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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

> It could end up akin to classical music, contemporary art, and literary fiction — important for a few in the upper crust, marginal to the lives of the majority of the public.

Most journalism nowadays is like pop music: it does not really provide anything new.

You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed.

The main problem, as I see it, is that there's just too much of it. There's no need for daily news and journalists produce formulaic content because it's the only way to produce so much content.

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> Most journalism nowadays is like pop music

TV and free news, yes. Paid journalism, per the article, no; it’s for elites.

The Financial Times and Politico’s reporting tend to be concise, timely and actionable. It’s just that the whip for a Schumer-Sinema-Johnson-other guy grind around the finer points of a budget negotiation, or jobs numbers vis-à-vis rates forecasts, aren’t relevant for most people. (Or the, for that matter.)

Zooming out a little, political news is repetitive, except for the names, and most of it is just mud throwing:

- This is the most important election of our times. The other candidate wants to send you and your children to the gulag.

- Person X had sex with person Y and laundered PAC money.

- Government shutdown unless item X gets funded and item Y doesn’t. X supporters say Y supporters are holding the country hostage. Y supporters say they just want America to get back to work.

- ...

The news organizations didn't make any of that stuff up though. Those are the actual rhetoric and the hypocritical or criminal acts of the politicians you are alluding to. You've just genericized it by replacing names with X and Y. However, it's anything but generic, and there are real patterns to it, so the names behind the X and Y matter.

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

Nevertheless, it raises the question of “how often is this relevant to me?” If I already know a person needs to be replaced or reelected next time at the polls, reading all the details is a waste of time and personal happiness.

What the journalists should report and what I should read are separate questions.

> What the journalists should report and what I should read are separate questions.

The OP was making a statement about what journalists should report on, not what people should choose to read.

Of course anyone can individually choose to not read a repeated story, just like they can choose not to watch the same weather forecast repeatedly.

You must be rather young or only started listening to the news recently after a lifetime of ignoring it.

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.

The post-Fox News polarization of cable news (small but influential like Twitter was), consolidation of local TV news, and collapse of local newspapers happened so fast we're still reeling from it and just starting to notice the effects.

The 90s were a constant Clinton sex scandal from the time he started running for office through his impeachment and people still talk about it. Simultaneously, there was the Harken energy scandal, featuring influence peddling by not-yet-President G.W. Bush. Etc.

Vox claims "the most important election ever" started in 2000 and has continued since, but I think that has more to do with when the author became politically aware than anything else.

https://www.vox.com/21504729/most-important-election-bush-go...

Consider Johnson's TV spot from the 60s, tacitly telling Americans that the election was a contest between L.B.J. and nuclear apocalypse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDypP1KfOU

I encourage anyone to look back further for more extreme elections.

The peaks of the unrest seem to happen near times when there's a shift in "Party System." We're currently in the US's Sixth (or is it Seventh?) Party System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System#Campaign_fi...

> The 90s were a constant Clinton sex scandal

Yes, I know, I lived through it. If you did too then you'll recall that the difference is that it wasn't considered important by average people, nothing like today anyhow. We paid plenty of attention to it, but it was like rubbernecking at a carwreck -- very interesting in the moment, but not earth shattering. It was important in an "oooh, fascinating hahaha" way, not in an "oh no, how anxiety inducing" kind of way, and that summarizes the difference between the 90s and the 20s.

"You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed."

I haven't listened to 7 O'Clock News/Silent Night in years, but I always felt the news in it were timeless. Maybe I'll give it a try tonight to see if 1966 news still sound fresh in 2024.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_O%27Clock_News/Silent_Nigh...

We don't need "news".

We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped.

Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected.

Make it filterable. Searchable. Etc.

This generation already see news boring, do you think an event log will appeal them even better?

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.

News that was less entertaining and did less to appeal to its audience would reduce the number of stupid people who vote in elections which would increase the quality of our elected politicians.

Cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC as well as their online competitors serve as propaganda wings of the political parties in general and typically the most corrupt wing of that political party in particular. They misinform their audience on purpose to create hyper-partisan voters who hate the other party and reliably vote for the donkey or the elephant no matter how unqualified, corrupt or unhinged the candidate may be.

We would likely be much better off if the people who base their identity on hating the other political party or who worship specific politicians would find a different hobby because the news was "boring" to them. If having tons of poorly informed or outright misinformed "vote {party} no matter who" voters participating in the political process wasn't to the benefit of large corporate interests, there wouldn't be an enormous corporate media industry intent on making sure they vote and telling them who to vote for.

We already have all of these. Hardly anyone cares.

Who decides what passes as these cold hard events? How would anybody ever transmit unbiased truth?

Who gets write access?

That 'log' is generated by journalists, and the only reason why I have a paid subscription to a newspaper. Imagine living in a world without journalists and politicians and enterprises can do whatever they like without anyone ever writing about it...

as opposed to politicians doing whatever they want, and journalists providing cover and/or distractions for them?

You'd need journalism to dig out the parts & trends that matter given historical and current context anyway. "Murders up 10% in [city]"—is that statistical noise? Was there a policy change that may be connected? Does it follow historical trends for current economic conditions, so is perhaps a "natural" variation? Is below or above statewide trends? National? International? If it's below or above any of those, what might be the cause? Which sorts of policies have a history of being effective under these particular circumstances, to reduce a murder rate? Do any of the policies being proposed by various political figures have a history of being effective, or a history of being ineffective, or any history at all? Do any of the political figures stand to profit from their own proposals, or otherwise personally or professionally benefit in some maybe-questionable way?

All of that's journalism work, which we could all do ourselves, of course, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and most people are pretty bad at that kind of thing (though, granted, so are plenty of journalists—regardless, the work is journalism).

There's a two-pronged problem.

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. :/

Insisting the world is this simple and black and white and algorithmic won't make it so.

And how are you supposed to digest it ? Journalists are here to provide the context of the event, the background. They also so the job of checking the sources. We are not machine, from the log "2 planes crashed on the 9/11 of 2001", we would have to search ourselves all the things surrounding it, probably missing a lot on the way because we all have our day job and have other things to do.

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.

We need both. The deep analysis that news is supposed to provide is an important service. Some things are important for reasons the reader does not necessarily understand, and providing it only in bite-sized form is not good enough.

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?

Heck, just digest it into a shittiness score and tell me once a year.

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.

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