Maybe it is because happy people do not consume the news? Happy people tend to have full lives and are therefore too busy to waste time ingesting news about events that are not going to personally affect them. Whereas, I can only speak for myself, but when I am down (like right now), I spend lots of time doing nothing but browsing news aggregator websites and leaving comments like this one.
And of course, negative news would resonate more with a person who is in a bad mood.
Some people are hoping for a catastrophe that will render all their personal problems irrelevant, be it World War III, environmental disasters or societal collapse. Like a snow day for your whole life.
Very interesting point. The other type is people who think they'll be on top after a society-breaking external event. It's a very bitter and passive attitude. Something to hold on to for the ones who don't have the power to do things themselves. I guess News just mirror that attitude. In a less dramatic way negative News distract you from your own problems for a while.
Of course everyone loses to an extent in a collapse but power is relative. And short of a meteor collapses are usually partial (e.g. the roman empire fell but the church remained and consolidated power).
You can only paint with a broad brush but it's not exactly hard to pick out groups that will be net recipients of relative power and wealth in various collapse scenarios.
If the financial system collapses people who own capital in whole (e.g. some tradesman with his van full of tools) and people who own "promises" of things (the contents of your 401k, bank account, etc) lose. If high level government collapses people who are associated with alternate sources of organization and administration (local government, the church) win. If local government collapses people who depended a lot on those services lose and people who already went without win.
Remember, money and political capital are convertible to each other to an extent so that complicates things as well.
So it's perfectly rational for people to root for the kind of specific tumultuous change that would benefit them.
In my experience, it's not those that are likely to be better off after a catastrophe who are looking for it. They are already pretty well off, they have a lot to lose in chaos.
Those who don't have a lot to lose are more interested in a chaotic phase that rolls the dice and will quickly reshuffle the social order. The rich are moving into gated communities, they're not looking forward to living in a mad max world -- they're trying to keep that world out.
In fairness, there's no such thing as a mad max world. At least not one without the rich. A mad max world is predicated on companies like Halliburton continuing to keep the fossil fuel deliveries coming. Which, in turn, is predicated on keeping refineries maintained and running. Keeping pipelines secure. And keeping roads repaired. All of which imply a very large number of wealthy people. (Assuming even state or regional scale energy logistics.)
To get mad max, we have to have alternative energy production and storage be cheap enough for broke people to afford. Even then, they'd need to be able to afford enough of that energy that they can spend huge amounts of it riding around looking for other people to steal from rather than spending the energy on farming and heating their homes. Raiding might work for post apocalyptic populations in Florida or South Carolina. I imagine the climate might be conducive to that sort of thing. But in a world with no energy deliveries, spending what little energy you have so frivolously would quickly doom you and your family if you live in Minnesota, Illinois, or Wisconsin for instance.
> Very interesting point. The other type is people who think they'll be on top after a society-breaking external event
Wait until you see those who want to create a nuclear war somewhere to make an apocalypse happen so that Jesus of Nazareth can come back. Then there are also ones who believe that the nuclear apocalypse must be global for Jesus to return. Have your next shock when you discover that these people actually have politicians among them. Then another one when you discover that the last US Sect. of State himself publicly admitted to be one of those...
That's kinda how the pandemic felt to a degree. A happier than average time in my personal life, despite (or perhaps due in part to?!) all the carnage and pandemonium throughout the world. Feels wrong to say, but I will look back on my experience of the pandemic fondly.
Agree, the pandemic didn't hit the way I expected and I've heard many with similar experiences. This type of response (generally speaking, not necessarily you) may for some be driven by hypervigilance, as one of the ways it manifests is a level of calm in emergencies when others are freaking out. Rather paradoxical on the surface, but has to do with adaptation to certain stress levels and threat/friend response. The pandemic made a lot of friends into threats, if you were trying to avoid covid. Safety came from a greater level of suspicion and alertness to surroundings; an unhealthy response in everyday life but rather suitable for a pandemic. Another example is soldiers who come back from war can feel really out of place in civilian life, but in wartime can feel like they're 'home'.
Yeah that is consistent with my experience for sure. Probably true for lots of others too. I'm pretty neurotic about dumb shit on a day-to-day basis, but the few times something actually extremely serious has gone wrong in/around my life, it's rarely felt particularly scary or panic-inducing -- maybe even less so than the usual "oh my god I probably left the stove on and the building will burn to the ground and it'll be all my fault!"
This is a pretty common behavior for folks with anxiety related disorders, obviously closely tied with neurotic behavior. For me, there's nothing like the clarity of an all-out disaster to focus and sober me up.
We had that. It was called Covid. Two years later we are still dealing with the first phase of the completely predictable results rolling lock downs caused. In another 5 we will start dealing with the unpredictable ones.
Here's hoping that we're wise enough to not let reddit admits dictate world health policy again.
Is is a snow day from their life or is it that their life hasn't or isn't going the way they expected but they perceive everyone else to be living fulfilling lives... and they would like to see that end?
It works the other way, too. You're happier when you don't consume the news. That is also scientifically proven, although I have no linkage to support that claim.
It is a valid question, but anecdotally, I am a happy camper, who typically does not really worry too much, but events over the past few years forced to cut down on checking news, because the more I understand it, the more depressed I get over state of affairs I have zero control over. This weird level of inability to make any kind of difference puts a damper on things.
I set acceptable times for when I review stuff and even then I try hard to curate it as much as possible to avoid mindless scrolling. It is not easy and you get psychological jitters ( and you try to channel it some other ways ) and you can feel your hard trying to reach for that mouse.
But overall the results were/are worth it. Sure, we are facing eventual extinction of human race, but one could argue that has been the case for several decades now so I sleep much better.
I suspect this isn’t the case. Even when I’m in a great mood, I find myself drawn more to negative headlines. I wonder if it’s related to our odd loss aversion behavior[0].
Trolls troll because they enjoy the stimulus that it provides. Perhaps there is some overlap with that and posting negative news? Prison Experiment meets Social Media (which weaponizes and amplifies).
Happy person speaking. I subscribe to the physical edition of several (paid) local news publications, mostly to keep tabs on local events, new businesses opening, and stuff that requires political engagement (votes, borough and city meetings, etc.) It makes me feel more connected to my community, and I never run out of fun stuff to do :)
I don't bother with online news; most of it is irrelevant to me. If a national story has some bearing on my life, it'll usually end up in the local Sunday paper anyway.
I can definitely recognise similar patterns in my own behaviour and how they relate to mood. Infamy is very effective at rallying what is essentially an ad-hoc community, and so is viscerally attractive when I feel lonely or have feelings adjacent thereof. But the company I find in misery ends up being especially unproductive and unconstructive and hostile to calls to action that are collaborative, or can't guarantee immediate ROI. And so, the payoff I need to feel better, collaborative edification and mutual restoration of hope, doesn't happen, and so I can find myself having spent hours hopping from outrage to outrage, getting progressively worse until exhaustion demands a rest that (hopefully) provides the respite and reset required to pursue a more productive alternative.
Or consume different news. Ad-driven news is vastly more crisis-impending than subscription-driven news, which tends to be more contemplative as well as zoom out and explore regions and issues that aren't in spotlight. (I read the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Economist, Information, Monde Diplomatique and Paris Review, in addition to a number of stacks.)
We've got huge quantities of multilingual news data with social metrics (e.g. newsapi.ai), classification models, research APIs for Twitter.
But Nature's running Upworthy and dictionary-based classification? It's almost low-N by today's standards. This is the sort of paper that could have been written a couple of decades ago.
There was no need to reach for more sophisticated tools; these were sufficient to give them the results they wanted.
I suspect you wanted research where people look at the world and discover what it means. This is the other kind, where people decide what they want the world to look like, then paint their data to reflect that.
Former newspaper city editor here. With few exceptions, positive stories -- although readers clamored for them in surveys -- never drove newsrack sales the way negative stories did. That's why we had a whole section for feel-good features but they didn't usually get prime front-page real estate.
In the age of infinite content, headlines have become a sort of drama arms race. But the basic dynamic of what works and what doesn't for drawing in readers hasn't changed.
Do you think this is just how we're wired? What is so extremely disappointing to me is that, across many objective measures, many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite, thanks to this perverse incentive.
Most people don't read online news. Online news is a subculture at this point and they're not interested in happy stories so happy stories are not produced.
> many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite
Online news (as well as cable news) in particular has taken to farming any kinds of changes to society as moral decay. Airing or printing only outrage is a business model unto its own. See: Huffpost, Breitbart for examples.
Politicians are also pushing the notion that things are getting worse for support and those politicians are supported by news networks who may skew coverage.
I'd argue that people's impression of the world is going to be driven largely by their own perspective, not media. Borrowing a quote [1] from Stephen Pinker, probably the most visible advocate for 'things are getting better' :
"... the United States is an outlier among rich Western democracies, with a stagnation in happiness and higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity and premature death.... "
Many of these issues are ones people are going to be aware of, and that is going to impact, them on a day to day basis. And that's going to inform their decisions much more than whatever the news is saying. And that was written back in 2018 which absolutely feels like the "good ole days" compared to now a days!
I think the way the news is reported says more about us than it does about the organizations that do the reporting. If we didn't want all the negativity, we would reject it, and they'd stop reporting it. But that doesn't happen. So, essentially, we want all the negativity - yes, it's how we're wired. We just don't want to accept it.
It makes sense at a surface level, if you ignore negative information it could potentially lead to negative outcomes for yourself.
If you ignore positive news, what's the worst that could happen if you're caught unawares? Something positive or at least personally benign?
News of a bad thing happening to someone far away does not really impact survival as well.
The point was not about providing a good counter-example. I wanted to show that when one hand-waves away a behavoiur to an abstract selection criteria, one can easily come up with criteria that contradicts that notion.
I watched a farewell video of a very far right person dying of Covid. He didn't get vaccinated but I don't know if it was because he was anti-vax, didn't think Covid was real or didn't get a chance as this was early in the pandemic. It was a recording made from a hospital bed and uploaded to Facebook. As he was saying his goodbyes he said something like "...and tell Brandon (son) I love him, not to trust anyone, and no one will ever help you in life"
I realized that certain people indoctrinate their children, and this is the correct usage of the word, with a negative outlook on life. They ignore the altruistic nature of humanity for a distance based trust system. Assuming the son takes this message to heart he'll likely experience more problems because of his mistrust and when he examines his situation in life confirmation bias will prevent any self reflection. I don't understand why you reduce us to "scared and vigilant" and I wonder if that is a self fulfilling state.
hah, the person below you did a nice imitation. They forgot "Assuming the daughter" not son.
But more seriously, the reason people indoctrinate isn't because they want them to be negative, but to realize that being pessimistic is actually going to be a more reliable way to have a plan for life when no one is able to help.
For example, if your car breaks down and your cell phone battery is around 30%- you have time to make a few phone calls, but instead of wondering if your friend can pick you up (assuming he has a cheap pickup truck that can tow), you rationalize- he might be sleeping, working, unwilling to answer the phone. You have three phone calls to make, so you decide you'll compare the rates of the two nearest towing companies.
Which do you call? You have money and time to spend, but you don't want to be stranded for a very long time, even assuming you were able to pull your car over to the side of the curb. Being pessimistic is just being prepared, and similarly, you want to try to save for a rainy day.
> the reason people indoctrinate isn't because they want them to be negative, but to realize that being pessimistic is actually going to be a more reliable way to have a plan for life when no one is able to help
I take it you are a conservative. This is a perennial city people (liberal) versus rural folk (conservative) discussion that will never have a resolution.
Liberals generally don’t believe in the idea that "no one is able to help" because they live in larger urban populations that see the government as beneficial.
