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Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that as it's getting easier & easier for "normal" people to do stuff like this - our media is getting worse and worse at it. They've essentially given up on reporting or investigating anything original and simply spew back "opinions", "tweets" or PR releases.

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The more cynical among us would say that one of the media's main jobs is to reinforce pre-approved narratives by cherry-picking examples that fit that narrative. Look how much attention the mediocre punk rock band"pussy riot" got because they happened to reinforce a narrative that the west was pushing about Russia.

I don't know if I'm being less or more cynical, but I have simpler explanation - the main job of the media is to make as much money as possible. This means optimizing for number of readers, and nowdays (because people interact with news on per-article, not per-site basis) pageviews. More pageviews = more ad dolars.

Optimizing for profit is a strong force, and initially it helps any new industry make huge leaps of quality. But at some point, it starts to be more profitable to sacrifice human values. We're far into this part in case of media. What sells is linkbait, controversy, "reinforcing pre-approved narratives" (or more generally, reinforcing what people already believe), fake "thought provoking" content that is actually repeating established beliefs. Investigative journalism, good news, well-thought pieces don't sell enough, so they get left behind.

Should one -- moi, specifically, a journalist -- upvote the approved anti-narrative? In terms of making a modest living, I don't see much middle ground.

Both sell newspapers/pageviews. There's all the room in the world between approved objectivity and calculated dissent. It just don't pay.

The recently butchered James Foley said he'd cover local planning commission meetings if that was his last professional option.

Idealist? Chump?

Who else is going to do it, and do it well -- who informs the polis, so that a half-ass democracy can at least pretend to function?

Crowd-sourced event coverage is cheap and easy and sexy. But it doesn't provide context.

Sadly, for-profit media seems determined to capitalize on free YouTube and Twitter feeds at the expense of paying professionals to pay attention and make sense of complex issues.

Nothing new here. Move along. News at 11.

Did I say that out loud? Again?

(Edit: I'm also a big fan of The Dish View From Your Window Contest, which leads this discussion. Interesting media model at The Dish: curate/create great content/commentary, and ask readers to pay. So far, so good.)

This may be the best explanation I have ever seen.

I'm not trying to attack you here but what you proffer here sounds like typical Russian tyranny apologia. To pick that old example makes me feel more like you're trying to blame the media for being very bad and biased because how dare they expose such shenanigans. Saying they are "mediocre" is just a way to slight them and downplay what actually happened.

Honestly, if that's the case then let's keep the "pre-approved" narratives coming because in that case, it happens to be the correct narrative.

That is a drastic reduction of the pussy riot situation. The attention they received had nothing to do with their music and everything to do with the fact that they were arrested and prosecuted in a a sham trial.

Honestly, there are hundreds of sham trials and prosecutions in the US every day, let alone the entire rest of the world. The question is, why focus on this one in particular?

They had two things going for them.

1) They represent a sexual minority

2) They have a name that allowed media to go for shock value by simply stating the band by their full chosen name

I think the issue isn't that the media is getting worse at it - rather they're just as good as they used to be (not very) but it's a lot easier to catch them when they're bad at it, so they just don't do it as much anymore.

I think this is related to the newspaper death. They have to lay off the non-essential positions, and can only afford to do the bare minimum.

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