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Comment by crimsonzagar | Hacker News Reader

Media is wrong? No. Perhaps the following lines put it succinctly.

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." - Steve Jobs

Guess, we have to do away with "when you're young" part now. Internet keeps us young.

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I start a company. You start a news company and report on me. Over time, I notice that a lot of people are reporting on me and I don't really control my image that well, so I start a press office. And the press office is mostly honest with you, because so many people are reporting on me and no-one would listen to what I had to say if I wasn't mostly honest.

So, there's no advantage in investigative journalism, which is relatively expensive. So, your media company hires less people to report on me and more people to just redistribute my press releases.

Now, at some point, I'm going to notice no-one's really reporting on me any more. And what do you think is going to happen then, once I've got you all over that barrel - you think I'm going to keep talking about myself honestly? Even if I will, someone won't, and that someone will have an advantage over me in the marketplace so, over time, she'll win.

That wouldn't be a conspiracy, at least not in the classical sense. You can get there with everyone starting off reasonably honest and if you shoot all the conspirators, then you'll just be right back where you started with the same underlying problem: Investigative reporting has to give you an edge in the marketplace that can't be eroded by the person you're investigating.

I'm not saying that's the only factor at work - though many news companies do seem to be more about second and third order content aggregation than they are about investigative reporting, especially when it comes to their relationship with organisations like the police. But - it's not necessarily about giving people what they want, or about a conspiracy, the news agencies can evolve into situations where they're going to be wrong. No-one needs to conspire, and no-one, at least on the news agency's part or the consumer's part - and very few initially on the part of the initial provider - needs to want it to be that way.

"We do X, because people want X" is the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The funny thing is, those arguments are always coming from CEOs making X.

How about we were made to like that, because CEOs of X can optimize their profits? But ok, everybody can tell me now that people can make their own choice. In fact, they can't.

IT'S THE TRUTH.

(btw ending a thought with "it's the truth" is yet another incredible stupid thing...oh boy)

hmm it does feel stupid to ground oneself to absoluteness when everything around is relative.

what do you mean by that? Can you be more concrete?

> IT'S THE TRUTH.

I meant w.r.t stating that "IT'S THE TRUTH" statement in absolute terms. Apologies, should have quoted it in my previous comment to avoid ambiguity.

They didn't create a group of people who wanted unbalanced press coverage of events in line with their own viewpoints.

In British print media there is a whole range of right wing, middle and left wing newspapers. They all have a readership, and they all serve that readerships requirements. None of them created their readers thirst for leftist spin, or right wing shock - it exists and so they sell to it.

Often times the left and right wing extremes are owned by the same parent company. They don't care what we want, as long as we buy it from them.

Yes, you're right, but I think what you're describing is the current situation. It doesn't say anything about how we got there in the first place.

For me this process is compareable to education of children. If you let your child drink coke instead of water, it will do so. But since we're good parents, we don't allow that, do we?

Btw, this whole argumentation isn't restricted to media. E.g. clothing companies: they want to make us believe, we want our stuff from Bangladesh, where the mortality is significantly higher in a cloth company than anywhere else?

So you're saying there are groups of people here who want this?

I just refuse to believe that.

In the end I'm not the one who makes a fortune of all this, so I'm not willing to take the responsibility.

You're both right. That's a great explanation for why media is wrong.

But the article is not titled well: the article gives reasons why the media misses many important stories. To oversimplify, not enough resources, and resources in the wrong places. The OP also gives reasons why those resources aren't allocated well, but that overlaps quite well with your Jobs quote.

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