Conservatives tended to live in more rural areas where there weren’t as many people to help them, and they couldn’t depend on the government.
Urban living is more anonymous and alienating than rural living.
There are too many people in a city to form relationships with everyone, you don't know 99.9% of the people you see in daily life because there are so many moving around. On the other hand in a small village, most times you see another person it's a repeated interaction and you have met that person before.
So the rural conservative view and values on social interaction is more based on repeated interactions with people you already know, whereas the urban liberal has values and prefers systems that work well with anonymous people; the government needs to step in to help people in need (because their neighbours won't).
In my experience, neither urban or rural communities are impersonal.
Suburbs, however, are dystopian soul destroying hellscapes. Simultaneously parasites feeding off of the prosperous urban areas while desecrating previously productive lands.
Urban and rural peoples are natural allies, kept apart by pro suburbanite propaganda. The American Dream™ was presented as McMansions, endless pavement, strip malls, and 2 SUVs in every garage.
I have lived in suburban, urban, and rural environments. I think the issue is more about whether globalization has changed all that. During the pandemic lockdown, many people were working from home, and some realized that paying for rent in NYC or SF wasn't worth it, if they couldn't go out and enjoy it, so it makes a lot more sense to work from home in a rural area if I am an IT person. That said, I don't think political viewpoints has anything to do with trust- when I was in the city, I didn't think "liberal" or "conservative" neighbors were more likely to be trusted. The point is that if one is raised believing there will always be a helping hand, it is better to not expect much, even if there is nothing wrong in asking for more help than supposedly more "individualistic" areas, which, in many cases isn't exactly reflected in rural vs. urban environments (e.g. cattle grazing was exploited by libertarians as cheap land leasing)
> The point is that if one is raised believing there will always be a helping hand, it is better to not expect much, even if there is nothing wrong in asking for more help than supposedly more "individualistic" areas
I don’t disagree with anything here, except there is a correlation between the amount of trust liberals and conservatives give to people in their community, and one user up above directly addressed how small towns generate trust between people they personally know. The only thing I would disagree with here is the notion that some people believe there is a helping hand to be had; I think this is more of a political myth. What I was originally getting at is that liberals believe government can and does help people, while conservatives, at least in the US, promote the idea that government should be hands off.
I don't disagree either, and maybe I worded it to indicate otherwise. While I think there is a difference between the notion that a helping hand exists or not and whether a person is entitled to advocate for government assistance, the two are typically correlated because liberals believe in a legal mechanism (voting) for seeing that type of assistance through a machine, the Democratic Machine (Tammany Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system) (I wouldn't even call many government services assistance, but programs that accomplish basic services, like National Parks management, etc).
I also think the GOP relies more on the patronage system now,
I think that best captures the divide, more so than specific political issues, although that does overlap alot- for example, the perception of crime and immigration, while not correlated, get grouped as a platform issue on the right, whereas the Democratic platform does not consider those issues in the same light.
There is another anthropological term for fear, that I can't remember but read a few days ago- I think it was a Dutch anthropologist who coined a term in the 70s and also developed a computer architecture.
Is missing out on something positive bad? Don't positive stories contribute to a positive outlook on life? Therefore missing these stories could be a negative?
I this this is a fair point. I would argue, though, that 99% of the negative news (or most news, for that matter) will have zero effect on 99% of the population (e.g. focusing on individual crimes vs. aggregate crimes or a systemic crime problem).
In an ideal world, news outlets aren't pushing news that is shocking for the sake of being shocking (and therefore, increasing viewership/readership), but pushing news that is actually relevant to a good percentage of their viewers.
Sure, report things like severe weather forecasts, boil water advisories, etc.
But I don't need to know about every crime, or every scandal in Hollywood, etc. -- and this is most of the negative information that's covered. Not the things that are genuinely relevant to most of us.
Has anyone tried a serious meta-approach: introducing the public to the notion and methods of contemplating the nature and consequences of the abstract phenomenon itself?
sometime around the 2016 US Presidential elections, when outragebait headlines had arguably achieved a local maximum, I will now never forget how I overcame headline rage forever.
I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter the back way, or something to that effect. I felt the all-too-familiar-at-that-point boiling rage enter my mind—this was an outrage! a clumsy attempt at making a political statement about racism, enacted through an act of mass racism. did these idiots not understand that they're not making things better for anyone, that their actions served only to divide rather than unite?! how could they not see this, it was so obvious?!? I could feel my blood start to boil: rrrrRRRRRAAAAUUUUUGHH—
suddenly, I had this moment of clarity out of nowhere, as though from God Himself: I was fully aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the whole point of this stunt was to cause outrage locally, and the whole point of the article about it was to spread the outrage globally, even though the article reporting on the event was politically opposed to the actions the students had taken. yet, in the end, their goal was the same: to cause outrage!
woah. "both sides" here want to cause me to be outraged, and here my dumb ass was, just letting it happen. why should I oblige either party? was I really so simple and manipulable that just seeing some words and photos on a screen about something dumb and wholly irrelevant to my own personal daily life could work me up this much? what the hell was wrong with me? why did I let myself fall for this bullshit?
since that day, I have never once felt that familiar blood-boiling rage as the result of reading a headline or news article again. I can't really explain it but something just clicked in my head that day, giving me insight into just how emotionally manipulative pretty much all "news" so obviously is, and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point!
I had nearly forgotten about this having ever happened until recently a very close friend saw a news article about something that had happened over a decade ago, politically framed such that it was relevant to contemporary politics, and it significantly emotionally affected him in a way that reminded me all too much about my past self. I talked him through this story and showed him how much better off I was today now that I choose to refuse to let news headlines and even stories massively emotionally affect me. it took awhile to talk him down from his irrationally outraged state but in the end he calmed down, heard what I had to say, and thanked me profusely for the perspective I gave him, as, much like the story that outraged me years ago, this too had caught him completely off-guard such that before he knew it he was an emotional mess, all because of something he read on the Internet, about something that had happened over a decade prior.
Had similar experience watching TV ads. It started with a beauty ad which was plainly targeting viewers’ body image insecurities. Was very jarring to recognize how dark and manipulative the glossy, “upbeat” ad truly was.
Then recognized same pattern in every TV ad afterwards, almost all target some sort of insecurity or feeling of lack.
I was surfing market analyses one day, and stumbled on this: in the US, the largest personal care product category was shampoo, but in India, it was skin lightening products. And then I found a multinational doing shampoo to be beautiful ads in the US, was doing whiter is better ad campaigns in India. Which long-term gave the former a rather different taste.
"dependent origination" is a name for that chain from a thought all the way via emotions and physiological reaction (blood boiling) to new thoughts and so on.
catching oneself in that circular road and taking another turn off that wheel, that aha!, that enlightening moment is what some people invest heavily into, time, energy even money.
and you have it just like so, ten years ago, from that news article on racists blaming anti-racists for a racist anti-racism gig...
Yeah, I actually get more annoyed when "my own" political side does this. They take the worst possible example of the other side and make outragous article about them. Yet I know most people on the other side are actually good people, with good intentions, we just disagree on a few points.
Yet all I ever see in the media are ridiculous parodies of the other side. I've basically stopped almost all politics reading at this point. It's no better than gossip columns, and big brother level entertainment, it's just packaged for people who think they're more intelligent than those who watch big brother.
I guess it comes down to caring more about engaging your base than it is appealing to a broader audience. Which is unfortunate.
> Yet I know most people on the other side are actually good people, with good intentions, we just disagree on a few points.
I think this is the attitude most people have if they stop consuming so much news. And I think it dissolves a huge amount of animosity we see between different groups in western society atm.
I have less of a side as I age. The opposing side would probably have a convert if they weren’t dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage.
I have a feeling a lot of people across the political spectrum feel the same. Some day one of the parties is going to find not pandering to the emotional appeals of their brand of extremists is actually a huge political gain. I hope for that day, but not much.
> The opposing side would probably have a convert if they weren’t dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage.
It's telling that I literally can't tell which side you're referring to, as both sides seem dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage. I guess amplifying that garbage is exactly what sells, which is why reporting of each side focuses on that.
> and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point!
I used to work at a food/recipe publication and had a similar experience -- users constantly complained that they wanted more healthy recipes, but those types of recipes always performed poorly. Meatloaf and other comfort foods dominated traffic.
This has been a good opening for niche creators on Youtube and such -- i.e., there are plenty of people out there interested in vegan, oil-free recipes, and that audience can go to a specialist on Youtube and the creator can be successful covering only that one niche. But in aggregate it's not going to outperform food that provides more dopamine, so the major food publications have to deprioritize it.
I suppose that depends on the meat you use and how else it's prepared.
Use a high fat ground beef and bread crumbs that'll soak up that fat, and I'm sure many would consider that unhealthy.
Use lean meat and something else as filler (oatmeal is common when trying to fill out meat) and it would be less unhealthy, but far more prone to error, resulting in perhaps a tasteless brick.
Never read on meatloaf, but I'm sure a publication would go the "easier but fattier" route.
I wouldn't call it unhealthy, unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy. It does retain most of the fat from the ground beef which would cook out of normal burgers or hamburger steak. But it's also more filling than either of those due the fat and the inclusion of bread crumbs or oatmeal as filler.
The comment before mine set the binary condition. I'm not writing a dissertation here.
> A moderate amount, especially lean, is considered a net health positive by the vast majority of the relevant professionals.
I don't think that's true, but how do you define "net health positive". My understanding is that you are better off without it, but a little won't kill you.
And thus, because profit motive drives literally everything (because it's impossible to forestall a takeover if you're broke) then all news-media trend toward maximum tolerable negativity.
That is, there is a saddlepoint for how much negativity viewers desire.
While I don't personally know what the threshold for psychological damage from exposure to this kind of media is, I would guess it's lower than the average exposure level is now.
What got me to break out of this habit is realizing that the vast majority of what news sites/tv report on isn't remotely actionable or relevant for the average viewer.
It's basically something that scratches the itch of human curiosity, but with manipulative and lowest common denominator garbage.
We'd all be better off if we scratched that curiosity itch by reading about things we're interested in, rather than current events.
Most daily-or-faster reporting is so shallow that consuming the information may, at times, be a net-negative to your understanding of whatever issue they're reporting about.
I've moved towards this too, for better or worse. Between 18-25, I was very passionate about national politics and macroeconomics and consumed by following political news and fiery debates, as many young people are. As my adult responsibilities grew, I realized that the national political stuff was either irrelevant to my day-to-day life experience and / or not something that I could affect much (not actionable, as you said), and the return-on-investment of my time and attention on more immediate things was much higher. In my 30s now, I almost exclusively read and listen to things closely related to my own work and family finances and health. I guess there's a downside of political disengagement for society, though. Old people seem to become more engaged again when they have more free time, but maybe we end up with this donut hole of representation among people who are in the middle of working full-time and raising kids.
Do these fiery debates help? I say as someone who also was like this in my late teens.
I do local advocacy for transit and civic planning related purposes in a US city. A lot of the "work" is really boring, just going to long public meetings and listening to SMEs drone about very specific issues. But that's where the sausage gets made. Our local transportation department is very receptive to the public's urban concerns and is doing a lot of great work. But they're blocked right now. Not just because their funding is uncertain or due to cranky old neighbors, but mostly because they have staff shortages as Baby Boomers retire. There's nothing we activists can do about this, we can't campaign for a measure or bill that puts butts into seats.
If you go to Youtube or online North American urbanist forums though, folks aren't interested in these local issues at all. A lot of it is raving and ranting about how the US puts cars first and hates its people. This is fun to get emotional about (and believe me I've had enough close run-ins with cars as a pedestrian or cyclist to feel the rage) but doesn't actually materially affect our local urban conditions. But it's a lot less fun to talk about budget appropriation and staffing politics and much more fun to get angry at the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, so nobody does.
