Did you hear? The Secretary of Defense was missing after getting sucked out of a faulty emergency door on a Boeing 737X while flying to testify that Ukraine needs more arms with which to pressure Israel into a ceasefire in a Trump trial.
My generation seems to read headlines on social media and nothing else. I wonder if it was the same back in the newspaper days. Would your average person see the headlines in the paper and stop there?
What I learned in journalism classes: yes, they mostly did. People would read the headline and, if the story was of some interest to them, the first paragraph. Most readers wouldn't read the full story unless it was something of particular interest to them.
We were taught that the first paragraph of a story should summarize the entire story because most people won't read past that.
Also, people tend to think they are informed about a story even when they just read the headline alone, despite that being obviously nonsensical.
> people tend to think they are informed about a story even when they just read the headline alone
Well, when the headline is "Lost hiker found using Apple Watch" or "Airline grounds fleet due to loose bolts" or "potential presidential candidate says something that sounds stupid" or "AMD says their new chips are faster than last year's chips", then I don't really need to read anything further to know the gist of the story, do I?
Yes, you do, unless the story isn't important to you. Even then, you shouldn't let the knowledge of a headline lead you to think that you know what's happened. Headlines are not written by the person who wrote the story, and are often misleading. The only thing a headline informs you about is the general topic of the story.
Thinking that the headline is a summary of the story or accurately reflects what the story says is risky.
The two primary ways that bias sneaks into news reporting are through story selection and through the choice of headline.
Unfortunately, headlines are frequently contradicted by the text in the article. For the headlines that are enticing enough to get high on social media, it seems like more than half are misleading.
> We were taught that the first paragraph of a story should summarize the entire story because most people won't read past that.
Also because it's better writing. For that purpose, anyway.
One can find readable images of e.g. late 19th and early 20th century papers that followed this style like it was the word of God, and they are so nice and effortless to read.
> I cannot stress enough how clear the structural trends are, and how fundamentally they will change journalism from serving the broad public to serving, basically, people like me who are affluent, highly educated, privileged, and middle-aged or older.
Is this a parody? I thought it was serious until here.
I also found this sentence to be oddly self-aggrandizing. He has determined that only cultured elites like himself are interested in knowing what's going on in the world, apparently.
Even if all only people who are affluent, highly educated, privileged (aren't all affluent people privileged?), and middle-aged or older read the news, that's still way more people than care about art. Plenty of people I know who fit these criteria don't care at all about art, but definitely read the news.
For a certain idea of what's going on in the world –– the author mentions horserace coverage, “behind the scenes” features, and punditry –– that's true.
TLDR journalism is expensive. Accurate journalism even more so, investigative 10 x that. if its only for rich people, then only rich people problems will get exposed.
Longer:
As you know journalism costs, "journalism" is cheaper, and often more popular. What do I mean?
Big paid for news systems have the budget to let people investigate stuff, peer in, check sources and generally have specialists in different areas (transport, health, science, trade, business, environment, law , etc). This means that its harder to sneak bullshit past them, and use that platform as a free advertiser.
What does this mean in practice? Well, lets look at tech coverage. the free sites are basically a thin veneer over tech company's PR. Certain sites will be given exclusive access if they are nice and well behaved. Tech companies are almost never tackled on their bullshit. Thats down to financial news sites or the like.
Theranos was obviously pulling some bullshit, but it wasn't until the WSJ put some effort in before consequences actually happened. but how could that be? because up until the finance news papers got involved, Theranos was operating in a pull model, sending invites to tech journalists who know that if they say bad things, they won't be called back. Apple and Tesla do this as well, along with others. This means that if you want eyeballs, you need to be nice to the tech companies and print bullshit.
So what does that mean?
It means that rich people's news sources are doing the majority of investigative journalism, which means there are scandals that affect the average person, going unpunished.
For the UK that means things like the collapse of the NHS, Adult and social care, the halfing of all local council budgets, along with education for kids with any kind of extra need. Most of that is known, but its never a front of centre by the news sources. Which means the government can ignore it. (see the post office scandal, it was known about, but never front page. it took a fucking drama to shame the state into action.)
There was a time when the news arm of networks and local TV was a loss center, and supported by revenue generated from other content, like prime time TV. At some point the businesses decided that news should turn a profit, and that was the beginning of the end. Even for newspapers, the majority of the profitable sections were sports and leisure, the hard news section was never expected to run in the green. Combined with Facebook and Google eating all the ad dollars, networks and news outlets couldn't sustain a news organization by any means.
