I think there are three levels for looking after prod
- monitoring - modelling - machining
This applies here I think
Firstly it’s reporting - a kind of event logging for society. It’s our timelines, it’s who bombed whom. And by far and away it’s the most common and frankly the most useless, because it needs to be interpreted through a model
What does it mean that your disk is 80% full? What does it mean that Huthi attacks on Red Sea mean shipping is diverted? Whose model You use determines what kind of alerting you get - does your model mean you add a new server when the disk is full? Or just ignore it?
Machining is the final part - what action to take. What to build or chnage - and this depends on the model you have. A lot of politics these days seems to be arguing over the alerting levels - when does this light go red?
Today in the UK we finally have Post Office post masters being pardoned for having been jailed - because the Post Office corporate body covered up Bugs in a central accounting system. Jailed because of bugs.
This has been “news” for 15+ years. But it only became “mainstream” this week.
News as Edward R Murrow knew it was all three parts at once. He scanned the horizon, found the story and told people that this person was not a communist (monitoring / reporting) and in the same time told them why this was wrong (liberty, freedom) and what action to take (remove senator)
But Murrows news has been disaggregated.
The OP is thinking news is this Murrow like idea where the elite choose a model, and find facts around that model. It’s not great (but done with integrity it works generally well)
The thing is now we have choices of models and reporting and actions and most people have not got a good model of the world and even if they did the flood of information barely allows them to adjust the model
We will always need Ed Murrow and others like them to curate the timeline and challenge the models.
We could make them explicit and testable (but that’s science) and we could build and validate our own but that’s hard work
Or we could seek out people of integrity to curate the models on our behalf and presenst their view for us to consume - with their doubts and uncertainties ans their opinions
What we need are great journalists.