I'm not saying these topics aren't important; if you're new to the issue it's important to understand why North American built environments are the way they are. But what's more important is working to change the reality around you, not getting wrapped up in online debates.
There's a reddit post that pointed out how much of an outlier your personality has to be to be someone that actively posts online. These online discussions are almost never worth the effort and don't really represent average people.
Yup. Doing actual policy work negates a person's interest in infotainment (keyfabe).
Similarly, working on campaigns reveals that most political commentary isn't even wrong, so not even worth debating.
PS-
> about how the US puts cars first
And the flip side: How anything less than full throated praise for and life long devotion to cars, such as asking for safety improvements like sidewalks and bike paths, is part of a grand anti car conspiracy. Sure. There's 1.4b cars in the world, and growing. And me peddling to work 3 days a week is an existential threat to the world order.
Sure, but there's no deep secrets. Take away the partisan criticisms and smarter-than-though HN commentary, and there are few surprises (unless you go deep into news coverage). Newspapers are generally best - much more scale and room than TV or other options, and the most well-regarded have reputations for good reasons. (The trick is to ingnore the opinion pages, which are often no better than long HN comments.)
* NY Times: Attacked from all sides by those in power, and for a good reason.
* Washington Post: Smaller, and if I had to say, maybe not quite up to the NY Times
* Financial Times: Expensive, but on par IMHO with the other two.
* The Guardian can be excellent, but signal-to-noise (consequential-to-not) ratio isn't as strong as the others, IMHO.
* The Economist: Free-market ideologues, but if you have to read one thing, they are most efficient. Not really journalism (they don't go out and dig up information, nor report their factual basis transparently with quotes, etc.; but short, efficient, sophisticated, very wide-ranging analysital pieces.
* Poltico: I'm not sure what I think of them; I don't trust their ownership entirely [0], but they are seriously competing with the others, at least in national/international political news.
The Wall Street Journal seems serious, but it's run by Rupert Murdoch. If people trusted the WSJ before, I don't know how they do now after the Dominion case revealed Murdoch openly manipulating reporting to favor Trump and others.
----
Another good options is curated news summaries. I'd look up Just Security's, for example. Politico also has some newsletters like NatSec Daily. Memeorandum can be great, if you skip over the less important stories.
[0] Look up the NY Times reporting on Axel Springer's owner (Axel Springer bought Politico recently).
This is in no way an attack on you, but your post shows exactly the problem. You first wrote
> With few exceptions, positive stories
and then you wrote
> a whole section for feel-good features
"Positive news" is more or less orthogonal to "feel-good features". When I moved to my current job, I had the option of watching Kansas City news or Topeka news. The KC news stations took the route you're suggesting. Everything was negative and intended to shock/alarm ("Joe Smith was murdered and then the police were involved in a car chase to catch the murderer. When they shot out his tires, he took his own life.") The Topeka stations did mostly positive news, with some negative mixed in. As any sane person would do, it didn't take long for me to go with only the Topeka news. It was nice to know what was going on in the area, to see a review of a local restaurant, or to hear about the debate on a change in the sales tax. I don't watch the news to see someone's good luck.
I've noticed some programming and sources have sort of jammed feel-good pieces in some weird attempt to counter balance things. People dying on Ukraine, banks defaulting, Little Timmy in nowhere USA is taking steps to setup his lemonade stand and donate to the local food shelter to make a difference.
Don't get me wrong, I think efforts like Little Timmy's are great and in the scope of their lives is probably significant. It doesn't however hit the level of magnitude/significance and scope of their negative counter parts. It's only in local news sources that I tend to see a better balance of things that truly effect, are relevant to me, and aren't full of doom and gloom.
Also there are often "feel good" stories that are really quite negative in disguise. "Little Timmy started a GoFundMe to pay off his school lunch debt, and all his friends donated!" and other dystopian "seems nice but is actually horrifying" content.
Spectacles drive the news. It's easier to frame a negative issue as a spectacle than a positive. Say you have a local festival. That's supposed to happen. There's no news there except for the time and date the festival is open, and any new or interesting things can be found by going there. Car drives into a festival and runs over some people? Wow, unexpected. Might wanna read about that and get the details.
But if your local high school football team wins a state title? You'll sell that paper out. Local refinery explodes? Likewise.
If the news is inherently skewed towards negativity then maybe it's not as valuable as we assume it is.
This isn't an argument against the free press or anything. As bad as bias and fearmongering in news is, adding government oversight would make it way worse. It's just a thought experiment.
To elaborate, if news is inherently skewed towards negativity (and I'm just taking that at face value), then maybe it shouldn't be revered as much as it is (by my estimation). I think people tend to think that news is sacred - more is better and it should face no challenges to its existence. But I also think we find ourselves in a predicament that we don't associate with times where news consisted of a daily paper and perhaps the radio. I'm not sure those times were any less prone to bias an negativity. The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news.
I'm not really sure what sort of attitude change or direction this would dictate. Like I said, it would be terrible for the government to limit news, and this negativity exists because there is strong demand for it. I guess I think people just shouldn't watch the news much, with some exception. I mean if you look at cable for example, it's virtually all garbage.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. In particular what "knowledge of the news" is.
What I'm getting at is that the premise that news is mostly negative seems to pretty clearly dictate that we would be better off without most news. Yet this seems to contradict a pretty wildly held belief that getting rid of news is troubling.
I think what they mean is that, someone knowing what is happening in the world, and being able to discuss those things, could be seen as them being part of a certain level/caste in society. Being able to discuss issues, being seen as intelligent and knowledgeable.
Ie, you will be looked down on in some circles if you are not aware of what is going on. Knowing what someone else doesn't know is a way of being better than them. Or signalling that you are better than them.
It's not usually as overt as this, but it's there.
I will admit that while reading the news I have on occasion consciously committed certain details about recent events to memory knowing I had an upcoming social gathering specifically for this purpose.
There's a whole category of widely believed and oft repeated historical myths that originated from journalists trying to sell newspapers, writing articles that were later cited as "contemporary accounts" once the truth had faded from living memory.
A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was no public panic caused by the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of these things were reported by the media at the time.
Think of the stories you see day to day and imagine in 100 years if these are the go-to source for information about our time how skewed a picture you would have of how things actually were.
That's interesting. I'm not sure what you point is. I think it reinforces my point that news in the past wasn't necessarily more informative. I'm not really sure though.
That it has never lived up to being the bastion of truth and democracy it's sometimes made out to be, it has always been about getting eyeballs and selling ads.
These examples are more "sensational" than negative, but it is essentially the same idea.
>it has always been about getting eyeballs and selling ads.
And setting the record straight, where "straight" is whatever the powers-that-be want.
We even have an age old saying for this: History is written by the victors.
Historical records, and by extension journalism, have never been concerned about recording the facts. They have always been concerned only about defining the narratives and truths for the powers of the time.
> A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was no public panic caused by the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of these things were reported by the media at the time.
Why should I believe you, a random person on the Internet?
> The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news.
I think you’re close. There was a lot less repetition of news. Now the need to fill endless hours with content means stories are repeated ad nauseam. Keep in mind that repetition is known and used as a torture technique. “Repetition is an important neural linguistic programming interrogation tactic to influence the target mind” [0].
Its valuable to us because of how our brains work. Learning a piece of info that is bad actually adjust our internal networks more effectively than learning what is good.
It works for ML too. If Tesla had a set of training data that was inversed, ie the vast majority of cars were involved in a crash, it would have a fully working level 5 autonomous autopilot 2 years ago.
Its much more efficient to have the knowledge of statistically improbable but bad actions to avoid, rather to have a set of good actions where you don't know where the boundaries are.
That’s an interesting take. I’m not sure I fully agree. Lots of things are scary. But not everything that is scary is worth constantly defending against. When the news oversamples or misrepresents then people will orient themselves towards a worse world that doesn’t exist. It leads to unjustified resentment and animosity.
Its not about defense, its about information efficiency. Bad events are rarer, and knowledge about them is more valuable than good events.
Lets say that you had to walk through a minefield with a set number of mines. You could pay me $10 for a piece of information. I can either tell you a spot with a mine, or a spot without one. How do you spend your money?
1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you.
2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions.
3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else).
---
#1 is the reason that news feels important enough that tuning it out completely feels irresponsible, but it's a very small component of most news.
#2 is perhaps necessary for democracy to work, but it's so easy to manipulate, and the incentive to manipulate it is so high, that it's questionable whether this type of news has ever existed without being more manipulation than fact---and this has been true since long before the internet.
#3 is the real reason most people (myself included) read news, even when they convince themselves it's #1 or #2. And it becomes unhealthy because, as long as you're convinced you need to care deeply about what you're reading because it's actually #1 or #2, it will inspire constant anxiety.
I would be interested to see a type of (perhaps government-funded) news service whose sole purpose is to publish only news that fits into category #1: if it is not reasonably likely to affect the average reader in an actionable way in the next 6 months, then it can't be published in this outlet.
For a long time, Al Jazeera was great on anything that didn't directly impact Qatari domestic politics.
PBS is pretty fantastic overall and serves a lot of niches that aren't served by commercialized media and really shouldn't be.
Like yes if you set out to make a state-sponsored propaganda agency then that's what you get (see: Voice of America, etc), but state sponsorship of media doesn't inherently corrupt. If anything it's the opposite and really the accusations of bias end up being a way to try and control coverage that you find inconvenient and force faux-centrism (see: NPR).
PBS is essentially corporate media, getting ~15% of its budget from government. NPR is even less at ~2%.
Corporate vs. public ownership matters a lot less than institutional standards and the org's cultural commitment to a rigorous journalistic mission. BBC has a relatively strong commitment; NPR (my favorite whipping boy for bad journalism packaged as Thinky Stuff) does not.
That's a pretty facile analysis. PBS and NPR both have affiliate models where the dozens of local public radio and tv operate independently and are funded separately utilizing the affiliate network to buy and sell content. They are mostly funded by membership, by government indirectly via CPB grants, and sponsorship.
You're right about the affiliate model. But most NPR stations in all but the largest markets predominantly run nationally syndicated content. Creating and syndicating that content is the NPR mothership's largest cost center, averaging 58% of operating expenses FY18-FY22.
Corporate sponsorships are, at an average 39% during the same period, the largest source of funding. Contributions (what we'd call donations) are 12%.
Put another way: Local donors may (or may not -- I don't know) form the backbone of funding individual stations. But corporate sponsorships fund most of the content that appears on most of the stations, and also funds its distribution.
I don't know how others do it, but my main tools are:
* Reading rather than watching/listening.
* Going out of my way to consume content from authors/publications whose worldview I disagree with. Ditto for non-U.S. sources.
* Filter based on seriousness rather than passion. The whole information ecosystem is full of people and institutions ready to be passionate about almost any topic; the number willing to be serious is a lot smaller. This, more than any other filter, will improve your news-consuming experience.
* Read what the journalists are reading to get their story ideas. That means niche-y Substacks, newsletters and industry websites.
Investigative journalism: There are some nonprofits doing an very good job, like ProPublica. But too often, those newsrooms are political/cultural monocultures. To use the ProPublica example, you're much, much more likely to see stories about evil billionaires and how government should have done something(tm), than investigations about how, say, government is holding people back.
Some of this stems from hiring trends in journalism, which have skewed more and more to hiring coastal, degree-holding (relative) elites compared to the more blue-collar newsrooms of the past. Hire for monoculture, get monoculture results.
