There used to be plenty newspapers sponsored by wealthy industrialists; the latter would cover the former's gaps between the costs and the sales, the former would regularly push the latter's political agenda.
The "objective journalism" is really quite a late invention IIRC, about the times of WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity
"To give the news impartially, without fear or favor." — Adolph Ochs, 1858-1935
Objectivity is the default state of honest storytelling. If I ask what happened ? and somebody only tells the parts that suit an agenda, they have not informed me. The partisan press exists, because someone has a motive to deviate from the natural expectation of fair story telling and story recounting.
Already at the level of what stories are covered you have made choices about what's important or not.
Your newspaper not covering your neighbors lawsuit against the city against some issue because they find it to be "not important" is already a viewpoint-based choice
A newspaper presenting both sides on an issue (already simplifying on the "there are two sides to an issue" thing) is one thing. Do you also have to present expert commentary that says that one side is actually just entirely in bad faith? Do you write a story and then conclude "actually this doesn't matter" when that is the case?
There are plenty of descriptions that some people would describe as fair story telling and others would describe as a hit piece. Probably for any article on any controversial topic written in good faith you are likely able to find some people who would claim it's not.
I think it's important to acknowledge that even good faith journalism is filled with subjectivity. That doesn't mean one gives up, you just have to take into account the position of the people presenting information and roll with that.
> We ask that you grant LWN exclusive rights to publish your work during the LWN subscription period - currently up to two weeks after publication.
News is valuable when it is timely, and subscribers pay for immediate access.
I kind of doubt that internet archive is really taking very much business away from them. Its a terrible UI to read the daily news.
I also don't think they care even a bit. They're pushing agendas, and not hiding it; rather, flaunting it.
Why not interpret it to mean something like “no news organization has biases that are fully aligned with my best interests”
Instead of reporting just the facts, they include opinions, inflammatory language, etc.
Reuters writes in a relatively neutral tone, as an example. Fox News doesn't, and CNN doesn't, as examples of the opposite.
If you don't notice, I doubt you're reading the news. It's part of the offering. Fox does it on purpose, not accidentally.
This is the particular thing I care about. If I can count on their facts, I can mostly subtract their agenda.
See: https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive
The problem comes in when I can't count on the "facts" being reported.
Newspapers in my country always were blogs before the internet existed. Its why they are still around and doing quite well- they don't just bring news.
Information bias is unfortunately one of the sicknesses of our age, and it is one of the cultural ills that flows from tech outward. Information is only pertinent in its capacity to inform action, otherwise it is noise. To adapt a Beck-ism: You aren't gonna need it.
Every source has it's biases, you should try to be aware of them and handle information accordingly.
They're both a bias, of course, but one is more palatable.
I think the real problem is that they often dont put events in context, which leads people to misunderstand them. They report the what not the why, but most events don't just happen one day, they are shaped by years or even decades of historical context. If you just understand the literal event without the background context, i dont think you are really informed.
If anything, we should simply me asking archive.org to limit their access to humans.
It's on the business to find a model that works within the environment of the free market and within the social framework.
If a business model only works by limiting competition, it's a bad model.
If it only works by limiting the rights of consumers, it's a bad model.
If it only works by blocking a legal activity (website crawling and scraping of publicly-facing data, for instance), it's a bad model.
And if their business can't operate otherwise, it's a bad business. No business has an intrinsic right to exist.
> No business has an intrinsic right to exist.
Do AI businesses have an intrinsic right to exist?
It’s passion and love of the community, despite the many struggles and drawbacks.
AI bots scrape our content and that drastically reduces the number of people who make it to our site.
That impacts our ability to bring on subscribers and especially advertisers - Google and Meta own local advertising and AI kills the relatively tiny audience we have.
I dread the day that it happens in realtime - hear sirens? Ask AI who already scraped us.
I can indeed find clear records of that in the archives. But what do I do with them? How do I use that evidence to hold news media to account? This is meaningless moral posturing.
Contact their rivals with the story, have them write a hit piece. "Other newspaper is telling porkies: here's the proof!" is an excellent story: not one I'd expect a journalist to have time to discover, but certainly one I'd expect them to be able to follow up on, once they've received a tip.
For the record, I'm talking about actual journalism groups, not Substack blogs. Here's one (largely US-centric) list, a ≈dozen links long: https://hcommons.social/@zeblarson/115488066909889058. You almost certainly have local journalists who need your support, which obviously I cannot list here.
I've contacted multiple journalists over the years about errors in their articles and I've generally found them responsive and thankful.
Sometimes it's not even their fault. One time a journalist told me the incorrect information was unknowingly added by an editor.
I get that it's popular on HN and the internet to bash news media, and that there are a lot of legitimate issues with the media, but my personal experience is that journalists do actually want to do a good job and respond accordingly when you engage them (in a non-antagonistic manner).
If a major article claims that certain groups don’t exist, while the same newspaper published a detailed report about those exact groups and how dangerous they are just two years earlier, it’s not because the journalist wasn’t able to do a 10-second Google search where their own paper’s article would have been among the top results.
The incentives for online news are really wacky just to begin with. A coin at the convenience store for the whole dang paper used to be the simplest thing in the world.
I mean this as a side note rather than a counterargument (because people learn to take screenshots, and because what can you do about particularly bad faith news orgs?): Immediate archival can capture silent changes (and misleadingly announced changes). A headline might change to better fit the article body. An editor's note might admit a mistakenly attributed quote.
Or a news org might pull a Fox News [1][2] by rewriting both the headline and article body to cover up a mistake that unravels the original article's reason for existing: The original headline was "SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown". The headline was changed to "AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral". An editor's note was added [3][4]: "This article previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that. This has been corrected." I think Fox News deleted the article.
[1] https://xcancel.com/KFILE/status/1984673901872558291
I have no idea why this behavior is even acceptable.
The reason the archiving works is because they expose the content publicly so search engines can index it.
They won't, of course, because they don't want accountability.