Broken and distrusting: why Americans are pulling away from the daily news
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We've belatedly come to realise that 'the news' is not the neutral reporting of events but rather the manufacture of information products for commercial or political gain, most preferably for the oligarchical media owners, both. We need a new revenue model, new ownership model of news media, before we can trust again what has been piped into our eyes and ears
When we consider the current state of journalism we should check the presupposition that we ever had a "free and functional press". I can't remember a time, nor can I find evidence, that it ever truly existed without some sort of circumstantial asterisks polluting the results.
1. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9kZWZjb3J0aGV0aHJ...
The internet has laid waste to that scheme. But not sure the facts have gotten any more factual in sum.
There was a managing editor of the New York Times. He knew that his reporters leaned somewhat left, so he steered the editorial slant of the paper somewhat right to balance. They literally put "He kept the paper straight" on his tombstone. Today the Times comes rather short of that standard.
No one can take on media bias in a serious fashion without discussing Fox news and it's kin.
Vaguely handwaving is in bad faith.
(1) It's all about views. Click bait, racing to publish, and so on results in lower quality news.
(2) Pretty much all the mainstream news is from one perspective. The agenda is pretty transparent and hurts the quality.
However, I do agree it's about eyeballs, not quality reporting. Everyone's guilty of that, the only question is how far they distort things to attract those eyeballs. An honest news outfit couldn't survive these days.
I remember a post on reddit about someone who grew up in the USSR/Russia before moving to America and they laid out how tuning out from media leads to not caring and eventually some authoritarian-style of government and how they were afraid this was slowly happening in America now.
Next thing is for most of the news it is all bad and I think we need to find some kind of shift. While the news should be accurate and reported, what about news about how many lives were saved last night in the ER? Or how some local non-profit feeds and provides goods for the homeless. The 24-hour news cycle with everything being bad has really curbed are ability to have empathy with other humans from anywhere.
The core of the issue is money. All major news agencies are all owned by corporate interests, and they aren't in the news business for the betterment of society - they want to turn a profit. This affects every editorial decision they make, and leads to consequences like fear-based reporting and, much worse, editorial decisions that favor the interests of the corporate owners, meaning a lot of stuff about them that may be bad is either downplayed, buried, our outright not printed.
This sounds conspiratorial, but it's all just the side effect of putting profit over people, which is the American way.
1) Negativity / Tragedy "sells" better than good news 2) The facts have taken a back seat to sensationalism and celebrity worship and opinion 3) There are only a handful of mega-corporations running all the "news" and deciding what to show/tell vs. what to hide/ignore.
What irks me most is that I now have to choose between A) being my own investigative report when a topic is important enough, or B) giving in to not knowing the truth. Being lazy and stupid is not a good plan forward, but being well-informed requires time I usually don't have to spend. Thanks, "news" industry.
The daily news is arguably narrative driven, and people have noticed many local stations share the exact same script it doesn't matter if its Fox, Abc, Cbs, Nbc.
That video is still being shared widely on both left and the right.
Poll: Do you trust the time tellers? Response: A lot less than I used to.
According to special relativity, the time for you is path dependent, and different than for everyone else depending on the vectors that brought you to this point. If two times are inconsistent it doesn't necessarily mean that either one is wrong.
(This works horribly well until the bad outcomes start to reach the elite class directly and personally)
The country is having a heat emergency https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32137713 and still nobody will talk sense over climate change.
If you must follow a UK paper, and not just pick up the background scattering of the news from Twitter, the FT remains reasonably reliable.
The constant 24hr mantra just has to be a recipe for psychological disaster. That isn't too say a victim of crime shouldn't have a voice. There is just too much for any one person to process, makes us feel more helpless. I can't help but think at times of the film nightcrawler. I'm sure media is staffed by well meaning people but underneath it feels like in part like this baying for blood, for more chaos.
I still keep up to date with the basics, outside of very major stories I try to avoid the whole "follow this story" side.
"The news" isn't journalism, journalism is about investigation. "The news" also doesn't have a monopoly on Journalism. I receive a lot of journalism on the internet from places which are not in any way considered to be "the news".
We say the problem is that they can't figure out how to profitable. This is nonsense. It isn't profitable because it mostly isn't providing any value so few people are willing to pay for it. If a majority of it died, people could find new ways to do things that do provide real value.
I read a lot of dense subject matter material. Whether it be software, our product domain, or just personal interest. It's possible to write high quality surface-level explainers, but the news feels like a college student's research essay written entirely in the free period before the class where it was due.
Even their blatantly biased calls to action are sloppy. They can drive me away from positions I believe in by arguing for them so poorly.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
- Michael Crichton
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
Exactly. Totally innocuous example that aptly illustrates the problem:
My local station did a story with an attached video about the cool new airplane CalFire got at a local base. At no point did they identify the aircraft by name, where it came from, why CalFire received it now, anything about its performance other than it carries 3,000 gallons of water & retardant, or even which airplane it was as they panned around the apron.
If even a single editorial review is apparently too expensive, what's the point of paying attention in the first place?
However the national news stations, except for `${myChannel}`, are biased garbage that should be put out to pasture.
Near as I can tell, The Guardian is owned by Scott Trust Limited, which looks to be a UK equivalent of the U.S.’s not-for-profit legal entity. Further, I can find no documentation of Soros being an influence.
What proof do you have of this claim?