Hacker News Reader

Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

“The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families.

Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time.

So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” is the answer, but it’s not entirely fair. Kind of like saying the cooks at McDonald’s have always been this bad; in fact it has never been their job to do world-class work.

View on HN

> Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time.

Correct answer.

People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish.

Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The business being covered will issue a press release and it gets rewritten into articles.

The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything about whether X is true or not.

This has become noticeably more true as newsrooms are cut to the bone. Content volume over content quality, because volume is what gets the ad dollars.

I wonder if there's a viable market for a news outlet which has as its distinguishing core principle the guarantee that it will never use any material from press releases (or equivalently unsolicited, self-interested messaging) as unqualified sources, except for narrow cases when no other source was available. And in such cases it is accompanied by an unambiguous indication (really unambiguous, like a different color font for any portions of the article text directly and solely derived from such sources) that the information presented therein should be trusted on the same level as motivated hearsay from a single source, because that's what it is.

But of course this would be expensive to operate, difficult to insulate from corruption and compromise, and unlikely to be popular with advertisers, whose objectives constitute the epitome of conflicted interest with such an outlet's stated core principle.

I don't think that model is compatible with news, where one of the value props is being fast.

As you shade over from news to analysis, there are outlets like that. The Economist comes to mind; I don't think I've ever felt that their content was written from press releases. But it's also at least a day, usually a week, later than the actual news.

There's probably a project management style triangle here: fast, accurate, and, um. Some third thing. Pick two.

It wasn't just 'The Morning Call.' It came from the top from the elite, international, consensus making publications like The New York Times and the Washington Post. These are the papers of record that have the resources to still do real journalism. We're harangued by them how 'democracy dies in darkness' every time we click one of their links, and yet they chose to give all these guileless grifters flattering coverage more often than not.

Doesn't Fox News make tons of money? Do you think they could capitalize on this failure of what you describe as the papers of record and start doing investigative journalism into financial and tech businesses?

Fox News is primarily a cable news network that republishes some of their work as articles. Television isn't really a medium that lends itself to long form investigative journalism.

Why would they bother with it when what they're doing is way more profitable? They also have a reputation for being the partisan press. They'd have to completely rebrand to get into a less lucrative area.

I'm told that all press is the partisan press of one side or the other, but it seems that there is little to no investigative reporting done by the conservative media - I wonder if it's an opportunity.

Unless you actually watch conservative media, you won't know about their investigative reporting, because it will rarely be mentioned in Democrat media.

And if it is mentioned, it is dismissed as misinformation, like Hunter Biden's laptop.

Prefacing this with the coordinated media blackout on the laptop story was horrendous. You couldn't even send a message using Messenger to a friend about it.

The long form journalism that the partisan press produces, both sides here, amounts to little more than fan service. It's incapable of investigating things out of public interest without it relating to their kayfabe. MSNBC can produce thousands of hours about Trump/Russia, but the for the Snowden leaks you get a few seconds of a professional talking head, who had to take off his lanyard with his CAC right before taping, telling you how Snowden is a bad man.

Fox News is not investigating complex issues because investigating complex issues is not within their remit. Their remit is to repeat simple memes that form easy sound bites for viewers receptive to that kind of thing.

The WSJ on the other hand has excellent investigative journalism which is usually well separated from conservative partisan commentary - see Carreyrou as a good example.

> it seems that there is little to no investigative reporting done by the conservative media

There is, but if you're ever exposed to it it's probably in the context of brutal point-by-point debunking. On account of how it tends to be hilariously bad. Like that recent Mules "documentary" from D'Souza, or various Sinclair must-run pieces. Typically they're just very-slanted advocacy masquerading as investigative reporting. Or they take the form of popular opinion-jockeys running special "exposé" episodes that are also mostly or entirely easily-dismissed-with-public-info BS. Collectively, these seem to sate the conservative demand for conservative-flavored investigative journalism, and are all much cheaper than doing actual investigation, especially since you'll always find something to "expose" and there are never any dead-ends wasting time and money (since there's no need for actual substance behind the whole exercise).

If you mean from actual newsrooms, sure, those don't do much investigative reporting, but then there aren't a lot of conservative newsrooms. And it's not like the non-conservatives ones do much, either, with a few exceptions.

60 minutes and PBS NewsHour beg to differ

Those don't make money.

They don't but European countries fund independent journalism and documentary makers. Check out IDFA.

https://www.idfa.nl/en/

Shout out to Frontline. Probably the best television investigative journalism I've ever seen.

How do their audiences compare to everything else on TV? The fact there are two, made three, programs out of... what, 1000 programs a week? I wouldn't take that as evidence that broadcast TV is well suited for long form journalism.

They're often good material. But they are way way way fringe. 60 Minutes especially is probably only still around because it would be a public embarrassment to kill it.

I mean, the heavy metal sonic aesthetic is not well suited for Mariachi music. The fact that Metalachi exists and has a following doesn't disprove the hypothesis.

