Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaa_aaa | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I don't know why these outlets are considered `prestigious`. To me they are just `popular`.

The Sun or the Daily Mail are far more "popular" than the Guardian. The Guardian is more prestigious, you won't see the top students in journalism studies saying that their dream is to work for at the Mail on Sunday :)

They just have different audiences. It does not make one more prestigious.

The difference is, even a reader of the Sun would probably agree that the Guardian is more prestigious (they just wouldn't necessarily think that that's a good thing).

That’s pretending that there’s prestige in being a student in journalism.

Well, some people consider it a great sign of prestige to be personal nemesis of some of the world's most powerful people. Or, as Nixon's attorney general allegedly said about the washington post's publisher Katie Graham: "Katie Graham … is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published" [1].

[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/08/the-nixon-gang-s...

To the sister comments: There are scientific definitions of quality and prestige in journalism. Some of them align along the demarcation of yellow press and "high brow" press [1]. Some do not. But it's neither irrelevant nor understudied. It's just that quality and prestige tap into an immensely complex value system that is highly specific to national cultures and temporally unstable.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978111884157...

I think "prestige" in legacy corporate media roughly correlates with the willingness to regurgitate propaganda aimed to further the state-corporate agenda. See: the "prestigious" New York Times and it's sycophantic support for imperialist wars and interventions, and willingness to publish lies and unverified claims to that end.

In other words, prestigious means never stepping far from the public opinion and lightly coloured with the opinion of your party of choice. The Guardian is left-leaning, so this means neverending support for Labour, LGBT, climate, veganism and women issues given a boost in priority.

The Economist, another prestigious newspaper I am familiar with, this means alignment with the Western neoliberal policies and monetary theory. If it's coming from the Bank of England, ECB or Federal Reserve, it is the truth.

Though I lean the same direction as those two newspapers, it is obvious they don't try very hard to be critical or entertaining alternative viewpoints. It's a big echo chamber, and all these newspapers, left and right, are so close to the centre they are basically spreading the same message.

They're a propaganda tool not for creating extremism, but for creating conformism.

Instead of asking writers to defend perspectives they aren't strong in, why not just read from multiple sources? Isn't aggregation the modern style of news? Who reads singular publications nowadays?

Also, away from the topic of credibility, what about coverage of relevant stories? If you're interested in video game news, are you going to wait for the NYT to finally cover your interests as a reader? No outlet can provide adequate coverage for your interests, so you are always going to be missing out on a story that you care about. Thus news products designed to be your one-and-everything are doomed to fail vs modern aggregators that allow you to have inclusionary and exclusionary lists of sources and topics.

You'd expect atleast some decency in such mainstream media, especially in areas where they should be competent at.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2022/may/17/evacua...

This for example, from the title, the word "evacuation" and even the headline image are a clear example of something that a "prestige" newspapar such as The Guardian should never do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com