But the other part is funding diversity -- left-leaning donors have embraced nonprofit journalism in a way right-leaning donors have not.
When the right gives to journalistic efforts it tends to take the form of local investigation (and there are some GREAT reporters doing local-market work with that model), open-the-books efforts aimed at government transparency or, these days, own-the-libs clickbait. This reflects the growing delta between how much the right and left trust the press in the U.S.
Are you implying PBS does not have a commitment to a "rigorous journalistic mission"? It seems quite disingenuous to lump PBS and NPR as "corporate media" in the same light as corporate media entities like Fox News, CNN, et al.
Since we are speaking of reasonable people, most reasonable people would define "corporate media" as for-profit entities either privately owned or with shareholders and which rely primarily on advertising to turn a profit. Nothing in that definition defines PBS or NPR as "essentially corporate media". What you are probably angling at is corporate underwriting -- in which case I can only direct you to read their statements of editorial standards and independence found on their websites. Now I suppose you will have to take their word here...but if not, then it's just an endless rabbit-hole of debate.
Now I won't say PBS or NPR are above criticism -- and as the kids say, "there's a lot to unpack here", but let's be honest, is NPR's journalism really low-quality? Or is it more likely you have a bit of grievance with NPR because you feel they do not favor your own particular political bias? Since we are internet strangers and have little context to go on, I can only assume the latter is the most likely.
I suggest the opposite. I'd like a proof that there is no government involvement.
Believe it or not, I think the closest to this is ideal is 4chan /pol/. It's not backed by any major corporation (unlike HN which is backed by Y Combinator), it's not partly owned by Tencent/China (unlike Reddit), and so on. There's no algorithm, there's no karma, there's no blue badge, it barely scrapes by using shady NSFW ads. That's the closest to the libertarian anarchy ideal we had in 90s.
There's of course alphabet agencies mining data and pushing narratives, but that's fine.
I don't see how an unmoderated, anarchic space like 4chan is close to what I described; the entire point of what I had in mind is a very specific kind of moderation: stories are only published if (a) they're reasonably likely to materially affect some significant portion of readers sometime in the next 6 months, and (b) there's something they can do about it or in response to it.
For example, if the readership of this news service was entirely US-based, then it would only publish a single article on the Ukraine war---when it started---and then might only ever mention it again if it has a direct practical effect on US residents, like travel restrictions.
> (a) they're reasonably likely to materially affect some significant portion of readers sometime in the next 6 months, and (b) there's something they can do about it or in response to it.
That's the entire point. Who are you to decide that? How can you quantify 'likelyhood to be materially affected'? How can you empirically determine if 'someone can do something about X'?
Your opinion is worth the same as the next guy's. Anarchy and no moderation whatsoever, in this context, is always better no matter how you try to rationalize it. The only problem is that it makes is harder to tell the signal from the noise (noise being fake stuff, tangential topics, hearsay, bullshit, etc.). But the opposite is much much worse.
I get the sense that you think I'm saying more here than I actually am. I'm not proposing that this is the only kind of news that should exist, only that it would be nice if it existed for the kind of people that want to read (only) this kind of news.
And I'm generally in agreement that most attempts to quantify 'truth' in media are hopelessly dependent on personal bias---but this mostly shows up in category #2 in my list. In things where you'd never know the difference if it were true or not, because it would never affect you either way.
The reason I thought a news service like this would work better as a government service than a private entity is because a government news service's commitment to the principles I listed could be defined by enforceable laws. "Likely to materially affect people" is something that you could reasonably argue about in a courtroom, just as much as other fuzzily-defined legal concepts like libel or false advertising.
I'm imagining a news agency whose legal responsibilities were defined in such a way that it could be sued if one of the following happened:
1. It reports something that no reasonable person would believe meets the criteria.
2. Readers experience some kind of material harm that could have been avoided if they had read news reported in another outlet but not this one. And this harm is not the result of the reader being in some very small minority of readers (say, <1%), because after a certain point this will always be true for things that affect a very small number of people.
I understand what you're saying, and it would definitely make for an interesting experiment. If every news piece meets that criteria, it would be a very specific subset of news, but valuable nonetheless.
> …a government news service's commitment to the principles I listed could be defined by enforceable laws.
The problem is whoever controls the government and controls the news is also the one enforcing the laws.
You want to see suppression of “fake news”, aka anything that makes the ruling party look bad, then look no further than government run media services.
I think they thought long and hard before they add freedom of the press to the bill of rights.
NPR does a half-assed good job of providing unbiased news (they unironically claim that title) as long as it isn’t some hot button issue like Roe v Wade. In those cases they go into full on partisan politics propaganda machine mode. My absolute favorite, as I enjoy the absurd, was trotting out some kids who grew up in foster care with the implication that they would have been better off if their mother had had an abortion. Just an example, not a statement of purpose.
The executive branch is in charge of enforcing the laws and is also traditionally the leader of the party.
Congress can pass all the laws it wants but they have no power to ensure they are being acted upon. And sometimes have no power to stop them from being violated like the whole Trail of Tears thing where a sitting president blatantly violated the law with no repercussions.
Summed up NPR pretty well. I listen to NPR, but sometimes it gets a bit much on the partisan stuff. However, they are still my choice for anything news related. I noticed a big change in them around the 2016 election when they shut down their comment section.
Since you brought up that abortion segment, here is another from last November when they ran audio of an actual abortion. Beware - it's brutal:
> Anarchy and no moderation whatsoever, in this context, is always better [...] the opposite is much much worse.
Why do you think this? What is your basis for this claim? Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda, so your claim that the only problem is distinguishing signal from noise is false by your own stated standards.
Agenda in reporting is a problem, there is no question, but I don’t buy for a second that anarchy is “always” better or even often better. I would agree that there are times when it helps, but I think it’s closer to few and far between, and that the noise and chaos in the mean time is detrimental and damaging to someone’s ability to see truth when it does come through. To use the example from this thread, 4chan is usually demonstrably and objectively worse than any mainstream news at sharing important, relevant, and true information.
> 4chan is usually demonstrably and objectively worse than any mainstream news at sharing important, relevant, and true information.
Are you talking about trivial news reporting ("this thing happened today")? If so, yes.
If you're talking about important questions in society, no. I mean, if you want full-on propaganda you can read the New York Times or The Atlantic, or Washington Post, etc. Aside from tangible reporting, your probability of finding truth about important questions in society is extremely low, while they tout it to be really high -- extremely disingenuous. And yes, in all of these places the Opinion section has adquired so much relevance that they are no longer newspapers in the traditional sense.
On the other hand, if you want actual truth, you'll have to read through tons of bullshit, slurs, memes, jokes, fake news, fake tweets, CIA narratives, Mossad/JIDF narratives, but it will be there... buried somewhere deep in a 4chan thread. The great thing about this is that there's no pretense, it's: come at your own risk, use common sense, take everything with a grain of salt, "everything said here is satire".
> Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda
That's definitely true, there's even specific slurs for those pushing propaganda. But that's the beauty of it, there could be conflicting narratives being pushed at once, and there's no way to tell whether someone believes it or is just shilling. At the end of the day, it's just an anonymous comment and you can only determine it's value based on the content of the post. You can't even safely tell if it's a human or a bot nowadays.
I have no doubt in my mind that the free flow of information is always better. Now, you can argue about the practicity of this, and you'd be right. The thing is, this is a symptom of the state of affairs. Think about it, there are 8 billion people walking on Earth, a great proportion of which have a computer with an internet connection and a high quality camera in their pockets. That means that this year will be the most commented on, most recorded in human history by far. On top of that, there are governments around the world spending billions of US dollars in propaganda. It's no wonder 'truth' is obfuscated and almost impossible to come by.
I appreciate the response, but yeah I just don’t buy that 4chan is better on any axis ever, especially for important world news. I see and acknowledge that you lack trust in mainstream news and your government, and there’s probably a longer story there, but I think it’s objectively false to claim you’ll find more truth on 4chan than mainstream news. It might be fair to say that certain subjects will be discussed that you wouldn’t see on TV, then again there’s almost no way to tell, and the stuff on 4chan is is rarely if ever made by people with any qualifications or expertise in the subject.
This twisted argument seems to be claiming that 4chan is more trustworthy because it’s less trustworthy. But you’re demonstrating a double standard. If you can excuse and overlook the unending ocean of fake news and propaganda and bullshit on 4chan, then it’s only fair and consistent to do the same for mainstream news, where it’s also true that not everything is propaganda. You’re whole complaint boils down to you writhing against the “pretense”, but why does that matter, exactly? You either care about the truth or not, so the reputation shouldn’t be a factor for you, especially if you seek information from disreputable sources.
That's a fair argument, and I can't dispute it. Thinking about this made me reflect a different way to put it. It shouldn't be one vs. the other, but rather, 4chan (and similar forums) are a meta reading of the news and train you to see blind spots or what's not being reported, listen to arguments from both sides of the aisle, and sprinkles a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, most of the discussion revolves around an extract from a maintream newspaper article or mainstream personality, so you're exposed to the "mainstream viewpoint" no matter what.
So the bottomline of what I'm trying to say would be: if you exclusively consume mainstream news, you're probably more vulnerable to adhere to a narrow viewpoint, and maybe not even know there are people who disagree.
Similar to how HN operates when discussing a blog post, especially clickbaity posts -- when reading the comments you may see that there's more to the story or that the author is wrong about something. Sometimes that has helped me get a more nuanced perspective on a specific topic.
FWIW I upvoted earlier but wanted to add that I agree with this completely, and got surprised by your kindness and acceptance and self-reflection, enough that I feel sheepish about my tone above.
Isn’t the pretence important? If I talk to a bunch of people at the pub I’m likely to get various answers, increase the size of the pub and I’ll get to hear all kinds of different stuff and since it’s just people at a pub I can take it or leave it at my will. But when there’s perceived authority involved, a trusted newspaper, maybe a uni lecturer, that kind of thing, then it’s easy to be frustrated that you still have to treat them like people from a pub because they’ve spent considerable effort having me believe they’re better than that. Maybe it’s the difference in expectations between brainstorming and a final review, or a professional and an amateur.
Perceived authority of the source is important to the question of how many people trust & believe some information, yes, you’re right.
This is why “Q” claimed to be a high-level government official, for example, to attempt to establish authority. Pretense, or just experience or expertise or authority, is always there even with the stuff on 4chan.
The authority of a source is a shortcut for evaluating the truth of a source’s information. I think this is what @t12hrow meant by the question of practicality. It takes a long time to verify information on it’s merits alone.
But of course, that misses the nuance. Lots of US-based readers come from Ukraine, have friends or family in Ukraine, or friends or family in Russia or another neighbouring country. Of course, that might be fine if your media hypothetical outlet is just one of many. But then people will probably just still end up the ones with categories #2 and #3 regardless.
I wouldn't describe 4chan as karmaless. While the site bemoans the idea of upvotes (updoots), they'll also be the first to tell you how much they crave replies (which they call "you"s). We can see how much this affects the forum, with many people posting content, not because they think it is the best thing to post, but because they think it will get a reaction.
Yes, I've thought about that. In my opinion, the difference is that "you(s)" often reward controversial/contrarian takes. 4chan is already contrarian so what I mean here is going the opposite way. That is, you can go and post something that's completely against the culture of the forum and you'll get plenty of reactions. Even if it's just insults or slurs.
In a funny way, this incentivises swiming against the current, so there's never a consensus.
Karma on the other hand only creates a chilling effect, beacuse you're either banned or shadowbanned or somehow silenced. Take HN for example, if you post something controversial here not only it doesn't get more visibility, but it's grey-ed out and thrown to the bottom.