Dominos would be my counterpoint: their pizza was just bad and they could do better. And they did.

I think it’s entirely possible that an industry with low competition and high nepotism could just be doing their jobs poorly.

Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?

Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective. They went from abysmal to merely bad. Which is fine at that price point and value prop.

> Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective.

They're not trying to be gourmet food, they're trying to be fast food. They were very bad by even that low standard, and they became better by that standard. I'm still not a fan, but to give credit where credit is due, they did improve.

Oh, 100% agreed there. But in a a larger conversation about "the media", Dominos is analogous to a large, mass-market, low cost outlet, not the media in general. It's entirely possible that TMZ or People Magazine had similar improvements that still keep them below the radar of someone serious about the product.

So yeah, some credit, that's fair. But I think the lesson is that good management recognizes when quality is falling off the bottom of the bottom rung, and makes adjustments to get back on that bottom rung.

That’s exactly my point:

We can both recognize the limits of mass market news and think that, eg, CNN is delivering a product below that standard.

Yeah, when did they get better? They've added more MSG over the last couple decades, I'm pretty sure, and kicked it up a lot when they publicized that they were re-formulating their sauce a decade or so ago—and, to be fair, they're far from alone in that, if you want a Pizza Hut pie that's about the same quality as a 1995 Pizza Hut pie, you're going to be paying more like $25 than $10 and you won't be getting it from Pizza Hut, all those chains been cutting quality and adding MSG for years to try to avoid raising prices—but haven't gotten better, except at making you regret eating it.

> They've added more MSG over the last couple decades

You say this as if it's an inherently bad thing. There's nothing wrong with some MSG as a flavor enhancer.

They already had some. Now there's a ton. And it's not to make it better, but to cover for the fact that all the other components have gotten a lot worse.

> Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?

How is Rogan an an example of good journalism? He doesn't do background research or push back on guests.

>So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad”

Vass you dere, Charlie? [1]

Misinformation/disinformation may, I suppose, have always been pretty much this bad, but the writing quality and intelligence in the mainstream media was not.

"Journalism" today reads like an assignment written by a near-illiterate freshman engineering student in the compulsory English class, by the standards of the mid-90s. At best.

And I think the reason is obvious - modern advertising technology proved that decent writing adds essentially zero value and forced everybody to accept it.

So the people with liberal arts degrees are not wrong to hate techies. But once, even techies wrote better.

We used to live in a world where elites guessed at what ordinary people wanted, and once the data-driven creed took over, it turned out they were mostly wrong. But optimization taken too far is evil.

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

> “The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families.

Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay.

I'd rather get paid like a tobacco lobbyist (or a FAANG developer) than a journalist. Our society has clearly shown us what it values.

So the onus on reporters to ferret out fraud has the same moral weight as tobacco lobbyists? Except they make $35k/year, get fired every 6 months as their newsrooms undergo layoffs due to lack of clicks, and get sued for investigating anyone powerful enough to matter? Can't imagine why more people don't sign up for that.

Let's say the onus is on reporters to not take money in exchange for glowing coverage. Having a mortgage to pay is no excuse. If you can't be an honest reporter, don't report at all. I think that's a reasonable standard to hold them to. If you can't hack it as an honest reporter, then go get a job in retail or something.

Anybody who took money from these people is not a victim.

Is there any evidence at all that any of these reporters were taking money vs. just writing up company press releases as news? And more generally, how do you square this stance with the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too biased against tech companies?

> Is there any evidence at all that any of these reporters were taking money vs. just writing up company press releases as news?

Yes. Being discussed now on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593234

> And more generally, how do you square this stance with the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too biased against tech companies?

Cynically, they give negative coverage by default to encourage "charitable giving". When the org starts "donating" money to journalists, the tone of the coverage flips.

The duty not to harm is far stronger than the duty to help.

> Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay.

It's not a "defense", it's just reality. When it snows, do you say that sounds like the "triple point defense" of frozen water?

People are by and large fallible. I am. And we're wired to prioritize our immediate family over nebulous ideas like The World Must Know The Truth. I am full of nothing but admiration if you are the rare exception who is doing only the most principled of things, with complete confidence that everyone you work for is upright, and that you have optimized your labor to produce the most good for the world in general, not just you and yours.

But I honestly don't blame those "Yuppie Nuremberg" people, and if you see shallow news reporting as the moral equivalent of lobbying for tobacco, I can't really disagree. I just don't have the energy to pass moral judgment on everyone, so I'm content with understanding the phenomenon.

> “The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families.

It's even worse. 50 years ago that's still what they were, but they had the "power" of defining reality. Politicians, millionaires, and other actually powerful people had to suck up to them or with the narrative-shapers against them they would have real problems.

But that reality is breaking (if not totally broken). Social media, feed algorythms, recomendation engines, etc, are taking those narrative-shaping powers from them. So they get less respect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com