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Comment by DamnYuppie | Hacker News Reader

I am an American and I support having less "American news"...way....way less

When I was younger I enjoyed reading my local newspaper (local news/local sports/classifieds), the USA Today (national news/sports), and the Wall Street Journal. Between those 3 I felt pretty well informed and enjoyed my daily ritual of reading them in the morning at school in the library. Unfortunately as other commenters have noted the quality of journalism has gone way down hill since then.

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I used to pay more attention to the news but it became such a time sync that I came full circle, no I check the local news station in the morning and apnews, if it doesn’t hit the first page of those, it’s not worth reading. Occasionally I’ll read something more in-depth like propublica but that’s it. Worrying about things you have little to no power over is kind of useless.

You just described me in high school.

Well just because you felt informed doesn't mean you were. More sources are better. If you feel glued to 24/7 news, just don't do that.

A counter point to your assertion is that more sources are better, if they are not all saying the same thing and being controlled by the same few owners. Which in today's world, in the west, most certainly are. Many years ago the news was covered from multiple angles so even with few sources I felt I was getting more insight to the story due to different perspectives.

Honestly due to the deluge of news I feel people today are more opinionated, less informed, easier to manipulate/deceive via controlled narratives, and have way shorter attention spans. The quality of journalism is so far gone it is laughable, so having more of a bad thing doesn't make it better imho.

> if they are not all saying the same thing and being controlled by the same few owners

Arguably, that just means they're just the illusion of "more sources" because really they're just one.

Reminds me of "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy"

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

> A counter point to your assertion is that more sources are better, if they are not all saying the same thing and being controlled by the same few owners. Which in today's world, in the west, most certainly are. Many years ago the news was covered from multiple angles so even with few sources I felt I was getting more insight to the story due to different perspectives.

I've found ground.news to be a good tool for finding different angles on stories. Sadly it only split sources based on American left/center/right which certainly is different from where I am (South/West Europe), but better than nothing.

Thinking from 10,000 feet, the quality of the media seems bad at a time when anyone can publish contradicting accounts, with evidence, on the internet.

Do you think the old media was actually better? Or was there just no platform for dissenting voices?

If there are no dissenting voices heard, then the media seems like “the truth”.

This is exactly why authoritarian governments and religions are very concerned about counter narrative publications. They want the people to believe that the official sources are the truth.

I mean, yes, but they also love playing the "Firehose of falsehood game", and playing with 'Bullshit Asymmetry'.

The problem with reality is it's way more complex than binary, things are not black and white. If you can't have and control a single news station, then make thousands of them that take small pieces of truth and stir them in a bucket of shit. Pump countless dollars of petro money into these sources so they have extreme reach into societies. Use the latest targeting tools to pull these people into their own little reality tunnels they'll have a hard time getting out of. Watch and laugh as the nation collapses in its own civil war.

How much does a country allow foreign actors to dictate what their citizens hear?

Old media was better because they had profits to hire highly skilled people.

Now that tech took all the advertising cash, there is no army of highly trained/skilled journalists any more. Those folks went to other industries.

No advance without a trade-off.

> More sources are better

I used Google News regularly for years, but I've had to abandon it. It has so many sources, and 9/10 of them are pure garbage. I mean absolute dreck.

More perspectives are better, except you have to rank the perspectives by descending popularity and then pick the top X, where there's a strongly diminishing return on every source after that.

The quality and Quantity of journalists has fallen off a cliff over the past 30 years. In 1990's there were 500,000 journalists, now we have around 100,000. Investigative journalism, where you get a crew of people and fly them across the world, and conduct first-hand research, is basically gone.

It is surprising to me that this is not common knowledge and we have people disputing a basic fact.

Many sources, just an example: https://patch.com/ohio/miamiuniversity-oxford/journalism-maj...

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