We've belatedly come to realise that 'the news' is not the neutral reporting of events but rather the manufacture of information products for commercial or political gain, most preferably for the oligarchical media owners, both. We need a new revenue model, new ownership model of news media, before we can trust again what has been piped into our eyes and ears
Darryl Cooper spoke about this in an earlier episode of The Unraveling[1]. The thesis of the episode was something along the lines of "If you pull the thread behind "honest journalism", you'll find that the US has been cultured to being told what to think since the days of Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite."
When we consider the current state of journalism we should check the presupposition that we ever had a "free and functional press". I can't remember a time, nor can I find evidence, that it ever truly existed without some sort of circumstantial asterisks polluting the results.
Walter Cronkite came closer to "the truth" than modern "journalism" does. He wasn't perfect, he had his own narrative, but he believed in objectivity, and he tried to reach it. He may have failed, but by trying, he came closer to reaching it than the current generation.
There was a managing editor of the New York Times. He knew that his reporters leaned somewhat left, so he steered the editorial slant of the paper somewhat right to balance. They literally put "He kept the paper straight" on his tombstone. Today the Times comes rather short of that standard.
Broad consumer sentiment lags reality by a decade or thereabouts. We're seeing people wise up to changes that happened in the journalism profession in the late '00s and early 10s.
"Mainstream" news is far closer to correct than the alternatives. Faux Noise and it's allies are terrible.
However, I do agree it's about eyeballs, not quality reporting. Everyone's guilty of that, the only question is how far they distort things to attract those eyeballs. An honest news outfit couldn't survive these days.
I remember a post on reddit about someone who grew up in the USSR/Russia before moving to America and they laid out how tuning out from media leads to not caring and eventually some authoritarian-style of government and how they were afraid this was slowly happening in America now.
Next thing is for most of the news it is all bad and I think we need to find some kind of shift. While the news should be accurate and reported, what about news about how many lives were saved last night in the ER? Or how some local non-profit feeds and provides goods for the homeless. The 24-hour news cycle with everything being bad has really curbed are ability to have empathy with other humans from anywhere.
There's an old saying in journalism - "If it bleeds, it leads." There are positive news sites out there - Upworthy being one notable example - but they don;t seem to do as well as fear based journalism.
The core of the issue is money. All major news agencies are all owned by corporate interests, and they aren't in the news business for the betterment of society - they want to turn a profit. This affects every editorial decision they make, and leads to consequences like fear-based reporting and, much worse, editorial decisions that favor the interests of the corporate owners, meaning a lot of stuff about them that may be bad is either downplayed, buried, our outright not printed.
This sounds conspiratorial, but it's all just the side effect of putting profit over people, which is the American way.
Yes, I've heard it said that CNN was the beginning of the end of journalism as we knew it. The drive to have 24 hours of things to say and the need to get people to watch it constantly really changed the formula. Now it's just a money making scheme and not really helpful in any meaningful way.
I have to say, I traveled to the UK last month and was astounded by the positive morning news. My mother and I both commented on how good it was to watch the news in the morning and not be inundated with the death and destruction that we see back in the USA.
I stopped watching/reading "the news" years ago, for these reasons:
1) Negativity / Tragedy "sells" better than good news
2) The facts have taken a back seat to sensationalism and celebrity worship and opinion
3) There are only a handful of mega-corporations running all the "news" and deciding what to show/tell vs. what to hide/ignore.
What irks me most is that I now have to choose between A) being my own investigative report when a topic is important enough, or B) giving in to not knowing the truth. Being lazy and stupid is not a good plan forward, but being well-informed requires time I usually don't have to spend. Thanks, "news" industry.
The daily news is arguably narrative driven, and people have noticed many local stations share the exact same script it doesn't matter if its Fox, Abc, Cbs, Nbc.
That video is still being shared widely on both left and the right.
If there was one clock for everyone we'd all trust the time and agree on it. When everyone carries around their own watch, we all have somewhat different times, and trust it and agree on it less. Now we each have access to thousands of clocks at the click of a button. They report wildly inconsistent times.
Poll: Do you trust the time tellers? Response: A lot less than I used to.
According to special relativity, the time for you is path dependent, and different than for everyone else depending on the vectors that brought you to this point. If two times are inconsistent it doesn't necessarily mean that either one is wrong.
Well .. I'm a Brit who's pulled away from the daily (UK) news, and I agree with this. It is grinding, mostly grindingly stupid, and the sense that it's worth engaging with the process to fix matters has evaporated. The UK news has always worn its political allegiances on its masthead, but that has now completely overridden any kind of sense or accuracy. The British press campaigned for Brexit for decades, and got it. Now we have a Twitter-stoked moral panic over trans people to deal with as well that has been pushed into existence from nothing over the past few years.
I'm not American but I've been making a conscience effort to reduce the amount of news I read (at least general news).
I found the constant negativity, not from any one place, just utterly anxiety inducing and depressing.
At the same time it also feels semi addictive, perhaps FOMO, I don't know.
The constant 24hr mantra just has to be a recipe for psychological disaster. That isn't too say a victim of crime shouldn't have a voice. There is just too much for any one person to process, makes us feel more helpless.
I can't help but think at times of the film nightcrawler. I'm sure media is staffed by well meaning people but underneath it feels like in part like this baying for blood, for more chaos.
I still keep up to date with the basics, outside of very major stories I try to avoid the whole "follow this story" side.
"The news" is an outdated concept and a vast majority of it could die off with no negative consequences.
"The news" isn't journalism, journalism is about investigation. "The news" also doesn't have a monopoly on Journalism. I receive a lot of journalism on the internet from places which are not in any way considered to be "the news".
We say the problem is that they can't figure out how to profitable. This is nonsense. It isn't profitable because it mostly isn't providing any value so few people are willing to pay for it. If a majority of it died, people could find new ways to do things that do provide real value.
I've been checked out on the news for about a decade. The main issue for me wasn't that it's attention grabby and sensationalist, or that it's often blatantly biased. At the end of the day it's just sloppy as fuck.
I read a lot of dense subject matter material. Whether it be software, our product domain, or just personal interest. It's possible to write high quality surface-level explainers, but the news feels like a college student's research essay written entirely in the free period before the class where it was due.
Even their blatantly biased calls to action are sloppy. They can drive me away from positions I believe in by arguing for them so poorly.
Exactly. Totally innocuous example that aptly illustrates the problem:
My local station did a story with an attached video about the cool new airplane CalFire got at a local base. At no point did they identify the aircraft by name, where it came from, why CalFire received it now, anything about its performance other than it carries 3,000 gallons of water & retardant, or even which airplane it was as they panned around the apron.
If even a single editorial review is apparently too expensive, what's the point of paying attention in the first place?
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Consolidation and resulting homogenization makes traditional daily news less fun and relevant. It's like any mass market: if you're not the target demographic, you don't get served.
Near as I can tell, The Guardian is owned by Scott Trust Limited, which looks to be a UK equivalent of the U.S.’s not-for-profit legal entity. Further, I can find no documentation of Soros being an influence.
We've belatedly come to realise that 'the news' is not the neutral reporting of events but rather the manufacture of information products for commercial or political gain, most preferably for the oligarchical media owners, both. We need a new revenue model, new ownership model of news media, before we can trust again what has been piped into our eyes and ears