I would be willing to pay an amount for better quality news than what can be found for free, however news outlets always seem to lean one way. I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.
I think it is incredibly hard to not tilt one way. After all, organisations are run by humans and we all have our own leanings. It is very much possible when we hire people those leanings bias us towards a certain ideology and we may hire like minded individuals. Also, people who don't fit the ideological tilt might feel left out and may leave on their own. So, over time a media organisation will come to represent one side more.
This all in addition to the biases that can come from the owners/company bankrolling the media house.
Agreed. Even if you get past the first layer, which is to create something that sells. You’re still left with organisational biases. Then after that personal reporter biases.
It would take a large conscious effort to get past all of these.
One reasonable way to deal with that would be to subscribe to several sources which lean in different directions and then explore the situation from various angles.
In the UK I subscribe to "The Week", which covers stories by reporting what different newspapers report.
You don't get much in depth, but you do get a good cross-section of how stories are reported, and you get to remove headlines which is the source of 96% of the world's troubles.
Austrailian version shut down in 2012, when it was attracting 28k issues a week.
UK version does fairly well, 3rd after Private Eye and Economist. They do a junior version for I guess 8-13 year olds too which is doing well too, so that's good.
Friend of mine runs a magazine aimed at people who like horses (typically well-to-do female over 35s) with c. 25,000 copies a week pre-covid. It was about 70:30 subscription. Subscription is up a little since covid, but newsstand sales are way down.
amazing that the truth gets flagged. shame be upon the flagger. objectivity speaks :D
Interestingly, both sides of the subject of an attempted "neutral" reporting will report bias against their side.
It would appear that humans avoid seeing their own implicit biases.
But objectively speaking: when one political party literally rejects science, facts, and logic on a given topic, you can say that reality will be biased against them. This fact is nothing to debate, but is the intention (implicit or explicit) of such a stance.
Trumpkins objectively can be said to be painting the sky green rather than admit that the sky is blue.
We often go to great lengths to justify our beliefs.
Ask any prison psychologists about the rationalizations they have heard for various acts their patients have committed, etc.
Additionally, when "decency" and "compassion" have expressly been abandoned by the global right-wing, you can call them left-wing values by default.
This is akin to Trump calling anyone he doesn't agree with "far-left" but it's expressly defined by the rights expressed divergence from these values that created this "left-wing bias".
Downvoters are not using their logical brains, just knee-jerk reacting from a position of political tribalism.
I'm objectively correct, as I'm merely describing the SELF_EXPRESSED DELIBERATE SELF POSITIONING OF THE RIGHT WING when they portray THEMSELVES as mean ruffians.
Complain some more about people taking one at ones own word whydontcha
That sounds like the 'Reality has a well known liberal bias' joke.
> Colbert then mocked Bush's sinking approval ratings:
> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, [...] because 32 percent means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.[18]
On top of that, multiple sources from social media and news organisations paints the real picture of what's really going on and exposes a particular narrative and who is omitting information.
The real danger is getting your news from a single social media or news org source.
It is sad that the WSJ sold out to the Murdochs and lost their way. It used to be the case that financial papers would have an agenda on their opinion pages, but when it came to making money people needed/wanted the truth or something as close as possible to this -- the market did not care about spin and believing spin that differed from reality would cost you money.
I was a decades-long subscriber to the WSJ print edition and as long as I ignored the last few pages of the first section I was a happy camper. I cannot imagine what possessed Murdoch to engage in such value-destruction, but the FT and Economist are now my go-to sources for getting news that is as low-spin as possible.
> I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.
No one on this planet is 100% unbiased. It doesn't matter if it's free or $100 per article, it's still written by a human being with personal opinions, experiences, prejudices, &c.
The easiest way to get close to the "truth", which is subjective in many cases anyways, is to read from many sources and cross check the facts between them.
The real problem is that for-profit news reporting will always start copying the biases of its readers, because that's how you'll sell more papers to them.
Only state-funded news sources are imune to that, of course they have perverse incentives of their own.
Present day, for local news, you can still get quite close to this compared to your perceived past standard. You can get as close as you can to this ideal on world news as your perceived past standard if you limit yourself to Reuters, AFP, AP.
But many find these sources unengaging since they report events as they occur and do not contextualize them in media narratives to the extent that more commonly popular news outlets do.
Neutrality in reporting is a relatively new concept and was brought about by the wire services so that they could have their content bought by the broadest reach of newspapers. You will still find unbiased reporting in the wire services themselves: Reuters, AP, etc.
Individual news sources have almost always been biased. This is why most cities had at least 2 major newspapers until relatively recently. You could get the liberal one or the conservative one (or in some places dozens of wildly politicized papers, anarchist papers from the early 1900s are great).
Consolidation has lead to a removal of voices from most local newspapers and the market has spoken when it comes to television: people prefer partisan news sources. The internet has gotten us closer to that 1900 view but then Facebook/Google became the arbiters of news for most people.
Numbers are objective, and all too often I see them manipulated in rather creative ways to paint a picture. It is certainly possible to present the hard numbers of a scientific paper as an easily digestible article without picking out only the more convenient ones.
> No one is 100% unbiased
No, and every journalist should know that and keep their own bias in mind when writing. One can have an opinion and still present a plausible alternative.
Although that is true, it would be very easy to be much better at it than most major media sources. There are theoretical limits then there is the limit that those clods actually achieve. It is a rare, rare day when an article manages to quote an entire paragraph of what a politician said, context and all.
One compromise is to find a news source that is at least open about its bias. The Economist is a famous example of this: it will openly declare support (and opposition) for particular political candidates and policies.
> I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.
This is unfortunately not possible. Even if an outlet only providing objective, verifiable facts there is some angle or bias in what facts you chose to report and what issues you chose to investigate.
What is unbiased? If you were a late 18th century french reporter writing a report about the death of king Louis XVI, would you write "King Louis was murdered", "King Louis was executed", "former king Louis executed by means of guillotine for high treason", "citizen Louis Capet beheaded on the order of the National Convention" or something else? All of those descriptions can be considered true and yet none are unbiased.
What's the bias you see in the statements "King Louis was executed" or "former king Louis executed by means of guillotine for high treason"? Both the terms "execution" and "high treason" are objective descriptions takens from the proceedings.
No? Treason is in the eye of the revolutionary judge. The trial was never a fair one, the outcome was clear from the start. And from an unfair trial and an unjust judgement you can't lawfully execute someone, you can only murder him execution-style.
To me, "executed for high treason" has the meaning that the person or organisation that killed him considered him to be guilty of high treason, and that they considered themselves to have the authority to decide to execute them, not that the paper with that headline necessarily agrees with either of those things. Similarly, a modern newspaper saying that someone "was executed by a gang for theft of their drugs" doesn't necessarily mean that they actually did take the drugs, that taking the drugs did constitute theft, or that the killing wasn't murder. So I think does count as objectively true.
Depends on the newspaper. Things that the newspaper doesn't want to judge the truth of usually get put in quotes or have attributes like "alledged" or "supposed" added. Without such limiting additions, the newspaper is assumed to embrace the written statement as true and will e.g. be liable for slander. The yellow press will care more about the catchy headline than the slander charges, so they usually avoid being precise and accept the punishment as cost of running their rag...
You are conflating reporting and editorializing. Whether the trial was fair and the execution just is an opinion, and yes, that has a bias. But whether you agree with the sentence has no bearing on whether it took place.
So no, you can't have it both ways. You can't point to objective reporting and claim it has a bias, when in reality you mean that the reporting isn't showing your preferred bias.
There are freedom fighters and terrorists. There are fair trials and star chambers. There is information and propaganda. There are governments and regimes.
Both are true, and which term you use just depends on your point of view. Both are true, but not unbiased.
There is no proper objectivity outside of the sciences. Everything in culture, society and politics depends on an everchanging inconsistent and observer-dependent frame of reference. You can be kind-of objective if all of you and your local neighbourhood agree on a common frame of reference. But you always have to be aware of the lack of global objectivity.
Critics agree that Mr Obama's middle name is Hussein and he is likely an islamic terrorist.
The first part is obviously true. For the second part, I am fairly certain I can find two people on 4chan who agrees with this, and they will certainly be critics of Obama.
Statements of objective truths can still be biased.
Would you say that "Illegitimate Tyrant Lincoln Executed by Sympathizer of Revolutionary Government" is a fair description?
Surely you understand the political connotations of the words deposed, king, executed, revolutionary, and government. Pretty much the only thing "objective" in your description is the guy's name.
This could be possible some 20 years ago, maybe. But these day even if you choose to just describe bare fact, you will still be criticized for the choice of words, such as "riot". Moreover, if you describe facts in full, including some background details, you will be crticized by people shouting "How is this relevant?!"
We're on the Internet. Link your sources or provide them as raw footage. At least it'd eliminate some attempts to modify/exaggerate news like the CNN is doing all the time.
You want something you can trust absolutely and not have to engage with critically at all. It's a reasonable desire, but one much more likely to be fulfilled in the realm of religious faith than that of news or any other human activity.
But jokes aside I stopped paying for my last newspaper subscriptions some time ago because I just didn't find the time to read and thought they were developing in a wrong direction.
I think Netflix TV shows have some kind of normalized content that I would fear would be mirrored if the service existed for news.
1. netflix is not having enough
2. i don't watch entire netflix
and the most genuine concern
3. way too many streaming services. every damn movie is on a different service.
I think a more accurate description is that the elite narrative is paywalled but the one for the proles is free - and the elite are absolutely convinced their narrative is the truth. The contents of, say, New York Times or Washington Post reporting on the state of US Covid-19 testing and contact tracing and how it compares to the rest of the world, the evidence on mask wearing, or anything to do with Trump or protests in no way resembles the truth.
Reading them leaves people absolutely convinced that - for example - the US is behind South Korea in per-capita coronavirus testing, despite this not having been true for a long time. Seriously, the number of people I've seen on here and in the Times comment section pointing to this one specific, untrue thing as clear proof Trump must've sabotaged Covid testing because there was no way that the US could have remained behind South Korea for so long otherwise was astounding - and even more astounding was the cleverness of the articles worded to trick people into believing this, or the boldness of the Times in literally printing a news headline accusing Trump of being the liar for pointing out the exact opposite was true.
I highly disagree. Rupert Murdoch is surely one of the most elite of the elites and his vast media empire has managed to brainwash certain folks into calling his vision "populism" due strictly to his outreach efforts.
It would also appear that you didn't read the article, as your point is not the topic of the article.
The article is about copyright law running counter to information accessibility, running counter to an interpretation of "freedom of speech".
The article is about economic rather than technological barriers to information sharing.
That's the problem with knee-jerk first-paragraph-read comments.
There's a reason I described the other narrative as "for the proles" and not "by the proles", you know... and the "truth" side having a business model that puts economic and convenience barriers in the way of access, so that only the people who really want to use it as their source of information and are willing to put up time and money to do so read it is a great way of turning that side into an elite thing.
Also, thinking about this some more, that particular bogus fact is probably an interesting counter-example to the rest of the article too. All the information required to debunk that claim about South Korean vs US coronavirus testing was and still is publicly available for free in English, and there were and still are really convenient sites aggregating it unobstructed by barriers like copyright. Everyone in the know believed the bogus elite-narrative claim anyway.
> Rupert Murdoch is surely one of the most elite of the elites and his vast media empire has managed to brainwash certain folks into calling his vision "populism" due strictly to his outreach efforts.
It's also possible you have the arrow of causality reversed. Murdoch's media could just be printing what that "the proles" want to hear.
How does it matter at all whether we're testing more than South Korea now? They did test far more at the onset of the crisis and have effectively contained the spread. We have dramatically more cases and a greater need for testing now than they do. Why would you get hung up on current testing rates when comparing the US to S. Korea? It is beside the point of who responded better. (Which they almost certainly did.)
Because what if you pay 0.5$ for an article, and then you find out it's not what you expected/badly written/...
You basically are not happy and less likely to do it again.
If you put payment to the end, then people are less willing to pay, because they already consumed the article. You can't take the information out of the head again if he's not willing to pay.
A possibility would be a (global, publication independent) subscription service like this: you pay a fixed amount in each month (say, ten dollars). Then every time you read an article from a website that subscribes to the service, if you liked the article you click on a widget. At the end of the month, the ten dollars are redistributed to the publishers in proportion to your clicks. So payment is voluntary but the total amount per month is already allocated- it's not a matter of deciding whether to pay or not but just how to distribute the money.
I fully support this. But publishing houses don't. They don't see the benefit.
Also with the a volunteer voting system you could use that to signal to people without a subscription what articles were "good", "controversial", ... to increase chances of a "buy-per-page" for like 10 cents per article.
Or something, I feel like the possibilities are vast, but publishing houses need to collaborate. Which they don't like to.
Not sure what the publishing houses would think about this, but how's the collaboration needed? You can create the service and distribute the widget; and if at first it will be used only by independent bloggers I don't see the issue. More commercial players might use it too if they think it can increase their revenues- maybe test it for a subset of articles at first.
I understand that the idea has tons of limitations but it might solve the issue of micropayments with their tiny amounts and the constant need to decide whether to pay or not to pay.
How do you know it's a good article before you read it, though? Articles aren't (and shouldn't) be produced like movies, video games or books, with marketing budgets and hype.
All that would do is massively incentivize clickbait headlines, if they could actually get paid $1 for each person who clicked on it.
Do you really want a world with even more clickbait headlines and articles artificially spread over 20 pages? Because that's what microtransactions would lead to.
I just want Netflix for journalism. I don't want a super expensive sub to a dozen papers. I want one subscription, they all should be included (maybe offer different tiers if you are an arse) and it shouldn't be more than $20/month.
