The Newswipe Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

The Newswipe Manifesto

aaronsw.com

28 pointsphilf14 comments

I've sometimes stumbled across newscasts from the 70's that are available on the publicly run Danish broadcast station (it's like the BBC) and really noticed the difference. The news would contain maybe 4 or 5 stories spread across an hour. The anchor would spend 10 minutes explaining the current political situation in Russia, and have a 10 minute interview with the foreign minister about how this would impact the country. The people interviewed actually got to tell us their opinion instead of speaking in soundbites. Very different to todays news.

"NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is the only current U.S. news show I can think of that is something like that. Charlie Rose goes even more in depth, spending a half hour or more with a single guest, with the guest doing the lion's share of the talking.

Tellingly, both of these shows are on PBS (the public TV network).

Jim Lehrer scares me. He takes that bizarre US cultural tradition of neutrality at all costs to an extreme. It doesn't matter how much one side spins and how true the other is. Lehrer must be found in the exact middle betwen the sides, and there he has those cold eyes.

I am not kidding, it's scary watching someone be that devoted to this inane idea of journalistic neutrality. The objective truth is absolutely disregarded. Middle of of the road, no matter where the middle happens to fall. I prefer the daily show.

Alexander Cockburn once wrote a hilarious parody of Lehrer about this: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06302005.html

This is pure gold:

The 'MacNeil/Lehrer Report' started in October 1975, in the aftermath of Watergate. It was a show dedicated to the proposition that there are two sides to every question, a valuable corrective in a period when the American people had finally decided that there were absolutely and definitely not two sides to every question

Thanks for the link!

I am trying to read this in a way that does not suggest you just want someone to regurgitate back to you the views you already hold in an entertaining way.

Yes, I realize that John Stewart was the only voice of sanity in the media over much of the last several years. But as he often tries to remind people, he is, in fact, a comedian. Brilliant, cutting, insightful, with an unparalleled nose for sniffing out bullshit, yes, but still a comedian.

You may find this hard to believe, but Bill O'Reilly's original schtick was dispensing with the "inane idea of journalistic neutrality", too. When people would say things he found outrageous, he would call them on it. Of course that rapidly devolved to him shouting over people and cutting their mike.

I am in no way criticizing John Stewart and the Daily Show. But I find the idea that so many people are un-ironically claiming the Daily Show as their prime news source a little bit troubling. For example, one thing that has bothered me is the obsession with continuing to talk about stupid Republicans. Yes, there are many stupid Republicans, saying enough stupid things to fill a 24 hour news cycle. But in the meantime, we have a Democratic President and Congress trying to put together some of the most sweeping legislative changes in my political memory. It is easy to put together an hour of making fun of Republicans. But couldn't that hour be better spent analyzing the complex health care bills now being debated? Can't we ignore the un-serious, obstructionist Republicans for a little bit to have a good idea of what we might be getting ourselves into?

If John Stewart is actually doing that kind of analysis, more power to him. If not, I would say we still need a news source in addition to the Daily Show. Maybe Leher's show does not fit the bill, but I'm opening to hearing about a U.S. news source that's better.

I am not sure there is a US TV news source that's better. And it's true the Daily Show is in fact not my primary news source. But the uniquely American obsession with neutrality is at best inane, and at worst an active aid to spin and lies. That's perfectly encapsulated by what I quoted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784936

The big newspapers haven't changed much. I read the New York Times, and the Metro (free local NYC paper) everyday during my commute.

TV is hopeless, and most internet news is watered down. CNN.com is perhaps the fastest declining of all news outlets, the amount of entertainment stories right now is unbelievable.

Reuters is the best I've found on the internet. The op-eds are a low percentage, and clearly marked. Save for the business and tech sections, they're notoriously hard to get PR into. They cover international news very well. Their stories are typically very matter-of-fact. If you just want the facts, they're a decent place to look.

And yet, what's this? The headline right now? "Bernanke still has his job." Yes, the headline is "Nothing happened". Following that? "The stock market liked nothing happening." At least I can't call it infotainment.

I think that's more of a US news thing. I still remember getting my first broken tiny TV in the US, which only got one channel. I had been out of the news loop for a few weeks at the time, literally just a few weeks of the plane. So I park myself in front of the TV to get some news.

First the local news, OK they do call it local so I'm not too surprised there's no world news, they do keep adverting this "nightly news" that's coming up. OK the nightly news... hmmm... doesn't seem like news more like infotainment, aaand it' over. I still have no idea what happened in the world today. But hey adds for another news block at 10pm, I guess I'll stay up for that. Oh but it's local again and I get a "world news minute".

Bizarrely not only do I have no idea what happened in the world today, but I didn't even hear much about US issues, certainly almost nothing about US foreign policy. Shockingly I got A LOT more information on the news behind the iron curtain when it was still up!

So yeah, there's no such thing as TV news in the US. But other places in the world have news. The Irish Times is a good paper for people who can only read English.

The quote comes from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, which is a British TV show made by the BBC for BBC4.

News as a concept doesn't make a lot of sense for educational purposes. It represents only a thin time slice of the most recent events - dust on the microfilm of history. It is far more informative to study the past, all the events that brought the world (or some part of it) to its current state. This will provide a more complete understanding, even if you are ignorant of the events of the last few months.

The programme as shown is here (with this speech in its original context about 1'30'' in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm4GiyyVKQQ

With the BBC metadata here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jhp50

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