The real question is why are people following the news anyway? It's pure entertainment at that point. "Hey Karen have you seen that a girl was raped and murdered 1000 miles away from you ? Have you heard what _unknown politician of a third world country you couldn't even place on a map_ said ! that's outrageous. A cop killed an innocent man today #thoughtsAndPrayers".
The world would be a much better place if everybody only checked what's happening around them instead of the other side of the country / world. 99% of the "news" have 0 impact on you and you have 0 power (direct and indirect) on 99% of what's happening, why even bother ?
Well that's short sighted. It's because of this flawed logic that a lot of Americans think they have the best education/healthcare in the World.
Just now that they started to look at what is happening elsewhere that they are starting to understand what they are lacking.
Here is the thing, and it works for everything in life: Knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it, even if it is not clear what use to make of it.
This said knowing what is happening near you is also very important.
No, the statement 'knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it', is balderdash.
An individuals knowledge is like a garden. It needs to be kept in order and it takes time to maintain. There is simply too much information being produced and a limited bandwidth to ingest this information. To select the right information is of the essence. Form a strategy of knowledge gathering. For example, one can decide to pick a topic that is not well known, in order to be a valuable amateur expert on that topic. But, just ingesting information without any rhyme or reason is a recipe for disaster.
So, because you found one, rather extreme case, where blindly consuming disparate pieces of information is maybe harmful you're arguing the entire premise is flawed?
The statement is not "at the sacrifice of all else, memorize everything possible."
If you take any advice to a logical extreme it will likely become bad advice. Maybe you should try to consider things from different angles before you capriciously write them off.
Personally I am of the opinion that one should always consider the knowledge one gathers similarly to the food one eats and the friends one keeps. One burger doesn’t make you fat, nor does one bad friend make you criminal. But we’d better make conscious decisions lest we’ll be a 200kg drug dealing gang member who believes the earth is flat.
No, I am not in agreement. We should always be careful with the information we gather and keep a focus. That’s different from: more information is always better.
I am not a native speaker. Where did you thought I was abrasive?
> Here is the thing, and it works for everything in life: Knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it, even if it is not clear what use to make of it.
Isn't that the problem though, knowing what is true? It is an incredibly hard thing to do, even when everyone is acting in good faith and trying their hardest, which certainly isn't the state of affairs today. I'd say much less than 10% of people would get a passing grade on both of those requirements, and I'm not even sure I'd give myself a passing grade.
"It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So."
And you provided a perfect example: Americans think they have the best education/healthcare in the World.
Yes, but these 'real news' as we could call them, will probably have a legal requirement to be posted on a government-owned source also (and I'm assuming this source would be free of twisted profit incentives). So, still not required to immerse yourself in the constant stream of noise and manipulation that is 'the news'.
Those in power will certainly prefer your kind of thinking. With your kind of thinking, Nelson Mandela wasn't going to be released from jail. I doubt they were even gonna send him to jail. They were going to quietly execute him. Apartheid wasn't going to be defeated, and black South Africans were still going to be treated like animals in their own country. It was reporting by British media, politicians, celebrities and ordinary citizens that put pressure on the apartheid government to end apartheid. What is happening in another country does affect you. Those people will soon be running to your country when life becomes unbearable.
Same as holocaust, I am sure Hitler was going to prefer that other countries don't report on what was happening so that he can continue to eliminate all German Jews. When he was done, he was going to move to neighbouring countries and continue until he reaches your backyard. By then, it will be too late.
What Donald Trump tweets, does affect me directly because Google Play on my Huawei phone can stop working with one announcement from him. I need to be up to date with the politics of the US. Recession in USresults in recessions all ov er the world. We are part of one global community and what happens on one corner of the world is everyone's problem.
I'll focus on my town and country before thinking about things happening 10k kilometres from me and on which I have absolutely no power whatsoever. That's why we're supposed to elect competent politicians btw, to take care of the serious business we citizen know jack shit about.
We can take a current event, hong kong, besides posting memes on reddit and #thoughtsAndPrayers on twitter what are people outside of the region doing ? Nothing. You can be aware and upset about something, if you don't do shit about it you're better off taking care of your local community.
I also doubt we can compare the vast majority of the click bait news spewed by mainstream media and the holocaust. There is a very big difference between a war next door and whatever happens in the other side of the world.