You could probably get most opinion for free, lifestyle content for next to nothing, etc. The weekly jobless claims articles could be handled by cheap content mills. A lot of columns like personal finance and restaurants could easily be purchased freelance on the market.
The Huffington Post demonstrated that non-investigative content can be had for free.
So there should probably be far fewer middle skill journalists.
But this is the same "race to the bottom" rhetoric that justified the entire "disruption" to the music and publishing industries that gave us Netflix and Amazon, respectively.
I'm less and less convinced that we are doing the world any service by demonetizing all content and cutting the heads of all tall talent, hence the authors presumption of a sort of public UBI or other non-private-sector basis as a condition to liberating the content.
The IP systems certainly are byzantine and punitive towards actual free information flow, as outlined in the article.
However, if one approaches this as a typical Free Market Libertarian American (tm), as the author expressly does NOT, one arrives at different economic conclusions, and basically, journalism will not survive the complete demonetization of all content for ONE reason:
content will become even more corruptly tied to out-of-band payment than is currently the case.
why bother writing articles against the big bad polluter, when you can get paid to write apologism for them?
Having run a newsroom, there is some very small truth in this. But the old motto of "you get what you pay for" is still true. The free stuff is uncontrollable - and is usually cloaked (or not so cloaked) advertising.
There's lot of "free" stories on the wire, but if your paper just runs wire stories then it ruins its reputation. And the reputation is what attracts advertisers.
In the end, you have to pay people to write good stuff. And that costs money.
However, Journalists do have to get over themselves. The days of journalists being the only people with a voice are long gone and never coming back.
Why do you assume that $20 is enough to support multiple newspapers?
That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning the corner as a business.
On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to multiple sources.
Don't many services that cost far more than journalism to produce charge $20 a month now? Netflix is $13, Disney+ is $7 a month, Xbox Game Pass is $10 a month...
And those movies, TV shows and games cost many millions of dollars to produce. Why is journalism so much more expensive when journalists likely aren't earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and spending millions on investigations?
On comparison: Take the movie "die hard". Since its creation 1988 (i feeld old) it has been rewatched time and time again and been paid for by nearly every channel and streaming service.
Now look at an newspaper edition from christmas day 1988. Yes, it still costs less, but you would agree that it was already "old news" a couple of days after and rereading it is not really worth something to you, is it?
One invisible cost in journalism is research and failure. I had a boss who humorously said "just research things that we will print", but in my area of experise in journalism - data and investigative reporting - more or less half of the research is a dead end, isn't interesting enough or has issues that make reporting unadvisable. Yes, sports has a better qouta, but has also taken over by bots writing the articles.
Also: Can we agreee, that independence can only be achived with decent pay? It is an issue in other areas of work as well, but this is not about those. Journalists need to be paid well and (mostly) independent of their output or you already weaken/poison the base for independent news. And this scales more than you think.
Now multiply this to have competition in journalism (like, gasp!, multiple newspapers/mags on the newsstand for one city) and it gets really, really expensive. All that cost was hidden when the only way to locally advertise was in paper (before the internet).
The Netflix CEO is (mostly) rich due to equity holdings, a market value of future cash flow.
Netflix’s actual cash on the other hand has actually gone nearly 100% of revenue to content creators — they actually have taken out quite a lot of debt in order to create their content, because they think they can ultimately earn money on it over time.
But truly you should thank Netflix for ~$50 billion in content creation so far.
This is the fallacy that led to the current broken model.
Suppose that instead of paying $17 a month to get the NYT, I pay $20 a month to get that and five other similarly high quality news sources. Does this make it harder to fund journalism? Not at all. The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. So do the five other organizations. And, since the consumer has a much better proposition, people who previously weren't paying will sign up and the total pot will be even bigger. Since all the costs are fixed costs, it doesn't matter if everyone reads six times as many articles. But they won't. They will read slightly more, but benefit much more by having a bigger choice.
This is what we saw with Spotify. You pay about the price of buying one album a month. But you get to listen to much, much, more. Even if you only listen to a few songs a day, the utility of being able to choose from anything is huge. Of course, some people used to spend a lot more each month on physical music. But lots of other people used to spend nothing, since if you only had $15 a month, you could't get much for it.
One problem is that the NYT, the the FT, the New Yorker, etc, each assume that they are uniquely trusted and loved by their audience. But that's only true because of selection bias. No one who values their output to the tune of $3 a month is part of their readership.
In the music industry, the huge monopolists could force adoption of the new model. But they're also the reason musicians don't make much money, since they are now supporting two sets of middlemen - the tech companies and the 'record labels'.
Let's not forget that these music services are possible because the authors are paid peanuts, i.e, almost nothing for their work (other than a handful of the most popular chart topping acts).
The thing with journalism is that you can't rely that much on back catalogs and artistic enthusiasm. An indie band might share all their music on Spotify for $1.37 a month revenue for the love of music, but that $1.37 will not buy you much of quality reporting...
> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much.
Not really, there must be an intersection between them and we don't know how large it is. And I don't believe there's many other magazine/news sites as successful as NYT so the revenue number is more likely 3x~4x even assuming no intersection and 100% conversion rate.
The real issue is that traditional media's competitive edge was its infrastructure for content distribution, not the content itself. Sadly, people willing to pay money for high quality journalism seems minority so its budget is. Otherwise, ads-powered yellow journalism cannot be thriving as is. In this landscape, there's simply not much incentive to pursue such aggregated subscription model for media itself. Maybe there can be suitable business models for aggregators like FB or Google, but I don't think this is what you really want.
I think the point is that a cheaper subscription model would bring in a lot of new subscribers that were previously paying nothing.
There's a quote that goes along the lines of "those who don't read the news are uninformed; those who read the news are misinformed".
For me, I see NYT as one of the more credible new sources, but it has a history of bias against reforms to wealth inequality, which is an important issue for me. Accordingly, I can't justify using it as my sole source of news, and I can't afford to pay more than $20/mo total for this sort of expense.
So, an option to pay $20/mo for access to 5-6 different news sources would be really appealing to me. Until then, I'll keep using my 3 free articles / month from the random news outlets that get posted to HN/reddit.
> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much.
There have been many many efforts to have sites that provide access to multiple news sources for a single price. Apple News, PressReader, Magzster, and more.
Newspapers and their corporate owners have ample data on your claim that low single prices massively increase the audience. I'm guessing your claim is not supported by the real world data and that's why they haven't adopted the model.
After all, only 16% of people have said they are willing to pay any amount of money to read the news. That's a total market of 40 million people. The NY Times has 6 million subscribers, so they've already captured 15% of the market. Your claim that they could capture 6x means this mythical service would capture 90% of the total available market.
Which just seems...implausible on the surface. Netflix doesn't even have remotely that penetration -- only 51% -- and they've been around forever, have massive brand recognition, have tons of money, have unique properties to draw viewers, etc, etc.
They've got somewhere north of 3 million online subscribers paying $17/month. It's not Netflix numbers, but it's still more than $600M/year - about a third of their claimed revenue. Their writers are salaried at $110K/year on average and probably around 1300 writers (given data from 2016), so that's about half their digital income for salaries.
There's also the economies of price here that's often neglected - if they charged less, more people could and would pay for it. At $17/month they can forget it, I'll get my news elsewhere. At $9.99/month, it becomes a consideration for me. At <$5/month, I'm almost definitely in; I give $4/month to Nintendo so I can play Animal Crossing with a few friends a couple times a month. I'd normally happily spend $5-10/month at a Starbucks on a mocha as an occasional treat (you know, if it weren't for the whole pandemic thing).
What I'm sure is really burning their income are holdovers from a bygone era - printing presses and their maintenance, prestigious billion dollar buildings in downtown New York City, and so on. There's no way the print side of the business is paying for itself anymore at the volume they're printing at... it's just time to let it go. And writers can work from literally anywhere... A curiously common refrain often heard here from tech workers.
> selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want.
if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse.
The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.
A customer saying, "My reservation price for the following good is $X." is not selfish. Information is easier to access and so, whether you agree with it, people are willing to pay less for information (including newspapers). We've seen many other "information services" get much cheaper due to this demand. The news media have simply been slow to change.
"Just". If I could get rid of that word, I would. "Just" is the tip of the iceberg. It often means the speaker has no idea how to implement or what it would take to implement.
Good point. There are a fair number of words and language forms that are often "tells" of how the person saying them conceptualized and overly simplifies complex scenarios.
In raw dollar terms this would undoubtedly >2x-3x the capital available to journalism as an industry. People who say (truthfully): "journalism needs more money" need to confront the reality that the current biz model doesn't work. Either we coerce Google news to tithe like Australia just did, or something like this sounds like a better solution than just letting journalism die.
You likely want Apple News+ [1] at just under $10 USD /mo - a single cost for a la carte access to a large pool of publications, basically the only premium subscription model that's going to be able to gain mainstream adoption.
The difference is that it doesn't just work in my browser. I easily pay $20 USD per month to not have to be shown a paywall when I click a link from HN, but that isn't what is being offered. I don't want to have to use their app. I like my browser.
No, what I want is Google Reader back. And I know I'm far, far, far away from being alone on this. Just give me the text, not the videos and the horrible formatting and poor font choices and all of that bullshit - I'd gladly pay for it, if it still existed.
That's like saying "Google is just a search engine" and ignoring the fact that "to google" is now an English verb and the rest of the impact it has had on information availability in the world.
Reader was a synthesis of open web culture - it offered a hub of reading multiple streams of content in one formatted location, and it did so with the support of one of the largest companies on the earth with the ability to use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted. Google could have been the 800 pound gorilla of news publications a decade before Apple News even tried.
But they just, threw it away. That's what I want back - I don't care if it's RSS or some new fancy JSON-backed article exchange protocol - the transport layer and reader app itself is largely meaningless to me; the simple elegance of being able to read the news in one location without some designers notion of layout and overzealous marketers' idea of ad coverage, and having it be quick is much more powerful. No more 2-10MB garbage landfills to serve 20kb of textual information. No more fighting to make the content work on mobile - RSS was inherently responsive and accessibility-friendly.
The technological idea of federated content have largely died because Google decided it didn't want to support them, and nobody else - not Microsoft, not Apple, nobody - stepped up to take the mantle. It had a technological problem for Google - the fact that you could pick another reader meant that there was no instinctive centralization on Googles' service, unlike situations like AMP where they're literally the man in the middle.
And while Instant Articles and AMP are trying to fill that market gap, more often than not what I find replacing it is Twitter, which is comically filled with horrible misinformation and terrible sourcing practices that make it a haven of misinformation instead of... news. And that's a real damn shame.
The point still stands that what Google Reader was and what you want is an RSS reader.
Unless I'm missing something, they never did anything unique to "use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted"—it was just an RSS reader, and what you've described is exactly how I use my reader of choice (Feedbin). Many modern offerings even offer a feature to pull the full text for articles where it's not included by default.
Not sure how available this is elsewhere but I get press reader access for free through the state library in my browser. It has a lot of papers and magazines (though the interface isn't the best)
> Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!
As is salon.com, theatlantic.com, theroot.com, vox.com, huffingtonpost.com, slate.com, and also somehow missing from that list, CNN!
I appreciate the point the author is trying to make, and realize this is tangential, but I would be grateful if he didn't try to deceive me with the choice of examples.
is CNN really putting up anything except news - of which reuters/AP/UPI already give a pretty good overview for free? And while all the left/neoliberal (and clickbaity) things you noted are free, they are less concerned with news, but more opinion – to my knowledge they don't try to make the impression of a news outlet as much as the listed ones (which carry typical news-speak even in their name!)
All those sites look like news sites to me, except the Atlantic, which is indeed limited to opinion/commentary.
Salon's About page: "Salon covers breaking news, politics, entertainment, culture, and technology through investigative reporting, commentary, criticism, and provocative personal essays." A few titles from their site:
-As pandemic spreads, feds go MIA
-Did Steve Daines get pharma kickback?
-The second pandemic: Pollution
-Many Black, Latinx and poor Americans who needed relief the most never got a stimulus check: study
-Dr. Fauci says it's not "dreaming" that a coronavirus vaccine could arrive by 2021
-The COVID-19 downturn triggers jump in Medicaid enrollment
The Root has an explicit "News" section (theroot.com/c/news). Some titles from the site (not limited to that section):
-Jamaica's Supreme Court Rules That School Can Ban Child With Dreadlocks (No, We're Not Kidding)
-Protests Planned in St. Louis, Mo. After New Prosecutor Says He Won't Make Criminal Charges in Police Killing of Michael Brown
-Brooklyn Man Sentenced to 10 Years for Hate Crime Against Black Woman
-After a Summer of Social Media Trolling By Gen Z, Trump Says He's Going to Ban TikTok From America
-Rumored VP Candidate Rep. Karen Bass Explains Video of Her Praising Church of Scientology, Denounces Fidel Castro
-Michigan Appeals Court Grants Release of Black Girl Who Was Detained After Not Doing Online Homework
Vox:
-The slow-motion 2020 election disaster states are scrambling to prevent, explained
-The US ambassador to Brazil reportedly asked Brazilian officials to help Trump’s reelection
-Scientists have backed away from the worst-case climate scenario — and the best one too
-“The end of arms control as we know it”
-Polls: Biden and Trump are nearly tied in North Carolina and Georgia
-As coronavirus cases increase worldwide, an Australian state is imposing tough new restrictions
-Lawmakers still “not close” to a coronavirus stimulus deal, a day after $600 federal relief expired
Huffpost also has a "News" section (the most prominent of all). Some titles taken straight from their front page:
-Coronavirus Live Updates: Read The Latest About The COVID-19 Outbreak
-Top Health Official: Time To ‘Move On’ From Hydroxychloroquine Efficacy Claims
-College Athletes Threaten To Skip Season Over COVID-19, Racial Justice Demands
-Watchdog Calls For Probe Amid Fears Of ‘Voter Suppression Tactics’ Through Postal Service
-Thousands Ordered To Evacuate As Wildfires Scorch Southern California
-Navy SEALS Investigate Video Of Dogs Attacking Colin Kaepernick Stand-In
The very first section of Slate is titled "News & Politics". A few titles from that section:
-The US Takes On TikTok
-The Republican National Convention in Charlotte Will Be Closed to the Press
-Arizona Congressman Tests Positive for COVID-19, Blasts Republicans Who Don’t Wear Masks
-Hundreds of Coronavirus Infections at Georgia Camp Raise Tough Questions About Schools Reopening
-EU Extends Ban on Dangerous Foreign Travelers (Americans)
In sum, there's no way to claim these are not news sites.
nothing in "investigative reporting, commentary, criticism, and provocative personal essays" is, what I consider news. q.e.d.
vox.com: "Vox explains the news.". No shroud of being objective here either. q.e.d.
slate.com: "we are a general-interest publication offering analysis and commentary about politics, news, business, technology, and culture" general interest is vague, but no non-commented news here either, q.e.d.
the root has a category "news", but if you visit their main page you see, it's just a sort of "community news-ticker" (like any political page has) and I don't see them making claims to universality.
