News could end up as Art important to few elites marginal to the rest

A raw event log is definitely useful tool in the toolbox, allow people who interested to perform deep level analysis.

To engage with different generations, we need different tools that engage with them and yet provide verifiable information.

1. The event log -- in many places, this still doesn't exist in digital, structured, usable format. It's gotten better, but there's still a ways to go

2. Referencing the underlying event log -- there needs to be interpretation, summarization, and commentary, for the average viewer/reader. However, all of that should come with a reference to the underlying event log

We've gotten to the place we've gotten because (1) is impenetrable to the average person (or non-existent) and (2) doesn't happen.

Consequently, a bag of words has become more and more confused with facts.

We've had hyperlink technology for a while, journalism needs to fucking use it. :/

Journalists are biased though, like any human, but I don't see how it can be fixed. Even an AI digesting the events will have some bias, though it might be aware of much more things than a simple humain brain.

Sometimes things need to be explained. Now, long-winded magazine articles that exist for the writer to show off the virtuosity of their prose? That's niche for people who enjoy those things.

But otherwise raw brute-force data encourages raw brute-force policy.

For example, data point of prevailing home prices indicates a problem - that housing has gotten very expensive. Dumb brute-force policy = price caps. Analysis explains that houses are expensive because of supply and demand and the supply has plummeted while demand is rising, and that price caps would make that worse. Where does that connection live in your event-log?

Hey Google, how much worse is everything this year?

According to Eventscore.com, national despair increased by 34.2%, a slight uptick compared to last year. School shootings have proceeded as expected, political corruption is within norms, and economic marginalization has followed modeled trends. Climate change and wars continue, planes are falling apart again, the courts made bad decisions, protestors are angry. But a new VR headset is coming out soon and a sportsball team somewhere won a game. Happy new year! Your next update is in 2025.

It would be journalistic malpractice not to report those things when there is evidence to support the allegations.

The news only started sounding like that very recently.

You can check this for yourself, go look at some archived newspapers from the early 1990s.

This perception of a dichotomy in news is a brain worm that needs to be excised from everyone's mind.

What's the "balanced" commentary for something like the JFK assassination, for example?

LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because LHO was a communist. LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because LHO was crazy. LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because the CIA paid him to (and then killed him). LHO was a patsie and the president was shot by a second gunman from the grassy knoll because the CIA wanted to invade Cuba.

Off the top of my head those are the stories that would need "balanced commentary".

News organization don't need to be unbiased and they don't need to be balanced. What they need is a to stop catering to rabid political fanbases who've got involved in the team sport of politics not out of some sense of civic duty to their fellow man but out of loneliness and a need to belong[1]. News organizations are the mirror reflecting us, not the other way around.

[1] https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2020/03/20/the_lone...

If you want non-profit, government funded news then NPR and VOA exist. The quality is generally pretty good, although they're not free of bias either.

Example: I see "[Administration] transporting migrants from the border to cities around the country, in secretive nighttime flights" receiving heavy coverage on a certain news channel (you can probably fill in the gaps here, but I'll leave the specifics out because that's not important for the illustration). Like, it's most of what they're talking about, for the entire hour or so I happen to be in a room with them on the TV, and not during an opinion segment.

Quick google:

1) Not secret,

2) Some are at night, but that's just because of, like... flight scheduling, same way some commercial flights are after sundown and others aren't, plenty are during the day, and it's not as if nighttime flights are somehow significantly harder to track than daytime ones or like it's weird for passenger planes to fly at night, so that whole bit was silly to begin with, worst evil plan ever if that was a deliberate part of it (as was implied), and

3) It's part of longstanding, ordinary operation of immigration control, isn't a new thing, and is happening for non-crazy (and certainly not secret) reasons—though one could disagree with them and say something else should be done instead, sure, but that's not how it's being covered, it's being covered as (implicitly) a new program (not new) being carried out for mysterious reasons (not mysterious) in secret (not secret).

Is this "story" receiving similar heavy coverage with a different slant on perceived-as-opposing channels? No, the info on it's mostly to be found on simple factual sites that published info on these activities from before it was "a story", and sites dedicated to debunking "fwd: fwd: fwd:" crap, because it's, emphatically, not even news, so how would an ordinary news program cover it? It's simply absent.

The less-brazen version of this is to not cover or downplay something that is news but that you'd rather bury but this stuff is... on another level. The "other side" can't provide a different slant, or uncover a story you're hiding, because it's not even a story. (the evolved version of this tactic, of course, is that your opinion-focused programs accuse the "other side" of burying the story and use it as Yet More Evidence that they can't be trusted, which story they can't even responsibly cover because it's made-up, unless their story is to report that you're inventing news) Bonus points that this gives you stuff to talk about if you're the ones trying to avoid a real story that's inconvenient. It's brilliant, really.

