. It's not just what i choose, it's what other people choose. Here in EU, we simply don't have any decent business class anywhere anymore.

Stocks - ETFs were a thing before internet and they don't require it. Vanguard exists since 1975 and it's fee structure didn't change since.

> I can't fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i can't afford.

Huh? Pick a decent airline, and long haul international business class is pretty comfortable. First, I hear, is even better. Expensive, but a heckuva lot less so than a private jet.

For really long distance flights, yes things are OK, but i'm flying over 5 hours maybe a couple times per year and never did since covid. But on "short" haul (intra EU) flights, and these are typically 3-4 hours from where i live, there is now either no premium service at all or "euro business", which is economy with middle seat blocked, best case with a transformer seat that slightly increase seat width by moving inner armrests inwards, but even that is a rarity. Some backwards, poor countries where digitalisation lags behind others, like Romania and Bulgaria, kept it for a lot longer, in fact Bulgaria Air still has proper business class on a few planes, but every "modern" country (France, Germany, Italy etc) destroyed their premium "short" haul service a long time ago.

Belarus hanged in for a lot longer than others, too, and i think for same reason. Russia still does - Aeroflot has proper 3-class service on most flights and at least normal 2-class even on short haul.

> For really long distance flights, yes things are OK, but i'm flying over 5 hours maybe a couple times per year and never did since covid. But on "short" haul (intra EU) flights, and these are typically 3-4 hours from where i live, there is now either no premium service at all or "euro business", which is economy with middle seat blocked, best case with a transformer seat that slightly increase seat width by moving inner armrests inwards, but even that is a rarity

This seems to really be a European thing. Proper domestic business class still exists in Australia (on premium carrier flights between most major cities–even between Sydney and Melbourne, which is only about 1 hour), and I'm not aware of any plans to discontinue it. Similarly, in Japan, domestic flights have first class and business class (never been on either–but both are better seats, as opposed to just blocking off seats in economy). Business class with proper seats is available on domestic flights in China too. First/business class on shorter US domestic flights looks pretty crappy, but I believe it is much better for the longer US domestic flights (such as JFK-LAX nonstop, or Hawaiian's BOS-HNL nonstop route).

You are probably right.

I don’t know what the “solution” is, but it was really obvious when my “local” paper turned into a repeater for CNN. It used to be pretty poor, but it was never this bad. I don’t subscribe it to him particularly, but this Trump-Era literally broke a lot of people’s brains, it has a downstream effect.

It unpleasant to watch journalists who were screaming every day that the guy is tearing apart almost every US institution and irrecoverably destroys this country, with the ultimate goal of him staying in power.

The journalists have seen these stories from other failed states, and they cannot unsee the similarities. And they were right. Just take a look at the proceedings of the Jan 6th committee. If it was not a dozen of people in the correct roles (mostly Republicans), on Jan 6th, he could had indeed achieved his goal.

It is us who were closing our eyes for 4 years, reassuring ourselves that his presidency was a normal presidency.

Nothing was normal.

Right, good post.

Yea, I was talking about about the hyperbolic nonsense that we've saw for years, things that were not based in reality, but complete media created perception. But you make a compelling counter with Jan 6th and righteous fear.

Is hyper-local news necessary anymore? If you think about the role that newspapers filled it was to distribute information broadly. We have many more ways of doing that now. Granted they aren’t as fully developed as newspapers eventually became but we seem to be on track to build these new institutions. I think we’re simply in a transitional phase where the old medium is dying and being replaced by a new one that is growing into its role.

I don't buy it.

When you live in a small community, you get local news from your neighbors and friends, and Facebook if you have it (Facebook is essentially replacing the local news outlet in small towns, and that's worse than the problem stated in the article, but that's a different discussion). If it's important you'll hear about it. If it's unimportant you'll probably hear about it too.

The same applies to national news. 90% of it is unimportant. If it is actually important, like the fact that your bread prices will go up due to a war in Ukraine, you'll hear about it.

Sure, but what about medium sized communities?

The Bay Area has lots of local news outlets and even more local "boots on the ground" community blogs run by volunteers. I don't know if that's true around the rest of the country though.

I always admire the self-importance journalists assign to themselves. Most local news was and would ever be utter trash. Small town journalism could only survive by peddling to some powerful local group or a political enterprise. With all its problems, social media has proven over and over to be a far more useful tool for communities.

Social media, maybe. Social (and other) ad-driven media? Certainly not.

>> With all its problems, social media has proven over and over to be a far more useful tool for communities.

I just LOVE how you proclaim this, without first seeing (a) the cosequences of social media (good or bad) 30+ years from now, and (b) whatever disrupts current social media next.

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