Compare that to Breitbart mingling everything there is into their political agend and explicitly stating: "truthful reporting", ... , "Breitbart News is one of America’s leading news organizations."
> nothing in "investigative reporting, [..]" is, what I consider news. q.e.d.
At this point I don't think there's anything I can say that will convince you.
But yes, if you invent some contrived definition of "news site" that disqualifies every left-wing site, only right-wing ones remain.
And I don't understand how that is even relevant to the article - as long as you can "get your news" from some source, that's enough. It doesn't have to pass some made-up purity test of what qualifies as a news site, because readers won't be applying that test. To pretend only right-wing sites share news and opinion for free is just willful blindness.
for me as a self-declared european conservative (in the history of the social(isty)-centrist-catholic parties) this page gives hope that the USA, even if currently split in between wars of oil, race and money might still have the potential to become, what it once was: a beacon of light for any honest, community-oriented and republican (in the most basic sense) democrat.
This is a long-ish article, as per usual for N Robinson, and I think people ITT are focusing only on the start. Yes free vs. subscription news media is an interesting and important issue, but this article goes on to make a more wide-reaching and incisive criticism of how Capitalism structures the production and distribution of information or knowledge (Current Affairs is a socialist magazine).
Information production is dominated by the super-rich and the state, and access to knowledge (not merely information) is carefully controlled for the benefit of and use by the highly educated, wealthy elite.
An aspect that I often think about is how the vast majority of truly top-tier multimedia (books, articles, movies) has been created decades ago. A person could, for example, spend multiple lifetimes reading the amazing academic and artistic literature in the public domain. But such an existence is terribly unprofitable, so it's heavily discouraged in favour of a content-diet full of pop-culture ephemera. Alan Kay said about Pop Culture, that it "is all about identity and feeling like you're participating, It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it's living in the present." Such over-stimulating, disorienting, and fashionable multimedia, perhaps perfected by Buzzfeed, is making us energetic consumers, and idiots. Amused to death drinking from a firehose of 'free'.
No, they're focusing only on the title. People on HN are no better than the people who get their news from Facebook memes. They just _think_ they're better.
Lies are not free, they are paid by ads and a complete industry is built on keeping this going. The price of the ads are built into the price of the product/service you buy, so we are basically paying for the lies too, it’s just not as obvious as paying to get through the paywall.
Great point. You could say that the "lies" are propaganda, as much as the advertisement that they are the vehicle for. Inundated with this much propaganda, which points to the impotence of the individual, no wonder we're seeing so much mass unrest.
Conspiracies are a never ending source for new ownable keywords and terminology, which combined with the "research it yourself mantra" only drives people deeper into the ecosystem of alternative book stores and prepper online shops etc. If people would know how the web works they'd be more sceptic about the media they encounter and their calls to action.
I think the meaning is pretty clear. Dishonest/misleading sources of information are intentionally designed to have a vary low barrier to entry, while trustworthy sources are forced to use off-putting paywalls due to the inherent higher cost of what they do. Hence the asymmetry.
In Germany, part of the problem is that old media lobbying has successfully prevented a reasonable (text based) internet presence of public broadcasting...
Public broadcasting in Germany is no better than private media. In fact most topics are reported the same and even the opinion is the same. But even ignoring this, it is a big problem that publicly funded media is in direct economic competition with privately funded media. This is exacerbated by the official entertainment mission (Unterhaltungsauftrag[1]) and the usage of advertisement.
Say you read ten articles every morning. With no public option, you read ten private articles. With a public option, you would still read the same number of articles each morning, but every time you read a public article, some private organization loses a tiny bit of revenue.
Worse still, imagine you are a paying subscriber to some private newspaper. If the public option has very high quality coverage, you may find that you no longer need your private subscription.
> If the public option has very high quality coverage, you may find that you no longer need your private subscription.
Or regardless of the quality of the public option, you may find that you can no longer afford your private subscription. The public option isn't free, after all—just pre-paid with no ability to opt out—and you may not be able to afford two such services. Other cases where public services "compete" with private providers (e.g. toll roads) suffer from the same problem: You don't get to choose between paying for the public option and paying for the private option. You're either paying for just the public option, or for both, even if the private option is all you want or need.
I'm German. Public broadcasting, including ARD/ZDF but also countless of local radio station is without a doubt significantly better in quality than BILD/RTL or other private tabloid media, and it's one of the reasons the country still has by and large a shared reality when it comes to political discussion.
I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic, because entertainment is part of a cultural offering that should be accessible by everyone. I don't really see the competition issue here, just like the BBC they produce content, which is fine.
Has to be said though in quality it doesn't really measure up to the BBC, but you can try to claw Tatort from my dead hands
Agree wholeheartedly. And I'd like to add that there is by no means a uniform opinion propagated. For example, the ARD (one of the major public broadcasting networks) hosts both the rather left-leaning "Monitor", and the more conservative "Report aus München". However, as you highlighted, they share a common understanding of the world, and therefore Germany doesn't suffer extreme polarisation.
(I'd argue that the fringes, as seen with the anti-lockdown demonstrations in Berlin recently, are actually sustained by newfangled social media.)
>I'd argue that the fringes, as seen with the anti-lockdown demonstrations in Berlin recently, are actually sustained by newfangled social media.
My impression was that they were mostly older people (50+), and from their style of clothing I could tell that they were mostly poor people, maybe people who got wrecked by Hartz4 reforms in the 90s and early 2000s, and grew a deep hate on German politics and the mainstream. Fringe social media groups and conspiracy nuts just take advantage of pre-existing hate.
"[...] and it's one of the reasons the country still has by and large a shared reality when it comes to political discussion."
Shared reality is quite a cynical word and is a reminder just how bad it really is.
"I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic, because entertainment is part of a cultural offering that should be accessible by everyone. I don't really see the competition issue here, just like the BBC they produce content, which is fine."
How is it not unfair if you compete in the exact same market with a publicly funded corporation[1]?
"Has to be said though in quality it doesn't really measure up to the BBC, but you can try to claw Tatort from my dead hands "
It is basically on par with ntv, Welt and doesn't really measure up to ServusTV. They all share one thing with ARD/ZDF tho and that is advertisement.
[1]: Open any site of public funded TV and look for "Unternehmen" (Corporation) also they have a lot of for-profit corporations spun off, so there is no point calling it a public institution when in fact it is not.
> I'm German. Public broadcasting, including ARD/ZDF but also countless of local radio station is without a doubt significantly better in quality than BILD/RTL or other private tabloid media
Better than FAZ, ZEIT, Spiegel? That's the private media you should compare the news sections to, and I have some doubts that anybody thinks Public Broadcaster by and large have a similar level of journalistic integrity & quality.
Public broadcasting does not replace FAZ/Zeit/Spiegel though. There's a difference between reporting short pieces of news and the articles in the mentioned news papers.
They're not completely the same, but they are competitors, since they also have vast text websites, they're not limited to broadcasting, which makes sense given their desire to expand the tax base and the population's pivot from TV to web.
I find the argument "look at quality of the private sector, we need the public broadcasters" to be generally disingenuous. Private companies will invest where there's a chance to make a profit, having to compete with tax-funded free services makes that much less likely, ergo you won't see a lot of investment. To consider that proof for the necessity of a tax-funded system is like a monopolist claiming that nobody would provide the services if they didn't, knowing full well that it's their abuse of the monopoly that keeps competitors out.
1) The public media web outlets I know do not publish in-depth articles like Spiegel/Zeit/Sueddeutsche. Yes, it makes sense that the public media change their focus as the to follow the focus of the population they serve.
2) Since the topic at hand is limited to Germany, I guess a look at other nations is an argument?
> Yes, it makes sense that the public media change their focus as the to follow the focus of the population they serve.
But that area was already more than well-covered by plenty of private companies. Why does the state need to compete? I can absolutely see an argument for the initial creation of public broadcasters: it's an enormous investment in a new technology and we want some control over it. But to enter a well-established market "because that's what most people prefer now and we're losing relevance" is a of private company perspective. "Oh hey, I noticed that there's a successful market providing what the customers want. Let me throw money at disrupting it" isn't usually a government position.
Sure, you can look at other countries. The US is a pretty good example in my opinion. They're getting better products in any direction: better if you want trash TV, higher quality news (with highly specialized channels such as Bloomberg TV but also general news-channels like CNN), better if you want entertainment (HBO vs Tatort? I don't think there's even a question), better if you want sports coverage (ESPN etc), better if you want music.
And they still have public broadcasting to serve special requirements, only at a much, much, much lower price because they don't try to make them cover everything anyone could ever want.
I agree that publich broadcasting in Germany is very much biased. Saying that they are better than tabloids (which other commenters here are) is hardly a high bar.
Besides wasting money on useless entertainment, German public broadcasters also prey on the vulnerable by promoting gambling. They even just prime time just before the evening news for this.
But worse than the content is the funding method. Instead of being funded from taxes the public broadcasters collect a separate non-means-tested fee that is still somehow mandatory. That might have made some sense when you could opt out of that fee by not owning a TV but that option is no longer available.
I don't see the direct economic competition as a problem. Informing the population is fundamental to living in a democratic society. Providing a non-profit oriented basis makes as much sense as funding libraries (which compete with publishers) and schools (compete with private schools).
I know it's not perfect, but it definitely is not a "big problem".
The Guardian as with other newspapers has to selectively report the news which it does using a vocabulary which implicitly or explicitly reflects their opinions about the news. Naturally the overall output confirms the prejudices of their readership. It's 'good news', they say.
> Now, I am sure there will be those who argue that any universal knowledge access system of this kind will inhibit the creation of new work by reducing the rewards people get. But let us note a few facts: first, dead people cannot be incentivized to be creative, thus at least everything ever created by a person who is now dead should be made freely available to all. The gatekeepers to intellectual products made by the dead are parasites the equivalent of a private individual who sets up a gate and a tollbooth in the middle of a road somebody else has already built and starts charging people if they want to pass.
This seems wrong. Longer-lasting copyright does incentivize authors more, because it can be sold for more.
But we are positively drowning in music, video and written words. We don't need more incentives for people to create copyrighted work. We need more effective markets for consumers to judge it.
We are drowning in repetitive shit and crap, I'd say. It is hard to find good new stuff although it is more abundant than ever because people who create it do not have resources to reach the audience through all the noise.
Also, an author could write books that are given to some type of trust or foundation with explicit orders not to publish them until certain favorable copyright or distribution laws are available.
So it could be possible to “be incentivized” to publish new works even after you’re dead. For the estate of an author that has developed a reputation, say like JD Salinger, this would be a very smart thing to do if you wanted to influence policy beyond your death.
The typical copyright term in the US is life of the creator + 70 years. Are potential revenues a hundred years from now really figuring all that much into the price of copyrighted work sold today?
“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books—books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon? '”
Parts of the article are relevant to historical research. There is a discussion about the cost of access to academic papers, which is a serious issue and one that I can relate to. I remember trying to access a paper in an academic journal about a decade ago, and was almost immediately turned by the $20 or $30 price tag. I say almost immediately because I did some additional research into what the paper was. It turns out that it was a one page editorial! So not only would costs mount for legitimate resources for a serious research project, but researchers have to put in extra effort to ensure the resources are legitimate in order to control those expenses.
Current affairs eventually become history, my point being that the truth isnt always the truth, its only the narrative of the winning, or more dominant party at the time.
Although the overall idea of this article makes sense but there are certain fallacies that stand out.
For example, the Times article on "neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions" might not be "free" but the same article on New York Times was free. Does this imply that Times article must be closer to truth than the one in the New York Times? This assumption seems flawed.
> You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall.
Excuse me but why would I want to pay for that ? I don't earn by reading articles online and the news websites are already littered with advertisements and autoplay videos. I get tracked around the web by these ads and I'm supposed to even fund that ?
Thank you but I will pass.
> The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times.
... and can't you do the same with Infowars ? Critically read it and look past the headlines ? Perhaps the truth will be there somewhere too. (albeit as a total negation of the Infowars article)
Don't even use Infowars and NYT in the same sentence. The NYT has some notable shortcomings, but Infowars is straight-up propaganda used by its host to shill for questionable food supplements and fake corona-virus cures.
I'm pretty conservative, and I hate the antisemitism at the NY Times. Yet, I pay for a subscription because there are some basic standards to their reporting that are worth it, even though their editorial slant doesn't always match up with mine.
I mean we do have PBS, we just underfund it relative to something like the BBC. We probably also don't have as strong of political norms around not politicizing it so it's inevitable that someone like Trump does.