4chan is a sick community where mental illness is coveted. You are correct about the 90s and finding true niche communities you could hang with, sharing ideas and ideology like the BBS days. Today is very different and the amount of brain washing put forth by anti-America bots and propaganda/make a buck machines is ridiculous.
The reality these places are pushing, including HN, is out of touch with society. Even the European stuff is so out of touch I get crazy looks and responses when I’ve asked people (Europeans) about them.
Some qualification: It's small enough that each board has a global chrono view of posts, same with replies on posts. You can reply back and forth and still understand what's going on despite the other noise.
Given that there’s basically no way to interact besides posting or replying, I’m willing to bet most of that traffic is just lurkers. And another large chunk of that traffic probably congregates on boards like /a/ and /g/.
Some boards are incredibly slow given the popularity of the site as a whole, threads on boards like /n/ can stay up for weeks with barely any replies.
Citizens that are active and care, is what's necessary for democracy to work, that is, citizens which actively monitor, and participate in, political developments. Mere "informed voters" just voting once every 4-5 years do not really make democracy, even if we were to be generous and assume that the elections-very-X-years model and the existing representation hierarchies system are adequate.
Beyond that, for real democracy to work, the number one source of information of citizens should be real life experience with other citizens that they're actively learning from (their issues, grievances, etc with laws, political decisions, officials, etc) and collaborate with. Not the media.
In other words, voter who 99.9% of the time tend to their private affairs alone, can't make democracy work.
> the number one source of information of citizens should be real life experience with other citizens that they're actively learning from (their issues, grievances, etc with laws, political decisions, officials, etc) and collaborate with. Not the media.
How can the real life experiences of people I know possibly inform me about Ukraine, Chinese foreign policy, the SVB bailout, pandemic issues, etc. etc. etc.?
In what way are you allowed to change state level policy on those issues? Should you (and by extension, everyone in your democratic society) be allowed to do so?
> In what way are you allowed to change state level policy on those issues?
State level policy depends on public support or opposition. For example, re Ukraine, US policymakers and others - from Fox News to the Russians to internationalists and many others - are carefully monitoring public opinion and trying to shape it.
They are investing a lot of time and resources in that. Why are they doing it if public opinion doesn't matter?
>State level policy depends on public support or opposition.
Arguable - I'd say even unlikely in most real world situations. The US has recently had a wildly unpopular president who showed remarkable indifference to said public opposition. And relying on the media to gauge public support, or inform the populace in objective terms about the actions of their representatives, is inadvisable. It is not difficult to find instances of the same media organizations arguing both in favor and against public policies depending on the elected official enacting them[0][1]. In that regard, mainstream media seems more akin to a tool of propaganda, shaping opinion and manufacturing consent after the fact, than a useful organ of democratic governance.
The issue is that the control the population realistically has over their representatives in a democratic republic like every (?) modern democracy is by necessity of the size of said governments extremely limited. You can't have a referendum on every issue, so for the most part all the public gets to decide is if someone did a good job over the last X years. I recommend reading Democracy for Realists for a more in-depth look, but suffice to say that that level of interaction is far too coarse to guide public policy on immediate, subtle, and complex issues like Ukraine, COVID, or Chinese foreign policy. If something is not a core issue (i.e. something that the parties have split and staked their identities on, like women's rights, access to guns, immigration, etc) or is so universally desirable that everyone just wants more of it (i.e. visible short-term economic growth - note that long-term economic growth is generally not rewarded by the electorate), policymakers have essentially no incentive to actually care, because their voters won't care enough about those issues when it matters to sway their vote one way or another.
To your last question; the public's opinion of a decision doesn't influence whether a policymaker will make the decision. The point of the media is not to inform the public on what their representatives are doing, it is to shape the narrative of politics in the country. The actual decisions, the policy positions, are for the most part incidental to that. The causal arrow goes the other way. See also: [2][3][4]
Democracy begins at home. If there's no active citizenry with real-world knowledge from discussion, colloboration, and participation in domestic issues, then there's just individuals being governed like cattle, and they being informed on whatever foreign issue doesn't matter: they'll just be listening to whatever those in power will be doing, like they do in domestic issues.
Also notice how I said "the number one source of information" and not "the sole source of information".
And it's not just about "people you know". When far more citizens were far more politically active, e.g. in the sixties and seventies for example, you could learn about developments in any part of the US, and actual perspectives and experiences of people involved, be it workers, blacks, gays, student, veterans, and so on - without reading an establishment print media once.
People and citizens movements were networked and exchanging experiences and perspectives, and they didn't even have internet, they had to do it by mouth, snail mail, real world gatherings, indie press, and so on.
1. I think serious news media (not just any news media) is more reliable than 'people you know'. People you know, now manifested in social media, is the vector for the virulant phenomenon of disinformation and misinformation.
> When far more citizens were far more politically active, e.g. in the sixties and seventies for example, you could learn about developments in any part of the US, and actual perspectives and experiences of people involved, be it workers, blacks, gays, student, veterans, and so on - without reading an establishment print media once.
Could you give some examples or evidence of that? Did you experience it yourself? I'm not saying people had no information then, but I think they have far more now via the Internet (information including disinfo and misinfo).
Realize that while they might make it more likely for some, this is not the default. You should not feel anxious just consuming regular news. If you do you should probably talk to a doctor as this seems like an unhealthy thing.
I only recently discovered PBS news. I thought it was great to have #1, #2 without much entertainment. Realistically I stopped watching after a few weeks as it was kinda boring. There needs to be some #3 in any offering.
> 1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you.
> 2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions.
> 3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else).
The stories people classify as "positive" are exclusively category 3. Crime stories are entertainment, charity porn (especially about children doing charity work), stories about sick people and animals that got well again, all entertainment. Sports. Stories about soldiers and cops that are framed as inspiring and patriotic. None of it is news, it's messaging.
It only makes sense. News that affects people is mostly news of problems, or more accurately, actionable news. "Ongoing Processes Maintaining Themselves As Planned" isn't news that affects you unless it's a followup on "Potential Problem Found In Ongoing Process." The other actionable news is "Event Occurring That You May Wish To Take Part In," and the "news" doesn't care about those unless the "event" writes a check.
Do you think it's always been the case ? I have a strange belief that people before the 60s, through harsher lives, were a lot more resilient and thus less interested by petty news cycles.
I highly recommend reading old press clippings from your area. Reading headlines from 100 years ago personally made me feel as though not much has changed.
I feel like you could break up negative stories into a lot of batches. Would you say the type of negative stories have changed? Maybe towards more outrage or drama stories instead of fear-based stories?
I follow the Community Impact paper for my city. It's a Texas firm that has specialized papers for each area of each major city. It's filled with very informative mostly positive community developments -- oriented around new establishments, expansions, road improvements, city parks/rec proposals, and events.
Engagement is engagement. Ryan Holiday wrote about this years ago. He’s not an academic but has a solid grasp on the practical aspect of how to exploit this tactic.
this is a bad headline. Drives is a causal word, which is not established. Indeed, a much more reasonable hypothesis is that both negative headlines and consumption are caused by high information events, which are more likely to be negative.
TFA discusses how randomized controlled trials were used to obtain their conclusions which do actually discuss causation. You're free to disagree with the study but you are incorrect in calling the article out as having a causation fallacy.
Ever since I started my news diet I feel better overall and less stressed. Sure you can claim being apathetic/ignorant towards global current events makes me a bad person, but I do not care. To me, no human is designed to handle as much information input as we experience today.
Maybe I'll become informed again when news becomes more balanced, but I am waiting.
I stopped reading news a year ago for this reason, having left social networks for much longer. Of course I still have some exposure through HN, but overall I'm happier and don't miss them one bit.
A questionable headline- does it frame and try to link negativity with news, or choose this proposition because it's more likely to get clicks?
If I had unlimited cash and I was the editor, my front pages would be tongue-in-cheek nods to negative stories, like "CRIME ON PAGE 15" so they'd have to flip through a meadow of full page color ads of sakura trees, the textual equivalent of green noise.
Archive.org has a pleasant viewing experience if you flip through many of the fully-scanned magazines, simply because there are no digital popups- at least the ads on the pages are inert and unable to cause a virus.
The paper doesn't seem to introduce any novel understanding of the topic, just reinforce what we already assumed - maybe I'm missing something.
I'd be more interested in a study of "persecution" news, the us-vs-them narrative that has become much more common in the last 20-30 years and which I think drives a lot of the so-called polarity of political dialogue.
Also it would be interesting to see effects in decentralized publishing, e.g. youtube/tiktok & independent journalism, since those are so much more prevalent and integral to the broader media narrative now.
The headline of the article is a concept that most of us are familiar with, but what I think is the novel part is how they quantified it. If you are not planning on reading all 8000+ words, scroll to the results section and look at table 2 for all the headline variations and click through rates.
It's in the human nature. People are more worried about what can affect them in a negative way than are they content about good things. Maybe it's the survival instinct that triggers with bad news, maybe people consider the good news to be normal.
I try to click less on negative stories and more on positive stories. Negative things can make me angry or sad and I dislike being angry or sad. Also I find many negative news to be tiresome.
> I try to click less on negative stories and more on positive stories.
An alternative approach is to consume news from multiple countries (including your own). It's so interesting to see how all the fnords are different and just how conditioned you were to consume the one kind of media designed for your country.
A tale that predates the "yellow journalism" movement. One of my favorite anecdotes about Ben Franklin (via the Isaacson biography) was his tendency to deliberately gin up stories or controversy in his publications, using fake letters to the editor and other tricks. This was in the mid 1700s.
TV news has the same problem. After the Eagles broke up, drummer Don Henley nailed it with one of his first solo hits, Dirty Laundry:
I make my livin' off the evenin' news
Just give me somethin', somethin' I can use
People love it when you lose
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda' been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear
374 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 392 ms ] threadAnd of course, negative news would resonate more with a person who is in a bad mood.
Hope, being good enough, your time is your time and desire mitigation is a solution.
Productize and scale happiness
You can only paint with a broad brush but it's not exactly hard to pick out groups that will be net recipients of relative power and wealth in various collapse scenarios.
If the financial system collapses people who own capital in whole (e.g. some tradesman with his van full of tools) and people who own "promises" of things (the contents of your 401k, bank account, etc) lose. If high level government collapses people who are associated with alternate sources of organization and administration (local government, the church) win. If local government collapses people who depended a lot on those services lose and people who already went without win.
Remember, money and political capital are convertible to each other to an extent so that complicates things as well.
So it's perfectly rational for people to root for the kind of specific tumultuous change that would benefit them.
Those who don't have a lot to lose are more interested in a chaotic phase that rolls the dice and will quickly reshuffle the social order. The rich are moving into gated communities, they're not looking forward to living in a mad max world -- they're trying to keep that world out.
To get mad max, we have to have alternative energy production and storage be cheap enough for broke people to afford. Even then, they'd need to be able to afford enough of that energy that they can spend huge amounts of it riding around looking for other people to steal from rather than spending the energy on farming and heating their homes. Raiding might work for post apocalyptic populations in Florida or South Carolina. I imagine the climate might be conducive to that sort of thing. But in a world with no energy deliveries, spending what little energy you have so frivolously would quickly doom you and your family if you live in Minnesota, Illinois, or Wisconsin for instance.
Wait until you see those who want to create a nuclear war somewhere to make an apocalypse happen so that Jesus of Nazareth can come back. Then there are also ones who believe that the nuclear apocalypse must be global for Jesus to return. Have your next shock when you discover that these people actually have politicians among them. Then another one when you discover that the last US Sect. of State himself publicly admitted to be one of those...
Here's hoping that we're wise enough to not let reddit admits dictate world health policy again.