I don’t know who the author considers “elite”, but I do consider News very marginal to me already (for several years actually). To keep the analogy, Art is much more important to me than News.
But I do consider myself in the elite of my country, considering wealth and education. I am not a millionaire, but my monthly income put me in the top 5%. I only have a bachelor degree, but that also puts me in the top 20%. Is that the elite they meant?
Without diminishing your achievements, the term 'elite' often refers to individuals possessing substantial societal influence, through wealth or similar channels.
> the term 'elite' often refers to individuals possessing substantial societal influence, through wealth or similar channels
It’s used variously. In terms of elite overproduction, it’s anyone with an education. In terms of social policy, it’s anyone with philanthropic wealth; top 1% is easily in this category. Top 5%, depending on one’s community.
That’s an unreasonably narrow definition of “elite” for any purpose which you’d want to talk about the elite. The top 0.01% depend on armies of top 5% people. The incomes of people at the 95th percentile have continued to grow at consistent rates throughout the 20th century, while the median income stagnated: https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-pos....
For example, I’m not in the 0.01%, but as a corporate attorney I make multiples of what I would make in Europe. Is that because American lawyers are smarter? No. It’s because the sheer profitability of American companies means they have a ton of money to fight legal battles with each other. The same is true for everyone from accountants to software engineers. Why are Silicon Valley salaries so high? Because Google and Facebook have profit margins comparable to Standard Oil back in the day.
And whether they think about it or not, all of these people have a strong incentive to maintain the system that enables them to capture an outsized share of the economy. Thus, properly defined, the elites include the ordinary wealthy whose livelihoods are intertwined with those of the super wealthy. In Scandinavian countries, the top tax bracket starts around 1.5x the median income. I think that’s a pretty fair definition of “elite”—these are people who would be worse off under a more equitable system.
The term also properly includes the educational elites who staff various bureaucracies and organizations that have high degrees of social influence. If you look at the folks who exercise decision making authority over the lives of ordinary people (everyone from judges to regulators), they overwhelmingly come from a handful of elite schools. DOJ attorneys might not be rich, but they went to school with and are friends with the CEOs and hedge fund guys. The same is true for journalists at national-level outfits like the New York Times.
I’ve been reading NPR along with some foreign sites like the guardian and Al Jazeera and it really feels like the US is drinking its own koolaid WRT what gets covered and what doesn’t.
Many issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time and discussion in the news or by our elected representatives.
Other reporting brings to mind the expression that’s something like: the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting.
To think this is somehow a US problem is not doing your view any favors. Listing other popular news sources, just means you are seeing other popular news. That can tell you little about how factual or relevant it is. Just how popular it is.
> It could end up akin to classical music, contemporary art, and literary fiction — important for a few in the upper crust, marginal to the lives of the majority of the public.
Most journalism nowadays is like pop music: it does not really provide anything new.
You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed.
The main problem, as I see it, is that there's just too much of it. There's no need for daily news and journalists produce formulaic content because it's the only way to produce so much content.
We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped.
Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected.
News that was less entertaining and did less to appeal to its audience would reduce the number of stupid people who vote in elections which would increase the quality of our elected politicians.
Cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC as well as their online competitors serve as propaganda wings of the political parties in general and typically the most corrupt wing of that political party in particular. They misinform their audience on purpose to create hyper-partisan voters who hate the other party and reliably vote for the donkey or the elephant no matter how unqualified, corrupt or unhinged the candidate may be.
We would likely be much better off if the people who base their identity on hating the other political party or who worship specific politicians would find a different hobby because the news was "boring" to them. If having tons of poorly informed or outright misinformed "vote {party} no matter who" voters participating in the political process wasn't to the benefit of large corporate interests, there wouldn't be an enormous corporate media industry intent on making sure they vote and telling them who to vote for.
That 'log' is generated by journalists, and the only reason why I have a paid subscription to a newspaper. Imagine living in a world without journalists and politicians and enterprises can do whatever they like without anyone ever writing about it...
You'd need journalism to dig out the parts & trends that matter given historical and current context anyway. "Murders up 10% in [city]"—is that statistical noise? Was there a policy change that may be connected? Does it follow historical trends for current economic conditions, so is perhaps a "natural" variation? Is below or above statewide trends? National? International? If it's below or above any of those, what might be the cause? Which sorts of policies have a history of being effective under these particular circumstances, to reduce a murder rate? Do any of the policies being proposed by various political figures have a history of being effective, or a history of being ineffective, or any history at all? Do any of the political figures stand to profit from their own proposals, or otherwise personally or professionally benefit in some maybe-questionable way?