The paywalled content is not, in my experience, the truth, just someone else's lies. I use "lies" as freely as the title. "Leaning" or "spin" might be more accurate.
That's why I buy my "news" at Amazon, as e-books on the topics I'm interested, since for 99.9999999999% of the things happening in the world, nobody really cares about how many months they will have to wait for my opinion.
If you choose to abstain from current events then you assume responsibility for the outcome. Functioning democratic societies require active, engaged citizenry.
Passive, disengaged voters are what creates the conditions for Donald Trump to arise.
Not really. No one has enough time in their life to be informed and opinionated about every single topic of at least minor importance. No one is superior because they’re perpetually high strung from constant political news cycles.
Extremism on one side causes extremism on the other, and vice versa. Weakly held moderate views that are open to change when presented with new information are more productive to functioning democracy than both extremists who condemn anyone that doesn’t subscribe.
"Creators must be compensated well. But at the same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few people will see them. The truth needs to be free and universal."
Let's also consider whether lies should be made more expensive. Free costs more than it's worth.
The government, scientists, experts in various fields, people who have proven to tell the truth in the past, etc.
You obviously still have your own ability to determine what fits your model of the universe and what doesn't. These are just groups of people more likely to have access to information that you might not. You don't have to trust anyone, but in a system where someone has to judge what is true, these groups are closer than the alternative, which would be people with no qualifications, no training, and no history of telling the truth.
>The government, scientists, experts in various fields, people who have proven to tell the truth in the past, etc.
But how has it been implemented in practice?
If you look at the raw numbers, generally we rely on the lowest bidders amongst Facebook/Google/Twitter's third-world-country subcontractors, as well as the Chinese government.
The existing practice is for the community of these sites to upvote good content and downvote bad content.
Separately, moderators purge controversial content as a check/balance to the voting system. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they choose a different site to frequent, as is the case in market systems.
again, if you look at the whole system in aggregate, the existing practice is for GooFaceTwitBaba to farm out their moderation works to subcontractors, while also bending backwards to prevalent political headwinds to preserve their shareholder value. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they are free to leave the megaplatforms and become approximately completely irrelevant, thus achieving the exact same effect as being deplatformed.
Maybe, but a well told lie told by The One Authority on Truth has more destructive power than a billion chaos monkeys typing on their typewriters for the next hundred generations.
And how have we discovered the incorrect and dishonest claims?
Through the process. You never have to trust the data if you have a good process. Process will verify data. Process will verify sources. Process is impartial. Trust the process, not the results.
Also, I take issue with the attempt to conflate people who are incorrect with people who are dishonest.
There is nothing wrong with being wrong. Being wrong is the first step to being right. You can't be corrected if you're never willing to be wrong. And we can't learn if everyone has to wait to be completely correct before making a claim. Often, we don't even know we should be looking into something until someone makes a claim that turns out to be incorrect on further study.
Knowledge isn't furthered in "eureka" moments where we have all the answers at once, it's in observing something and thinking, "Huh, that's weird", then seeking the answers.
>Through the process. You never have to trust the data if you have a good process. Process will verify data. Process will verify sources. Process is impartial. Trust the process, not the results.
The GP's post didn't say trust science or trust data. It said trust scientists. I'm taking issue with the desire to put faith in individuals.
Who is a scientist in this case but someone publicizing the process? Their job, in the media anyway, is to explain data and results and why that data makes sense. You don't have to blindly trust the scientist if what they're saying is backed by scientific process, and you can hopefully trust-but-verify by looking at whatever scientific literature exists on the topic.
I guess I don't understand the alternative: is everyone expected to go look up the write-up and replicate the experiment for themselves because we can't trust the scientists who performed the experiment? I agree we need more replication studies, but I think we're reaching the absurd ends of the "do your own research!" movement here.
The problem here is not Science. It's the perverse incentives in Academia and Journalism.
In Science as it should be practised, yes, a scientist talking to a journalist should "explain the the data and results and why that data makes sense". The journalist should then paraphrase that clearly for their audience, without altering the essential conclusions of the study/paper/experiment.
But this is so naive it's laughable now. Nobody, ever, does this. The scientist wants maximum impact, so will maximise the sensational aspects of their results. In turn the journalist wants maximum clicks, so will sensationalise more. What ends up being read by the public can be a very long way away from any conclusion that the data actually supports.
He's essentially reiterating Mac's argument from It's Always Sunny, casting doubt on people who deliver information by informing us that "Science is a liar... sometimes".
It was also people who found out those people were wrong or lying.
Yes, Piltdown man was a fraud, but it was the same "scientific community" that discovered it was a fraud. Because there were things that didn't make sense even within the confines of the field of study.
That's the great thing about the process, it's ultimately self-correcting.
A scientist being wrong is GOOD! The scientific process relies on assimilation of negative results.
If a scientist is emotionally attached to a result and ignores a result that they don't like, they are no longer engaged in science.
Peer review and replication is the correcting factor for the unfortunate reality that science must be, for the moment carried out by humans.
At the very least, when operating properly science becomes less wrong. That cannot be said for politicians who are interested in nothing but confirmation of their preconceptions.
There is a special place in hell for those who cynically use the fact that scientists are sometimes wrong as an attack against the very existence of knowledge and consensus reality itself.
I don't disagree with you. The only thing I'm arguing against is the GP's comment that we should blindly put our trust in the groups mentioned.
Some of the best parts about science, as you've pointed out, are peer review and replication. There should never be a need to put your faith in an individual scientist and take them at their word.
>There is a special place in hell for those who cynically use the fact that scientists are sometimes wrong as an attack against the very existence of knowledge and consensus reality itself.
I hope it's clear that I was in no way doing that.
Reading charitably, I don't believe that it's what you meant. But with disturbing frequency, I do see similar words uttered and written with fairly clear cynical intent.
I completely agree; it's an alarming trend that's used to sew ignorance. Blindly following experts clearly isn't an antidote to that, which is all I was trying to express originally.
Another fun one I ask when someone brings up Snopes: Who snopes the snopes? In other words how do we know they are not being biased or thorough enough?
I am not saying everything there is wrong but I have ran into weird biased articles before.
They are biased, but if the facts are accurate, that's irrelevant.
A trustworthy organization doing fact checking on one side of the aisle while ignoring inaccuracies from the other side is preferable to no fact-checking at all. Question is: where is Republican Snopes? It's a free information market; why is nobody doing it?
There is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus). At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself, you are ultimately dependent on some network of trust to inform you of the truth or falsity of something. And even then "true" and "false" outside of logical and mathematical domains is entirely dependent on ones values. That's not to say there's no objective universal set of values.
Most people are Liberal (in the American sense) because that's what all the organs of culture promote and reinforce. It's like the "default" position that people adopt. I grew up liberal in a liberal household where we watched Hollywood movies and mainstream news like ABC, NBC, PBS and I listened to NPR and I went to school which was run by generally liberal teachers and administrators and that's pretty much why I was liberal.
This is the Cathedral vs the Bazaar approach to sense-making.
If you're talking about people like Chris Wallace, then I agree with your point. People like him are very much an example of The Cathedral but on the conservative side. Even stuff like The Five is pretty middle brow and establishmentarian but they aren't the vanguards of mainstream conservatism like Maddow and Joy Reid and others are for mainstream liberalism.
Steve Bannon and his movement are more representative of mainstream conservatism. Even someone Tucker Carlson used to be very much like Chris Wallace. The reason why his program is so popular now is because he's shifted radically away from his establishmentarian position towards Steve Bannon's position.
Personally I don't watch Fox News because of how low to middle brow and Cathedral-like it is.
Probably because the Cathedral of mainstream liberalism has been mortally wounded over the past decade. That has rapidly accelerated as of late and you're seeing the last dying breaths with the rise of populism on the left and right. Maddow used to have much higher ratings. AOC for example is not part of mainstream liberalism. She is at the vanguard of mainstream popular leftism.
You can only get a plurality in most cases with mainstream media, because like it or not it does tend to be progressive/liberal in most outlets (in the American sense, not European).
I always laugh when I see someone bring up Fox News in this context. You realize your just proving his point, right? I can name dozens or hundreds of major media outlets that that lean left (MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, BuzzFeed, etc.), but you can only name one or two that lean right.
Most of the "left-leaning" organizations you cite above are not considered particularly left-leaning by the left. A better description of them would be "pro status quo", or if you're feeling punchy "relentlessly pro status quo" with a side of "pro-corporatist" thrown in for seasoning.
Now, Fox News and OAN and Sinclair are not, publically, actually the John Birch Society, so sure, you could say "right wingers don't think they lean right either".
Plot out a chart of US political opinion, and I more or less guarantee you that in most things, you'll find your list of media outlights absolutely "centrist", and the 3 I just named distinctly "to the right" of mainstream US political opinion.
Lumping into an "us vs them" or "republican vs liberal" via
> here is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making
Which is both mixing the some undefined set of concepts of the Enlightenment with some undefined characteristics of "All Republicans", in an awkward ad-hominem against "non-republicans"? It's nonsensical.
> At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself,
All truth is subjective, so there is no truth tautology.
Etc etc. There isn't a point being made or a topic to discuss. It's a "too many ideas" post mixed with too many wild tangents that are intentionally designed to incite.
Whether or not there is truth is dependent on if you believe in an objective set of values. Conservatives believe there is (the Bible, natural law, God, etc) and people like Postermodernists believe there isn't.
And yes all discussions of this type require some generalization and lumping. "Republican" doesn't even mean one thing since the party consists of libertarians and evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives among many others.
> There is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus).
Conservatives have always done sense making via institutional consensus, even moreso than post-enlightenment liberals, though the institutions that they tend to appeal to are those explicitly devoted to their ideological world view (whether it's the organs of a particular Church, or economists of the Austrian School) and not so much those even superficially devoted to objective exploration of facts, even when approaching questions that are, at least on the surface, about objectives facts (what is) rather than ideology (what should be).
> Most people are Liberal (in the American sense)
No, they aren't, unless you are conflating multiple different and incompatible American senses of “Liberal” and thus covering the entire range from the moderate right to the far left.
> objectives facts (what is) rather than ideology (what should be)
What is a "fact" or what is "true" is dependent on your values (aka your ideology). This is one of Nietzsche's main contributions to philosophy.
There are things like mathematical and logical truth and really basic physical assertions (e.g. the sky is blue) but those are qualitatively different than what we're talking about.
Both normative and positive statements about the world of human affairs are ultimately dependent on ideology and that might explain to you why you perceive conservatives as focusing on arguments over ideology. That is what people should be arguing over since from that all else flows. When people don't share substantially similar values even language itself becomes useless as a means of communication because the words themselves mean different things.
> What is a "fact" or what is "true" in dependent on your values (aka your ideology). This is one of Nietzsche's main contributions to philosophy.
No, it's not. That's one of the Enlightenment’s many contributions to philosophy and the foundation on which the advances in knowledge of the universe enabling the explosion of post-Enlightenment technical progress is built.
Obviously, one might have ideological, aesthetic, or other preferences for what facts ought to be, and one might have beliefs about questions of fact that ultimately result from those preferences, but—Roadrunner cartoons not withstanding—beliefs about the material universe don't trump material facts.
(However, it's kind of funny that you are making, as a positive argument in favor of conservatism, exactly the argument that conservatives usually not only reject, but also attribute—not entirely inaccurately though certainly overgenerally—to the “postmodern” left and cite as a key reason for rejecting the left.)
> enabling the explosion of post-Enlightenment technical progress is built.
The same metaphysical view you're describing also enabled utopian totalitarian visions like Nazism and Communism. Communism famously proposes a view of the world that sees everything through the lens of materialism. This discussion is much deeper than what a thread on HN can really do justice to. I would just strongly urge you to consider reading Beyond Good and Evil for a different perspective and study of this question by a great thinker.
> to the “postmodern” left and cite as a key reason for rejecting the left.)
Postmodernism hinges on whether or not there is an objective set of values. Conservatives believe there is (the Bible, natural law, God, etc) whereas Postmodernists believe there isn't.
Everything I've said holds true regardless of where you come down on that. Personally yes I believe there is an objective set of values.
> The same metaphysical view you're describing also enabled utopian totalitarian visions like Nazism and Communism.
Leninism and it's descendants are totalitarian, Communism (even Marxism) more generally is not, but, sure, you can certainly make the case that scientific rationality has some connection to Marxism and thus an indirect effect on Leninism. OTOH, scientific rationality and the proven results are also the explicit basis for the widespread Western rejection of Leninism and it's descendants (and explictly cited as such by wide segments of the Right, including those who generalize that rejection to Communism generally, which the left might argue is an overgeneralization, but even in that argument there is a broad consensus that there are actual material facts that one can draw conclusions about from material evidence which transcends ideology when approached correctly.)
OTOH, Nazism was not based on scientific rationality, except as a reaction against it, and in fact both Italian Fascism and Naziism were explicitly based on the exact Nietzschean view that you advance (both the idea and explicitly crediting it to Nietzche).
> Postmodernism hinges on whether or not there is an objective set of values. Conservatives believe there is (the Bible, natural law, God, etc) whereas Postmodernists believe there isn't.
That may be a difference between your particular worldview and postmodernism, but large number of other conservatives criticize the “postmodern left” not merely for rejecting objective values which you claim is the difference between Conservatism and Postmodernism, but for rejecting objective facts and viewing facts as constructs which depend on ideology—the position you take on the nature of facts is one explicitly rejected and criticized (and attributed as a failing of the left) by most mainstream conservative thinkers, though I will agree that the factions of the Right who adhere to it are at what is, at least, a recent local maximum of prominence.
How can you say this when Nazis famously "pioneered" and promulgated things like Phrenology and Eugenics? Scientific racism was at the heart of the Nazi program.