I set acceptable times for when I review stuff and even then I try hard to curate it as much as possible to avoid mindless scrolling. It is not easy and you get psychological jitters ( and you try to channel it some other ways ) and you can feel your hard trying to reach for that mouse.
But overall the results were/are worth it. Sure, we are facing eventual extinction of human race, but one could argue that has been the case for several decades now so I sleep much better.
More specifically the things you don't have control over.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-trolls-dont-j... (New research shows trolls don’t just enjoy hurting others, they also feel good about themselves)
And normal people love self-serving, simplistic, "just so" stories.
All reading the news ever did was make me upset about things I couldn't change.
I don't bother with online news; most of it is irrelevant to me. If a national story has some bearing on my life, it'll usually end up in the local Sunday paper anyway.
Or consume different news. Ad-driven news is vastly more crisis-impending than subscription-driven news, which tends to be more contemplative as well as zoom out and explore regions and issues that aren't in spotlight. (I read the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Economist, Information, Monde Diplomatique and Paris Review, in addition to a number of stacks.)
But Nature's running Upworthy and dictionary-based classification? It's almost low-N by today's standards. This is the sort of paper that could have been written a couple of decades ago.
I suspect you wanted research where people look at the world and discover what it means. This is the other kind, where people decide what they want the world to look like, then paint their data to reflect that.
In the age of infinite content, headlines have become a sort of drama arms race. But the basic dynamic of what works and what doesn't for drawing in readers hasn't changed.
Online news (as well as cable news) in particular has taken to farming any kinds of changes to society as moral decay. Airing or printing only outrage is a business model unto its own. See: Huffpost, Breitbart for examples.
Are they the things that matter to the people who have the perception, though?
I don't think it's all about the news.
"... the United States is an outlier among rich Western democracies, with a stagnation in happiness and higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity and premature death.... "
Many of these issues are ones people are going to be aware of, and that is going to impact, them on a day to day basis. And that's going to inform their decisions much more than whatever the news is saying. And that was written back in 2018 which absolutely feels like the "good ole days" compared to now a days!
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02...
I think the way the news is reported says more about us than it does about the organizations that do the reporting. If we didn't want all the negativity, we would reject it, and they'd stop reporting it. But that doesn't happen. So, essentially, we want all the negativity - yes, it's how we're wired. We just don't want to accept it.
Like OOP said, that was a surface level thought. Finding evidence in evolutionary psychology seems like a big leap from that.
News of bad event could directly impinge survival. News of a good thing happening to someone far away does not really improve comfort and stability.
The point was not about providing a good counter-example. I wanted to show that when one hand-waves away a behavoiur to an abstract selection criteria, one can easily come up with criteria that contradicts that notion.
I realized that certain people indoctrinate their children, and this is the correct usage of the word, with a negative outlook on life. They ignore the altruistic nature of humanity for a distance based trust system. Assuming the son takes this message to heart he'll likely experience more problems because of his mistrust and when he examines his situation in life confirmation bias will prevent any self reflection. I don't understand why you reduce us to "scared and vigilant" and I wonder if that is a self fulfilling state.
But more seriously, the reason people indoctrinate isn't because they want them to be negative, but to realize that being pessimistic is actually going to be a more reliable way to have a plan for life when no one is able to help.
For example, if your car breaks down and your cell phone battery is around 30%- you have time to make a few phone calls, but instead of wondering if your friend can pick you up (assuming he has a cheap pickup truck that can tow), you rationalize- he might be sleeping, working, unwilling to answer the phone. You have three phone calls to make, so you decide you'll compare the rates of the two nearest towing companies.
Which do you call? You have money and time to spend, but you don't want to be stranded for a very long time, even assuming you were able to pull your car over to the side of the curb. Being pessimistic is just being prepared, and similarly, you want to try to save for a rainy day.
I take it you are a conservative. This is a perennial city people (liberal) versus rural folk (conservative) discussion that will never have a resolution.
Liberals generally don’t believe in the idea that "no one is able to help" because they live in larger urban populations that see the government as beneficial.
Conservatives tended to live in more rural areas where there weren’t as many people to help them, and they couldn’t depend on the government.
There are too many people in a city to form relationships with everyone, you don't know 99.9% of the people you see in daily life because there are so many moving around. On the other hand in a small village, most times you see another person it's a repeated interaction and you have met that person before.
So the rural conservative view and values on social interaction is more based on repeated interactions with people you already know, whereas the urban liberal has values and prefers systems that work well with anonymous people; the government needs to step in to help people in need (because their neighbours won't).
Suburbs, however, are dystopian soul destroying hellscapes. Simultaneously parasites feeding off of the prosperous urban areas while desecrating previously productive lands.
Urban and rural peoples are natural allies, kept apart by pro suburbanite propaganda. The American Dream™ was presented as McMansions, endless pavement, strip malls, and 2 SUVs in every garage.
https://lit.newcity.com/2010/12/20/nonfiction-review-please-...
I don’t disagree with anything here, except there is a correlation between the amount of trust liberals and conservatives give to people in their community, and one user up above directly addressed how small towns generate trust between people they personally know. The only thing I would disagree with here is the notion that some people believe there is a helping hand to be had; I think this is more of a political myth. What I was originally getting at is that liberals believe government can and does help people, while conservatives, at least in the US, promote the idea that government should be hands off.
I also think the GOP relies more on the patronage system now,
What I find interesting is that there is a study of this viewpoint, and it's called Primals: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-Primals-Project-resear...
I think that best captures the divide, more so than specific political issues, although that does overlap alot- for example, the perception of crime and immigration, while not correlated, get grouped as a platform issue on the right, whereas the Democratic platform does not consider those issues in the same light.
There is another anthropological term for fear, that I can't remember but read a few days ago- I think it was a Dutch anthropologist who coined a term in the 70s and also developed a computer architecture.
Strange thing to say in a hospital bed? Also, if the doctors know you are dying of Covid you can hardly talk right? Seems fishy.
It's strange until you get the hospital bill in the mail.
Your investigation didn't involve a simple Google search?
In an ideal world, news outlets aren't pushing news that is shocking for the sake of being shocking (and therefore, increasing viewership/readership), but pushing news that is actually relevant to a good percentage of their viewers.
Sure, report things like severe weather forecasts, boil water advisories, etc.
But I don't need to know about every crime, or every scandal in Hollywood, etc. -- and this is most of the negative information that's covered. Not the things that are genuinely relevant to most of us.
I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter the back way, or something to that effect. I felt the all-too-familiar-at-that-point boiling rage enter my mind—this was an outrage! a clumsy attempt at making a political statement about racism, enacted through an act of mass racism. did these idiots not understand that they're not making things better for anyone, that their actions served only to divide rather than unite?! how could they not see this, it was so obvious?!? I could feel my blood start to boil: rrrrRRRRRAAAAUUUUUGHH—
suddenly, I had this moment of clarity out of nowhere, as though from God Himself: I was fully aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the whole point of this stunt was to cause outrage locally, and the whole point of the article about it was to spread the outrage globally, even though the article reporting on the event was politically opposed to the actions the students had taken. yet, in the end, their goal was the same: to cause outrage!
woah. "both sides" here want to cause me to be outraged, and here my dumb ass was, just letting it happen. why should I oblige either party? was I really so simple and manipulable that just seeing some words and photos on a screen about something dumb and wholly irrelevant to my own personal daily life could work me up this much? what the hell was wrong with me? why did I let myself fall for this bullshit?
since that day, I have never once felt that familiar blood-boiling rage as the result of reading a headline or news article again. I can't really explain it but something just clicked in my head that day, giving me insight into just how emotionally manipulative pretty much all "news" so obviously is, and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point!
I had nearly forgotten about this having ever happened until recently a very close friend saw a news article about something that had happened over a decade ago, politically framed such that it was relevant to contemporary politics, and it significantly emotionally affected him in a way that reminded me all too much about my past self. I talked him through this story and showed him how much better off I was today now that I choose to refuse to let news headlines and even stories massively emotionally affect me. it took awhile to talk him down from his irrationally outraged state but in the end he calmed down, heard what I had to say, and thanked me profusely for the perspective I gave him, as, much like the story that outraged me years ago, this too had caught him completely off-guard such that before he knew it he was an emotional mess, all because of something he read on the Internet, about something that had happened over a decade prior.
Then recognized same pattern in every TV ad afterwards, almost all target some sort of insecurity or feeling of lack.
catching oneself in that circular road and taking another turn off that wheel, that aha!, that enlightening moment is what some people invest heavily into, time, energy even money.
and you have it just like so, ten years ago, from that news article on racists blaming anti-racists for a racist anti-racism gig...
what a gift :-)
and thank you for sharing!
Yet all I ever see in the media are ridiculous parodies of the other side. I've basically stopped almost all politics reading at this point. It's no better than gossip columns, and big brother level entertainment, it's just packaged for people who think they're more intelligent than those who watch big brother.
> Yet I know most people on the other side are actually good people, with good intentions, we just disagree on a few points.
I think this is the attitude most people have if they stop consuming so much news. And I think it dissolves a huge amount of animosity we see between different groups in western society atm.
I have a feeling a lot of people across the political spectrum feel the same. Some day one of the parties is going to find not pandering to the emotional appeals of their brand of extremists is actually a huge political gain. I hope for that day, but not much.
It's telling that I literally can't tell which side you're referring to, as both sides seem dominated by raving lunatics obsessed with offensive garbage. I guess amplifying that garbage is exactly what sells, which is why reporting of each side focuses on that.
Welcome to the equanimity of Stoicism.
This has been a good opening for niche creators on Youtube and such -- i.e., there are plenty of people out there interested in vegan, oil-free recipes, and that audience can go to a specialist on Youtube and the creator can be successful covering only that one niche. But in aggregate it's not going to outperform food that provides more dopamine, so the major food publications have to deprioritize it.
Use a high fat ground beef and bread crumbs that'll soak up that fat, and I'm sure many would consider that unhealthy.
Use lean meat and something else as filler (oatmeal is common when trying to fill out meat) and it would be less unhealthy, but far more prone to error, resulting in perhaps a tasteless brick.
Never read on meatloaf, but I'm sure a publication would go the "easier but fattier" route.
It's not a mindset, any more than gravity is a mindset.
A moderate amount, especially lean, is considered a net health positive by the vast majority of the relevant professionals.
> A moderate amount, especially lean, is considered a net health positive by the vast majority of the relevant professionals.
I don't think that's true, but how do you define "net health positive". My understanding is that you are better off without it, but a little won't kill you.
That is, there is a saddlepoint for how much negativity viewers desire.
While I don't personally know what the threshold for psychological damage from exposure to this kind of media is, I would guess it's lower than the average exposure level is now.
32 links to stories above the fold for my browser
3 are emotionally neutral or positive
---------------------------------------
https://www.foxnews.com/:
6 links to stories above the fold
0 are emotionally neutral or positive
The only thing next is to just be the violence network
It's basically something that scratches the itch of human curiosity, but with manipulative and lowest common denominator garbage.
We'd all be better off if we scratched that curiosity itch by reading about things we're interested in, rather than current events.
Most daily-or-faster reporting is so shallow that consuming the information may, at times, be a net-negative to your understanding of whatever issue they're reporting about.
I do local advocacy for transit and civic planning related purposes in a US city. A lot of the "work" is really boring, just going to long public meetings and listening to SMEs drone about very specific issues. But that's where the sausage gets made. Our local transportation department is very receptive to the public's urban concerns and is doing a lot of great work. But they're blocked right now. Not just because their funding is uncertain or due to cranky old neighbors, but mostly because they have staff shortages as Baby Boomers retire. There's nothing we activists can do about this, we can't campaign for a measure or bill that puts butts into seats.