All of that's journalism work, which we could all do ourselves, of course, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and most people are pretty bad at that kind of thing (though, granted, so are plenty of journalists—regardless, the work is journalism).
1. The event log -- in many places, this still doesn't exist in digital, structured, usable format. It's gotten better, but there's still a ways to go
2. Referencing the underlying event log -- there needs to be interpretation, summarization, and commentary, for the average viewer/reader. However, all of that should come with a reference to the underlying event log
We've gotten to the place we've gotten because (1) is impenetrable to the average person (or non-existent) and (2) doesn't happen.
Consequently, a bag of words has become more and more confused with facts.
We've had hyperlink technology for a while, journalism needs to fucking use it. :/
And how are you supposed to digest it ? Journalists are here to provide the context of the event, the background. They also so the job of checking the sources. We are not machine, from the log "2 planes crashed on the 9/11 of 2001", we would have to search ourselves all the things surrounding it, probably missing a lot on the way because we all have our day job and have other things to do.
Journalists are biased though, like any human, but I don't see how it can be fixed. Even an AI digesting the events will have some bias, though it might be aware of much more things than a simple humain brain.
We need both. The deep analysis that news is supposed to provide is an important service. Some things are important for reasons the reader does not necessarily understand, and providing it only in bite-sized form is not good enough.
Sometimes things need to be explained. Now, long-winded magazine articles that exist for the writer to show off the virtuosity of their prose? That's niche for people who enjoy those things.
But otherwise raw brute-force data encourages raw brute-force policy.
For example, data point of prevailing home prices indicates a problem - that housing has gotten very expensive. Dumb brute-force policy = price caps. Analysis explains that houses are expensive because of supply and demand and the supply has plummeted while demand is rising, and that price caps would make that worse. Where does that connection live in your event-log?
Heck, just digest it into a shittiness score and tell me once a year.
Hey Google, how much worse is everything this year?
According to Eventscore.com, national despair increased by 34.2%, a slight uptick compared to last year. School shootings have proceeded as expected, political corruption is within norms, and economic marginalization has followed modeled trends. Climate change and wars continue, planes are falling apart again, the courts made bad decisions, protestors are angry. But a new VR headset is coming out soon and a sportsball team somewhere won a game. Happy new year! Your next update is in 2025.
TV and free news, yes. Paid journalism, per the article, no; it’s for elites.
The Financial Times and Politico’s reporting tend to be concise, timely and actionable. It’s just that the whip for a Schumer-Sinema-Johnson-other guy grind around the finer points of a budget negotiation, or jobs numbers vis-à-vis rates forecasts, aren’t relevant for most people. (Or the, for that matter.)
Zooming out a little, political news is repetitive, except for the names, and most of it is just mud throwing:
- This is the most important election of our times. The other candidate wants to send you and your children to the gulag.
- Person X had sex with person Y and laundered PAC money.
- Government shutdown unless item X gets funded and item Y doesn’t. X supporters say Y supporters are holding the country hostage. Y supporters say they just want America to get back to work.
The news organizations didn't make any of that stuff up though. Those are the actual rhetoric and the hypocritical or criminal acts of the politicians you are alluding to. You've just genericized it by replacing names with X and Y. However, it's anything but generic, and there are real patterns to it, so the names behind the X and Y matter.
It would be journalistic malpractice not to report those things when there is evidence to support the allegations.
Nevertheless, it raises the question of “how often is this relevant to me?” If I already know a person needs to be replaced or reelected next time at the polls, reading all the details is a waste of time and personal happiness.
What the journalists should report and what I should read are separate questions.
The post-Fox News polarization of cable news (small but influential like Twitter was), consolidation of local TV news, and collapse of local newspapers happened so fast we're still reeling from it and just starting to notice the effects.
The 90s were a constant Clinton sex scandal from the time he started running for office through his impeachment and people still talk about it. Simultaneously, there was the Harken energy scandal, featuring influence peddling by not-yet-President G.W. Bush. Etc.
Vox claims "the most important election ever" started in 2000 and has continued since, but I think that has more to do with when the author became politically aware than anything else.
I encourage anyone to look back further for more extreme elections.