> the position you take on the nature of facts is one explicitly rejected and criticized (and attributed as a failing of the left) by most mainstream conservative thinkers,
I do agree with you here. What we're discussing really only has meaning when both sides of the discussion are able and willing to have a deeper discussion about this sort of stuff.
What Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro engage in is completely sufficient for the audience they're trying to engage with and appeal to. To get into this more abstract kind of discussion would be counterproductive in my opinion. Postmodernism is actually really harmful for people to believe in and at that point where you're lost in a world where most major cultural institutions are pushing that, you just need someone articulating an alternative view point. At that level, getting into a discussion about how they're actually similar would be a bad idea.
> How can you say this when Nazis famously "pioneered" and promulgated things like Phrenology and Eugenics?
They...didn't. Phrenology was was developed at the end of the 18th century and scientifically discredited by the mid-19th century; the Nazis may have adopted it, but that's proof that they weren't motivated by anything like scientific rationalism. Eugenics is overtly ideological (and, again, not pioneered by the Nazis, having become a widespread ideology before they existed), though it relies on scientific results (but even those who take your ideological stance of rejecting objective facts have no problem adopting the results of science that they see as useful for advancing their ideology, so there's nothing surprising about a group who does that adopting an ideological program relying on technology for it's implementation.)
But the reason I can say that Italian Fascism and German Naziism expressly adopted your Nietzschean view is because both said they did, and praised Nietzche for presenting it.
> scientifically discredited by the mid-19th century
I mean the science is bunk but it wasn't "discredited" in the sense that you mean among the scientific community or the policy community across the West who enacted policies based on it well until after the mid 20th century.
> the Nazis may have adopted it, but that's proof that they weren't motivated by anything like scientific rationalism
The Nazis adopted scientific racism and this is proof they weren't motivated by scientific rationalism? I suppose your contention would be that Hitler didn't really believe any of that or something and it was all just about power. That's such a lazy position to take IMO. If you really want to die on that hill I don't think we can go forward with the discussion at least on this front. The Nazis established a whole body of thought and policies around racial hierarchies that were in part dependent on the work of eugenics and phrenology. And yes I do believe they really believed this stuff.
> But the reason I can say that Italian Fascism and German Naziism expressly adopted your Nietzschean view is because both said they did, and praised Nietzche for presenting it.
Nietzsche was highly derisive of nationalism and the examples he would deride were actually those of German nationalism. You can read Beyond Good and Evil to see that.
What you're talking about is actually highly ironic considering that Nietzsche actually predicts some sort of Hitler-like figure coming to power due to how weak-minded and herd-like Europeans were. He didn't call them herd-like as a compliment.
What they adopted among other things was his method of attack on morality itself and in particular Christianity and Judaism. This is what he meant by going "Beyond" Good and Evil (morality itself) to replace it with Strong and Weak or Beautiful and Ugly which was more of the Greco-Roman system of values. That does sound more like Nazism doesn't it? You can see it in the iconography of the Nazis and all the Roman stuff they adopted (e.g. the Nazi standards which harken to the Roman standards).
Nietzsche wasn't perfect IMO. You can read Psychological Types by Carl Jung who does a beautiful job of analyzing and filling in the holes in Nietzsche's positions.
Since you dismiss the existence of objective, non-ideological facts, isn't that necessarily your position on all science?
> but it wasn't "discredited" in the sense that you mean among the scientific community or the policy community across the West who enacted policies based on it well until after the mid 20th century
Yes, phrenology was discredited , and why you posted a link about eugenics to support your rebuttal of a point about phrenology that had nothing to do with eugenics, I don't know.
> The Nazis adopted scientific racism and this is proof they weren't motivated by scientific rationalism?
That wasn't my actual argument, but it works, since “scientific racism” doesn't actually follow the methodology of post-enlightment empiricism, merely adopting it as an elaborate rhetorical flourish for propaganda purposes, much the way that, say, intelligent design does. It recognizes that some of it's audience might be positively disposed to the superficial appearance of empiricism, rather than actually embracing it itself.
This looks like its for questions about Mormonism or theological questions, not current events or other pop-culture things (forwards from Grandma) like Snopes.
Yes, its scope is very narrowly about the Mormon faith. Conversely, Snopes doesn't tend to weigh in on things like the stories surrounding Joseph Smith.
If your point is that there is an analogy between liberals and Snopes and Mormons and fairmormon.org then I actually agree with you since things like Snopes are basically ecclesiology for liberals.
>The OECD's numbers tell a similar story. In 2007, the OECD said that the United States spent $7,290 per capita on health care, ranking it first among the 30 countries studied. Five other nations spent more than $3,645 per capita, the point at which the United States no longer doubles their spending. The highest is the Netherlands at $4,417. The other four were Austria, Canada, Norway and Switzerland.
So he was rated as wrong for saying 'double' because it was actually 1.65 times for one country out of thirty. Oh and they used the dollar exchange rate for their numbers, not the PPP which is what actually matters.
Since the statement they're fact checking is "twice as much... than any other nation," averages don't apply; the smallest ratio is the strongest counterexample. Politicians can avoid being fact checked like this by using less absolute statements in their rhetoric.
(Additionally, PPP is a model someone can use, but it's hardly agreed upon universally as the correct model for equivalent spend value. It's a "basket of goods" model, influenced by the goods chosen. At worst, Politifact is guilty of making a judgement call based on a choice of metric that reasonable people can disagree on, which is hardly "a lie" that "pushes an agenda").
The Netherlands PPP conversion factor is less than 1, and was in 2009 as well. This means that each Euro spent by the Netherlands goes further than the exchange rate equivalent number of dollars would go in the US.
Wouldn't adjusting for PPP bring their healthcare spending up, not down, making Sanders less correct, not more?
The bad thing about snopes is they don't have a spectrum, it's a binary 'fact or not fact' system. This means even a slight bit of bias can be the difference between fact or not.
But the more important question is why a random website is being used as the basis for truth. They don't even try to hide the bias in their language, it's just filled with words you would never see in an academic document.
I was thinking more along the lines of a true spectrum, like a percentage system. What you have here is a bunch of qualitative truthiness symbols decided arbitrarily, it's not much different from just saying true or false.
For example, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marijuana-electron-microsc... this article would lead a passerby to believe that there is equal parts truth and lie in this picture + caption. In reality I would judge this as 'mostly true' because the caption is more true than it is false.
I saw one on PolitiFact about Biden a while back. The claim was that he's been fighting to cut social security benefits for the last 40 years. The verdict was "mostly false" but if you read the contents [1], it's "mostly true." You see shit like this all the time.
It's more in the middle. He clearly was going with the flow of politics at the time on budget hawking. It hardly seems like he wanted to eliminate/privatize SS like most conservatives who aren't retired want to do. So there a levels to "cutting social security" like most complicated topics from freezing it to reducing it to eliminating it. I agree though their mostly false doesn't seem reasonable to me from a statistical analysis of what they presented in the article
You can, follow their sources. Even if they're only 90-95 correct that is orders of magnitude better than what's on facebook and twitter where people go just because someone put up a picture with words on it.
1) Complete lack of transparency. No versioning or history of how answers have changed. They even opt-out of archive.org history tracking. They usually only disclose one author, when oftentimes there are many.
2) They editorialize many questions, changing them in such a way that they can give the answer they want to. This is done often by inserting modifiers like "always" or "never" or something similar.
The world is multi-faceted. Situations and individuals are complex. Externalities and exceptions abound.
Multiple perspectives can accurately describe the same event - e.g. the fable about the blind me all describing an elephant.
Each of their individual descriptions is true. There is also a larger truth that none of them are aware of. That doesn’t make them liars either individually or a group.
Additionally, it can be highly politically advantageous to frame, spin, or otherwise mischaracterize, on the thinnest evidence, both out of bad faith and naïveté.
So, about Truth with a capital ‘T’, I’d like to paraphrase PK Dick’s statement, “truth is what exists when you stop believing.”
I am starting to think that ultimately, though, the answer is one that no one particularly wants to admit because it boils down to two unpalatable options, one distributed and unregulated; the other centralized and regulated.
1) Unregulated: No one is the arbiter of truth, in which case a haphazard group of marketers, propagandists and psyops peddlers reign supreme. This eventually/inevitably consolidates into an organized propaganda outlet.
2) Regulated: A group is selected based on some credential or merit and you end up with essentially a Technocracy. More or less what the "Elites" boogeyman is. If the Technocracy is staffed by scientists and engineers, then it might be the best possibility available. But this also eventually consolidates and leads to an erosion of the eligibility credentials and then non-expert people will gain positions within it for ulterior motives.
If the technocratic group is limited in scope of what "truths" it can decide on, then that is potentially a reasonable compromise.
You can. And there's an easy way to smell test a source:
What's their response to verification? People who are lying are going to say either you can't or don't want to check up on them. At some point, they're going to say "trust me".
Never trust someone who asks for your trust. Someone trustworthy isn't concerned whether or not you trust them. They will just say, "Fine, here's what I used. Show me what I missed."
To paraphrase: Not everyone who hides data is a liar, but all liars hide data.
The rule isn't to positively identify liars. The rule isn't to positively identify non-liars either.
The rule is to dismiss as many liars as possible as fast as possible. By immediately dismissing anyone who doesn't want you to check their work or doesn't give you all the information necessary to recreate their work, you will dismiss a lot of liars with little effort.
You will also dismiss some people who aren't lying, but that's actually ok. It's better to dismiss an honest study that doesn't meet scrutiny rather than accept a dishonest study. Eventually, either the data will come out and you can vet the information, or someone else will reach the same conclusion and they will share their data. Liars can never reach that point.
I mean, I know you're joking, but people agree on the easy stuff (mostly, I guess), so all that's left to figure out is the hard stuff. It's true that people have spent thousands of years thinking about epistemology, but my impression is that it's not a solved problem at all.
I know right? Wittgenstein solved the whole thing in 1922 and yet here we are 100 years later, still acting like "knowing the truth" is a hard problem.
(Here's hoping I can avoid the wrath of Poe's law)
By that logic, who merits being judge of who other merits being judge? The act of asking your question, is itself a judgement, and a vote to silence others - which is, in whole, a politically violent act.
Let's also consider whether lies should be made more expensive.
Whether lies should be more expensive or not, lies cannot be made expensive. Even in a totalitarian state, false rumors spread easily. The cost of production of lies is close to zero, the cost of distribution of lies also close to zero.
It's like all of HN is eager to apply an argument that makes sense for cheap, knock-off auto parts ("Cheap is too expensive", etc) to decent public journalism. It doesn't work.
This is nothing new, the right-wing media has always been heavily subsidised.
(I hate to use right/left as a term, so, sorry, but it's useful in this context).
The problem is the left believes that the value of what they're saying stands by itself, facts and good journalism are important and should be valued!
The right knows that it needs to drive emotion, and get it's ideas in front of people.
This isn't just my opinion, this is the opinion of Eric Arthur Blair (commonly known as George Orwell), who's first works mocked a very cheap newspaper which espoused "anti-left" talking points.
To quote wikipedia:
> His own explanation was that the rise of the "puritan middle class", who had stricter morals than the aristocracy, tightened the rules of censorship in the 19th century. Orwell's first published article in his home country, "A Farthing Newspaper", was a critique of the new French daily the Ami de Peuple. This paper was sold much more cheaply than most others, and was intended for ordinary people to read. Orwell pointed out that its proprietor François Coty also owned the right-wing dailies Le Figaro and Le Gaulois, which the Ami de Peuple was supposedly competing against. Orwell suggested that cheap newspapers were no more than a vehicle for advertising and anti-leftist propaganda, and predicted the world might soon see free newspapers which would drive legitimate dailies out of business.
Of course the free newspaper in the UK (the metro) is quite right wing, but the other papers (Sun, Daily Mail) are much cheaper than contemporaries that are not right wing (The Guardian, Independent). -- While none of these are out of business yet, it's interesting to note that the DailyMail and Sun have a significant online presence, often appearing in the top 3 search results on google for an article, sometimes being the only freely accessible version of it.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadThe basic fundamental knowledge of biology and medicine is completely free.
It's the journalist B.S. which is paywalled.
This all in addition to the biases that can come from the owners/company bankrolling the media house.
It would take a large conscious effort to get past all of these.
You don't get much in depth, but you do get a good cross-section of how stories are reported, and you get to remove headlines which is the source of 96% of the world's troubles.
UK version does fairly well, 3rd after Private Eye and Economist. They do a junior version for I guess 8-13 year olds too which is doing well too, so that's good.
Friend of mine runs a magazine aimed at people who like horses (typically well-to-do female over 35s) with c. 25,000 copies a week pre-covid. It was about 70:30 subscription. Subscription is up a little since covid, but newsstand sales are way down.
Interestingly, both sides of the subject of an attempted "neutral" reporting will report bias against their side.
It would appear that humans avoid seeing their own implicit biases.
But objectively speaking: when one political party literally rejects science, facts, and logic on a given topic, you can say that reality will be biased against them. This fact is nothing to debate, but is the intention (implicit or explicit) of such a stance. Trumpkins objectively can be said to be painting the sky green rather than admit that the sky is blue.
We often go to great lengths to justify our beliefs. Ask any prison psychologists about the rationalizations they have heard for various acts their patients have committed, etc.
Additionally, when "decency" and "compassion" have expressly been abandoned by the global right-wing, you can call them left-wing values by default. This is akin to Trump calling anyone he doesn't agree with "far-left" but it's expressly defined by the rights expressed divergence from these values that created this "left-wing bias".
Downvoters are not using their logical brains, just knee-jerk reacting from a position of political tribalism. I'm objectively correct, as I'm merely describing the SELF_EXPRESSED DELIBERATE SELF POSITIONING OF THE RIGHT WING when they portray THEMSELVES as mean ruffians.
