In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse!
And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.
We have unrealistic expectations of news publishing. Modern TV and movies has made certain professions far more glamourous than they are (journalists, police, doctors) because it makes for good media. But most doctors are not ER doctors. Most journalists are not breaking news. Most police never fire their service weapon.
But to somehow think the moral distributions of people are superior from the average population, just because of career selection, is dubious at best. Something being protected by law doesn't somehow make its practice exalted.
News co-ops are part of the free market. If you want to site successful non-free-market news organisation there are things like the BBC. Which is respectable, and really quite a wonderful organisation if the propaganda is favourable to your cause.
Eloquently put! Personal experience- wrote to bbc and asked them to address/edit/revisit their past articles making someone a victim and a 'hero' for a cause several years earlier in light of a court ruling absolving the accused and establishing holes in the 'victimhood'. They refused it flat out! Took a few seconds for BBC's reputation to go 180 degrees in my mind.
NPR has an implicit assumption in ~every story that a problem is best addressed by government intervention and spending. They're credulous of any claim an "authority" makes.
2. Could this article be more sympathetic to the administration? https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027552833/heres-why-biden-is... the meanest thing they say it's "misjudged the speed". Why not "it's been obvious for two decades ANA could never hold together including the eight years he was VP"
It's more benign than qanon. I haven't checked their coverage of mask wearing. I'll change my mind if they were pushing masks when Fauci was lying and saying they were unnecessary.
QAnon is benign, we wouldn't even know of its existence if it wasn't constantly brought up by press outlets to supply their readers with a desperate need for a boogeyman.
Yeah, not sure what that guy's on about. PBS, NPR, and other not for profit news orgs like BBC aren't perfect, but then what is? If I had to choose a single news source to try to stay informed, I'd take any one of those three over any of their for-profit competition.
Don't mistake the BBC for a "not-for-profit". BBC Worldwide is a commmercial operation. The BBC has large shares in various commercial TV operations.
The only parts of the BBC that are arguably not-for-profit are iPlayer, and domestic TV and Radio; and the BBC World Service. These are paid for by a controversial hypothecated tax, controlled by the government of the day; as a consequence, the Beeb is fairly consistently pro the government of the day, and anti the official opposition (they can see which side their bread is buttered on).
[Edit] The World Service is paid for out of general taxation, specifically the Foreign Office budget. It's not paid for out of the Licence Fee.
According to the author's examples of bullshit, NPR peddles the same stuff as the other for-profit main stream publications.
> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops [0], viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls [1], vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots [2] behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation [3], and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths.
I listed to them for years but noticed a considerable shift in their reporting in the last 2-3 years.
They were presumably not referring to NPR specifically, but to public-service broadcasters in general, like ARD and ZDF in Germany, BBC in Britain, ORF in Austria, RAI in Italy, and so on.
Edit: I'm sorry for the lengthy post, but I felt giving rough examples was necessary to convey the point.
It's true that some unofficial quality voices are disrupting established narratives ... but I'm sorry to say this isn't the shift that matters, because 99% of the 'unofficial sources' are considerably worse than just 'bullshit' in the press.
The 'Giant Kraken Monster' of fake news is really shocking, and it's taking over some sectors. I couldn't quite fathom it until I saw it happen to someone in my own life.
While we argue about 'truth' here on HN, information is being submerged by nonsense on mainstreet.
It's not so much war between civil people arguing over the facts - it's more like Information World War Z of people hopped up on very bad, made up information.
I was at a relative's home a few days ago listening as a he was listening to his Facebook stream and it was very shocking.
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but:
"Tanks will Roll, Power Cut, the Great Reset and Trump will be re-instated by Coup on Aug 10 ..."
"I have a source, who cannot be named, because his life would be in danger, that Nanci Pelosi was in direct contact with the Chinese Communist Party on January 6 directing the assault on Capitol Hill"
"Those that stole the election, put them ballot boxes full of fake votes for Biden, they need to be executed for treason, the True Patriots Will Rise"
"It's masks now, folks, but this is the globalist master plan, it's just the first step. This is the reason the second amendment exists, folks"
"Big Pharma does NOT want you to know about natural cures, because, well, why do you think? You are the experiment folks. The Sheep out there doing what the government tells them - but the Lions, the True Patriots, know better."
"Q said:" - and then a bunch insane of statements from QAnon etc.
It's dizzyingly conspiratorial and it's really scary to watch people eat that up. My family member indicated that they don't believe most of it, but that's their primary news source and, it has affected them greatly.
My family member is becoming an information zombie who is losing their grounding in reality, and cannot be reasoned with on these issues, even if they are quite rational otherwise. Once you start to believe cabals of the elite are killing children in basements in blood-lust ceremonies, that mysterious Q controls things behind the scenes, that vaccines i.e. life-saving medicines are invented as a tool of control, and that of course all of the 'main stream media outlets' are all lying, then what?
