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).
Entirely understandable. But taken too far, it is sort of like a person being raped coming to terms with the abuse and actually learning to like it. News can be addictive, so its important to keep it in check. But too much ignorance makes you an unwitting slave.
...Maybe I didn't do a good enough job of trying to avoid that implication, but the point is not "I don't lie anymore" (implying "that would be a lie"), but rather "I now obsessively tell the truth in all situations even when it would be detrimental" (meaning "that would be omitting things I Absolutely Must Say").
In other words, even if I know just saying "ok" would probably work, I feel the need to somehow "brag" or otherwise disclose my proud ignorance, even if that only results in the literal opposite of what I want.
> 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.
> 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.
> Two gifts to Trump family from foreign nations are missing, report says
> Michigan Is Becoming The Anti-Florida On LGBTQ Rights ― And A Lot More
> Biden jokes he's ‘really not Irish’ because he's sober, doesn't have relatives ‘in jail’
> Just Because ChatBots Can't Think Doesn't Mean They Can't Lie
> Derek Chauvin, ex-officer convicted of killing George Floyd, pleads guilty to federal tax evasion
> As crucial legal test for Antifa ideology heads to trial, right-wing media also scrutinized
I live on the west coast and the above items you mentioned are pure sensationalism and have absolutely nothing to do with me, my state, or my local community. They add absolutely no value, informational or otherwise, to my life. They do not help me make more informed choices for me and my family or better my life in any discernible way.
You want to care about all that fluff and noise? Good for you. Just don't go around pretending to be a better person for that, or denigrating others who don't fall for that crap. People like you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Sure, there are some things that won't apply to you, but there are many that do. Also, why limit the scope of importance to state and local - it seems arbitrary. Things all over the world affect you. Look at climate change, as an easy example. (Also, the Antifa trial is in San Diego.)
> pure sensationalism
Political censorship in elite law schools, corruption by your President, AI dangers, justice, political oppression. Those things can certainly affect you and do, and will. The freedom of future Americans and people around the world depends on you - there's nobody else to do it for you. We're on our own. Let's get to work!
While you fight for this narrative, you surrender your power to others who are determing the course of your life. You are doing just want they want.
Sorry, yeah, we’re in agreement here, my comment was poorly worded — I meant the death rate and global economic damage would have been beyond catastrophic had it become more virulent as it became more transmissible. Yes, it was bad, really bad (my healthy 40y/o friend was on death bed at start), and to hear someone say it’s “not that bad” or “no worse than a bad cold” is beyond the pale. I think my lotto comment was more in line of, “do you know how fucked we would be had it become more virulent while you all played along with games of politicizing masks and vaccines?” Sigh.
One vote doesn't matter, in fact you get negative value out of it cause it takes time and exposes some of your private info to the public. I vote despite that, only cause I want to. There isn't a logical explanation for it.
C'mon, we can think deeper than that. One soldier doesn't matter; are militaries useless? One software developer can't do much on a sizeable project; should we abandon all software? All open source? One journalist, one HN comment, etc. etc. When can one person accomplish much by themselves?
You're right, one person alone doesn't accomplish much, yet somehow humanity has accomplished incredible things. We are social creatures, we naturally work together to build and do amazing things. Please join us! The sky is the limit, and not even that since 1961.
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.
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.
I think the situation is a bit more complex than this; or at least that it can be.
The thing driving consumption is engagement. So what can news provide that drives engagement?
Incomplete narrative.
Conflict is probably the most familiar place to find an incomplete narrative. The easiest way to present conflict is from a negative perspective. A problem that is missing a solution is very easy to engage with.
Mystery is another. What really happened? What will happen next? Speculate!
These are broadly considered "lazy journalism", and for good reason. Controversial narratives are trivial to construct, even when the controversy itself is fake. Mystery is either an incomplete story or speculative fiction.
---
The best works of journalism present a complete story, but that doesn't leave much to engage with. It might be interesting. It might be complicated. It might be important. Is that enough? Sometimes.
Stories that good don't get written every day. If they did, they would become relatively mundane. The news does get published every day. What can we do except to fill the days in between with conflict and mystery?
What kinds of engagement are actually positive? Can they compete?
---
I visit hacker news because it is thriving with examples of positive engagement.
New tools, educational exposition, open questions, historical exploration, etc. Many of the posts here aren't news per se, but they are better than vain controversy.
I think that news organizations should diversify their content and presentation formats. Find more alternatives to "new" than opinion and speculation. Present opportunities for objectivity instead of neatly wrapped conclusions.
> 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]
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).
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.
An alternative is to find someone whose thought process you trust who does consume a lot of news and treat them as a human filter. Not too much different than how we use experts in other domains.
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?
News are not news anymore. They are fake headlines just fishing for one more click.
Real News should be government driven. News and not click headlines. And it is in finland and GB, atleast one alternative among the market ones.
Don't know about the GB one but in finland the YLE has crazy overgrown budget that just grows and grows, too many people working with too much time and the result is that it's not anymore "government basic information agency for every citizen" but a hundreds of ppl with no real work, but just to make gay, lesbian and lqbqt content on the headlines and everywhere. The amount of unbiblical sickness of sex-related vomiting is just so much that it must be the end of times..
57 comments
[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] thread* 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).
In other words, even if I know just saying "ok" would probably work, I feel the need to somehow "brag" or otherwise disclose my proud ignorance, even if that only results in the literal opposite of what I want.
I doubt that's true. Certainly not if we are all reading broadly and shallowly, from a few dozen media sources all trying to trigger outrage.
It would be true if we all looked deeply at different topics. Then voting would represent some combination of all of that deep knowledge.
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
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.
> 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.
> My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School
> Two gifts to Trump family from foreign nations are missing, report says
> Michigan Is Becoming The Anti-Florida On LGBTQ Rights ― And A Lot More
> Biden jokes he's ‘really not Irish’ because he's sober, doesn't have relatives ‘in jail’
> Just Because ChatBots Can't Think Doesn't Mean They Can't Lie
> Derek Chauvin, ex-officer convicted of killing George Floyd, pleads guilty to federal tax evasion
> As crucial legal test for Antifa ideology heads to trial, right-wing media also scrutinized
I live on the west coast and the above items you mentioned are pure sensationalism and have absolutely nothing to do with me, my state, or my local community. They add absolutely no value, informational or otherwise, to my life. They do not help me make more informed choices for me and my family or better my life in any discernible way.
You want to care about all that fluff and noise? Good for you. Just don't go around pretending to be a better person for that, or denigrating others who don't fall for that crap. People like you are part of the problem, not the solution.
> pure sensationalism
Political censorship in elite law schools, corruption by your President, AI dangers, justice, political oppression. Those things can certainly affect you and do, and will. The freedom of future Americans and people around the world depends on you - there's nobody else to do it for you. We're on our own. Let's get to work!
While you fight for this narrative, you surrender your power to others who are determing the course of your life. You are doing just want they want.
C'mon, we can think deeper than that. One soldier doesn't matter; are militaries useless? One software developer can't do much on a sizeable project; should we abandon all software? All open source? One journalist, one HN comment, etc. etc. When can one person accomplish much by themselves?
You're right, one person alone doesn't accomplish much, yet somehow humanity has accomplished incredible things. We are social creatures, we naturally work together to build and do amazing things. Please join us! The sky is the limit, and not even that since 1961.
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.
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?
The thing driving consumption is engagement. So what can news provide that drives engagement?
Incomplete narrative.
Conflict is probably the most familiar place to find an incomplete narrative. The easiest way to present conflict is from a negative perspective. A problem that is missing a solution is very easy to engage with.
Mystery is another. What really happened? What will happen next? Speculate!
These are broadly considered "lazy journalism", and for good reason. Controversial narratives are trivial to construct, even when the controversy itself is fake. Mystery is either an incomplete story or speculative fiction.
---
The best works of journalism present a complete story, but that doesn't leave much to engage with. It might be interesting. It might be complicated. It might be important. Is that enough? Sometimes.
Stories that good don't get written every day. If they did, they would become relatively mundane. The news does get published every day. What can we do except to fill the days in between with conflict and mystery?
What kinds of engagement are actually positive? Can they compete?
---
I visit hacker news because it is thriving with examples of positive engagement.
New tools, educational exposition, open questions, historical exploration, etc. Many of the posts here aren't news per se, but they are better than vain controversy.
I think that news organizations should diversify their content and presentation formats. Find more alternatives to "new" than opinion and speculation. Present opportunities for objectivity instead of neatly wrapped conclusions.
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
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).
> 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.
Your investigation didn't involve a simple Google search?
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?
Real News should be government driven. News and not click headlines. And it is in finland and GB, atleast one alternative among the market ones. Don't know about the GB one but in finland the YLE has crazy overgrown budget that just grows and grows, too many people working with too much time and the result is that it's not anymore "government basic information agency for every citizen" but a hundreds of ppl with no real work, but just to make gay, lesbian and lqbqt content on the headlines and everywhere. The amount of unbiblical sickness of sex-related vomiting is just so much that it must be the end of times..