Complain some more about people taking one at ones own word whydontcha
Even to take it at face value, 'left' and 'right' are only directions, not absolute positions. There is no objective centre.
> Colbert then mocked Bush's sinking approval ratings:
> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, [...] because 32 percent means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.[18]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_Wh...
The real danger is getting your news from a single social media or news org source.
I was a decades-long subscriber to the WSJ print edition and as long as I ignored the last few pages of the first section I was a happy camper. I cannot imagine what possessed Murdoch to engage in such value-destruction, but the FT and Economist are now my go-to sources for getting news that is as low-spin as possible.
No one on this planet is 100% unbiased. It doesn't matter if it's free or $100 per article, it's still written by a human being with personal opinions, experiences, prejudices, &c.
The easiest way to get close to the "truth", which is subjective in many cases anyways, is to read from many sources and cross check the facts between them.
Should we forego every trial because no judge can be impartial? The argument is lacking.
That impartiality doesn't lead to economic success and sustainability for outlets is another story of course.
Cross checking is required even if journalists wouldn't be as active in framing stories of course.
Only state-funded news sources are imune to that, of course they have perverse incentives of their own.
But many find these sources unengaging since they report events as they occur and do not contextualize them in media narratives to the extent that more commonly popular news outlets do.
Individual news sources have almost always been biased. This is why most cities had at least 2 major newspapers until relatively recently. You could get the liberal one or the conservative one (or in some places dozens of wildly politicized papers, anarchist papers from the early 1900s are great).
Consolidation has lead to a removal of voices from most local newspapers and the market has spoken when it comes to television: people prefer partisan news sources. The internet has gotten us closer to that 1900 view but then Facebook/Google became the arbiters of news for most people.
> No one is 100% unbiased
No, and every journalist should know that and keep their own bias in mind when writing. One can have an opinion and still present a plausible alternative.
So while they have a bias they acknowledge, it isn't a "beat them into submission" type of bias.
This is unfortunately not possible. Even if an outlet only providing objective, verifiable facts there is some angle or bias in what facts you chose to report and what issues you chose to investigate.
So no, you can't have it both ways. You can't point to objective reporting and claim it has a bias, when in reality you mean that the reporting isn't showing your preferred bias.
Both are true, and which term you use just depends on your point of view. Both are true, but not unbiased.
There is no proper objectivity outside of the sciences. Everything in culture, society and politics depends on an everchanging inconsistent and observer-dependent frame of reference. You can be kind-of objective if all of you and your local neighbourhood agree on a common frame of reference. But you always have to be aware of the lack of global objectivity.
Critics agree that Mr Obama's middle name is Hussein and he is likely an islamic terrorist.
The first part is obviously true. For the second part, I am fairly certain I can find two people on 4chan who agrees with this, and they will certainly be critics of Obama.
Statements of objective truths can still be biased.
Could a legitimate news organisation (considering it'd be the biggest news of the day) justify not covering it, or moving their coverage to Page 56?
That's one of the biggest criticisms I see of bias in the media, is the flexing of prominence based on stories of a similar (wider) importance.
It's not hard to be objective when you put your mind to it. It's just that it doesn't pay since everyone has a spin they prefer.
Surely you understand the political connotations of the words deposed, king, executed, revolutionary, and government. Pretty much the only thing "objective" in your description is the guy's name.
Simple recipe to follow:
- Show your work.
- Cite your sources.
- Corroborate.
- Sign your name.
- Admit your mistakes.
Voila, you're a journalist.
We're on the Internet. Link your sources or provide them as raw footage. At least it'd eliminate some attempts to modify/exaggerate news like the CNN is doing all the time.
AP seems to me to be fairly reasonable (not dramatically slanted one way or the other).
Buy all of that stuff separately won’t be cheap
But jokes aside I stopped paying for my last newspaper subscriptions some time ago because I just didn't find the time to read and thought they were developing in a wrong direction.
I think Netflix TV shows have some kind of normalized content that I would fear would be mirrored if the service existed for news.
1. netflix is not having enough 2. i don't watch entire netflix and the most genuine concern 3. way too many streaming services. every damn movie is on a different service.
Reading them leaves people absolutely convinced that - for example - the US is behind South Korea in per-capita coronavirus testing, despite this not having been true for a long time. Seriously, the number of people I've seen on here and in the Times comment section pointing to this one specific, untrue thing as clear proof Trump must've sabotaged Covid testing because there was no way that the US could have remained behind South Korea for so long otherwise was astounding - and even more astounding was the cleverness of the articles worded to trick people into believing this, or the boldness of the Times in literally printing a news headline accusing Trump of being the liar for pointing out the exact opposite was true.
It would also appear that you didn't read the article, as your point is not the topic of the article.
The article is about copyright law running counter to information accessibility, running counter to an interpretation of "freedom of speech".
The article is about economic rather than technological barriers to information sharing.
That's the problem with knee-jerk first-paragraph-read comments.
Also, thinking about this some more, that particular bogus fact is probably an interesting counter-example to the rest of the article too. All the information required to debunk that claim about South Korean vs US coronavirus testing was and still is publicly available for free in English, and there were and still are really convenient sites aggregating it unobstructed by barriers like copyright. Everyone in the know believed the bogus elite-narrative claim anyway.
It's also possible you have the arrow of causality reversed. Murdoch's media could just be printing what that "the proles" want to hear.
The business model is to bundle everything together, for a long subscription - most want at least a month, perhaps a year, full subscription.
Because what if you pay 0.5$ for an article, and then you find out it's not what you expected/badly written/...
You basically are not happy and less likely to do it again. If you put payment to the end, then people are less willing to pay, because they already consumed the article. You can't take the information out of the head again if he's not willing to pay.
It's a tricky thing
Also with the a volunteer voting system you could use that to signal to people without a subscription what articles were "good", "controversial", ... to increase chances of a "buy-per-page" for like 10 cents per article.
Or something, I feel like the possibilities are vast, but publishing houses need to collaborate. Which they don't like to.
I understand that the idea has tons of limitations but it might solve the issue of micropayments with their tiny amounts and the constant need to decide whether to pay or not to pay.
Do you really want a world with even more clickbait headlines and articles artificially spread over 20 pages? Because that's what microtransactions would lead to.
Go.
You could probably get most opinion for free, lifestyle content for next to nothing, etc. The weekly jobless claims articles could be handled by cheap content mills. A lot of columns like personal finance and restaurants could easily be purchased freelance on the market.
The Huffington Post demonstrated that non-investigative content can be had for free.
So there should probably be far fewer middle skill journalists.
I'm less and less convinced that we are doing the world any service by demonetizing all content and cutting the heads of all tall talent, hence the authors presumption of a sort of public UBI or other non-private-sector basis as a condition to liberating the content.
The IP systems certainly are byzantine and punitive towards actual free information flow, as outlined in the article. However, if one approaches this as a typical Free Market Libertarian American (tm), as the author expressly does NOT, one arrives at different economic conclusions, and basically, journalism will not survive the complete demonetization of all content for ONE reason:
content will become even more corruptly tied to out-of-band payment than is currently the case.
why bother writing articles against the big bad polluter, when you can get paid to write apologism for them?
There's lot of "free" stories on the wire, but if your paper just runs wire stories then it ruins its reputation. And the reputation is what attracts advertisers.
In the end, you have to pay people to write good stuff. And that costs money.
However, Journalists do have to get over themselves. The days of journalists being the only people with a voice are long gone and never coming back.
That's nearly how much the New York Times ($17/month) alone costs and they lost money every year in recent history until 2018 and are only now turning the corner as a business.
On the surface I'd assume that actual journalism -- not just clickbait opinion pieces -- is going to cost you way more than $20 a month if you want access to multiple sources.
And those movies, TV shows and games cost many millions of dollars to produce. Why is journalism so much more expensive when journalists likely aren't earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and spending millions on investigations?
The $4 billion rich Netflix CEO says that artists should try harder if they don't want to starve (source, this same article we are discussing)
Netflix’s actual cash on the other hand has actually gone nearly 100% of revenue to content creators — they actually have taken out quite a lot of debt in order to create their content, because they think they can ultimately earn money on it over time.
But truly you should thank Netflix for ~$50 billion in content creation so far.
Suppose that instead of paying $17 a month to get the NYT, I pay $20 a month to get that and five other similarly high quality news sources. Does this make it harder to fund journalism? Not at all. The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. So do the five other organizations. And, since the consumer has a much better proposition, people who previously weren't paying will sign up and the total pot will be even bigger. Since all the costs are fixed costs, it doesn't matter if everyone reads six times as many articles. But they won't. They will read slightly more, but benefit much more by having a bigger choice.
This is what we saw with Spotify. You pay about the price of buying one album a month. But you get to listen to much, much, more. Even if you only listen to a few songs a day, the utility of being able to choose from anything is huge. Of course, some people used to spend a lot more each month on physical music. But lots of other people used to spend nothing, since if you only had $15 a month, you could't get much for it.
One problem is that the NYT, the the FT, the New Yorker, etc, each assume that they are uniquely trusted and loved by their audience. But that's only true because of selection bias. No one who values their output to the tune of $3 a month is part of their readership.
In the music industry, the huge monopolists could force adoption of the new model. But they're also the reason musicians don't make much money, since they are now supporting two sets of middlemen - the tech companies and the 'record labels'.
The thing with journalism is that you can't rely that much on back catalogs and artistic enthusiasm. An indie band might share all their music on Spotify for $1.37 a month revenue for the love of music, but that $1.37 will not buy you much of quality reporting...
Not really, there must be an intersection between them and we don't know how large it is. And I don't believe there's many other magazine/news sites as successful as NYT so the revenue number is more likely 3x~4x even assuming no intersection and 100% conversion rate.
The real issue is that traditional media's competitive edge was its infrastructure for content distribution, not the content itself. Sadly, people willing to pay money for high quality journalism seems minority so its budget is. Otherwise, ads-powered yellow journalism cannot be thriving as is. In this landscape, there's simply not much incentive to pursue such aggregated subscription model for media itself. Maybe there can be suitable business models for aggregators like FB or Google, but I don't think this is what you really want.
There's a quote that goes along the lines of "those who don't read the news are uninformed; those who read the news are misinformed".
For me, I see NYT as one of the more credible new sources, but it has a history of bias against reforms to wealth inequality, which is an important issue for me. Accordingly, I can't justify using it as my sole source of news, and I can't afford to pay more than $20/mo total for this sort of expense.
So, an option to pay $20/mo for access to 5-6 different news sources would be really appealing to me. Until then, I'll keep using my 3 free articles / month from the random news outlets that get posted to HN/reddit.
There have been many many efforts to have sites that provide access to multiple news sources for a single price. Apple News, PressReader, Magzster, and more.
Newspapers and their corporate owners have ample data on your claim that low single prices massively increase the audience. I'm guessing your claim is not supported by the real world data and that's why they haven't adopted the model.
After all, only 16% of people have said they are willing to pay any amount of money to read the news. That's a total market of 40 million people. The NY Times has 6 million subscribers, so they've already captured 15% of the market. Your claim that they could capture 6x means this mythical service would capture 90% of the total available market.
Which just seems...implausible on the surface. Netflix doesn't even have remotely that penetration -- only 51% -- and they've been around forever, have massive brand recognition, have tons of money, have unique properties to draw viewers, etc, etc.
With no unit-cost, volume is a big deal for such content.
So if Times got 3x subs, they could cut their prices by 1/2 no problem. Car companies can't do that.
So creating a good marketplace with demand and volume can do this.
There's also the economies of price here that's often neglected - if they charged less, more people could and would pay for it. At $17/month they can forget it, I'll get my news elsewhere. At $9.99/month, it becomes a consideration for me. At <$5/month, I'm almost definitely in; I give $4/month to Nintendo so I can play Animal Crossing with a few friends a couple times a month. I'd normally happily spend $5-10/month at a Starbucks on a mocha as an occasional treat (you know, if it weren't for the whole pandemic thing).
What I'm sure is really burning their income are holdovers from a bygone era - printing presses and their maintenance, prestigious billion dollar buildings in downtown New York City, and so on. There's no way the print side of the business is paying for itself anymore at the volume they're printing at... it's just time to let it go. And writers can work from literally anywhere... A curiously common refrain often heard here from tech workers.
I have always wanted human curation, filters, opinion.
Anyway, you've described a cable bundle model, not Netflix's model.
if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse.
The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.
[1] https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
May it rest in peace.
Reader was a synthesis of open web culture - it offered a hub of reading multiple streams of content in one formatted location, and it did so with the support of one of the largest companies on the earth with the ability to use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted. Google could have been the 800 pound gorilla of news publications a decade before Apple News even tried.
But they just, threw it away. That's what I want back - I don't care if it's RSS or some new fancy JSON-backed article exchange protocol - the transport layer and reader app itself is largely meaningless to me; the simple elegance of being able to read the news in one location without some designers notion of layout and overzealous marketers' idea of ad coverage, and having it be quick is much more powerful. No more 2-10MB garbage landfills to serve 20kb of textual information. No more fighting to make the content work on mobile - RSS was inherently responsive and accessibility-friendly.
The technological idea of federated content have largely died because Google decided it didn't want to support them, and nobody else - not Microsoft, not Apple, nobody - stepped up to take the mantle. It had a technological problem for Google - the fact that you could pick another reader meant that there was no instinctive centralization on Googles' service, unlike situations like AMP where they're literally the man in the middle.
And while Instant Articles and AMP are trying to fill that market gap, more often than not what I find replacing it is Twitter, which is comically filled with horrible misinformation and terrible sourcing practices that make it a haven of misinformation instead of... news. And that's a real damn shame.