If you go to Youtube or online North American urbanist forums though, folks aren't interested in these local issues at all. A lot of it is raving and ranting about how the US puts cars first and hates its people. This is fun to get emotional about (and believe me I've had enough close run-ins with cars as a pedestrian or cyclist to feel the rage) but doesn't actually materially affect our local urban conditions. But it's a lot less fun to talk about budget appropriation and staffing politics and much more fun to get angry at the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, so nobody does.
I'm not saying these topics aren't important; if you're new to the issue it's important to understand why North American built environments are the way they are. But what's more important is working to change the reality around you, not getting wrapped up in online debates.
Similarly, working on campaigns reveals that most political commentary isn't even wrong, so not even worth debating.
PS-
> about how the US puts cars first
And the flip side: How anything less than full throated praise for and life long devotion to cars, such as asking for safety improvements like sidewalks and bike paths, is part of a grand anti car conspiracy. Sure. There's 1.4b cars in the world, and growing. And me peddling to work 3 days a week is an existential threat to the world order.
News generally doesn't "educate" (eg add knowledge to your views that then updates them), it confirms biases.
* NY Times: Attacked from all sides by those in power, and for a good reason.
* Washington Post: Smaller, and if I had to say, maybe not quite up to the NY Times
* Financial Times: Expensive, but on par IMHO with the other two.
* The Guardian can be excellent, but signal-to-noise (consequential-to-not) ratio isn't as strong as the others, IMHO.
* The Economist: Free-market ideologues, but if you have to read one thing, they are most efficient. Not really journalism (they don't go out and dig up information, nor report their factual basis transparently with quotes, etc.; but short, efficient, sophisticated, very wide-ranging analysital pieces.
* Poltico: I'm not sure what I think of them; I don't trust their ownership entirely [0], but they are seriously competing with the others, at least in national/international political news.
The Wall Street Journal seems serious, but it's run by Rupert Murdoch. If people trusted the WSJ before, I don't know how they do now after the Dominion case revealed Murdoch openly manipulating reporting to favor Trump and others.
----
Another good options is curated news summaries. I'd look up Just Security's, for example. Politico also has some newsletters like NatSec Daily. Memeorandum can be great, if you skip over the less important stories.
[0] Look up the NY Times reporting on Axel Springer's owner (Axel Springer bought Politico recently).
> With few exceptions, positive stories
and then you wrote
> a whole section for feel-good features
"Positive news" is more or less orthogonal to "feel-good features". When I moved to my current job, I had the option of watching Kansas City news or Topeka news. The KC news stations took the route you're suggesting. Everything was negative and intended to shock/alarm ("Joe Smith was murdered and then the police were involved in a car chase to catch the murderer. When they shot out his tires, he took his own life.") The Topeka stations did mostly positive news, with some negative mixed in. As any sane person would do, it didn't take long for me to go with only the Topeka news. It was nice to know what was going on in the area, to see a review of a local restaurant, or to hear about the debate on a change in the sales tax. I don't watch the news to see someone's good luck.
Don't get me wrong, I think efforts like Little Timmy's are great and in the scope of their lives is probably significant. It doesn't however hit the level of magnitude/significance and scope of their negative counter parts. It's only in local news sources that I tend to see a better balance of things that truly effect, are relevant to me, and aren't full of doom and gloom.
--The Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof
But if your local high school football team wins a state title? You'll sell that paper out. Local refinery explodes? Likewise.
But large notable news probably still drives clicks, yeah? The moon landing was the most watched program in history, after all.
This isn't an argument against the free press or anything. As bad as bias and fearmongering in news is, adding government oversight would make it way worse. It's just a thought experiment.
To elaborate, if news is inherently skewed towards negativity (and I'm just taking that at face value), then maybe it shouldn't be revered as much as it is (by my estimation). I think people tend to think that news is sacred - more is better and it should face no challenges to its existence. But I also think we find ourselves in a predicament that we don't associate with times where news consisted of a daily paper and perhaps the radio. I'm not sure those times were any less prone to bias an negativity. The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news.
I'm not really sure what sort of attitude change or direction this would dictate. Like I said, it would be terrible for the government to limit news, and this negativity exists because there is strong demand for it. I guess I think people just shouldn't watch the news much, with some exception. I mean if you look at cable for example, it's virtually all garbage.
I suspect discussing knowledge of the news is some kind of social signaling.
What I'm getting at is that the premise that news is mostly negative seems to pretty clearly dictate that we would be better off without most news. Yet this seems to contradict a pretty wildly held belief that getting rid of news is troubling.
Ie, you will be looked down on in some circles if you are not aware of what is going on. Knowing what someone else doesn't know is a way of being better than them. Or signalling that you are better than them.
It's not usually as overt as this, but it's there.
A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was no public panic caused by the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of these things were reported by the media at the time.
Think of the stories you see day to day and imagine in 100 years if these are the go-to source for information about our time how skewed a picture you would have of how things actually were.
These examples are more "sensational" than negative, but it is essentially the same idea.
And setting the record straight, where "straight" is whatever the powers-that-be want.
We even have an age old saying for this: History is written by the victors.
Historical records, and by extension journalism, have never been concerned about recording the facts. They have always been concerned only about defining the narratives and truths for the powers of the time.
Why should I believe you, a random person on the Internet?
I think you’re close. There was a lot less repetition of news. Now the need to fill endless hours with content means stories are repeated ad nauseam. Keep in mind that repetition is known and used as a torture technique. “Repetition is an important neural linguistic programming interrogation tactic to influence the target mind” [0].
[0] https://neuralguantanamo.com/no-touch-torture-techniques/
It works for ML too. If Tesla had a set of training data that was inversed, ie the vast majority of cars were involved in a crash, it would have a fully working level 5 autonomous autopilot 2 years ago.
Its much more efficient to have the knowledge of statistically improbable but bad actions to avoid, rather to have a set of good actions where you don't know where the boundaries are.
Lets say that you had to walk through a minefield with a set number of mines. You could pay me $10 for a piece of information. I can either tell you a spot with a mine, or a spot without one. How do you spend your money?
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1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you.
2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions.
3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else).
---
#1 is the reason that news feels important enough that tuning it out completely feels irresponsible, but it's a very small component of most news.
#2 is perhaps necessary for democracy to work, but it's so easy to manipulate, and the incentive to manipulate it is so high, that it's questionable whether this type of news has ever existed without being more manipulation than fact---and this has been true since long before the internet.
#3 is the real reason most people (myself included) read news, even when they convince themselves it's #1 or #2. And it becomes unhealthy because, as long as you're convinced you need to care deeply about what you're reading because it's actually #1 or #2, it will inspire constant anxiety.
I would be interested to see a type of (perhaps government-funded) news service whose sole purpose is to publish only news that fits into category #1: if it is not reasonably likely to affect the average reader in an actionable way in the next 6 months, then it can't be published in this outlet.
For a long time, Al Jazeera was great on anything that didn't directly impact Qatari domestic politics.
PBS is pretty fantastic overall and serves a lot of niches that aren't served by commercialized media and really shouldn't be.
Like yes if you set out to make a state-sponsored propaganda agency then that's what you get (see: Voice of America, etc), but state sponsorship of media doesn't inherently corrupt. If anything it's the opposite and really the accusations of bias end up being a way to try and control coverage that you find inconvenient and force faux-centrism (see: NPR).
Corporate vs. public ownership matters a lot less than institutional standards and the org's cultural commitment to a rigorous journalistic mission. BBC has a relatively strong commitment; NPR (my favorite whipping boy for bad journalism packaged as Thinky Stuff) does not.
Corporate sponsorships are, at an average 39% during the same period, the largest source of funding. Contributions (what we'd call donations) are 12%.
Put another way: Local donors may (or may not -- I don't know) form the backbone of funding individual stations. But corporate sponsorships fund most of the content that appears on most of the stations, and also funds its distribution.
Since you're an expert:
How do you find and consume news?
If you were made King/BDFL, how would you "fix" investigative journalism? A la the documentary "Fit to Print".
* Reading rather than watching/listening.
* Going out of my way to consume content from authors/publications whose worldview I disagree with. Ditto for non-U.S. sources.
* Filter based on seriousness rather than passion. The whole information ecosystem is full of people and institutions ready to be passionate about almost any topic; the number willing to be serious is a lot smaller. This, more than any other filter, will improve your news-consuming experience.
* Read what the journalists are reading to get their story ideas. That means niche-y Substacks, newsletters and industry websites.
Investigative journalism: There are some nonprofits doing an very good job, like ProPublica. But too often, those newsrooms are political/cultural monocultures. To use the ProPublica example, you're much, much more likely to see stories about evil billionaires and how government should have done something(tm), than investigations about how, say, government is holding people back.
Some of this stems from hiring trends in journalism, which have skewed more and more to hiring coastal, degree-holding (relative) elites compared to the more blue-collar newsrooms of the past. Hire for monoculture, get monoculture results.
But the other part is funding diversity -- left-leaning donors have embraced nonprofit journalism in a way right-leaning donors have not.
When the right gives to journalistic efforts it tends to take the form of local investigation (and there are some GREAT reporters doing local-market work with that model), open-the-books efforts aimed at government transparency or, these days, own-the-libs clickbait. This reflects the growing delta between how much the right and left trust the press in the U.S.
But I am very comfortable critiquing the consistently low quality of NPR journalism.
That doesn't mean that they're in the same league with the worst of cable news. However, some of the dynamics are similar:
* Journalists interviewing other journalists;
* Stories with no balance from opposing-view sources; and
* Facts regularly asserted by the journalist rather than a credible source.
Now I won't say PBS or NPR are above criticism -- and as the kids say, "there's a lot to unpack here", but let's be honest, is NPR's journalism really low-quality? Or is it more likely you have a bit of grievance with NPR because you feel they do not favor your own particular political bias? Since we are internet strangers and have little context to go on, I can only assume the latter is the most likely.
If I was drinking coffee my monitor and keyboard and mouse and desk would be ruined right now.
I hope it's a joke. No one could say this with a straight face
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64855760
I suggest the opposite. I'd like a proof that there is no government involvement.
Believe it or not, I think the closest to this is ideal is 4chan /pol/. It's not backed by any major corporation (unlike HN which is backed by Y Combinator), it's not partly owned by Tencent/China (unlike Reddit), and so on. There's no algorithm, there's no karma, there's no blue badge, it barely scrapes by using shady NSFW ads. That's the closest to the libertarian anarchy ideal we had in 90s.
There's of course alphabet agencies mining data and pushing narratives, but that's fine.
For example, if the readership of this news service was entirely US-based, then it would only publish a single article on the Ukraine war---when it started---and then might only ever mention it again if it has a direct practical effect on US residents, like travel restrictions.
That's the entire point. Who are you to decide that? How can you quantify 'likelyhood to be materially affected'? How can you empirically determine if 'someone can do something about X'?
Your opinion is worth the same as the next guy's. Anarchy and no moderation whatsoever, in this context, is always better no matter how you try to rationalize it. The only problem is that it makes is harder to tell the signal from the noise (noise being fake stuff, tangential topics, hearsay, bullshit, etc.). But the opposite is much much worse.
And I'm generally in agreement that most attempts to quantify 'truth' in media are hopelessly dependent on personal bias---but this mostly shows up in category #2 in my list. In things where you'd never know the difference if it were true or not, because it would never affect you either way.
The reason I thought a news service like this would work better as a government service than a private entity is because a government news service's commitment to the principles I listed could be defined by enforceable laws. "Likely to materially affect people" is something that you could reasonably argue about in a courtroom, just as much as other fuzzily-defined legal concepts like libel or false advertising.
