Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

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The idea is that these people spend their days in the weeds, working over stories and leads, getting to know people personally, absorbing information and insight that doesn't make it to print, seeing the connections and threads between all the things they publish, and are literally professional news people the way many of us here are professional technology people who might have some insight on technology topics.

You can make the case that they might be disingenuous or manipulative in sharing what they claim to be their opinions, or that their opinions reflect cultural indoctrination rather than professional assessment, etc -- and so you don't have to take their endorsements seriously.

But it's not a crazy idea that they have something valuable to share for all the time they spend very close to news and politics, and it's not bad to know what their big picture view of topics and people are as they write and select stories for the rest of the paper as it helps you contextualize them in their subjectivity.

Those people working in mass media are going to have massive biases and blind spots the same way tech people do. That’s because news isn’t an accurate representation of reality, it’s representing the most extreme examples and outliers in society. If you have a group of people reading about outliers all day they aren’t going to be grounded in what ordinary people are actually experiencing.

If you'll pardon me, as a devil's advocate, it could go either way. They have a value but it's difficult to know to whom they owe that value to, the party, the corporations, voters, readers etc. The other is that.. they have value in the act of playback.

One political faction/side knows a publication is favored by one of the two parties. It can use that fact to feed it false information, or truthful, and watch to see how it gets reported, and the reaction of that electorate.

But it’s sold as keeping you informed about the world. When it actually is just about what journalists think.

Like you said, that can be valuable, especially in politics, when one hopes they aid your messaging. But it’s not a moral or even practical imperative to keep up with journalism.

Imagine learning about sports through ESPN commentary and never actually watching a game.

A similar professional blindspot occurred when many engineers thought twitter would collapse when Elon fired all those people. Because they see twitter as a piece of software, not a brand and organization.

> that can be valuable, especially in politics, when one hopes they aid your messaging

But why is there a cohort so unsure of their decisions they need support from others? Is this how we want people making decisions for the country?

I agree with the sentiment, this is just how people work. We aren’t constructing frameworks from first principles, we hear ideas from peers and filter them through our experience. Journalists just insert themselves in that process, using local ethics and archetypes against their audience.

Im sorry you didn’t catch the underlying meaning of my statement. Anybody unable to form an opinion on their own I don’t wish they have the ability to vote.

Are you advocating for aristocracy? Based?

This reminds me of when The New Republic had a bunch of staff quit en masse because the new imported editor was blatantly bullshitting them. He didn’t realize that he was talking to a bunch of professional journalists who knew exactly what being bullshit was like.

Was that the story they wrote about themselves?

It may have been.

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