Let's reverse your argument, what about Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan ? the US managed to (initially) get public support for those through the medias, are they a net good for the average citizen ?
> It was reporting by British media, politicians, celebrities and ordinary citizens that put pressure on the apartheid government to end apartheid
Not just British, it was a global effort and a global boycott. The British government of the time wasn't a supporter of Mandela.
> I am sure Hitler was going to prefer that other countries don't report on what was happening so that he can continue to eliminate all German Jews.
The Holocaust was barely reported at the time. Much of the details were only discovered by horrified Allied troops that overran the camps. Internment and the other racial discriminatory laws were reported; and the wave of Jewish refugees was, along with the high levels of opposition to taking in refugees.
I singled out Britain because they were the most vocal in the fight against apartheid. Maybe it was because they were our former colonisers. They are the ones who imposed sanctions that helped. As for US, it was in fact the CIA who gave apartheid government intel which led to the arrest of Nelson Mandela.
I have, sadly, given up. I can't stand watching/reading the news and feeling that I am quite possibly being manipulated, so I have completely given up. Anything I do read, I mistrust.
I don't want to be ignorant towards what is happening around me, but I feel like I have no choice, I don't want to become bitter and "pick a side", I prefer to remain ignorant.
Even when friends say "Oh, but try this source, they are soooo much better", it doesn't take long to realise there is ALWAYS an agenda behind it, a political leaning... It's exhausting.
This is exactly the effect that the news-spammers want to achieve. If you don't pick a side, you're not voting, or you're not an informed voter. So you've opted out of democracy. Which is nice, you've relieved yourself of a whole bunch of stress, and nothing changes in the short term.
Until something goes wrong. It's not that there won't be elections, they'll just be won by the same party for years on end. You personally will be fine, but there's an uptick in the number of journalists and activists killed in car bombs or more mysterious circumstances. The quality of the roads deteriorates and the number of homeless you have to step over increases.
>This is exactly the effect that the news-spammers want to achieve. If you don't pick a side, you're not voting, or you're not an informed voter
How does this follow at all?
You're doing exactly what the news spammers want. You're believing that they are the gatekeepers to knowledge and being informed. You're buying into the story that you need them to understand the world. This is a load of hogshit.
Candidates post their platforms and their ideas and encourage you to read them before you vote. How does watching the news make me more informed of their platform? They have values and they apply those values to the issues at hand. They say things like, "I believe in universal healthcare," or "I am tough against gun rights." How does being super up to date on the news help me understand how they will react to hypothetical situations, which is what I'm voting on?
Why do I need to know that there's massive protests going on in Hong Kong, the middle east and South America? Those are irrelevant to the domestic issues we face at home. The same domestic issues we face every election cycle (in the US): jobs, health care, food, guns, infrastructure. How does being well informed of the news help me make decisions based on my values and on the alignment of values with a candidate?
> How does watching the news make me more informed of their platform?
The candidate is the "most biased" source on their own platform! Especially as to the important second order questions of "is this actually important, or have they just declared War on Pecans for some dumb reason", and "will this actually fix the problem, or is this just funneling money to their campaign donors"?
The most important issue in the immediate UK election is Brexit. Do you think the candidates' statements about the likely outcomes of their Brexit policies are reliable, or would you like to buy this bridge I have to sell?
You can definitely make the argument that foreign news is irrelevant to you. I have a lot of sympathy with that as a Brit who gets over-exposed to US news. But this only holds true until things get bad enough. Someone blows up a refinery in Saudi Arabia and the price of petrol skyrockets. In the most extreme version, someone starts a war and you get drafted. Until then, sure.
> jobs, health care, food, guns, infrastructure
So there's an important philosophical question here; are those issues important to you only in as much as they affect you personally, or those close to you, or are they important as they affect your fellow Americans?
Why do you care if it wasn't your child in the latest school shooting? Why do you care about 9/11 if nobody you know was in the towers? Why do you care about healthcare if you're healthy? Why do you care about infrastructure other than that specific bridge you drive over every day? If you live in California, do you have an interest in knowing what's up with all the fires, or are you going to wait until they approach your house?
> Why do I need to know that there's massive protests going on in Hong Kong, the middle east and South America?
