Comment by throw0101b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw0101b | Hacker News Reader

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> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this.

Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it?

We've had salacious media for a long time:

> Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the editor of one of the earliest scandal sheets, The Morning Post, which specialized in printing malicious society gossip, selling positive mentions in its pages, and collecting suppression fees to keep stories unpublished.[5]: 11–14 Other Georgian era scandal sheets were Theodore Hook's John Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's The Age, and Barnard Gregory's The Satirist.[5]: 53 William d'Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, explained his purpose:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_magazine

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_reporting

Definitely a demand issue. Sure, there are secondary supply-side effects, but the simple truth is what we see today is what captures available demand. There is no other domain where you find that Americans are willing, en masse, to eat their vegetables before dessert. So the pro-wrestling flavor of televised news is going to crush anything more thoughtful slash less entertaining with relentless invariance.

To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)

Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.

It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.

> Definitely a demand issue.

This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product.

> To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale.

This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.

> The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day

The media that created the Trump brand, the media that gave him 24/7 free publicity, the media that got him elected, etc? That's the media you are praising?

> do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage

The problem in society is news. More news or more government funded news is not the answer.

I’m not sure about this, but I think there’s a pretty good and absolutely foregone conclusion that the world is actually extremely fucked up in new ways, growing in metastatic ugliness every year, and that it really is this Bad News that people are turned off by.

To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.

I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.

The world isn't without problems, but certain things (life expectancy, income, education, literacy, etc.) got a lot better after the industrial revolution.

https://ourworldindata.org/breaking-the-malthusian-trap

I don't think this is necessarily true -- if you limit your sources to "good" ones (thoughtful, reliable, with minimal political agenda -- I'd include the economist and a handful of substack writers in this mix) then you can be informed without needing to expose yourself to the awful deluge of mainstream crap. So maybe you can be somewhat happy (if your definition of happiness depends upon you not being engaged in the culture war), but still informed and intelligent.

The problem, however, is the impact this change in political reporting has on actual politics. That, I'm not sure how to solve.

It used to be that pre-election debates were for nerds and policy wonks. Now everyone watches them, but all substance has been removed. Debates themselves may even cease to exist.

> This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.

As opposed to being paid directly by the people they're supposed to hold accountable?

Government-funded media would at least have a fighting chance of being neutral, checks and balances and all. By all accounts the US justice system is corrupt as well, but it would obviously be orders of magnitude worse if you outsourced it to private corporations.

> This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms.

The product was already being produced pre-Internet, pre-television, pre-radio:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

A new distribution medium didn't cause it to be created.

Both, really. As technology has created new and broader reaching mediums, the people operating those mediums have changed their target audience to support their existence.

as human nature is more understood, human nature adapts to better exploit^Wcater to human nature

There is more and better quality news available now than ever in history and people flock to the crappiest options because they can't get enough. It's demand.

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

-Steve Jobs

Ironic considering Jobs conspired to fix prices with media partners including News Corp. Either way, network TV isn't the only news. There's plenty of non-profit news and non-predatory news in the world besides network TV.

Wasn't there more to this? I can't find the source for the quote, but I believe Jobs also said something like "and I didn't understand why that was until I realized that after a hard day of work (etc.) you really want to relax and turn your brain off, and TV is perfect for that - in fact you burn fewer calories watching TV than you do sleeping."

He also said "We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."

Though maybe he was kind of wrong about televisions and PCs not merging - see youtube, netflix, Apple TV (both device and service), "smart" TVs, etc. I also imagine Jobs might put social media in the "turn your brain off" category.

Mainstream media is not blameless in the least. Pushing psychological buttons to create addiction to what is very little else than entertainment and biased opinion. Rarely if ever are there references to sources. Instead there are interpretations and nth hand accounts that you are expected to accept as is. It's there plain for everyone to see, yet rarely is it taken seriously for what it is, propaganda.

There has always been "better quality" news and worse quality news available to people. We simply have more of both now.

Right and people gravitate heavily towards the bad. The most watched cable news by far is FOX which has been caught dead to rights conspiring with government, with campaigns and telling intentional lies in furtherance of propaganda goals. And they don't suffer any loss in loyalty. That is 100% the faults of the viewers who elect to be deceived in ways they enjoy.

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