Unless I'm missing something, they never did anything unique to "use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted"—it was just an RSS reader, and what you've described is exactly how I use my reader of choice (Feedbin). Many modern offerings even offer a feature to pull the full text for articles where it's not included by default.
As is salon.com, theatlantic.com, theroot.com, vox.com, huffingtonpost.com, slate.com, and also somehow missing from that list, CNN!
I appreciate the point the author is trying to make, and realize this is tangential, but I would be grateful if he didn't try to deceive me with the choice of examples.
Salon's About page: "Salon covers breaking news, politics, entertainment, culture, and technology through investigative reporting, commentary, criticism, and provocative personal essays." A few titles from their site:
The Root has an explicit "News" section (theroot.com/c/news). Some titles from the site (not limited to that section): Vox: Huffpost also has a "News" section (the most prominent of all). Some titles taken straight from their front page: The very first section of Slate is titled "News & Politics". A few titles from that section: In sum, there's no way to claim these are not news sites.vox.com: "Vox explains the news.". No shroud of being objective here either. q.e.d.
slate.com: "we are a general-interest publication offering analysis and commentary about politics, news, business, technology, and culture" general interest is vague, but no non-commented news here either, q.e.d.
the root has a category "news", but if you visit their main page you see, it's just a sort of "community news-ticker" (like any political page has) and I don't see them making claims to universality.
Compare that to Breitbart mingling everything there is into their political agend and explicitly stating: "truthful reporting", ... , "Breitbart News is one of America’s leading news organizations."
leaves the huffpost which is laughable by design.
At this point I don't think there's anything I can say that will convince you.
But yes, if you invent some contrived definition of "news site" that disqualifies every left-wing site, only right-wing ones remain.
And I don't understand how that is even relevant to the article - as long as you can "get your news" from some source, that's enough. It doesn't have to pass some made-up purity test of what qualifies as a news site, because readers won't be applying that test. To pretend only right-wing sites share news and opinion for free is just willful blindness.
Information production is dominated by the super-rich and the state, and access to knowledge (not merely information) is carefully controlled for the benefit of and use by the highly educated, wealthy elite.
An aspect that I often think about is how the vast majority of truly top-tier multimedia (books, articles, movies) has been created decades ago. A person could, for example, spend multiple lifetimes reading the amazing academic and artistic literature in the public domain. But such an existence is terribly unprofitable, so it's heavily discouraged in favour of a content-diet full of pop-culture ephemera. Alan Kay said about Pop Culture, that it "is all about identity and feeling like you're participating, It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it's living in the present." Such over-stimulating, disorienting, and fashionable multimedia, perhaps perfected by Buzzfeed, is making us energetic consumers, and idiots. Amused to death drinking from a firehose of 'free'.
/r/LOLHackerNews
Some Google-translated coverage: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
[1]: https://www.die-medienanstalten.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Rec... in §11
I can imagine they have a "popularity" competition in terms of viewership and so on but why economic? Can you elaborate please?
Worse still, imagine you are a paying subscriber to some private newspaper. If the public option has very high quality coverage, you may find that you no longer need your private subscription.
Or regardless of the quality of the public option, you may find that you can no longer afford your private subscription. The public option isn't free, after all—just pre-paid with no ability to opt out—and you may not be able to afford two such services. Other cases where public services "compete" with private providers (e.g. toll roads) suffer from the same problem: You don't get to choose between paying for the public option and paying for the private option. You're either paying for just the public option, or for both, even if the private option is all you want or need.
I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic, because entertainment is part of a cultural offering that should be accessible by everyone. I don't really see the competition issue here, just like the BBC they produce content, which is fine.
Has to be said though in quality it doesn't really measure up to the BBC, but you can try to claw Tatort from my dead hands
(I'd argue that the fringes, as seen with the anti-lockdown demonstrations in Berlin recently, are actually sustained by newfangled social media.)
Links (German only, sorry):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_(Fernsehmagazin)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_München
My impression was that they were mostly older people (50+), and from their style of clothing I could tell that they were mostly poor people, maybe people who got wrecked by Hartz4 reforms in the 90s and early 2000s, and grew a deep hate on German politics and the mainstream. Fringe social media groups and conspiracy nuts just take advantage of pre-existing hate.
"I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic, because entertainment is part of a cultural offering that should be accessible by everyone. I don't really see the competition issue here, just like the BBC they produce content, which is fine." How is it not unfair if you compete in the exact same market with a publicly funded corporation[1]?
"Has to be said though in quality it doesn't really measure up to the BBC, but you can try to claw Tatort from my dead hands " It is basically on par with ntv, Welt and doesn't really measure up to ServusTV. They all share one thing with ARD/ZDF tho and that is advertisement.
[1]: Open any site of public funded TV and look for "Unternehmen" (Corporation) also they have a lot of for-profit corporations spun off, so there is no point calling it a public institution when in fact it is not.
Better than FAZ, ZEIT, Spiegel? That's the private media you should compare the news sections to, and I have some doubts that anybody thinks Public Broadcaster by and large have a similar level of journalistic integrity & quality.
I find the argument "look at quality of the private sector, we need the public broadcasters" to be generally disingenuous. Private companies will invest where there's a chance to make a profit, having to compete with tax-funded free services makes that much less likely, ergo you won't see a lot of investment. To consider that proof for the necessity of a tax-funded system is like a monopolist claiming that nobody would provide the services if they didn't, knowing full well that it's their abuse of the monopoly that keeps competitors out.
2) Since the topic at hand is limited to Germany, I guess a look at other nations is an argument?
But that area was already more than well-covered by plenty of private companies. Why does the state need to compete? I can absolutely see an argument for the initial creation of public broadcasters: it's an enormous investment in a new technology and we want some control over it. But to enter a well-established market "because that's what most people prefer now and we're losing relevance" is a of private company perspective. "Oh hey, I noticed that there's a successful market providing what the customers want. Let me throw money at disrupting it" isn't usually a government position.
Sure, you can look at other countries. The US is a pretty good example in my opinion. They're getting better products in any direction: better if you want trash TV, higher quality news (with highly specialized channels such as Bloomberg TV but also general news-channels like CNN), better if you want entertainment (HBO vs Tatort? I don't think there's even a question), better if you want sports coverage (ESPN etc), better if you want music.
And they still have public broadcasting to serve special requirements, only at a much, much, much lower price because they don't try to make them cover everything anyone could ever want.
Besides wasting money on useless entertainment, German public broadcasters also prey on the vulnerable by promoting gambling. They even just prime time just before the evening news for this.
But worse than the content is the funding method. Instead of being funded from taxes the public broadcasters collect a separate non-means-tested fee that is still somehow mandatory. That might have made some sense when you could opt out of that fee by not owning a TV but that option is no longer available.
I know it's not perfect, but it definitely is not a "big problem".
This seems wrong. Longer-lasting copyright does incentivize authors more, because it can be sold for more.
So it could be possible to “be incentivized” to publish new works even after you’re dead. For the estate of an author that has developed a reputation, say like JD Salinger, this would be a very smart thing to do if you wanted to influence policy beyond your death.
For example, the Times article on "neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions" might not be "free" but the same article on New York Times was free. Does this imply that Times article must be closer to truth than the one in the New York Times? This assumption seems flawed.
The paywalled stuff is bullshit too. Plus, they know they have a micro-targettable audience of suckers who are willing to pay.
Excuse me but why would I want to pay for that ? I don't earn by reading articles online and the news websites are already littered with advertisements and autoplay videos. I get tracked around the web by these ads and I'm supposed to even fund that ?
Thank you but I will pass.
> The New York Times is, in fact, extremely valuable, if you read it critically and look past the headlines. Usually the truth is in there somewhere, as there is a great deal of excellent reporting, and one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times.
... and can't you do the same with Infowars ? Critically read it and look past the headlines ? Perhaps the truth will be there somewhere too. (albeit as a total negation of the Infowars article)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/leahrosenbaum/2020/04/09/infowa...
I did not use them in the same sentence. I did not intend to support Infowars.
Passive, disengaged voters are what creates the conditions for Donald Trump to arise.
"Creators must be compensated well. But at the same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few people will see them. The truth needs to be free and universal."
Let's also consider whether lies should be made more expensive. Free costs more than it's worth.
You obviously still have your own ability to determine what fits your model of the universe and what doesn't. These are just groups of people more likely to have access to information that you might not. You don't have to trust anyone, but in a system where someone has to judge what is true, these groups are closer than the alternative, which would be people with no qualifications, no training, and no history of telling the truth.
If you have another alternative I'm all ears.
But how has it been implemented in practice?
If you look at the raw numbers, generally we rely on the lowest bidders amongst Facebook/Google/Twitter's third-world-country subcontractors, as well as the Chinese government.
Separately, moderators purge controversial content as a check/balance to the voting system. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they choose a different site to frequent, as is the case in market systems.
It's very easy to point out that nothing is perfect. It's very difficult to come up with a better solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial
Through the process. You never have to trust the data if you have a good process. Process will verify data. Process will verify sources. Process is impartial. Trust the process, not the results.
Also, I take issue with the attempt to conflate people who are incorrect with people who are dishonest.
There is nothing wrong with being wrong. Being wrong is the first step to being right. You can't be corrected if you're never willing to be wrong. And we can't learn if everyone has to wait to be completely correct before making a claim. Often, we don't even know we should be looking into something until someone makes a claim that turns out to be incorrect on further study.
Knowledge isn't furthered in "eureka" moments where we have all the answers at once, it's in observing something and thinking, "Huh, that's weird", then seeking the answers.
The GP's post didn't say trust science or trust data. It said trust scientists. I'm taking issue with the desire to put faith in individuals.
I guess I don't understand the alternative: is everyone expected to go look up the write-up and replicate the experiment for themselves because we can't trust the scientists who performed the experiment? I agree we need more replication studies, but I think we're reaching the absurd ends of the "do your own research!" movement here.
In Science as it should be practised, yes, a scientist talking to a journalist should "explain the the data and results and why that data makes sense". The journalist should then paraphrase that clearly for their audience, without altering the essential conclusions of the study/paper/experiment.
But this is so naive it's laughable now. Nobody, ever, does this. The scientist wants maximum impact, so will maximise the sensational aspects of their results. In turn the journalist wants maximum clicks, so will sensationalise more. What ends up being read by the public can be a very long way away from any conclusion that the data actually supports.
It was also people who found out those people were wrong or lying.
Yes, Piltdown man was a fraud, but it was the same "scientific community" that discovered it was a fraud. Because there were things that didn't make sense even within the confines of the field of study.
That's the great thing about the process, it's ultimately self-correcting.
If a scientist is emotionally attached to a result and ignores a result that they don't like, they are no longer engaged in science.
Peer review and replication is the correcting factor for the unfortunate reality that science must be, for the moment carried out by humans.
At the very least, when operating properly science becomes less wrong. That cannot be said for politicians who are interested in nothing but confirmation of their preconceptions.
There is a special place in hell for those who cynically use the fact that scientists are sometimes wrong as an attack against the very existence of knowledge and consensus reality itself.
Some of the best parts about science, as you've pointed out, are peer review and replication. There should never be a need to put your faith in an individual scientist and take them at their word.
>There is a special place in hell for those who cynically use the fact that scientists are sometimes wrong as an attack against the very existence of knowledge and consensus reality itself.
I hope it's clear that I was in no way doing that.
Academia, not so much
I am not saying everything there is wrong but I have ran into weird biased articles before.
A trustworthy organization doing fact checking on one side of the aisle while ignoring inaccuracies from the other side is preferable to no fact-checking at all. Question is: where is Republican Snopes? It's a free information market; why is nobody doing it?
Most people are Liberal (in the American sense) because that's what all the organs of culture promote and reinforce. It's like the "default" position that people adopt. I grew up liberal in a liberal household where we watched Hollywood movies and mainstream news like ABC, NBC, PBS and I listened to NPR and I went to school which was run by generally liberal teachers and administrators and that's pretty much why I was liberal.
This is the Cathedral vs the Bazaar approach to sense-making.
Steve Bannon and his movement are more representative of mainstream conservatism. Even someone Tucker Carlson used to be very much like Chris Wallace. The reason why his program is so popular now is because he's shifted radically away from his establishmentarian position towards Steve Bannon's position.
Personally I don't watch Fox News because of how low to middle brow and Cathedral-like it is.
Cable TV is still a niche.
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
Now, Fox News and OAN and Sinclair are not, publically, actually the John Birch Society, so sure, you could say "right wingers don't think they lean right either".
Plot out a chart of US political opinion, and I more or less guarantee you that in most things, you'll find your list of media outlights absolutely "centrist", and the 3 I just named distinctly "to the right" of mainstream US political opinion.
> here is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making
Which is both mixing the some undefined set of concepts of the Enlightenment with some undefined characteristics of "All Republicans", in an awkward ad-hominem against "non-republicans"? It's nonsensical.
> At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself,
All truth is subjective, so there is no truth tautology.
Etc etc. There isn't a point being made or a topic to discuss. It's a "too many ideas" post mixed with too many wild tangents that are intentionally designed to incite.
ie Vapid flamebait.
And yes all discussions of this type require some generalization and lumping. "Republican" doesn't even mean one thing since the party consists of libertarians and evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives among many others.
Conservatives have always done sense making via institutional consensus, even moreso than post-enlightenment liberals, though the institutions that they tend to appeal to are those explicitly devoted to their ideological world view (whether it's the organs of a particular Church, or economists of the Austrian School) and not so much those even superficially devoted to objective exploration of facts, even when approaching questions that are, at least on the surface, about objectives facts (what is) rather than ideology (what should be).
> Most people are Liberal (in the American sense)
No, they aren't, unless you are conflating multiple different and incompatible American senses of “Liberal” and thus covering the entire range from the moderate right to the far left.