I don’t think those two explanations are at odds with each other. People may prefer listening to a news source that tries to be neutral. But if the reporters can’t hide their personal leanings, they would rather go with a news source where the reporters’ personal leanings agree with their own.

Part of this is driven by the increasing polarization of journalists. In 1971, democrats somewhat outnumbered republicans among journalists. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tiny-percentage-american-jo.... By 2022, that ratio is now 10:1 https://ustimesmirror.com/a-tiny-shrinking-percentage-of-ame....

People aren’t stupid. They can tell the difference between someone who is trying to overcome their personal leaning and be neutral, and someone who is so affected by their personal leaning that they can’t even conceal it. People can trust the former person even if they disagree. People can’t trust the latter person.

   to delay sharing the essential information in a story, and beginning with 
   secondary details instead.

Well, when the headline is "Lost hiker found using Apple Watch" or "Airline grounds fleet due to loose bolts" or "potential presidential candidate says something that sounds stupid" or "AMD says their new chips are faster than last year's chips", then I don't really need to read anything further to know the gist of the story, do I?

Also because it's better writing. For that purpose, anyway.

One can find readable images of e.g. late 19th and early 20th century papers that followed this style like it was the word of God, and they are so nice and effortless to read.

There are some good investigative journalists in my country, but that is about it. I have seen very close (family member) how even the excellent investigative journalists have difficulties, because they are making power structures uncomfortable, and media ownership is too close to the power structures.

In my country, there is even a platform for deep and slow journalism, but the content is crap, because even when journalists get the resources to do quality journalism, they are no longer able to do it. It appears to me that they are so used to pushing agendas, that the only kind of journalism they can do is agenda journalism.

Sports Illustrated was what I had in mind when I said that it has already partly happened.

It is going to be interesting if people will eventually realize that there is very little substance in the content, especially if the content continues to detoriate. At least Sports Illustrated was ashamed they got caught, and removed the articles.

For News orgs the focus is on New Infotmation.

So even though news orgs have professional trained info collectors, and have good access to networks that produce Info they don't think of them selves as a Wiki or Factbook. Why?

Cause legacy + they are taught media theory not information theory + tech platforms are not taught either and control distribution of info.

But things change as people learn the system is a waste and noise generating. Learning takes time.

It’s used variously. In terms of elite overproduction, it’s anyone with an education. In terms of social policy, it’s anyone with philanthropic wealth; top 1% is easily in this category. Top 5%, depending on one’s community.

For example, I’m not in the 0.01%, but as a corporate attorney I make multiples of what I would make in Europe. Is that because American lawyers are smarter? No. It’s because the sheer profitability of American companies means they have a ton of money to fight legal battles with each other. The same is true for everyone from accountants to software engineers. Why are Silicon Valley salaries so high? Because Google and Facebook have profit margins comparable to Standard Oil back in the day.

And whether they think about it or not, all of these people have a strong incentive to maintain the system that enables them to capture an outsized share of the economy. Thus, properly defined, the elites include the ordinary wealthy whose livelihoods are intertwined with those of the super wealthy. In Scandinavian countries, the top tax bracket starts around 1.5x the median income. I think that’s a pretty fair definition of “elite”—these are people who would be worse off under a more equitable system.

The term also properly includes the educational elites who staff various bureaucracies and organizations that have high degrees of social influence. If you look at the folks who exercise decision making authority over the lives of ordinary people (everyone from judges to regulators), they overwhelmingly come from a handful of elite schools. DOJ attorneys might not be rich, but they went to school with and are friends with the CEOs and hedge fund guys. The same is true for journalists at national-level outfits like the New York Times.

To expand on the second sentence, centuries ago news was little more than propaganda to appease the peasant classes - "we've invaded the next village and won, we're great" - all delivered by a town crier or equivalent. I don't believe we ever really went beyond that too much. Here in the UK, there's no such thing as a non-partizan newspaper - every newspaper is pushing an agenda, people buy the newspaper that the rest of their tribe reads, they all get enraged about the same things and those are the things that someone, somewhere, wants them to get enraged about because it serves some need that the proles don't need to worry their silly little heads about.

All of this is not to say that some individual people within the news machines are not incredible, hard working, honest people doing extremely important work. There are many. But when that hard work conflicts with the wishes of the puppeteer, it's bumped to page 28 and quickly dropped.

The Horizon / Post Office scandal is a perfect, and timely, example of this. Some journalists were banging that drum for years, yet it never hit the front pages despite being the biggest miscarriage of justice the UK has ever seen. Only when a terrestrial TV channel turned it into a drama, coincidentally in an election year, is it suddenly on the front pages with our politicians blaming the other side and our newspapers happily printing the talking points fed to them. Now the few elites want us to know about it, specifically so that they can score some points and use it for electioneering.