Watching them listen - it's like a form of information hypnotism - it's as though they're in a mystical / religious trance. If someone already has a reason to actually 'want to believe', and they don't care, and they just 'let go of rationality' ... then they fall into the trap. I think it's the same kind of programming that cults use.
It's really a sight to behold, and the experience of how the information is communicated, the anger, the tone of voice, etc..
The MSM has a problem with bias that could stand to be corrected, and it's have more quality 'outside' voices, but even some of the better sources often falter. Matt Taibi, probably in the same vein of the author of this piece about 'BS', usually has some great things to say but I feel even he is jumping the shark a bit trying to get attention to his Substack with overzealous headlines.
In order to put this into relative context, here is some polling data from Pew [1][2] which shows a material minority of Americans are susceptible to even the more over the top conspiratorial information (i.e. QAnon), for less egregious but nevertheless still completely false information, I believe the number is much higher, reaching up to 30% for those who believe that the election was fraudulent [3].
1. Use narrative engineering to persuade angry, frightened, gullible people to tune in and self-select.
2. Use narrative reinforcement to make them angrier and more frightened.
3. Wind them up and point them at a target.
4. Profit politically, and possibly also financially.
It doesn't matter what the narrative is. As long as it has an outgroup that can be accused of doing terrible things that arouse fear, rage, and disgust, almost any narrative will do. It could be vax conspiracies, it could be election conspiracies, it could be any number of other hot-button topics.
It's no different to how official propaganda works. [1] It isn't even all that different to conventional advertising.
The only difference now is that it portrays itself as covert, revolutionary, transgressive, and individualistic, where during the glory days of Time it used to present itself as wise, objective, and paternal.
But in fact it's just the same old farmed behaviour modification reinvented for social media.
[1] The suggestion that there was ever any kind of benign separation between old-fashioned patrician journalism and the US establishment is itself obvious bullshit. Historians have written books about this. This is just one intro.
So that would include the far right and the government, then. Hardly "everyone" ;)
I do find it interesting that left-leaning people (like myself) find it difficult to acknowledge that left-leaning media also engages in The Bullshit. Because we tend to agree with the propaganda statements, it's incredibly difficult to spot as Bullshit.
I remember when France went to war against Khadafi our newspapers/TVs were all supporting this, given the amount of direct suffering it caused I'd say that being worse than this is .. hard!
Gaddafi stated publicly that he was going to Benghazi to kill civilians, something which he had done in the past. He had a few battalions heading through the desert to do that.
He was already causing great harm, or rather, the war was causing great harm. Choosing to tilt the game board to one side over the other is definitely something to ponder, and there's definitely a lot of information to dig up and report on, but it's not a 'fake news' story.
Gaddaffi's life is actually stranger than fiction, he did kidnap young women and put them into his Harem. That's not made up. In fact, it's odd that you don't hear more 'fake news' about some world leaders who continue to have these practices because there's so much material to work with.
You're misrepresenting/misreading what I said, yes he was a scum doing great harm but it seems that the situation became a lot worse after France&England intervention as was to be expected, so what was the point of the intervention?
Noone in the mainstream news AFAIK did its job and asked what will be going to happen next?
1) 'It was worse after UK/France intervened' is basically false.
"so what was the point of the intervention" - like I already said, at least to prevent an impending massacre, and then to tilt the outcome to 'one side', in which all things being equal, was preferable, and still is even in retrospect.
There was already a civil war, before any intervention.
If the UK and France had not intervened, there would have likely been a massacre - again, this is what Gaddafi stated he would do, moreover, there's no reason to believe that he would have unambiguously quashed the rebellion, meaning the civil war would have gone on in which he would have been a primary antagonist, possibly with the upper hand.
'The outcome' was titled by Western Powers, and it would have been better if there were more stability, but there's no reason to believe that it's worse after intervention.
The 2011 war was not hugely violent. In the entire war only a few thousand civilians and fighters died, which is frankly minimal. Through to the late 2010's the political instability was not very violent. The mini-war in the late 2010's was again, fairly specific and shortlived with few casualties.
2) 'Noone in the mainstream news AFAIK did its job and asked what will be going to happen next' - first, I don't think that this would represent any kind of fake news, just the media not having foresight, and often they do not. Second, Obama was very public with his statements of 'What Happens Next?' - it's why the US did only the frontline air support, AWACS, drones etc. and didn't do any of the main fighting. The 'big questions' around 'bad outcomes' definitely lingered, there were a lot of question marks about that during the war. Finally - none of that constitutes fake news or 'bullshit' really. If you wanted more specific and detailed covarage in the aftermath, you can see most of it on Al-Jazeera. CNN is not exactly going to have good coverage within Libya.
Am I to read your comment correctly as if to indicate that you are seriously validating the legitimacy of QAnon given their ostensible 'prediction' of COVID?
And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.