I'm imagining a news agency whose legal responsibilities were defined in such a way that it could be sued if one of the following happened:
1. It reports something that no reasonable person would believe meets the criteria.
2. Readers experience some kind of material harm that could have been avoided if they had read news reported in another outlet but not this one. And this harm is not the result of the reader being in some very small minority of readers (say, <1%), because after a certain point this will always be true for things that affect a very small number of people.
The problem is whoever controls the government and controls the news is also the one enforcing the laws.
You want to see suppression of “fake news”, aka anything that makes the ruling party look bad, then look no further than government run media services.
I think they thought long and hard before they add freedom of the press to the bill of rights.
NPR does a half-assed good job of providing unbiased news (they unironically claim that title) as long as it isn’t some hot button issue like Roe v Wade. In those cases they go into full on partisan politics propaganda machine mode. My absolute favorite, as I enjoy the absurd, was trotting out some kids who grew up in foster care with the implication that they would have been better off if their mother had had an abortion. Just an example, not a statement of purpose.
I know that it is not as applicable today, but you should really look into the whole 'separation of powers' thing.
Congress can pass all the laws it wants but they have no power to ensure they are being acted upon. And sometimes have no power to stop them from being violated like the whole Trail of Tears thing where a sitting president blatantly violated the law with no repercussions.
What does the Judicial branch do again?
Since you brought up that abortion segment, here is another from last November when they ran audio of an actual abortion. Beware - it's brutal:
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/03/1133790770/what-its-like-insi...
Why do you think this? What is your basis for this claim? Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda, so your claim that the only problem is distinguishing signal from noise is false by your own stated standards.
Agenda in reporting is a problem, there is no question, but I don’t buy for a second that anarchy is “always” better or even often better. I would agree that there are times when it helps, but I think it’s closer to few and far between, and that the noise and chaos in the mean time is detrimental and damaging to someone’s ability to see truth when it does come through. To use the example from this thread, 4chan is usually demonstrably and objectively worse than any mainstream news at sharing important, relevant, and true information.
Are you talking about trivial news reporting ("this thing happened today")? If so, yes.
If you're talking about important questions in society, no. I mean, if you want full-on propaganda you can read the New York Times or The Atlantic, or Washington Post, etc. Aside from tangible reporting, your probability of finding truth about important questions in society is extremely low, while they tout it to be really high -- extremely disingenuous. And yes, in all of these places the Opinion section has adquired so much relevance that they are no longer newspapers in the traditional sense.
On the other hand, if you want actual truth, you'll have to read through tons of bullshit, slurs, memes, jokes, fake news, fake tweets, CIA narratives, Mossad/JIDF narratives, but it will be there... buried somewhere deep in a 4chan thread. The great thing about this is that there's no pretense, it's: come at your own risk, use common sense, take everything with a grain of salt, "everything said here is satire".
> Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda
That's definitely true, there's even specific slurs for those pushing propaganda. But that's the beauty of it, there could be conflicting narratives being pushed at once, and there's no way to tell whether someone believes it or is just shilling. At the end of the day, it's just an anonymous comment and you can only determine it's value based on the content of the post. You can't even safely tell if it's a human or a bot nowadays.
I have no doubt in my mind that the free flow of information is always better. Now, you can argue about the practicity of this, and you'd be right. The thing is, this is a symptom of the state of affairs. Think about it, there are 8 billion people walking on Earth, a great proportion of which have a computer with an internet connection and a high quality camera in their pockets. That means that this year will be the most commented on, most recorded in human history by far. On top of that, there are governments around the world spending billions of US dollars in propaganda. It's no wonder 'truth' is obfuscated and almost impossible to come by.
This twisted argument seems to be claiming that 4chan is more trustworthy because it’s less trustworthy. But you’re demonstrating a double standard. If you can excuse and overlook the unending ocean of fake news and propaganda and bullshit on 4chan, then it’s only fair and consistent to do the same for mainstream news, where it’s also true that not everything is propaganda. You’re whole complaint boils down to you writhing against the “pretense”, but why does that matter, exactly? You either care about the truth or not, so the reputation shouldn’t be a factor for you, especially if you seek information from disreputable sources.
So the bottomline of what I'm trying to say would be: if you exclusively consume mainstream news, you're probably more vulnerable to adhere to a narrow viewpoint, and maybe not even know there are people who disagree.
Similar to how HN operates when discussing a blog post, especially clickbaity posts -- when reading the comments you may see that there's more to the story or that the author is wrong about something. Sometimes that has helped me get a more nuanced perspective on a specific topic.
This is why “Q” claimed to be a high-level government official, for example, to attempt to establish authority. Pretense, or just experience or expertise or authority, is always there even with the stuff on 4chan.
The authority of a source is a shortcut for evaluating the truth of a source’s information. I think this is what @t12hrow meant by the question of practicality. It takes a long time to verify information on it’s merits alone.
In a funny way, this incentivises swiming against the current, so there's never a consensus.
Karma on the other hand only creates a chilling effect, beacuse you're either banned or shadowbanned or somehow silenced. Take HN for example, if you post something controversial here not only it doesn't get more visibility, but it's grey-ed out and thrown to the bottom.
The reality these places are pushing, including HN, is out of touch with society. Even the European stuff is so out of touch I get crazy looks and responses when I’ve asked people (Europeans) about them.
Of course, it's still small scale in relation to behemoths like Twitter, FB, Insta, TikTok.
Some boards are incredibly slow given the popularity of the site as a whole, threads on boards like /n/ can stay up for weeks with barely any replies.
Citizens that are active and care, is what's necessary for democracy to work, that is, citizens which actively monitor, and participate in, political developments. Mere "informed voters" just voting once every 4-5 years do not really make democracy, even if we were to be generous and assume that the elections-very-X-years model and the existing representation hierarchies system are adequate.
Beyond that, for real democracy to work, the number one source of information of citizens should be real life experience with other citizens that they're actively learning from (their issues, grievances, etc with laws, political decisions, officials, etc) and collaborate with. Not the media.
In other words, voter who 99.9% of the time tend to their private affairs alone, can't make democracy work.
How can the real life experiences of people I know possibly inform me about Ukraine, Chinese foreign policy, the SVB bailout, pandemic issues, etc. etc. etc.?
State level policy depends on public support or opposition. For example, re Ukraine, US policymakers and others - from Fox News to the Russians to internationalists and many others - are carefully monitoring public opinion and trying to shape it.
They are investing a lot of time and resources in that. Why are they doing it if public opinion doesn't matter?
Arguable - I'd say even unlikely in most real world situations. The US has recently had a wildly unpopular president who showed remarkable indifference to said public opposition. And relying on the media to gauge public support, or inform the populace in objective terms about the actions of their representatives, is inadvisable. It is not difficult to find instances of the same media organizations arguing both in favor and against public policies depending on the elected official enacting them[0][1]. In that regard, mainstream media seems more akin to a tool of propaganda, shaping opinion and manufacturing consent after the fact, than a useful organ of democratic governance.
The issue is that the control the population realistically has over their representatives in a democratic republic like every (?) modern democracy is by necessity of the size of said governments extremely limited. You can't have a referendum on every issue, so for the most part all the public gets to decide is if someone did a good job over the last X years. I recommend reading Democracy for Realists for a more in-depth look, but suffice to say that that level of interaction is far too coarse to guide public policy on immediate, subtle, and complex issues like Ukraine, COVID, or Chinese foreign policy. If something is not a core issue (i.e. something that the parties have split and staked their identities on, like women's rights, access to guns, immigration, etc) or is so universally desirable that everyone just wants more of it (i.e. visible short-term economic growth - note that long-term economic growth is generally not rewarded by the electorate), policymakers have essentially no incentive to actually care, because their voters won't care enough about those issues when it matters to sway their vote one way or another.
To your last question; the public's opinion of a decision doesn't influence whether a policymaker will make the decision. The point of the media is not to inform the public on what their representatives are doing, it is to shape the narrative of politics in the country. The actual decisions, the policy positions, are for the most part incidental to that. The causal arrow goes the other way. See also: [2][3][4]
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/BaldingsWorld/status/153358567932...
[1]: https://www.racket.news/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american (search "Khashoggi")
[2]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/01/marc-edwards-...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/c1fk5l/newsweek_in...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
Also notice how I said "the number one source of information" and not "the sole source of information".
And it's not just about "people you know". When far more citizens were far more politically active, e.g. in the sixties and seventies for example, you could learn about developments in any part of the US, and actual perspectives and experiences of people involved, be it workers, blacks, gays, student, veterans, and so on - without reading an establishment print media once.
People and citizens movements were networked and exchanging experiences and perspectives, and they didn't even have internet, they had to do it by mouth, snail mail, real world gatherings, indie press, and so on.
1. I think serious news media (not just any news media) is more reliable than 'people you know'. People you know, now manifested in social media, is the vector for the virulant phenomenon of disinformation and misinformation.
> When far more citizens were far more politically active, e.g. in the sixties and seventies for example, you could learn about developments in any part of the US, and actual perspectives and experiences of people involved, be it workers, blacks, gays, student, veterans, and so on - without reading an establishment print media once.
Could you give some examples or evidence of that? Did you experience it yourself? I'm not saying people had no information then, but I think they have far more now via the Internet (information including disinfo and misinfo).
Active citizens are like leaders of a group. A group needs a leader but a group also needs its members.
Realize that while they might make it more likely for some, this is not the default. You should not feel anxious just consuming regular news. If you do you should probably talk to a doctor as this seems like an unhealthy thing.
> 2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions.
> 3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else).
The stories people classify as "positive" are exclusively category 3. Crime stories are entertainment, charity porn (especially about children doing charity work), stories about sick people and animals that got well again, all entertainment. Sports. Stories about soldiers and cops that are framed as inspiring and patriotic. None of it is news, it's messaging.
It only makes sense. News that affects people is mostly news of problems, or more accurately, actionable news. "Ongoing Processes Maintaining Themselves As Planned" isn't news that affects you unless it's a followup on "Potential Problem Found In Ongoing Process." The other actionable news is "Event Occurring That You May Wish To Take Part In," and the "news" doesn't care about those unless the "event" writes a check.
Bad news usually does that - in that it helps us reflect that “well at least i’m not THAT guy!”
https://communityimpact.com/
Every state should have a similar paper.
Maybe I'll become informed again when news becomes more balanced, but I am waiting.
Great success.
If I had unlimited cash and I was the editor, my front pages would be tongue-in-cheek nods to negative stories, like "CRIME ON PAGE 15" so they'd have to flip through a meadow of full page color ads of sakura trees, the textual equivalent of green noise.
Archive.org has a pleasant viewing experience if you flip through many of the fully-scanned magazines, simply because there are no digital popups- at least the ads on the pages are inert and unable to cause a virus.
I'd be more interested in a study of "persecution" news, the us-vs-them narrative that has become much more common in the last 20-30 years and which I think drives a lot of the so-called polarity of political dialogue.
Also it would be interesting to see effects in decentralized publishing, e.g. youtube/tiktok & independent journalism, since those are so much more prevalent and integral to the broader media narrative now.
I try to click less on negative stories and more on positive stories. Negative things can make me angry or sad and I dislike being angry or sad. Also I find many negative news to be tiresome.
An alternative approach is to consume news from multiple countries (including your own). It's so interesting to see how all the fnords are different and just how conditioned you were to consume the one kind of media designed for your country.
The crime is marketing benign events as risk.
TV news has the same problem. After the Eagles broke up, drummer Don Henley nailed it with one of his first solo hits, Dirty Laundry:
I make my livin' off the evenin' news
Just give me somethin', somethin' I can use
People love it when you lose
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda' been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry