All news is bad, because human beings find happy stories to be uninteresting.
Many stories told for entertainment describe tension and release, but very few describe paradise.
The difference might be, that the news lately has been all about increasing tension, and nothing much about the release, or resolution, of that tension.
We need good news, especially about topics like Fukushima,and the war in Ukraine, for examples. Good news on other topics can't cancel that lack of good news.
I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world"
And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening news would give you the stories of the day, and then you would buy the next morning's newspaper if you wanted to read about it more in depth. Sometimes multiple newspapers if it's a topic you really wanted to sink your teeth into. There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
As more people turn away from the news, it seems that they rely on their own smaller, informal communities to filter and signal boost the topics they really should pay attention to. Articles that get shared in a Discord catch my attention more than anything on Drudge or even Hacker News.
> There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't have a real conversation about this." That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
I wonder if they meant that you need a deeper understanding to have a meaningful conversation. Talking about what "the news" presents to you only scratches the surface and only covers what "the news" wants you to pay attention to. In that sense, only consuming "the news" could be considered a waste of time.
> That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.
You're absolutely right. However, we're not lawyers discussing law. We're random people that play video games discussing personal opinions in an informal setting. The point is we're getting hose fed "news stories" and I'm one mere person with a wife who I give much of my attention to, a job that I probably work more than my 40 hour share of a week at, hobbies that take more of my time, etc. Do you think it's reasonable to expect everyone with an opinion to have read a 237 page opinion piece on supremecourt.gov? Much more likely we're reading some editor's cut to speed along the process of absorbing enough information to be dangerous. I think it's fair to point out I might be missing some nuance of a judge's opinion because I didn't read their individual 45 page opinion, but in about 10 minutes I'm going to be reading a news story about China launching a real Death Star into orbit, and I need to get my brain ready to consume knowledge on that one, and then in about 25 minutes I'll be reading about covid-23.
Lawmakers don't even read the bills the vote on, they have legal experts explain the implications to them. Would you have a better understanding of a system if you skimmed the source code or if you watched a presentation from the author?
237 pages of legalese is way beyond what most people can handle, this is why lawyers exist. If you're saying people shouldn't have an opinion unless they read complex legal documents you're just saying you don't think people should have opinions.
My favorite is when the same lawmaker who voted on a 300 page bill that they needed to pass RIGHT NOW will complain that they didn't have enough time to review a 10 page bill after a change of majority party.
It's not at all legalese. Part of the reason the whole publication is so long is that each of the justices was fully aware that it'd be read by law students, interested citizens, etc. for decades to come and wrote out in longhand what legal scholars could just assume as background knowledge.
Each section was written to persuade the reader that the author's position is correct, and nobody gets appointed to the US Supreme Court without being really damn good at putting together a clear persuasive essay. These are extremely smart people with a small staff of very smart editors trying to convince you their position is the only right one; it's not like an insurance contract or EULA designed to "baffle 'em with bullshit".
If you've got a few hours to spare and even a modest level of background knowledge about American history and the current controversy involving racial quotas it's very readable. If it leaves you more ambivalent than before you started it's probably because they're arguing over a genuine public controversy where intelligent people operating in good faith can come to very different conclusions.
I did some decision reading in college for my GEs. They were all incredibly dry, difficult to get through, and I don't remember a single thing about any of them.
Depending on how old your kids are you might have an hour per day of free time. At an average of 40 pages per hour, this could take 6 days. Or I can find a legally versed content creator on youtube that will explain this to me and be done with it on the bus.
This is a topic that everyone has already moved on about. The fact that it's totally doable to spend 6 days on it does not make it a good idea to do. I would go as far as to say that for such a niche topic, for the vast majority of people this is a bad idea to do, and they shouldn't do it.
It really depends on the decision! For example, the mass of pages the Supreme Court has spent on ERISA could possibly count as a method of state-sponsored torture.
I totally understand being over the whole deal, but if you actually care about the issue the PDF itself is more coherent and readable than almost all the pre- and post- decision commentary which is mostly predictable, information-free nonsense.
If the topic is the correct interpetation of the constitution someone who has only read the most recent Supreme Court court opinion isn't particularly well read or knowledgable on the subject either, you need to read what the Supreme Court has historically said about the constitution, not just what the most recent group of judges is saying.
"That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long."
That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
Moreover, the PDF of an opinion usually includes the actual opinion, and all the concurring and dissenting opinions, in a single document, so the actual opinion is usually much smaller than the whole PDF.
(While reading the concurring and dissenting opinions may be useful, they are, in effect, other important people’s opinions on the opinion, and not necessary to have an basic informed opinion on the opinion.)
well, this is how real life works. This is how popular vote works. 99% of voters will never read any of that crap (maaaybe just the tldr from the news) but will happily opine, and popular vote is based on that. so not exactly uncommon.
"I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world"
I'm sad that kids these days did not get to experience things like the Sopranos, otherwise known as the best TV series ever.
This is the reason I receive every morning a notification with a link to the pdf version of a newspaper: to get an abridged recap of news like in the old times.
Sometimes to keep your sanity you need help from others.
> it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world
I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing.
However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed.
The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight.
And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.
That assumes you even read the newspaper... when I was a kid, I had a paper route for a couple years. Only about 1/3 of houses got the paper, and not everyone even read it every day. Often only a couple cover articles, and maybe the 5pm or 10/11pm news. It was a relatively narrow window into only the most pressing issues of a given day.
Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia of what a celebrity said/wore, or every single military engagement in Ukraine. The gulf war in Iraq was probably the first 24/7 news cycle engagement in human history for any significant number of people.
I also agree on quality degradation. There is both more editorialization and lower quality writing all around. In addition to personal narratives all around.
The issue is that political aspects of the news are simply too entrenched at this point. My mechanism for changing it used to be my single vote (that's useless), but the other was expressing views with people I knew to change how they think on things. But nobody listens, or it's drowned out, or I don't even get to talk to people with other views, or nobody is undecided anymore.
I'll try to avoid being political here with Trump. Trump was a deconstruction of old guard media and the illusions they put up with the political process. He reduced political campaigning to almost pure media events and games, with almost no substance for the right or the left (except outrage or adulation).
As part of that, old media like CNN that tries to keep the trappings of authoritative news delivery have been thoroughly "pantsed". Everyone knows you are stupid if you accept what newspeople tell you at face value (unless they are telling you things you already agree with emotionally).
I'd like to note, I view myself primarily as a environmentalist, and the corollary to that is I feel I have no political party. The right is outright hostile to it, the left is duplicitous and non-supportive of it.
Social media has corralled everyone into echo chambers, and then added a massive amount of cacophony to drown out any real conversation.
But practically everyone is dealing with this for whatever they care about. Social media has highlighted how little we can do, yet amped up the education about a lot of shadow stuff that used to be completely hidden.
Anyway, now I watch sports "news" and let the social stuff bleed in.
The real question is if the internet has made people smarter as a whole. I believe the internet of the last 30 years has made almost everyone smarter. What will the next 30 years look like?
But it took 30 years for non-internet corporations and governments/politicians to "figure out" the internet on a fundamental level. IMO the Trump election was the first example of that. Control and corralling of information with echo chambers has changed things.
Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from
what is really happening.
> Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from what is really happening.
This has been true consistently since the major drop in crime rates in the 1990s. (And it was true for particular kinds of crime that were declining well before that.) This isn’t a new effect of todays news that differs from decades past: “if it bleeds, it leads” and the effect that has is much older.
I haven't seen a good analysis that includes urbanization and human migration.
It can be simultaneously true that Urban crime rates have declined while average crime experienced by people has increased.
If Grandma grew up in a rural setting with a low property crime rate, and I was in a big city with a higher crime rate, the crime in their environment has gone up even if the city's crime rate is going down.
The same may be true for the average American due to the net increase in urbanization.
For specifically the 90s, its crime rate is genuinely better than the absolute horrible time of 70s and 80s. To this day when we say "crime is decreasing", in a fraud way we always compare it to those peak bad times even though compared to 90s it creeps back up (all of this is US specific). With collapse of Soviet Union and absolute victory of Gulf War, western world and especially USA is in euphoria until 9/11.
Uh, early 2000s? There was very much 24/7 news media back then. Mature internet news, immature social media, multiple 24/7 national news channels for most major countries and languages...
I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war.
Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was minted in this era of hyper-pervasive media.
Note that the actual non-news media of the early 2000s, and the period pieces that remake it, mostly ignore this reality and are culturally set a decade or more earlier. This is a sort of 'the Simpsons' effect where creators in their 30s and 40s who don't realize how much the world has changed produce media about their childhood set in the present.
I recognize there was 24/7 news media then, but it was still better than now. And before there was 24/7 news media was even better than the early 2000s
Kindly define 'better'. News in the early 2000s, the 1990s, the 1980s, ... was all just as commercialized, propagandized, and partisan as it is today. I think the difference that in the early 2000s the breadth of 'news' didn't include all of the micro niches and pointless internet celebrity drama that seems to infect everything everywhere today. Also in the early 2000s there wasn't the hyper addictive social networks demanding your attention on 'news' that is ultimately manufactured for views and clicks that we have today.
When people yearn for the yesteryear of mass market propaganda it just means they yearn for when they didn’t know it was propaganda, and didn’t realize that a world where their side does everything right is a world that only exists in the propagandist’s mind.
Better meaning that in the 90s or early 2000s, your news sources were mostly: newspaper, television, radio, and some Web 1.0 websites. You most likely consumed this at various distinct times of the day, then went about your business to school, work, etc. You did not receive push notifications to a device in your pocket about the latest event, or have people blasting their opinions out all over a social feed.
And before the 90s, you most likely sat down and watched the evening news at one time a day, then read the newspaper in the morning for further information. So this was an even more segmented version of the 90s and early 2000s.
Was the content of the news commercialized and partisan? Yeah, probably was. But you consumed much less of it because it wasn't shoved in your face, demanding your attention at every waking hour.
The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such.
Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Instead we talk about the direction of the country and indeed, humanity itself, with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team, or voting people off the island on Survivor.
Where I was the US, 7pm - 9pm was prime entertainment time, and the news would start at 9pm or 10pm depending on the channel (which I think was partially so TV would become boring to kids right around when they should go to bed). Don't remember how long it ran, though my guess would be an hour before the late-night shows would begin.
As far as I'm aware the 20:15 thing here in germany is because nobody want's to compete with the "Tagesschau". In other countrys where I lived all the channels would start their movies whenever they want(7pm, 9pm or such strange times), as a german I found that pretty irritating, who could live like that? It's pure anarchy. :)
As I recall in the US, there was typically a post-primetime local news broadcast. The network news was pre-primetime (and it may have been accompanied with a local news slot beforehand).
In Chicago, there was only a single news broadcast that _wasn't_ at 10pm and that was Channel 9. It was part of their marketing to have the news at 9 (channel 9, news at 9). In the mid-late 80's when Fox came online, they copied the 9 o'clock news.
> But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
This is how the news was for me as a 90s kid who only had over the air channels for TV. 6:00-6:30PM was local news, 6:30-7:00PM was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Outside of that folks weren't particularly concerned with what was happening beyond their immediate bubble.
Even in the early 90s news started shifting towards our modern incarnation. CNN was considered hard news in the 80s, but that changed around the time of the Persian Gulf war and Wolf Blitzer becoming the Scud-Stud, and all the other shows like Cross-Fire becoming news-er-tainment (or whatever the proper industry term is), etc...
I blame CNN for much of the state of news today. TV news has always been poor, but before CNN proved otherwise, news was not something that was considered a profit-maker. Once CNN showed it can make money, then the profit maximalization began in earnest, and with that came the descent into news-as-entertainment.
Oh, that goes way back before CNN and cable, or even TV.
As an aside, 99% invisible had a pretty good podcast on how radio (which delivers news to more Americans -and is trusted more- than TV) content has changed over the years. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-divided-dial/
The change has been systemic, and that change shaped CNN more than the other way around.
This is still true today, though. I am generally sick of the news too but sometimes it is nice to watch local news (WDIV channel 4 here in Detroit) from 6 to 6:30 to hear about stuff going on around town, and then NBC nightly news from 6:30 to 7 to get some more national info.
That's good to hear. I haven't watched cable or OTA TV for around 15 years at this point so I don't have a good idea of what it's like these days, except for that time ~5 years ago when I tried plugging in an antenna to see what I could pick up but immediately lost interest after being reminded how much time ads take up on OTA TV channels.
i feel like TV ads get a bad rap sometimes. you dont have to actually watch them, they provide a natural pause in the action to go get a snack, go to the bathroom, do something else, rather than sitting there for 12 hours straight "consuming content"
There's a weird phenomenon I've started noticing when watching streaming shows where I keep thinking a commercial break would be nice. Even on shows built for streaming.
It's not that I want the ads so much as I want a short break from consuming the content.
But when they are in the middle of a film, they often make the film twice as long, and films these days are already awfully long. They can also give you a heart attack when they are thrice as loud as the film, and often start after there was a silence in the film.
Yep. For a decent chunk of my early adulthood, barring really major events, my news consumption was ABC World News Tonight and maybe This Week with David Brinkley on Sunday if I was around--and Time Magazine delivered weekly to my mailbox.
While there are/were Sunday magazines, I'd generally consider magazines more broadly for deep dives into particular aspects of culture, politics, and hobbies.
I was more reflecting on newspapers not being mentioned at all as a news source. ABC World News Tonight, This Week, and Frontline are all TV sources, and Time Magazine is a pretty different beast. Back in the day newspapers and radio were pretty significant news sources for people (and radio still is).
I don't know if I'd call newspapers long form, as they certainly have lots of short articles, but I'd say they regularly have "longer form" than Frontline.
Certainly a fair number of people got daily newspapers at one point. Post-uni, I never actually lived especially near a city and never felt the need to subscribe to the (in my case) Boston Globe which wasn't especially relevant to my day-to-day life. (To this day I don't although I do subscribe digitally to the NYT and the Economist.)
And realistically, as a fellow 80s and 90s kid . . . what benefit is there to this always-on 24 hour news extravaganza?
There are not enough relevant things going on in the world to merit a 24-hour news cycle, so the media has to make things up to fill the gaps. But once they make things up, they're pathologically incapable of distinguishing their own made-up crap from actual relevant news items.
So we spend the day glued to our phones flooded in crap.
"with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team"
While true, I can't help but think everyone who says that is talking about "other people" (mostly people on the other side but maybe a few from my side) or "other news sources" (mostly ones from the other side that I don't watch and maybe a few isolated examples on my side).
I think most of us realise that "our side" is just as likely as the other side... We all recognize the problem, it's just that we differ on what we believe are ideal solutions. In the end, the breakdown of actual compromise on most issues is the result and it's bad for anyone without the pocketbook to overcome the issue, politically speaking.
Some of us are mostly adjacent. I'm a right-leaning libertarian. I actually dislike when people refer to modern progressives as "liberal" as it's pretty insulting to classic liberals who also aren't into where progressives have gone. I never voted for Trump, don't really like him. I have to admit, I did/do enjoy how worked up those with TDS get about him though. But it's completely hyperbolic on both ends, and there's more dishonesty about the man than from the man.
Many people want the establishment out... the problem is, as above, that there are several camps of what people believe should prevail in terms of direction... so no traction gains and the establishment wins. I'm thinking more people on either side should start voting for more anti-establishment candidates all around. They may be a bit cooky, but in the end, if they're willing to negotiate we could see better outcomes overall that at least try to serve the people and not the establishment insiders.
i agree 100%, i feel like in the venn diagram of politics there is a lot of overlap but its just more fun/engaging/dopamine to focus on the outside crescents i guess... which serves the divide/conquer goals of the establishment.
Cable TV and Internet are tools. They are technologies. They are not people.
News companies, specifically news company executives looking to sell as much ad revenue as possible, and are willing to produce any content that gets viewership, are to blame.
> The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
No, it's television in general. People were famously making that exact same point in the 1980s, before the widespread adoption of cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death. tl;dr: the medium is the message, and the message of television is entertainment, even when the news was only a half-hour a day.
Social media and its manipulation have amplified the problem vastly, and what makes it even worse is the consolidation of ownership. Nothing like turning on an ABC (owned by Disney) news program and getting ten minutes of self-referential Disney news.
I think the internet and social media's effects have been different than television. Like television, it encourages even shorter attention spans and even more superficial engagement with things. Unlike television, it tends towards anger and outrage (not entertainment) and encourages more fragmentation and tribalism.
"... the human race is divided into two distinct and irreconcilable groups:
those that walk into rooms and automatically turn television sets on,
and those that walk into rooms and automatically turn them off.
The trouble is that they end up marrying each other."
I have to agree, and some have even said the quiet parts out loud... and that there wasn't broad-spread outcry is somewhat terrifying to me. I don't care what side you're on, I disagree with many on most things. This is frankly a terrifying, and somewhat delusional, precedent.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this.
Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it?
We've had salacious media for a long time:
> Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the editor of one of the earliest scandal sheets, The Morning Post, which specialized in printing malicious society gossip, selling positive mentions in its pages, and collecting suppression fees to keep stories unpublished.[5]: 11–14 Other Georgian era scandal sheets were Theodore Hook's John Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's The Age, and Barnard Gregory's The Satirist.[5]: 53 William d'Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, explained his purpose:
Both, really. As technology has created new and broader reaching mediums, the people operating those mediums have changed their target audience to support their existence.
There is more and better quality news available now than ever in history and people flock to the crappiest options because they can't get enough. It's demand.
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
Ironic considering Jobs conspired to fix prices with media partners including News Corp. Either way, network TV isn't the only news. There's plenty of non-profit news and non-predatory news in the world besides network TV.
Wasn't there more to this? I can't find the source for the quote, but I believe Jobs also said something like "and I didn't understand why that was until I realized that after a hard day of work (etc.) you really want to relax and turn your brain off, and TV is perfect for that - in fact you burn fewer calories watching TV than you do sleeping."
He also said "We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
Though maybe he was kind of wrong about televisions and PCs not merging - see youtube, netflix, Apple TV (both device and service), "smart" TVs, etc. I also imagine Jobs might put social media in the "turn your brain off" category.
Mainstream media is not blameless in the least. Pushing psychological buttons to create addiction to what is very little else than entertainment and biased opinion. Rarely if ever are there references to sources. Instead there are interpretations and nth hand accounts that you are expected to accept as is. It's there plain for everyone to see, yet rarely is it taken seriously for what it is, propaganda.
Right and people gravitate heavily towards the bad. The most watched cable news by far is FOX which has been caught dead to rights conspiring with government, with campaigns and telling intentional lies in furtherance of propaganda goals. And they don't suffer any loss in loyalty. That is 100% the faults of the viewers who elect to be deceived in ways they enjoy.
Definitely a demand issue. Sure, there are secondary supply-side effects, but the simple truth is what we see today is what captures available demand. There is no other domain where you find that Americans are willing, en masse, to eat their vegetables before dessert. So the pro-wrestling flavor of televised news is going to crush anything more thoughtful slash less entertaining with relentless invariance.
To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)
Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.
It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.
This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product.
> To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale.
This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.
> The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day
The media that created the Trump brand, the media that gave him 24/7 free publicity, the media that got him elected, etc? That's the media you are praising?
> do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage
The problem in society is news. More news or more government funded news is not the answer.
I’m not sure about this, but I think there’s a pretty good and absolutely foregone conclusion that the world is actually extremely fucked up in new ways, growing in metastatic ugliness every year, and that it really is this Bad News that people are turned off by.
To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.
I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.
The world isn't without problems, but certain things (life expectancy, income, education, literacy, etc.) got a lot better after the industrial revolution.
I don't think this is necessarily true -- if you limit your sources to "good" ones (thoughtful, reliable, with minimal political agenda -- I'd include the economist and a handful of substack writers in this mix) then you can be informed without needing to expose yourself to the awful deluge of mainstream crap. So maybe you can be somewhat happy (if your definition of happiness depends upon you not being engaged in the culture war), but still informed and intelligent.
The problem, however, is the impact this change in political reporting has on actual politics. That, I'm not sure how to solve.
It used to be that pre-election debates were for nerds and policy wonks. Now everyone watches them, but all substance has been removed. Debates themselves may even cease to exist.
> This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.
As opposed to being paid directly by the people they're supposed to hold accountable?
Government-funded media would at least have a fighting chance of being neutral, checks and balances and all. By all accounts the US justice system is corrupt as well, but it would obviously be orders of magnitude worse if you outsourced it to private corporations.
> This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms.
The product was already being produced pre-Internet, pre-television, pre-radio:
Isn't it remarkable how healthy and wise our society was before 24-hour news. Nowadays we have newfangled problems like "populism", "anger", "Nazis" - say, where does that name even come from?
No, we have a problem with the news selling those fictional things as real. Turn off CNN or OAN wherever you get your firehose of algorithmically generated nonsense from and they magically go away.
Cable News may have boiled it down to its essence, but the problem transcends tv. The same problem exists in writing, its just more spread out.
If you synthesize all that happens in Washington in a day, it is a giant soap opera. IT keeps its power by keeping people paying attention to it. Even a "just the facts, maam" view of the news is largely rabblerousing.
I wonder how much of what I see on https://www.memeorandum.com/river today will matter in 10 years. How much of it belongs in a history book. How much of it is needed to make an informed decision in an election. How much of it is needed to understand the world around me.
I think the amount of news we expose ourselves to should correlate more with the closeness of the events (or inversely with their distance from us). We can actually have an impact on events in our local community. And in a lot of ways what is immediately around us when we walk out the front door has a more impact than anything else on how we experience the world.
News from far away is just second hand sadness.
Neil Postman articulates this point in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and cites Marshal McLuhan’s adage, “the medium is the message”: TV is entertaining and context-free. News over TV will adopt the shape of the medium.
Postman is the sort of public intellectual no longer exist. Classically educated and proud of it, conservative in spirit, tolerant in action. He also made digestible a lot of the work from 60s70s academia on these topics.
Mcluhan, his French counterparts, Deborah, ELlul, all understood something 60 years ago. Mass manufacturing and mass media are the key determinants of our society. The first has commoditized the physical things we surround ourselves with. The second commoditizes our dispositions. Political or economical arrangements matter so much less.
Taking that view, and the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology as we think it is. Just another means for media saturazition, washing out individual thought.
A salient effect, when everything is essentially the same, the only mechanism to differentiate is branding. Hence, everything is captured by marketing. Products are differentiated by their commercials, people differentiate themselves by the identity they assume, everything/everybody is thrown in a marketplace where comparison is based on image, not substance. Really nothing can be evaluated intrinsically anymore, our evaluation of everything gets mediated by a story, a narrative, an image. The matrix is real, not the living in the computer part, but the unease that everything is fake, everything is a projection.
If true, and it also explains why the classic California easy-going personality is now the dominant one. It is not even cool anymore to be 90s abrasive or cynical, that just elicits eye rolls (the rebellion in fight club looks quaint now, almost adorable). Better to just bland in.
The logical end point of this evolution is that we all become widgets. Essentially the same, responding to inputs, participants in algorithm, the only difference maybe the skinning, the look&feel. All undifferentiated tough.
May be true, may be not. But it certainly explains a lot of the last 150 years, and it makes our current era less special. which is comforting, we're not messing up in ways grandpa wasn't already doing so.
I started following Jay Rosen on Twitter and that's something he often talks about. Coverage is like a horse race, that talks about the odds, not the consequences of someone getting elected.
The problem is speed of information eroding our sense-making coupled with the dominant linguistic framework of economics which reduces communication to zero-sum competition.
To pine for any kind of quaint return is missing the point entirely. The only way through is forward and out.
My grandparents managed to maintain this way of watching news. The TV was off the entire day. They would turn it on at 8pm after dinner for the local/national news report, and turn it off when it finished. It's possible to do but it takes discipline and intention.
Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine would be the one switch to flip to undo a lot of this very destructive mess. Of course all of the media giants would throw all the lawyers at it. Now that they know how incredibly lucrative news-as-entertainment is. But it's what must be done to turn this problem around and get a handle on it.
Literally illegal for certain with anything non-broadcast about with about 90% certainty for broadcast. It’s such a blatant violation of the first amendment it’s never going to happen.
America's notion of freedom of speech was designed at time when we thought humans would prefer truth over "truthiness". Turns out none of that was true, or only true for a small subset of the population. No other country runs with our rules of "freedom of speech == freedom of consequences" (particularly for the rich). But then, most of the West is running into similar problems with the news.
Not sure there is an easy answer. None of us want to be censored, but for sure the market has failed (both the demand side and the supply side, and there is lots of money to be made from all the fake controversy and scandal)
Not designed: emerged. Our notions of free speech emerged in a world where publishing was under British law a licensed industry, and the operation of an illegal printing press was a crime which could be punished, where there were parts of the New World where the only legal printing the press could be used for was for the Bible and where there were other parts of the New World where the British Crown retained the rights to the King James Edition of the Bible and it was illegal to print in America.
With the First Amendment we revoked Congress’ power as a lawmaking body to govern publishing. The market hasn’t failed, but other people are reading and believing things that you or I don’t agree with, but the difference is that you basically want to make them stop doing that, which I guess includes me as I am disagreeing with you here.
Don’t forget that all elected positions are Offices of Power and to seek an election is to seek to acquire power. I am more than happy to keep the flow of information outside the grasp of the types of people who seek to acquire an elected Office and the power vested in it, even at the risk that other people are wrong and take wrong actions with wrong information.
I am not sure we disagree, as I proposed no solution.
I certainly wouldn't trust or give politicians the ability to censor what they don't like.
As I said, this is a hard problem. No individual should be censored. But, as with most things, scale is a problem in of itself. There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit. There is significant profit in anger, fear, sowing divisions, artificial controversy; but this comes at a large detriment to us as a society.
> I am not sure we disagree, as I proposed no solution.
That’s embarrassing. I actually did overstate the disagreement upon re-reading your prior comment. My apologies.
> There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit.
Even CNN and Fox can be held in check for literally lying, but by the people they’re lying about, and in turn they operate in a space where they report on a more powerful entity than themselves when they lie or subvert the truth. The American government is also a player in the information space, and its chief officials are not always telling the truth, or disclosing the full truth. So what we have is a wash in which information competes with information, and we don’t always have good, accurate or useful information where we need it or desire it. I still wouldn’t call this a market failure, people profit and lose off of good or bad information all the time; it’s when we allow ourselves to become tools for moneyed or empowered interests who use those programs and writings to induce action that we experience a very real human or political failure.
The purpose of the news industry is to inform, but it has always and will forever be at the behest of people with an interest in informing in a manner they prioritize in competition with other people with differing interests, and it is itself for-profit industry whether or not the profits are expressed on the P&L of a given corporation.
What is it you think this would even accomplish? There’s no shortage of contrasting and opposing viewpoints, but people watch and read what they want to, and most often on non-broadcast mediums.
Would it? Remember TV competes with online news. Fox biggest competitor isn't NBC, it is Breitbart, The Dodge Report or Real truth network.
And you are never going to get the fairness doctrine to apply to those that are online.
You could have Facebook set rules for posts on their network, but then Facebook competes with Twitter and Tiktok and whatever, so if the posts on Facebook are less engaging than those on Twitter, people may go there.
Viewers are to blame. Cable and the internet are just better than ever monetizing the garbage people gravitate towards. There's more high quality journalism on offer than ever and it's audience just keep dwindling in favor of social media and purely fraudulent news like FOX.
People talk about media or corporations or government like they're from some alternate dimension or alien species. They're run by the exact same human beings that exist in your daily life. Most people act out of self-interest and are subject to bias. Media didn't invent it, it's an extension of human nature.
> The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment.
That's a very bold claim but I can't say it's wild. The news is supposed to be a critical source of information but I think the effect is a net negative. By a large margin. It's a pretty perverse situation.
I don't think the government should ban news or anything. That's obviously bad. But society would probably be better off without it (as-is), as extreme as that would be.
> But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Essentially this is arguing for limited distribution & gatekeepers for the news. That would almost certainly be better for society, but there's the problem with disenfranchisement & how you select/entrust gatekeepers. I don't think the "old" solutions to those problems were particularly good.
I don't think you can really say anything is to blame for this: people follow incentives and the incentives are to yell higher and higher to be heard over all the noise of everybody else and to create the most insane headlines to be hear over all the other insane headlines.
The solution to this tradegi of the commons is to ignore it all and read up on the various candidates a few weeks before the election.
I totally agree with this. Except when it comes to new platforms and media of the likes of tech we are collectively much more willing to examine and be critical of our own industry even on HN. However IMHO the thing that makes the news industry so scummy is that these are the people that still control most of the narratives people read about and they seem to almost never be self critical at all and if they were then Jon Stewart wouldn’t still have a show getting laughs off of this truth.
And when entertainment isn't recharging our souls, giving us time off, isn't wholesome (which all apply to current news) we don't get what our souls need, and we become worse people individually and collectively.
Watching the 24 hour news cycle as entertainment is just like any kind of constant trauma, constant onslaught, constant conflict and it fundamentally is rewiring our brains individually and collectively
How about reinstating the fairness doctrine that changed (along with so much else) in the 1980s as a start? And creating some rules to prevent news sources from being used as propaganda machines by billionaires?
True that the US seems to have its own "quality" of news, but most western countries don't fare better. On the contrary, the less sensationell style often makes you believe the news to be more reliable, but in essence it never truly is.
The moment you realize that news is just another form of entertainment, not a source of knowledge you're obligated to follow, you free to stop wasting your time on it.
I not only avoid it, I've added news sites that I used to read to my hosts list, redirecting to localhost so I can't compulsively check them in the middle of the day anymore.
Personally, I think Aaron Swartz was right [1]: I feel better off, emotionally and mentally, reading a monthly magazine or an annual book than trying to absorb every tidbit of clickbait dished out by the view-driven media. Monthly content is generally more nuanced and often more actionable, and whatever social media furor accompanied each small part of it, as it developed, is omitted for being the tempest in a teapot that it was.
Beyond not watching news shows and not having a TV, this is how I filter. What action can I take? It has drawn me closer to local issues where I can do something.
Maybe I can clean up the beaches in Australia, but I'm not there. Becoming enraged about politics 1,000 miles away shows a lack of humility and lack of understanding my sphere of influence.
24 hour news stations should be banned along with on the hour news. The constant feed of content edited to poke our serotonin receptors serve no real benefit. News 3 or 4 times a day should be plenty, very very few news stories require blow by blow coverage. The news has just turned into another thing to buy/sell our limited attention for profit.
The problem is that people don't just ignore the mainstream news media. A lot of them also turn to fringe channels that peddle an alternative view of the world that's more affirmative of their own worldview - without being more truthful. It's going to be a huge challenge to every democracy because people will fundamentally disagree about basic facts.
If anything the concept of “facts” or “the truth” is up for grabs. You can find any quasi-legit looking source that supports just about any version of “the truth” you want. And your favorite content aggregator will pick up on that and suck you into the vortex. It’s echo chambers all the way down!
Considering that even “The Experts” who many claim hold “The Truth” are subject to the same echo chambers and powerful tribal allegiances that everybody else is… you cannot really trust them either. Many will be more than happy to bend things to suit their political affiliations or sometimes even lie to you face if it promotes their narrative.
The most important skill, I believe, is question everything you hear. Only you can determine what is true and isn’t. Outsourcing critical thinking to others is setting yourself up for manipulation. It’s sounds ridiculous, but based on the events over the last three years I believe that is as good as it gets in modern times. There is no such thing as “The Expert”. It’s your brain against the endless tide of information and only you get to decide what makes sense and what doesn’t.
It’s interesting that the people so concerned with the survival of democracy or whatever, also seem deeply skeptical of actual democratic outcomes.
You guys gotta decide if you like democracy or not. Is it still acceptable when the results are tainted by voters watching watching the wrong, untruthful, bad, fringe news instead of the good, right, truthful, mainstream kind?
The problem is that it’s no longer contained to Fox News and MSNBC. NPR now incredibly biased, CNN was but is trying to backtrack (?), and the various top newspapers have all gradually slid more and more to biased viewpoints.
There isn’t a major news source out there for me. I don’t want my own political beliefs confirmed and be told how bad the other side is so I can feel superior. I want facts, and not just those I agree with. That largely doesn’t exist anymore.
It is a remarkable phenomenon that all three cable news channels in America have dedicated themselves entirely to the individual of Donald Trump, all the way from 2016 to 2024 and beyond.
It defies a certain logic that audiences can tire of Marvel movies that come out a couple times a year, but daily coverage of such an asinine topic for nearly a decade is supported by the market?
Certainly this has to be culturally damaging, but everyone sort of pretends it's normal for the country to focus on the antics and tribulations of one person.
TV runs the country for now but I am optimistic their vapidity will drive the next generations to the internet. There appears to me a growing number of young people growing up online.
It's no better on the internet. Can I have a news aggregator not give me 20 stories a day about what Trump said? I don't care how prolific he is on whatever off-brand Twitter he's on, I still don't care about what breathless all-caps rant he's delivered this hour.
I'm about two decades removed by mainstream media news/cable tv programming.
I'm an American but I don't consume any news or television programming
I watch netflix sometimes? Reddit/HN? Whenever we cut the cord many ideas left our household with the cable TV box.
I feel like the news used to focus on things we didn't know, and has shifted to telling us what we enjoy hearing. A great deal of it is in the form "<person you dislike> did <exactly what you'd think they'd do>", and what the reader gains is not information but a fresh opportunity to disapprove of their outgroup.
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[ 88.2 ms ] story [ 1327 ms ] threadMany stories told for entertainment describe tension and release, but very few describe paradise. The difference might be, that the news lately has been all about increasing tension, and nothing much about the release, or resolution, of that tension.
We need good news, especially about topics like Fukushima,and the war in Ukraine, for examples. Good news on other topics can't cancel that lack of good news.
And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening news would give you the stories of the day, and then you would buy the next morning's newspaper if you wanted to read about it more in depth. Sometimes multiple newspapers if it's a topic you really wanted to sink your teeth into. There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
As more people turn away from the news, it seems that they rely on their own smaller, informal communities to filter and signal boost the topics they really should pay attention to. Articles that get shared in a Discord catch my attention more than anything on Drudge or even Hacker News.
This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't have a real conversation about this." That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.
On HN, not only is it easy, it's standard operating procedure...
/s, but not really...
237 pages of legalese is way beyond what most people can handle, this is why lawyers exist. If you're saying people shouldn't have an opinion unless they read complex legal documents you're just saying you don't think people should have opinions.
Each section was written to persuade the reader that the author's position is correct, and nobody gets appointed to the US Supreme Court without being really damn good at putting together a clear persuasive essay. These are extremely smart people with a small staff of very smart editors trying to convince you their position is the only right one; it's not like an insurance contract or EULA designed to "baffle 'em with bullshit".
If you've got a few hours to spare and even a modest level of background knowledge about American history and the current controversy involving racial quotas it's very readable. If it leaves you more ambivalent than before you started it's probably because they're arguing over a genuine public controversy where intelligent people operating in good faith can come to very different conclusions.
Depending on how old your kids are you might have an hour per day of free time. At an average of 40 pages per hour, this could take 6 days. Or I can find a legally versed content creator on youtube that will explain this to me and be done with it on the bus.
This is a topic that everyone has already moved on about. The fact that it's totally doable to spend 6 days on it does not make it a good idea to do. I would go as far as to say that for such a niche topic, for the vast majority of people this is a bad idea to do, and they shouldn't do it.
I totally understand being over the whole deal, but if you actually care about the issue the PDF itself is more coherent and readable than almost all the pre- and post- decision commentary which is mostly predictable, information-free nonsense.
That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
(While reading the concurring and dissenting opinions may be useful, they are, in effect, other important people’s opinions on the opinion, and not necessary to have an basic informed opinion on the opinion.)
Yes. Why do you want to have opinions on things you don't understand?
Yes, and they are entitled to a vote that gets aggregated with others on the issues and candidates subject to public elections.
That’s different from them having an opinion that is worth listening to individually.
I'm sad that kids these days did not get to experience things like the Sopranos, otherwise known as the best TV series ever.
One hour. Once per week. No binge watching.
Sometimes to keep your sanity you need help from others.
I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing.
However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed.
The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight.
And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.
Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia of what a celebrity said/wore, or every single military engagement in Ukraine. The gulf war in Iraq was probably the first 24/7 news cycle engagement in human history for any significant number of people.
I also agree on quality degradation. There is both more editorialization and lower quality writing all around. In addition to personal narratives all around.
I'll try to avoid being political here with Trump. Trump was a deconstruction of old guard media and the illusions they put up with the political process. He reduced political campaigning to almost pure media events and games, with almost no substance for the right or the left (except outrage or adulation).
As part of that, old media like CNN that tries to keep the trappings of authoritative news delivery have been thoroughly "pantsed". Everyone knows you are stupid if you accept what newspeople tell you at face value (unless they are telling you things you already agree with emotionally).
I'd like to note, I view myself primarily as a environmentalist, and the corollary to that is I feel I have no political party. The right is outright hostile to it, the left is duplicitous and non-supportive of it.
Social media has corralled everyone into echo chambers, and then added a massive amount of cacophony to drown out any real conversation.
But practically everyone is dealing with this for whatever they care about. Social media has highlighted how little we can do, yet amped up the education about a lot of shadow stuff that used to be completely hidden.
Anyway, now I watch sports "news" and let the social stuff bleed in.
The real question is if the internet has made people smarter as a whole. I believe the internet of the last 30 years has made almost everyone smarter. What will the next 30 years look like?
But it took 30 years for non-internet corporations and governments/politicians to "figure out" the internet on a fundamental level. IMO the Trump election was the first example of that. Control and corralling of information with echo chambers has changed things.
Cue oddly specific example of “The Ukraine” and “rocket volley”.
Next, the highlight that informal communities that make their own echo chambers are more popular as distrust in established media is sown.
Finally, a personal anecdote that echo chambers curate more attention-getting articles.
Nothing in this post is especially truthy or falsey, yet it serves up mild “distrust the media” nihilism.
This has been true consistently since the major drop in crime rates in the 1990s. (And it was true for particular kinds of crime that were declining well before that.) This isn’t a new effect of todays news that differs from decades past: “if it bleeds, it leads” and the effect that has is much older.
It can be simultaneously true that Urban crime rates have declined while average crime experienced by people has increased.
If Grandma grew up in a rural setting with a low property crime rate, and I was in a big city with a higher crime rate, the crime in their environment has gone up even if the city's crime rate is going down.
The same may be true for the average American due to the net increase in urbanization.
I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war.
Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was minted in this era of hyper-pervasive media.
Note that the actual non-news media of the early 2000s, and the period pieces that remake it, mostly ignore this reality and are culturally set a decade or more earlier. This is a sort of 'the Simpsons' effect where creators in their 30s and 40s who don't realize how much the world has changed produce media about their childhood set in the present.
And before the 90s, you most likely sat down and watched the evening news at one time a day, then read the newspaper in the morning for further information. So this was an even more segmented version of the 90s and early 2000s.
Was the content of the news commercialized and partisan? Yeah, probably was. But you consumed much less of it because it wasn't shoved in your face, demanding your attention at every waking hour.
Now if you ignore the news you’re assumed to be some form of social pariah.
Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Instead we talk about the direction of the country and indeed, humanity itself, with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team, or voting people off the island on Survivor.
Back in my day and in Germany, "news" was from 20:00 to 20:15 with the last 5 or so minutes of that were dedicated to the Bundesliga :)
This is how the news was for me as a 90s kid who only had over the air channels for TV. 6:00-6:30PM was local news, 6:30-7:00PM was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Outside of that folks weren't particularly concerned with what was happening beyond their immediate bubble.
I blame CNN for much of the state of news today. TV news has always been poor, but before CNN proved otherwise, news was not something that was considered a profit-maker. Once CNN showed it can make money, then the profit maximalization began in earnest, and with that came the descent into news-as-entertainment.
That started well before the gulf war.
As an aside, 99% invisible had a pretty good podcast on how radio (which delivers news to more Americans -and is trusted more- than TV) content has changed over the years. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-divided-dial/
The change has been systemic, and that change shaped CNN more than the other way around.
Which has an effect on the political process.
It's not that I want the ads so much as I want a short break from consuming the content.
And that was pretty much it.
I don't know if I'd call newspapers long form, as they certainly have lots of short articles, but I'd say they regularly have "longer form" than Frontline.
There are not enough relevant things going on in the world to merit a 24-hour news cycle, so the media has to make things up to fill the gaps. But once they make things up, they're pathologically incapable of distinguishing their own made-up crap from actual relevant news items.
So we spend the day glued to our phones flooded in crap.
While true, I can't help but think everyone who says that is talking about "other people" (mostly people on the other side but maybe a few from my side) or "other news sources" (mostly ones from the other side that I don't watch and maybe a few isolated examples on my side).
Some of us are mostly adjacent. I'm a right-leaning libertarian. I actually dislike when people refer to modern progressives as "liberal" as it's pretty insulting to classic liberals who also aren't into where progressives have gone. I never voted for Trump, don't really like him. I have to admit, I did/do enjoy how worked up those with TDS get about him though. But it's completely hyperbolic on both ends, and there's more dishonesty about the man than from the man.
Many people want the establishment out... the problem is, as above, that there are several camps of what people believe should prevail in terms of direction... so no traction gains and the establishment wins. I'm thinking more people on either side should start voting for more anti-establishment candidates all around. They may be a bit cooky, but in the end, if they're willing to negotiate we could see better outcomes overall that at least try to serve the people and not the establishment insiders.
News companies, specifically news company executives looking to sell as much ad revenue as possible, and are willing to produce any content that gets viewership, are to blame.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
No, it's television in general. People were famously making that exact same point in the 1980s, before the widespread adoption of cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death. tl;dr: the medium is the message, and the message of television is entertainment, even when the news was only a half-hour a day.
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it?
We've had salacious media for a long time:
> Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the editor of one of the earliest scandal sheets, The Morning Post, which specialized in printing malicious society gossip, selling positive mentions in its pages, and collecting suppression fees to keep stories unpublished.[5]: 11–14 Other Georgian era scandal sheets were Theodore Hook's John Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's The Age, and Barnard Gregory's The Satirist.[5]: 53 William d'Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, explained his purpose:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_magazine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_reporting
-Steve Jobs
He also said "We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
Though maybe he was kind of wrong about televisions and PCs not merging - see youtube, netflix, Apple TV (both device and service), "smart" TVs, etc. I also imagine Jobs might put social media in the "turn your brain off" category.
To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)
Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.
It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.
This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product.
> To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale.
This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.
> The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day
The media that created the Trump brand, the media that gave him 24/7 free publicity, the media that got him elected, etc? That's the media you are praising?
> do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage
The problem in society is news. More news or more government funded news is not the answer.
To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.
I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.
https://ourworldindata.org/breaking-the-malthusian-trap
The problem, however, is the impact this change in political reporting has on actual politics. That, I'm not sure how to solve.
It used to be that pre-election debates were for nerds and policy wonks. Now everyone watches them, but all substance has been removed. Debates themselves may even cease to exist.
As opposed to being paid directly by the people they're supposed to hold accountable?
Government-funded media would at least have a fighting chance of being neutral, checks and balances and all. By all accounts the US justice system is corrupt as well, but it would obviously be orders of magnitude worse if you outsourced it to private corporations.
The product was already being produced pre-Internet, pre-television, pre-radio:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
A new distribution medium didn't cause it to be created.
It's very similar to how professional wrestling isn't real wrestling, but actually 'wrestling entertainment'.
I call this the 'WWE-ification' of the news and politics.
https://voussoir.net/writing/slamming_and_blasting
If you synthesize all that happens in Washington in a day, it is a giant soap opera. IT keeps its power by keeping people paying attention to it. Even a "just the facts, maam" view of the news is largely rabblerousing. I wonder how much of what I see on https://www.memeorandum.com/river today will matter in 10 years. How much of it belongs in a history book. How much of it is needed to make an informed decision in an election. How much of it is needed to understand the world around me.
I did a little write-up after reading AOtD for a TL;DR of the book: https://lambdaland.org/posts/personal/2020-06-07-amusing-our...
(Though you really should read the book and not my dumb little write-up.)
Mcluhan, his French counterparts, Deborah, ELlul, all understood something 60 years ago. Mass manufacturing and mass media are the key determinants of our society. The first has commoditized the physical things we surround ourselves with. The second commoditizes our dispositions. Political or economical arrangements matter so much less.
Taking that view, and the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology as we think it is. Just another means for media saturazition, washing out individual thought.
A salient effect, when everything is essentially the same, the only mechanism to differentiate is branding. Hence, everything is captured by marketing. Products are differentiated by their commercials, people differentiate themselves by the identity they assume, everything/everybody is thrown in a marketplace where comparison is based on image, not substance. Really nothing can be evaluated intrinsically anymore, our evaluation of everything gets mediated by a story, a narrative, an image. The matrix is real, not the living in the computer part, but the unease that everything is fake, everything is a projection.
If true, and it also explains why the classic California easy-going personality is now the dominant one. It is not even cool anymore to be 90s abrasive or cynical, that just elicits eye rolls (the rebellion in fight club looks quaint now, almost adorable). Better to just bland in.
The logical end point of this evolution is that we all become widgets. Essentially the same, responding to inputs, participants in algorithm, the only difference maybe the skinning, the look&feel. All undifferentiated tough.
May be true, may be not. But it certainly explains a lot of the last 150 years, and it makes our current era less special. which is comforting, we're not messing up in ways grandpa wasn't already doing so.
To pine for any kind of quaint return is missing the point entirely. The only way through is forward and out.
Not sure there is an easy answer. None of us want to be censored, but for sure the market has failed (both the demand side and the supply side, and there is lots of money to be made from all the fake controversy and scandal)
With the First Amendment we revoked Congress’ power as a lawmaking body to govern publishing. The market hasn’t failed, but other people are reading and believing things that you or I don’t agree with, but the difference is that you basically want to make them stop doing that, which I guess includes me as I am disagreeing with you here.
Don’t forget that all elected positions are Offices of Power and to seek an election is to seek to acquire power. I am more than happy to keep the flow of information outside the grasp of the types of people who seek to acquire an elected Office and the power vested in it, even at the risk that other people are wrong and take wrong actions with wrong information.
I certainly wouldn't trust or give politicians the ability to censor what they don't like.
As I said, this is a hard problem. No individual should be censored. But, as with most things, scale is a problem in of itself. There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit. There is significant profit in anger, fear, sowing divisions, artificial controversy; but this comes at a large detriment to us as a society.
That’s embarrassing. I actually did overstate the disagreement upon re-reading your prior comment. My apologies.
> There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit.
Even CNN and Fox can be held in check for literally lying, but by the people they’re lying about, and in turn they operate in a space where they report on a more powerful entity than themselves when they lie or subvert the truth. The American government is also a player in the information space, and its chief officials are not always telling the truth, or disclosing the full truth. So what we have is a wash in which information competes with information, and we don’t always have good, accurate or useful information where we need it or desire it. I still wouldn’t call this a market failure, people profit and lose off of good or bad information all the time; it’s when we allow ourselves to become tools for moneyed or empowered interests who use those programs and writings to induce action that we experience a very real human or political failure.
The purpose of the news industry is to inform, but it has always and will forever be at the behest of people with an interest in informing in a manner they prioritize in competition with other people with differing interests, and it is itself for-profit industry whether or not the profits are expressed on the P&L of a given corporation.
And you are never going to get the fairness doctrine to apply to those that are online.
You could have Facebook set rules for posts on their network, but then Facebook competes with Twitter and Tiktok and whatever, so if the posts on Facebook are less engaging than those on Twitter, people may go there.
Its all broken incentives all the way down.
Viewers are to blame. Cable and the internet are just better than ever monetizing the garbage people gravitate towards. There's more high quality journalism on offer than ever and it's audience just keep dwindling in favor of social media and purely fraudulent news like FOX.
People talk about media or corporations or government like they're from some alternate dimension or alien species. They're run by the exact same human beings that exist in your daily life. Most people act out of self-interest and are subject to bias. Media didn't invent it, it's an extension of human nature.
That's a very bold claim but I can't say it's wild. The news is supposed to be a critical source of information but I think the effect is a net negative. By a large margin. It's a pretty perverse situation.
I don't think the government should ban news or anything. That's obviously bad. But society would probably be better off without it (as-is), as extreme as that would be.
Essentially this is arguing for limited distribution & gatekeepers for the news. That would almost certainly be better for society, but there's the problem with disenfranchisement & how you select/entrust gatekeepers. I don't think the "old" solutions to those problems were particularly good.
The solution to this tradegi of the commons is to ignore it all and read up on the various candidates a few weeks before the election.
And when entertainment isn't recharging our souls, giving us time off, isn't wholesome (which all apply to current news) we don't get what our souls need, and we become worse people individually and collectively.
Watching the 24 hour news cycle as entertainment is just like any kind of constant trauma, constant onslaught, constant conflict and it fundamentally is rewiring our brains individually and collectively
How about reinstating the fairness doctrine that changed (along with so much else) in the 1980s as a start? And creating some rules to prevent news sources from being used as propaganda machines by billionaires?
Is this article 'news'?
The article talks about 'traditional' sources of newspapers, NPR, MSNBC -- is there a certain type of 'news' that people are starting to avoid?
Personally, I think Aaron Swartz was right [1]: I feel better off, emotionally and mentally, reading a monthly magazine or an annual book than trying to absorb every tidbit of clickbait dished out by the view-driven media. Monthly content is generally more nuanced and often more actionable, and whatever social media furor accompanied each small part of it, as it developed, is omitted for being the tempest in a teapot that it was.
[1]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Beyond not watching news shows and not having a TV, this is how I filter. What action can I take? It has drawn me closer to local issues where I can do something.
Maybe I can clean up the beaches in Australia, but I'm not there. Becoming enraged about politics 1,000 miles away shows a lack of humility and lack of understanding my sphere of influence.
Considering that even “The Experts” who many claim hold “The Truth” are subject to the same echo chambers and powerful tribal allegiances that everybody else is… you cannot really trust them either. Many will be more than happy to bend things to suit their political affiliations or sometimes even lie to you face if it promotes their narrative.
The most important skill, I believe, is question everything you hear. Only you can determine what is true and isn’t. Outsourcing critical thinking to others is setting yourself up for manipulation. It’s sounds ridiculous, but based on the events over the last three years I believe that is as good as it gets in modern times. There is no such thing as “The Expert”. It’s your brain against the endless tide of information and only you get to decide what makes sense and what doesn’t.
You guys gotta decide if you like democracy or not. Is it still acceptable when the results are tainted by voters watching watching the wrong, untruthful, bad, fringe news instead of the good, right, truthful, mainstream kind?
There isn’t a major news source out there for me. I don’t want my own political beliefs confirmed and be told how bad the other side is so I can feel superior. I want facts, and not just those I agree with. That largely doesn’t exist anymore.
It defies a certain logic that audiences can tire of Marvel movies that come out a couple times a year, but daily coverage of such an asinine topic for nearly a decade is supported by the market?
Certainly this has to be culturally damaging, but everyone sort of pretends it's normal for the country to focus on the antics and tribulations of one person.
TV runs the country for now but I am optimistic their vapidity will drive the next generations to the internet. There appears to me a growing number of young people growing up online.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/742225/frequency-of-watc...
This one puts the average age at about 60 for all primetime viewers.
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/the-cw-age-average-viewer-b...
Even so, I read the Post, Atlantic, BBC, and Al Jazeera. Sometimes listen to NPR, but they seem to have been infiltrated by the Koch brothers schemes.
I also try to have deep discussions with a diverse, educated, well-traveled set of acquaintances.
All of this leads to, I hope, a well informed perspective.
It’s heavily filtered and spun stories from a small group of heavily biased and like-minded individuals.
This is true of mainstream media, social media*, and even small circles of friends.
It’s hard to find single sources of unbiased news where there isn’t bias or an agenda.
*Yes, this includes HN, but I believe (hopefully) to a lesser extent, or I wouldn’t be here either.
I'm okay with the unavoidable news.
News media has had completely dissolved all sense of morality in reporting. They've killed the goose looking for golden eggs.