Given the poor quality of the reporting on local political issues it seems highly unlikely that the news is even reporting foreign political situations in a helpful fashion.
Even assuming good faith; it just seems unlikely that the facts will all get identified and accurately synthesised.
It certainly could be that they’re intentionally making the news an indecipherable morass. But continuing to participate in it wouldn’t prevent the catastrophe you predict. If anything, abandoning the chaotic media and helping to collapse their ad revenue might be more effective.
I've done exactly the same and have the complete opposite feeling of you. Why not 'be ignorant'? What are you really ignorant towards when ignoring the news? Most of its use, it seems to me, is to have something to talk about, with people you otherwise have have nothing to talk about. If you really need certain/real news (like investors basing decisions on earnings reports) you will have your quality, non-mass-media sources anyway.
identify potential biases in a source and then filter the information of that source through a bias lense, then use another source and do the same thing to triangulate "the truth"
giving up on consuming news because everything might be biased is simply lazy
Beware that the truth is not necessarily the midpoint between opposing opinions. Sometimes a source with a general bias gets it exactly right in a specific case.
>giving up on consuming news because everything might be biased is simply lazy
Not at all; it's a valid strategy. The events and the state of the world can be deduced from observing the (near) past just as well as from reading the news, perhaps even better. A person can stay reasonably well informed by skipping on the news, and instead observing actual events, actual outcomes, that is the (near) history. Both in person and through social circles, in particular friends and family. You could call it "the slow way" of getting the news.
As noted in OP and elsewhere in discussion, the news are rife with misinformation. It follows news listeners, subject to the misinformation, end up with various misconceptions and strong emotions, thus prone to doing things no well informed person would do. Having a sizable segment of population not subject to the news, and instead informed via others means is a natural counter-balance, a safety mechanism against single mindedness imparted by the centralized news.
> Even when friends say "Oh, but try this source, they are soooo much better", it doesn't take long to realise there is ALWAYS an agenda behind it, a political leaning... It's exhausting.
Journalism is always biased; even supposedly "objective" news outlets, by just picking which stories to emphasize or even report at all, are engaging in bias -- even when you think that the stories they do choose are "fair". This is not a bad thing, it's just a reality of life (it could be argued that objective reporting is impossible, philosophically speaking). You just have to be aware of the bias and take it into consideration.
Being informed is hard. Now, I'd be talking about the spanish speaking-sphere, but I guess some of this may apply to the US too.
Every time I want to dig in a subject it always comes down to this:
1. If the topic has scientific coverage, try to find meta-analysis. If there isn't any the field has a high chance of lacking ground truth. Sadly you need at least statistics knowledge to know where are you getting into, and some times this isn't enough because domain knowledge is a must. Some words may be used in a different meaning than you're used to.
2. If there isn't any scientific coverage, try to find specialized sources. Most of them are not open access though.
3. If your only resource is main stream media or internet outlets, then try to balance out different approaches. This is a very hard task because the amount of noise is staggering. It's not only agendas but journalist really doing a poor/cheap/lazy work or a combination of them all.
If you happen to know a domain, then try to avoid anything other than specialized media upwards, because you'll get angry or at least you won't believe how weird some realities are depicted to the general public.
It's also a good exercise to read info that doesn't reinforce your beliefs, try to break the famous "eco chamber", it's probably the only way to not become an idiot, even if you know the truth from first hand, because it's useful to know what people are being told to think and how some other people can reach other conclusions.
what if you assume that objectivity shouldn't even be a goal? I feel like reading/watching multiple sources of informations, of which you understand their bias, is quite useufl.
I feel like twitter is actually the best place to that process, and to "defragment" the complexity of information flow. You can follow "mainstream" opinion makers and "rebels", "experts/specialists" for narrow but deep insights, and so on
Having run a newspaper, I know the problem is the business model. Funding by advertising is a terrible business model for journalism.
"real" journalism doesn't make any money because it's expensive to make and doesn't generate any more ad revenue than bad journalism.
Most newspapers lose money, and that's getting worse not better. So billionaires own (and subsidise) newspapers, and get to influence content.
So either we start paying for our news, or we continue with the current situation. Though it's going to get worse because we're de-training an entire generation of journalists, and the advertising revenue is shrinking.
obviously because private money has sick incentives and there's only tax money besides private capital to work with. like i said the problem is tax money also has sick incentives.
Is this really that surprising? Billionaires owning vanity projects isn’t news when they’re football teams, why is it when they’re corporate news organizations?
Also, if there was ever a time to be concerned about the owners of media organizations controlling the narrative this is not it. The media, and the ruling class more generally, being pissed off that the peasants are daring to speak back and have their own non approved opinions is behind the never ending stream of invective directed at the big tech companies[1].
Martin Gurri’s book on this loss of control, The Revolt of the Public, is amazing by the way[2].
> Billionaires owning vanity projects isn’t news when they’re football teams, why is it when they’re corporate news organizations?
You really can't see the difference between the two? If Mark Cuban has a problem with a player and cuts him from a game, then only the Maverick's suffer. If he (owned a paper and) has a problem with a politician and demands hit pieces, the whole country suffers.
Perhaps "surprising" is the wrong word, but this absolutely is the problem; billionaire-owned "news" organisations able to propagandise with very little opposition. Although the question of who the staff class is also important; people have started to notice that the (publicly owned!) BBC's political presenter Andrew Neil works for all sorts of Conservative party-aligned institutions like the Spectator.
A skeptical mind should immediately ask "wait, that sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory, am I to believe Jeff Bezos is acting as an editor for the newspaper he owns?" Which is a perfectly valid question.
Noam Chomsky explains to a BBC journalist how it can be accomplished much more cleverly:
Reporter: How can you know that I'm self-censoring, how can you know that a journalist is self-censoring?
Chomsky: I'm not saying you're self-censoring, I'm sure you believe everything you say. But what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.
I find the idea that there can be an unbiased news source deeply problematic. All reporting of an event has to be from a perspective, and has to make decisions about what to report, what to leave out; what to emphasise, what to play down. An honest news source should be one that is one that is honest about its own biases.
There’s a difference between bias and just making shit up. I think people are capable of dealing with biased reporting of actual events. Up until recently, most reporting in the us was done by Americans working for American companies who generally were trying to tell the truth the way they saw it even if the way they saw it was biased.
What changed in the 2016 election is the torrent of foreign governments who were spreading outright lies in the interest of harming the country, and Americans who gleefully cooperated with them.
2016?.... No 2016 is when a lot of people finally noticed it. It was occurring long before that. Large multinationals have been consolidating news for decades. Noam Chomsky has been warning about this for quite some time.
There is nothing wrong with bias. All media has biases, and those that a required to be unbiased, such as the BBC, end up causing other biases with equality of camera time making every issue a discussion. Which has been well exploited by certain minority views.
What has changed is the mainstream media used to care a lot more about being honest. Now they often couldn't give a toss.
I don't mind media being partisan, it's always been so, and often it's revealing to see the reporting from both sides of an issue, and add the FT's take for the financial slant. I do mind that we're rapidly running out of sources that care about being honest. Murdoch ruined the Times, the Barclay Brothers ruined the Telegraph. Both now far more opinion than news. That's a loss, whatever your politics.
the mainstream media used to care a lot more about being honest
Quite the contrary, in the USA, anyway. Think back to Hearst and the "yellow journalism" era.
Never in the history of the world have individuals had such ease of access to original sources, such as eyewitness accounts, texts of legislation, etc. Yet people generally stay within their bubbles.
I totally agree with you - there's nothing wrong with bias, and it's completely unavoidable in the modern media context. News media needs to be honest about its biases, whilst still upholding standards of reporting & journalism.
I agree and there will always be bias in news, intentional or not.
There is the argument that if people were equipped with the skills to identify bias in reporting themselves then these news sources would not be able to operate as effectively and with as much influence as they do today.
For example, in Swedish schools children are actively taught to identify and evaluate biases in news sources as a way to filter false reporting [1].
It we start giving children the toolbox required to live in our (real) world of imperfect reporting then the impact of biased news sources might be neutralized in a generation.
I think one problem is that, due to general mistrust and paranoia regarding the "mainstream media," people tend to conflate bias with intentional fabrication and propaganda.
there have been numerous examples of fabricated information or outright propaganda in mainstream media in the past. Most recently the fake news stories regarding ISIS from ABC.
You mention "numerous examples of fabricated information or outright propaganda" and "fake news stories regarding ISIS from ABC" (stories, plural) but only cite one data point - a story for which the wrong video was used, and which was later retracted. And for which, as far as I understand, malicious intent has yet to be proven.
I understand it's considered axiomatic here to assume malice where stupidity would suffice as regards the media, but as you're attempting to argue against fabrication and deception by the media, your yourself are attempting to deceive readers here by conflating your case.
Perhaps you could add weight to your argument by listing the other fake news stories regarding ISIS from ABC?
I agree that it is hard to dial down bias in reporting to an absolute zero (which Jean-Luc Godard provocatively referred to “50% time for the jews 50% time for Hitler”). But there is still a scale. And right now, in the heat of a political campaign in the US and the UK, it is dialled up to 11.
The reporting could be a lot more balanced, presenting both sides, not using provocating headlines, etc.
It would probably be a bit more boring (which is why even previously serious publications like the Financial Times gave up).
News shouldn't have a political agenda it should have a factual agenda. It's raining in Florida would be a fact. Trump is campaigning in Florida is a fact (I dont know if he is, just an example). Trump is winning over the Floridan people with his exciting rallie displays a political agenda.
That's an unachievable ideal, particularly and especially for complex stories (e.g. just about any political story) where there are too many facts to report, to much backstory to fill in, and an editor has to make a decision about what to leave in and what to omit.
I'm an avid reader of Chomsky. He often gets his sources from financial and foreign policy publications. I think I remember him writing something to the effect of: the best source of truthful journalism is in the finance and foreign policy publications, the reason being that those publications help powerful people form their opinions and make decisions, and none of the powerful people would be subscribing to publications that do a shitty job and that compromise the powerful people's decisions. So those publications are necessarily honest, the articles they publish would often be devoid of emotion or moral judgement (e.g. a "member of the communist party" would be just that, not a "commie"), they would even openly admit about, for instance, how some policy protects the interests of certain circles of powerful people.
I can't remember where exactly I've read that and what the exact wordings were though.
Foreign Policy has biased publications. I know this because I've been involved in events they talked about and it was indeed biased and lacked information, and some of the context. The job was still better than main stream media, that's true.
You're right. He has been saying that for many years and I've heard many variations. The WSJ is famously his favourite newspaper, though that may have shifted post-Murdoch.
>Property relations between the French media and their main shareholders
>The data is organized in two tables:
>1. 'medias_francais.tsv' contains all shareholders (natural or legal persons) and media represented on the map
>2. 'relations_medias_francais.tsv' details the capital links between these shareholders and the groups or media they own
>Last updated November, 2019
>Technical indication: for those who wish to participate in updating the database by making a pull request, make sure that the file is encoded in UTF-8 with unix line breaks so that we can merge it all without conflict.
Edit: I wish this was all added to Wikidata so we can chart this for every country but also map the transnational stake-holding.
I use the NewsGuard (I admit they're far from perfect) browser plugin and there's an alarming number of news stories that are broken by entities that have virtually all of the green check marks except that they conceal the ownership and financing of their newspaper.
Overall this post is crap. The whole point about people choosing what they want to read or get reported on only reinforces bubbles. That’s what Facebook did.
However I agree that the media is biased and it is worse now than ever. I think even more than being biased, it’s what they choose to report on or not report on that matters. Look at the coverage of Andrew Yang on MSNBC. There are over a dozen instances of ignoring him on charts and graphs and putting lower-polling candidates on display other than him. A few times is one thing but it’s literally over 15 times, including ignoring him for the first 30 mins of the November debates and giving him the least amount of talking time of all the candidates for the 4th debate in a row. Things like this show that media is biased to a degree that is undermining our democracy.
This happens every political season and has for decades. The media organizations have winners they have ready picked. This really blew up in their face in 2016 with the pied piper candidate.
Something which continues to stun me is how much spin and opinion are added to the news and that "just the facts" isn't a thing anymore. I listen to the No Agenda Show podcast (In The Morning!) which can most succinctly be described as news deconstruction and they go to the source material, transcripts, and audio clips with context as often as possible -- and then contrast those against what CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and the rest are saying. In too many cases the news outlets, both (American) conservative and (American) liberal are claiming significance and meaning that is either absent from the source material or COMPLETELY OPPOSITE of what the source material suggests.
Strangely, this is reassuring to my sanity because looking at the opposite points of view of the media leads the logical person to conclude they can't be talking about the same thing, that they both cannot be true. With news deconstruction like they do on No Agenda it becomes obvious that "mainstream news" in the United States is pretty much a world of make-believe these days.
Despite the social shame associated with it, I no longer even believe main stream history around things like the kennedy assassination. I don't know what happened, but I'm skeptical that what they say happened actually happened.
We live in an epistemological radical age, with mass psychological operations being carried out by multiple state and non-state actors.
The good news is that the only sane response is to step back and focus on the ones we love around us, which is what we should be doing anyway.
The problem is that, in order to protect the ones you love, especially their future, you need to make some important decisions like voting, joining protests when you need to, and maybe even trying to convince other people to vote for the same candidate or to join you in protest; all of these activities require being informed of the true agenda and abilities of candidates, of important socio-political issues, etc.
You can't just say "I'll focus on the ones I love around me" and ignore the rest.
I disagree. In as much as any of those distract you from raising good children, they hurt more than they help, and voting and political activity in general is pointless (at best) in most countries. The elites are going to get what they want until there is bloodshed, and probably even beyond that as well.
Irish Democracy[1] is more effective and more moral than any sort of political activism.
[1] "Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous….One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy”—the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people—than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs." James Scott - Two Cheers for Anarchism
What you are talking about is the "action". I don't think that really invalidates my point: good old democracy via voting may not be your preferred mode of political action, but you still need to be informed about issues so that you take action for the right cause, whatever the form of political action you want to take.
Put another way, you need to be informed so that you can engage in lawbreaking and disobedience for the right cause.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating for lawbreaking or disobedience. What I said above was just for the sake of argument in favour of staying informed.
Right, but with the main information channels (popular media, academic media, history) being at least in part a system of disinformation and control, and with the alternative channels easily overwhelmed by state and non-state actors as well as kooks, even paying attention is usually a net negative. It takes up valuable time and energy you could be using locally.
I suppose my point here is mainly one of degree: sure, be somewhat informed as to what the current disinformation campaigns are, but don't take it too seriously or think you are getting any "truth" out if it. And read old books, especially by people who were popular in their time but are now ignored, such as Henry George.
From the article:
"One way to restore trust is to give power back to the people, enabling them to choose what stories matter most to them. By doing this, we can revolutionise the current state of the news media — from an entity that dictates information to an industry that only reports legitimate information that has been requested by the population."
That's the only solution that's offered, and a bad one at that. Letting "the people decide", e.g. democratizing the news, is a bad idea. How would we know what to choose? How would we know that there's an important issue out there that needs to be reported on, beforehand? Normal people aren't investigative reporters.
I don't have a solution either, but I know what it is we need. We need good journalists to do good journalism and be able to choose freely what they research and report on. The current for-profit corporate structure of the news media is incompatible with that.
That's why you get more truth nowadays from independent journalists, researchers and content creators than from the corporate media, which will almost exclusively lie to you to further an agenda. It's very hard to separate the weed from the chaff though, and it requires a lot of critical thinking and observation of the reader.
> I don't have a solution either, but I know what it is we need. We need good journalists to do good journalism and be able to choose freely what they research and report on. The current for-profit corporate structure of the news media is incompatible with that.
Well sure, but how can such a thing really be accomplished, considering all the difficult pre-requisites, one of the main ones being likely no workable business model under the current state of affairs in the world?
This fake news thing is a huge problem, but who do we expect to find a solution, under the current constraints nature forces upon us? Politicians? Media? Altruistic billionaires? Democracy ("the people")?
In the bizarre matrix of information flow that takes place on Planet Earth circa 2019, HN happens to be a unique and substantial junction, frequented by an unusually high concentration of intelligent and logical people. I propose that if something is ever going to change, if any entity is capable of bringing the mental horsepower to the table to perform a comprehensive, unbiased analysis of the problem, and come up with workable solutions that can overcome the unfortunate constraints, it is going to take the collective intelligence of something like the HN community. I further propose that not only do we have this capability, but also that we have a responsibility. The world is what we make of it, and as it is it seems like we're all using our substantial intellectual abilities to analyze the problem, but then just complain to each other about it and point out how others (the people mentioned above) "should" fix it. News flash: they're not going to fix it, for the very reasons that people are pointing out in this thread.
So, what are we going to do about this problem dang?
I've become quite fascinated lately how artists seem able to better communicate complex, multi-dimensional ideas, where plain language and logic fails. But then, this has always been the case if you stop and think about it.
I'll throw one idea in the ring: a government-sponsored, unbiased and transparent, crowd-sourced version of Snopes, that doesn't just fact-check cherry picked fake news stories, but rather does a continuous review of the daily news stream. The goal isn't to perform a full, "truthful" telling of each story, but rather to serve as a "spot the lie" service, pointing out bias, assumptions, memes, opinions, mind reading, future predicting, history rewriting, logical fallacies, different perspectives, overlooked complications, and so forth and so on. The goal is not to tell people what's really going on, but rather to make it crystal clear that in actuality, we don't really know WHAT is going on! And that's ok, because at least we'd now know that, which is quite an improvement from our current state.
Of course, this is kind of what reddit is in a sense, and it typically degrades into a shitshow of people yelling at each other and voting on their subconscious biases. Identifying that behavior as a problem, and finding a solution, is something I suspect the minds of HN could solve. Well, if we could stop fighting amongst each other that is.
The ability to be expressive comes with it certain biological traits and dispositions. These traits may determine your viewpoints on matters.
So, if I hire journalists purely based on their writing ability, I may find most of them have very similar political views. If I create an industry of the best actors/musicians, again I may find them to have similar traits and views.
So, you can have a situation where some view has 50% support in the larger population, but almost no support in the press, academia, entertainment industry etc.
In a society based on free speech and no violence, the views supported by expressive people have an overwhelming advantage. The problem is just because you are very good at communication, doesnt mean your viewpoint is always correct. That is the reason some brilliant professors dont make it in the private sector, while someone who cant string a sentence together becomes a billionaire.
But when people see, supposedly neutral organizations have an overwhelming slant to one side of a viewpoint, the organization loses credibility. They are in a bubble.
When you no longer have institutions of fairness everyone can agree upon, you create the problem of fake news.
"The ability to be expressive comes with it certain biological traits and dispositions. These traits may determine your viewpoints on matters."
This is an extremely hand-wavy assumption that you're basing your arguments on. Any evidence to back that up? It would seem to me that the ability to express one's views would be orthogonal to one's viewpoints on various matters.
> It would seem to me that the ability to express one's views would be orthogonal to one's viewpoints on various matters.
Since when? I know quite a number of brilliant engineers in different fields. Most of them should never be put in front of a camera or a general audience for public speaking. Having strong and even well understood viewpoints does not mean you have the ability to translate them outside of your domain well. That is a rather rare trait.
The info-graphic posted in the article links back originates from titlemax.com [0]. Their article at least list the owners of some outlets. I've got to say I am a bit surprised to see such an blogpost from a lending corp. Their wiki article suggest they faced criticism in the past for predatory lending [1], I wonder if this is their version of getting back at those who reported on them, or what their intention for that topic is?
It's actually easier to tell today whether something is fake because there are more outlets to determine an intersection within.
Here's how you do it:
Read both CNN and Fox. If something is reported on both, it's real. For stories that exist on both, notice the slant of each story. Pay attention to emotive conjugation [1] and ask yourself these three questions:
1. Why did the editors pick this story?
2. What is their opinion of it and the actors in it?
3. What stories are not being reported because the editors are not interested in them.
I've always felt news organisations should be legally required to be non-for-profit and wages capped at some sensible multiple of the national average wage (e.g 6x)
If the belief is that the press (news) should be free and unencumbered to report the truth, and accepting all solutions are imperfect, then I think its a case of removing the worst influences in alignment with that goal.
Media conglomerates and billionaires usually have competing interests due to their diverse interests and influence. So my suggestion is not to remove them or exclude them from news but to limit the number of levers they can pull within news.
I accept that my thoughts are imperfect and flawed also, so offer them for discussion and nothing else.
You're casting a pretty wide net there. I've always felt news organizations should be legally required to recruit from my exact microdemographic and only from registered members of the party I most recently voted for, with wages indexed to between 99% to 101% of my current income.
It's somewhat ironic that you can't even trust this article. There's an obvious bias towards a "power struggle" view of the world's problems. The issue with the current state of affairs is essentially assumed to be because of billionaires and corporate consolidation. The solution presented is then to give more power to the people. Neither point is substantiated by fact.
One could just as easily argue that the state of the media is due to a failure to adapt to the internet in which blogs, Twitter, and social media become peoples primary source of information. So the "power of the people" could have in fact caused this issue. This also being a conjecture.
The only point in this article that is well substantiated is that trust in media is low and I feel this article is perfectly on trend.
Its generally thought that trust in media was dropping before the advent of the blog. Massive consolidation in the media industry along with the event of 24 hour news where something had to fill the channel at all times is considered a precursor to the situation we are in.
There was a post going around showing a screenshot of CNN versus Fox after Sonderland's testimony at the impeachment hearings. Each had a wildly different take on what was said, at least in the headline. It was posted as a complaint that one of these sites was fake news and the other reflected reality more accurately.
I don't see a problem with two wildly different takes on the same incident, particularly when it is political. In fact, I would say this is a sign of a healthy democracy. Compare it to the alternative: a single, typically state-sponsored viewpoint in a totalitarian state.
This isn't to say there aren't problems with fake news, the corporatisation of media, sensationalism, etc. But competing narratives imposes at least some checks and balances.
First, start by seriously broadening the range of sources you get your news from. Specifically, choose to put in some "contrary" sources to those you are used to.
Second, analyse and average out the stances & reporting angle from the articles that are put out about any subject. Finally, be mindful to always look at things critically and don't take things at face value. These are businesses and therefore have agendas. Besides Google News there's nothing out there that is able to cluster news articles from multiple sources into a single topic, so here's my shameless plug: https://thoro.news
I'm afraid that in the bigger picture of modern media landscape, that's not going to have much of an effect.
Let's say you disbar some John Doe so he cannot be hired by a news media organisation any more.
There is still nothing stopping him from blogging, tweeting, instagramming, and tiktoking. I suspect that the people who really know how to spin stories and get a following don't really need to work for a newspaper at all.
What I'm saying is that the news corporations may not be as influencial as some people believe. Let me take, for example, the Hong Kong protests/riots (whatever you would like to call them). There were plenty of fake news and rumors circling around Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc; and those had real influence on how people viewed the protests/riots; none of those fake news or rumors had to come from a "proper" news tv station or newspaper.
You make a good point about that and this doesn’t solve that issue.
The issue it tries to address is the one where people are looking to find journalistic news based on confirmed evidence rather than hearsay, speculation, playing loose with statistics, posing opinionmakers as experts and driving narrative, etc.
First, don't trust anything that isn't a direct, verifiable quote (basically, on camera). Ignore headlines and anything that is an interpretation of what someone said. Same goes for any other facts - believe what you can verify, or where there's direct testimony from people who were there and know what happened.
Second, make an effort to understand the context of any actions or quotes. This may require some more research and understanding. You can rarely extract this from a news article and requires some careful language parsing to determine what the facts are vs some reporters opinion or agenda.
If you think about it, this is the same problem faced by any student of history. Some facts are "solid", some are squishy, interpretations are vague and/or self-serving, much is made up to support various narratives the participants are peddling.
I wonder if we'll start seeing 1) better tools for historians, and 2) tools historians currently used accelerated/improved to do more real-time news.
I think the biggest problem isn't reporting false statements. It's reporting marginal or true statements, but presenting only one side of the story. Or controlling the narrative-- by selecting which questions to ask/answer, the purveyor totally controls the conversation.
I think the only defense is to get news from a variety of diverse sources.
Came here to say that I hate that stupid ticker at the top. Utterly unnecessary, gratuitous, overboard animation, even when the price of an item didn't actually change!
Immediately switched to Reader View in Firefox because the ticker was too annoying.
Not the OP, but I'd guess the only connection to potential antisemitism is the critical mention of Sheldon Adelson, "an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist" who is very supportive of some of the politics carried out by the Israeli state.
I read it as an attempt by someone who doesn't particularly like Jews to conflate the issue actually being discussed in the article with the Jewish question. I wouldn't waste time trying to draw out of him how his concern spiel relates to reality.
The world would be a much better place if everybody only checked what's happening around them instead of the other side of the country / world. 99% of the "news" have 0 impact on you and you have 0 power (direct and indirect) on 99% of what's happening, why even bother ?