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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

> Not to mention we just elected a President who ran on Haitians are eating pets and fear mongering of “other”.

Prompted by unverified claims going viral on TikTok.

Ceding mindshare to organizations whose only allegiance is to profit (and therefore eyeball time) is a loss, even compared to a world of less-than-perfect professional journalism.

Journalism as a well-funded, independent, competitive market for news is the cornerstone of any democracy.

Because without it, a populace can't be educated enough to vote in even their own best interests. (Exhibit A: Trump being elected on a manufactured illegal border crossing crisis)

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So you blame TikTok for a grown man and our now President getting his information from TikTok?

The population doesn’t want to be “educated”. They knew exactly what they were getting. How do you “educate” people who in their heart believes that for instance saving Israel will bring on the second coming of Jesus during the rapture and if they condone the “gay lifestyle” they are going to burn for eternity and the nation will be set on fire?

I blame the lack of alternatives to TikTok.

The US no longer has a market of well-funded, professional sources of journalism. (Of the kind and scale that existed before ~2010)

It has for-profit partisan outlets and social media, and those are insufficient substitutes to power a democracy.

Again, you blame one of the candidates - someone who we would hope surrounded himself by experts - for believing what he saw on TikTok?

There were plenty of alternatives to TikTok to get information that was more credible than a Chinese own media company.

I do not blame one of the candidates: I blame the failing US media landscape.

Look at NYT revenue [0], and it's the largest and most solvent of the big papers left. Newsrooms of everything after it (WSJ, WP, LAT) are even more gutted.

24/7 news channel "journalism" isn't a substitute, even when you can find it between the filler shows.

And it takes money to fund high quality journalism. Facebook and Google hijacked those funding streams, but then didn't use those profits to fund an actual replacement.

Instead, their platforms (and the ones that came after them) reward attention algorithm hacking and race-to-the-bottom in content quality.

And now, they've decided that even funding a fact checking function is inconvenient to their bottom line, so ditched that responsibility as soon as the political winds allowed them to.

[0] https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times/r...

Conservatives haven't spent decades opting in to getting all their information from Fox News and AM radio hosts spewing hate because it's more accurate.

People want to consume what agrees with their beliefs. As long as Americans continue to believe they are a magical place with magical people that you can't compare to anywhere else for advice, that the Civil war was fought over "state's rights", that we disliked the Nazis in the 1930s, that certain TYPES of people are intrinsically better than others, that we are a "christian" nation, we will never get better.

Hell, even media made for people who don't actively hate LGBTQ types STILL treats the civil war like just some small kerfuffle and it's fine that two brothers on opposite sides of the war just needed to reconcile and love each other and that's totally fine even though one of them signed up to fight and die for a regime who's entire purpose was the continued enslavement of millions of black people for the crime of being born black.

A significant portion of our country is outright TAUGHT IN SCHOOL that the civil war was a war of "Northern" (read: those goddamned coastal elites) aggression.

The south fired the first shot for fucks sake.

Why do you think those people would EVER choose to consume news that tells them: "Sorry, you've kind of been lied to for a long time and actually your ancestors were kind of bad people doing kind of bad stuff and also uh we genocided the indians and also the Nazis were pretty popular here and holy shit you should see the horrible stuff we did under the guise of 'science' when we discovered Eugenics let us claim black people were inherently inferior. Because their skull was the wrong shape. No I'm serious"

How do you get someone to believe something they absolutely do not want to believe in and they don't even respect the primacy of material fact like "The southern states literally said they were fighting to maintain slavery IN THEIR SUCCESSION DOCUMENTS"? You can't force another human to respect and understand reality when they spend their entire existence and have built their entire worldview around "No, the people telling me my country did bad things in the past are actually the enemy"?

I listed to a great discussion about the consolidation of conservative media (~1980-2010) on the radio.

Murdoch aside, it generally happened because of profit chasing.

It was easy and profitable to capture conservative audiences with centrally-programmed partisan content (read: Rush Limbaugh). Progressive-partisan political shows didn't do as well (read: Air America).

Furthermore, stations couldn't mix partisanship without pissing off their listeners.

So you ended up with stations choosing conservative programming because it was more profitable, and then becoming conservative-programming stations because that because their audience.

With the net result of a huge disparity between the availability of conservative and progressive radio programming.

... compound that over a couple decades, and here we are.

You probably shouldn't "murdoch aside" conservative media control. He's a huge huge huge part of it himself, in the entire english speaking world!

Sure, profit chasing plays a part in it. A big reason why Youtube and Facebook push you down right-wing hate rabbitholes at the slightest hint that you might bite is simply that hate, oversimplification, and bullshit lies just drive engagement better than a 30 minute video essay on just how complicated this one tiny subsection of homelessness is and how much human labor and time it takes to work on it.

Humans like easy answer. Humans "engage" more (in ad-company parlance) with hate and things that cause anger. In a free meme market, the most shallow, most hateful content will always rise to the top.

But letting those incentives play out that way is a choice. Letting everything consolidate, an activity that is known to be detrimental to a free market, as long as they lower prices for a couple years before taking advantage of their monopoly is a very dumb choice. Reagan made plenty of dumb choices, but there were enough smart people in his cabinet to tell him exactly how this would play out. You don't live through the cold war and not know that owning the largest media narrative is power. And oh boy is it.

As much as I am aware of the perils of states rights, I’m almost in favor of a smaller federal government that lets each state fend for itself and let the Blue richer states have higher state taxes and lower federal taxes.

Then for instance like minded states could form alliances. A true Federalist country.

And yes I am well aware of my own hypocrisy only living in GA and FL my entire life and I know that the south would even be worse for people of my skin color if it weren’t for the civil rights legislation of the 60s, the official abolishing of segregation, etc

Next time you're riding around, tune into local AM. Very dystopian.

>Journalism as a well-funded, independent, competitive market for news is the cornerstone of any democracy.

A cornerstone. Another cornerstone is popular memes like this, our culture is composed of thousands of them, and they control how we think.

The. Memes are only reflections of things people already know.

When's the last time you saw a meme that taught you something or made you think about something more deeply?

The vast majority are cotton candy facts.

Have you something even remotely resembling a proof for this set of rather interesting claims of fact?

I was asking you, specifically. When was the last time?

Just now: "Perception is reality".

Now, can you transfer some of that impressive courage toward the task of answering the question I posed to you?

If you're unable to think of a time, any answer of mine would be moot.

"Now" is a point in time.

I used a very unpopular meme though, so unpopular you may not be able to see it.

Journalism is, but I’m not sure for-profit journalism is.

Any more that for-profit healthcare or housing is.

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