It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this…
You can find out the technical details in one quick search.
How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article.
Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
Although I don’t completely disagree with your cynical take I don’t think that’s actually the case for most of the Guardians journalists, they do a lot of quality reporting too
Sure, deep investigative jounalism with real skill and effort behind it is a thing; but it is an expensive thing, and opinion pieces disguised as jounalism are much cheaper, as is reporting on other people's reports.
We're already seeing this happen.
Going forward the full stack of perpetrators, unindicted coconspirators, lawyers, judges, legislators, journalists, editors, fact checkers, ... it'll all be LLM all the way down such that nothing will be trustable save something akin to Stephenson's gargoyles and Flock cameras for which people will conduct spectacles to shape the salience landscape.
Most “bullshit jobs” are already being replaced. The era of bullshit jobs is coming to an end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Als unless we come up with something like UBI or a dramatic rethinking of how capitalism works in our society there will probably be __more__ bullshit jobs.
My wife was a reporter with a top tier news agency in DC and I was shocked how they divvied up topics.
At best, it was "you're good with computers, go report on this hearing on cybersecurity" but more commonly, it was "who has this morning open? You do? Great. Go cover this 9am on the Israel-Palestine negotiations and what the implications are. We'll do a segment in the 11am hour."
It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way.
They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs.
Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not enough money in what's left of that industry to do that anymore.
They're not after money. They're motivated by prestige which CAN be money (ew, tacky) but is actually measured by access to key figures, your name being in the right places with the right people, and the cocktail party circuit.
My wife was a reporter in DC and she was at the White House Correspondents Dinner and everything. Living in those circles is surreal. The namedropping is a whole other level. When I realized I was doing it too (with some legit impressive names at the time), I gtfo. I'd rather be evaluated by what I've done or can do vs who I know or knows me.
Journalism school is "eye-wateringly" expensive:
> J-school attendees might get a benefit from their journalism degree, but it comes at an eye-watering cost. The price tag of the Columbia Journalism School, for instance, is $105,820 for a 10-month program, $147,418 for a 12-month program, or $108,464 per year for a two-year program. That’s a $216,928 graduate degree, on top of all the costs associated with gaining the undergraduate prerequisites. (Columbia, it seems important to say, is also the publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, the publication you’re now reading.)
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/do-we-need-j-schools.php
> It's people who are very good with words,
They are also not good with words.
And FWIW, in my very limited and anecdotal experience, the programs are inhabited by people who fully understand their employment and salary prospects, but believe in the work, and often have above-average family wealth to compensate for the gaps. They're good people, but they are not experts.
Me thinks the fool speaks of himself.
Obviously, "who becomes a journalist in this age" does not translate to "every person who is alive now who has ever been a journalist".
I'm not sure if your error lies in parsing colloquial English, or in basic statistics. Either way, I think you have fully illustrated the commenter's point.
Journalists are not reliably selected for, or demonstrative of, comprehension or accuracy.
Maybe Christmas just leaves the worst on HN … statistically.
Defending your mistakes doesn't either, but I can understand the confusion.
Happy holidays.
(You can’t engagement logically technically or even correctly here and keep Spouting others are wrong. Think hard on how poorly you comprehension here is even when explained why you are Wrong.)
Points have been illustrated contradicting the statement. No points have been made supporting it.
Your argument boils down to “all x is bad is valid by default and all Ys that contradict are inherently ‘statistically invalid’”. Do you not get how horribly dumb your logic is?
By this logic I could state all HNErs posting on Christmas are idiots and wrong by default. This of course can’t by contradicted by any statement you make because you are just a data point of one and therefore invalid. Also the original point is supported with exactly 0 data points so in actuality data point of 1 > 0. So my guy. Jesus. Learn stats. Or anything.
I know some journalists. They are smart people. However, they are not experts in math, science, or technology. They are experts in journalism. This wasn't any different at any time in the past.
That's the first sentence of the article, and that's all there is to it.
The error is consumers believing journalist news is anything but uninformed, hot take heresy; spun in the most sensationalistic way.
They are hired to get eyeballs for advertisers. Not to be accurate, thorough truthful, or unbiased.
Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".
I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.
State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal.
To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious.
To the general public… a significant percentage have problems with paged results and scroll bars. Including my dad, who developed military IFF simulation software before he retired, and then spent several years of retirement using Google before realising it gave more than three results at a time.
Would he, with experience working with the military, have made this soecific mistake about redaction? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the level of ignorance was well within his range. (I'm not better, it's just my ignorance is e.g. setting fire to resistors).
*Our* "common sense" isn't universal.
There are undoubtedly some people who would be fooled by this, but you don’t have to be technical in order to not be one of them.
That's *literally* what "redaction" is.
These people are bad at magic, were told to do magic, fooled only themselves and other people who are also bad at magic.
I’m guessing to you, it is also black magic.
Their job is to write coherent articles that gather views, not truly understand what it is they are writing about. That's why the Gell-Mann Amnesia [1] aspect so often crops up for any technical article (hint, it also crops up for every article, but we don't recognize the mistakes the journalist makes in the articles where we don't have the underlying knowledge to recognize the mistakes).
Journalists are people, like everyone else, and most people are bad at their jobs.
Plus, what even is the job? For most journalists out there, it's just writing something that draws ad impressions and clicks.
The percentage of journalists that work for outlets where the content itself is the cash source is very small (NYTimes, probably a bunch of other paid subscriptions). And even the NYTimes isn't above clickbait.
“People are People and therefore dumber than HN tech master race”