What is a "fact" or what is "true" is dependent on your values (aka your ideology). This is one of Nietzsche's main contributions to philosophy.
There are things like mathematical and logical truth and really basic physical assertions (e.g. the sky is blue) but those are qualitatively different than what we're talking about.
Both normative and positive statements about the world of human affairs are ultimately dependent on ideology and that might explain to you why you perceive conservatives as focusing on arguments over ideology. That is what people should be arguing over since from that all else flows. When people don't share substantially similar values even language itself becomes useless as a means of communication because the words themselves mean different things.
No, it's not. That's one of the Enlightenment’s many contributions to philosophy and the foundation on which the advances in knowledge of the universe enabling the explosion of post-Enlightenment technical progress is built.
Obviously, one might have ideological, aesthetic, or other preferences for what facts ought to be, and one might have beliefs about questions of fact that ultimately result from those preferences, but—Roadrunner cartoons not withstanding—beliefs about the material universe don't trump material facts.
(However, it's kind of funny that you are making, as a positive argument in favor of conservatism, exactly the argument that conservatives usually not only reject, but also attribute—not entirely inaccurately though certainly overgenerally—to the “postmodern” left and cite as a key reason for rejecting the left.)
The same metaphysical view you're describing also enabled utopian totalitarian visions like Nazism and Communism. Communism famously proposes a view of the world that sees everything through the lens of materialism. This discussion is much deeper than what a thread on HN can really do justice to. I would just strongly urge you to consider reading Beyond Good and Evil for a different perspective and study of this question by a great thinker.
> to the “postmodern” left and cite as a key reason for rejecting the left.)
Postmodernism hinges on whether or not there is an objective set of values. Conservatives believe there is (the Bible, natural law, God, etc) whereas Postmodernists believe there isn't.
Everything I've said holds true regardless of where you come down on that. Personally yes I believe there is an objective set of values.
Leninism and it's descendants are totalitarian, Communism (even Marxism) more generally is not, but, sure, you can certainly make the case that scientific rationality has some connection to Marxism and thus an indirect effect on Leninism. OTOH, scientific rationality and the proven results are also the explicit basis for the widespread Western rejection of Leninism and it's descendants (and explictly cited as such by wide segments of the Right, including those who generalize that rejection to Communism generally, which the left might argue is an overgeneralization, but even in that argument there is a broad consensus that there are actual material facts that one can draw conclusions about from material evidence which transcends ideology when approached correctly.)
OTOH, Nazism was not based on scientific rationality, except as a reaction against it, and in fact both Italian Fascism and Naziism were explicitly based on the exact Nietzschean view that you advance (both the idea and explicitly crediting it to Nietzche).
> Postmodernism hinges on whether or not there is an objective set of values. Conservatives believe there is (the Bible, natural law, God, etc) whereas Postmodernists believe there isn't.
That may be a difference between your particular worldview and postmodernism, but large number of other conservatives criticize the “postmodern left” not merely for rejecting objective values which you claim is the difference between Conservatism and Postmodernism, but for rejecting objective facts and viewing facts as constructs which depend on ideology—the position you take on the nature of facts is one explicitly rejected and criticized (and attributed as a failing of the left) by most mainstream conservative thinkers, though I will agree that the factions of the Right who adhere to it are at what is, at least, a recent local maximum of prominence.
How can you say this when Nazis famously "pioneered" and promulgated things like Phrenology and Eugenics? Scientific racism was at the heart of the Nazi program.
> the position you take on the nature of facts is one explicitly rejected and criticized (and attributed as a failing of the left) by most mainstream conservative thinkers,
I do agree with you here. What we're discussing really only has meaning when both sides of the discussion are able and willing to have a deeper discussion about this sort of stuff.
What Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro engage in is completely sufficient for the audience they're trying to engage with and appeal to. To get into this more abstract kind of discussion would be counterproductive in my opinion. Postmodernism is actually really harmful for people to believe in and at that point where you're lost in a world where most major cultural institutions are pushing that, you just need someone articulating an alternative view point. At that level, getting into a discussion about how they're actually similar would be a bad idea.
They...didn't. Phrenology was was developed at the end of the 18th century and scientifically discredited by the mid-19th century; the Nazis may have adopted it, but that's proof that they weren't motivated by anything like scientific rationalism. Eugenics is overtly ideological (and, again, not pioneered by the Nazis, having become a widespread ideology before they existed), though it relies on scientific results (but even those who take your ideological stance of rejecting objective facts have no problem adopting the results of science that they see as useful for advancing their ideology, so there's nothing surprising about a group who does that adopting an ideological program relying on technology for it's implementation.)
But the reason I can say that Italian Fascism and German Naziism expressly adopted your Nietzschean view is because both said they did, and praised Nietzche for presenting it.
I mean the science is bunk but it wasn't "discredited" in the sense that you mean among the scientific community or the policy community across the West who enacted policies based on it well until after the mid 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
> the Nazis may have adopted it, but that's proof that they weren't motivated by anything like scientific rationalism
The Nazis adopted scientific racism and this is proof they weren't motivated by scientific rationalism? I suppose your contention would be that Hitler didn't really believe any of that or something and it was all just about power. That's such a lazy position to take IMO. If you really want to die on that hill I don't think we can go forward with the discussion at least on this front. The Nazis established a whole body of thought and policies around racial hierarchies that were in part dependent on the work of eugenics and phrenology. And yes I do believe they really believed this stuff.
> But the reason I can say that Italian Fascism and German Naziism expressly adopted your Nietzschean view is because both said they did, and praised Nietzche for presenting it.
Nietzsche was highly derisive of nationalism and the examples he would deride were actually those of German nationalism. You can read Beyond Good and Evil to see that.
What you're talking about is actually highly ironic considering that Nietzsche actually predicts some sort of Hitler-like figure coming to power due to how weak-minded and herd-like Europeans were. He didn't call them herd-like as a compliment.
What they adopted among other things was his method of attack on morality itself and in particular Christianity and Judaism. This is what he meant by going "Beyond" Good and Evil (morality itself) to replace it with Strong and Weak or Beautiful and Ugly which was more of the Greco-Roman system of values. That does sound more like Nazism doesn't it? You can see it in the iconography of the Nazis and all the Roman stuff they adopted (e.g. the Nazi standards which harken to the Roman standards).
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--Ngy5XGuS2Y/U_kCNxwY_5I/AAAAAAAAJ...
Nietzsche wasn't perfect IMO. You can read Psychological Types by Carl Jung who does a beautiful job of analyzing and filling in the holes in Nietzsche's positions.
Since you dismiss the existence of objective, non-ideological facts, isn't that necessarily your position on all science?
> but it wasn't "discredited" in the sense that you mean among the scientific community or the policy community across the West who enacted policies based on it well until after the mid 20th century
Yes, phrenology was discredited , and why you posted a link about eugenics to support your rebuttal of a point about phrenology that had nothing to do with eugenics, I don't know.
> The Nazis adopted scientific racism and this is proof they weren't motivated by scientific rationalism?
That wasn't my actual argument, but it works, since “scientific racism” doesn't actually follow the methodology of post-enlightment empiricism, merely adopting it as an elaborate rhetorical flourish for propaganda purposes, much the way that, say, intelligent design does. It recognizes that some of it's audience might be positively disposed to the superficial appearance of empiricism, rather than actually embracing it itself.
I already said I believe in an objective set of values so for you to say this means you've clearly missed the entire point of the discussion.
Not really:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/aug/20/bernie-san...
>The OECD's numbers tell a similar story. In 2007, the OECD said that the United States spent $7,290 per capita on health care, ranking it first among the 30 countries studied. Five other nations spent more than $3,645 per capita, the point at which the United States no longer doubles their spending. The highest is the Netherlands at $4,417. The other four were Austria, Canada, Norway and Switzerland.
So he was rated as wrong for saying 'double' because it was actually 1.65 times for one country out of thirty. Oh and they used the dollar exchange rate for their numbers, not the PPP which is what actually matters.
On average, are the facts accurate?
Also, 1.65 isn't double. I'm not quite sure what you're saying here.
Regardless, even if the average WERE 1.65, that's still a damning enough number that the meter shouldn't be all the way to the "False" side.
This is a lie by the fact checkers. One that pushes an agenda that's obvious to see for everyone who cares to look.
(Additionally, PPP is a model someone can use, but it's hardly agreed upon universally as the correct model for equivalent spend value. It's a "basket of goods" model, influenced by the goods chosen. At worst, Politifact is guilty of making a judgement call based on a choice of metric that reasonable people can disagree on, which is hardly "a lie" that "pushes an agenda").
Wouldn't adjusting for PPP bring their healthcare spending up, not down, making Sanders less correct, not more?
But the more important question is why a random website is being used as the basis for truth. They don't even try to hide the bias in their language, it's just filled with words you would never see in an academic document.
For example, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marijuana-electron-microsc... this article would lead a passerby to believe that there is equal parts truth and lie in this picture + caption. In reality I would judge this as 'mostly true' because the caption is more true than it is false.
1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/12/bernie-san...
The NEXT 2 PARAGRAPHS say, in simple language, what part is true and which is not.
I'm curious if the bias is perceived or blatant.
1) Complete lack of transparency. No versioning or history of how answers have changed. They even opt-out of archive.org history tracking. They usually only disclose one author, when oftentimes there are many.
2) They editorialize many questions, changing them in such a way that they can give the answer they want to. This is done often by inserting modifiers like "always" or "never" or something similar.
Multiple perspectives can accurately describe the same event - e.g. the fable about the blind me all describing an elephant.
Each of their individual descriptions is true. There is also a larger truth that none of them are aware of. That doesn’t make them liars either individually or a group.
Additionally, it can be highly politically advantageous to frame, spin, or otherwise mischaracterize, on the thinnest evidence, both out of bad faith and naïveté.
So, about Truth with a capital ‘T’, I’d like to paraphrase PK Dick’s statement, “truth is what exists when you stop believing.”
I am starting to think that ultimately, though, the answer is one that no one particularly wants to admit because it boils down to two unpalatable options, one distributed and unregulated; the other centralized and regulated.
1) Unregulated: No one is the arbiter of truth, in which case a haphazard group of marketers, propagandists and psyops peddlers reign supreme. This eventually/inevitably consolidates into an organized propaganda outlet.
2) Regulated: A group is selected based on some credential or merit and you end up with essentially a Technocracy. More or less what the "Elites" boogeyman is. If the Technocracy is staffed by scientists and engineers, then it might be the best possibility available. But this also eventually consolidates and leads to an erosion of the eligibility credentials and then non-expert people will gain positions within it for ulterior motives.
If the technocratic group is limited in scope of what "truths" it can decide on, then that is potentially a reasonable compromise.
How some of the largest countries already work
What's their response to verification? People who are lying are going to say either you can't or don't want to check up on them. At some point, they're going to say "trust me".
Never trust someone who asks for your trust. Someone trustworthy isn't concerned whether or not you trust them. They will just say, "Fine, here's what I used. Show me what I missed."
The rule isn't to positively identify liars. The rule isn't to positively identify non-liars either.
The rule is to dismiss as many liars as possible as fast as possible. By immediately dismissing anyone who doesn't want you to check their work or doesn't give you all the information necessary to recreate their work, you will dismiss a lot of liars with little effort.
You will also dismiss some people who aren't lying, but that's actually ok. It's better to dismiss an honest study that doesn't meet scrutiny rather than accept a dishonest study. Eventually, either the data will come out and you can vet the information, or someone else will reach the same conclusion and they will share their data. Liars can never reach that point.
(Here's hoping I can avoid the wrath of Poe's law)
It certainly wasn't intended that way. Maybe you're judging my question incorrectly?
Coal plants offer cheap power, mostly because they ignore the externalities of pollution.
If you could identify the externalities of lies and tax or fine them in some way, maybe they would be minimized.
(tax what you want less of)
Whether lies should be more expensive or not, lies cannot be made expensive. Even in a totalitarian state, false rumors spread easily. The cost of production of lies is close to zero, the cost of distribution of lies also close to zero.
It's like all of HN is eager to apply an argument that makes sense for cheap, knock-off auto parts ("Cheap is too expensive", etc) to decent public journalism. It doesn't work.
But they can. Defamation laws make false claims expensive. Accounts can be revoked. Costs can be imposed if society has the will to do so.
(I hate to use right/left as a term, so, sorry, but it's useful in this context).
The problem is the left believes that the value of what they're saying stands by itself, facts and good journalism are important and should be valued!
The right knows that it needs to drive emotion, and get it's ideas in front of people.
This isn't just my opinion, this is the opinion of Eric Arthur Blair (commonly known as George Orwell), who's first works mocked a very cheap newspaper which espoused "anti-left" talking points.
To quote wikipedia:
> His own explanation was that the rise of the "puritan middle class", who had stricter morals than the aristocracy, tightened the rules of censorship in the 19th century. Orwell's first published article in his home country, "A Farthing Newspaper", was a critique of the new French daily the Ami de Peuple. This paper was sold much more cheaply than most others, and was intended for ordinary people to read. Orwell pointed out that its proprietor François Coty also owned the right-wing dailies Le Figaro and Le Gaulois, which the Ami de Peuple was supposedly competing against. Orwell suggested that cheap newspapers were no more than a vehicle for advertising and anti-leftist propaganda, and predicted the world might soon see free newspapers which would drive legitimate dailies out of business.
Of course the free newspaper in the UK (the metro) is quite right wing, but the other papers (Sun, Daily Mail) are much cheaper than contemporaries that are not right wing (The Guardian, Independent). -- While none of these are out of business yet, it's interesting to note that the DailyMail and Sun have a significant online presence, often appearing in the top 3 search results on google for an article, sometimes being the only freely accessible version of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Politics