The peaks of the unrest seem to happen near times when there's a shift in "Party System." We're currently in the US's Sixth (or is it Seventh?) Party System:
Yes, I know, I lived through it. If you did too then you'll recall that the difference is that it wasn't considered important by average people, nothing like today anyhow. We paid plenty of attention to it, but it was like rubbernecking at a carwreck -- very interesting in the moment, but not earth shattering. It was important in an "oooh, fascinating hahaha" way, not in an "oh no, how anxiety inducing" kind of way, and that summarizes the difference between the 90s and the 20s.
"You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed."
I haven't listened to 7 O'Clock News/Silent Night in years, but I always felt the news in it were timeless. Maybe I'll give it a try tonight to see if 1966 news still sound fresh in 2024.
You've copped some downvotes but I think your first sentence rings true.
I think your second sentence is bullshit because why would any "they" care what "we" feel like. The news industry is built around making money from peoples attention. Like many other things in this world that seem planned it's just the product of business satisfying a human desire.
"Show me the incentives and ill show you the outcome". That is more or less what you are saying, but I don't know why you would preclude the possibility of a deliberate strategy in achieving those ends.
I'm a little surprised at the downvotes, but then reading my comment back the brevity leans it toward pithy, so probably deserved.
To expand on the second sentence, centuries ago news was little more than propaganda to appease the peasant classes - "we've invaded the next village and won, we're great" - all delivered by a town crier or equivalent. I don't believe we ever really went beyond that too much. Here in the UK, there's no such thing as a non-partizan newspaper - every newspaper is pushing an agenda, people buy the newspaper that the rest of their tribe reads, they all get enraged about the same things and those are the things that someone, somewhere, wants them to get enraged about because it serves some need that the proles don't need to worry their silly little heads about.
All of this is not to say that some individual people within the news machines are not incredible, hard working, honest people doing extremely important work. There are many. But when that hard work conflicts with the wishes of the puppeteer, it's bumped to page 28 and quickly dropped.
The Horizon / Post Office scandal is a perfect, and timely, example of this. Some journalists were banging that drum for years, yet it never hit the front pages despite being the biggest miscarriage of justice the UK has ever seen. Only when a terrestrial TV channel turned it into a drama, coincidentally in an election year, is it suddenly on the front pages with our politicians blaming the other side and our newspapers happily printing the talking points fed to them. Now the few elites want us to know about it, specifically so that they can score some points and use it for electioneering.
I have to agree totally with the propaganda and electioneering angle of some aspects news.
But it does feel like there is a lot of "content" that isn't there for that reason and is just included as part of the news for the purpose of distraction. Maybe there's a question of what section of the newspaper/site we are looking at and the type of story in it.
The first job AI will replace (this has already partly happened) is the "journalist".
Not because the job of a good journalist would be easy to replace, but because there are no longer good journalists around.
They have already been replaced by people who just regurgitate content. That kind of "journalism" is easy to replace with AI.
Therefore, the content will be even cheaper to produce. Therefore I don't see it disappearing, because the consumers of the "news" provide value to those who have an agenda to push.
Oh there still are good journalists around. People just don't care enough about quality journalism that they'd spend a few bucks on it a month when there's crappy free journalism.
There are some good investigative journalists in my country, but that is about it. I have seen very close (family member) how even the excellent investigative journalists have difficulties, because they are making power structures uncomfortable, and media ownership is too close to the power structures.
In my country, there is even a platform for deep and slow journalism, but the content is crap, because even when journalists get the resources to do quality journalism, they are no longer able to do it. It appears to me that they are so used to pushing agendas, that the only kind of journalism they can do is agenda journalism.
In cases like this I think it's better to say AI is eliminating jobs, not replacing them. As you note, the tech can't do the job, but it can do a job, for profit, that will result in other jobs going away. Much like the computer eliminated the job of the newspaper typesetter.
Some newspapers already have no local staff, and just publish content generated at some distant office by the owner, like Gannet. Give Gannet access to sufficient LLM resources and they'll churn out crappier crap. Even Sports Illustrated was caught using generated, complete with fake author biographies.[1].
Sports Illustrated was what I had in mind when I said that it has already partly happened.
It is going to be interesting if people will eventually realize that there is very little substance in the content, especially if the content continues to detoriate. At least Sports Illustrated was ashamed they got caught, and removed the articles.
Am I the only one that read the name of the author at the top of the page, "Rasmus Kleis Nielsen", and thought it was a joke on Rasmussen, Nielsen etc, the usual poll companies? It's even more on the nose, since trust on opinion polls maybe the only thing lower than trust on mainstream news.
This is the natural result of cable news becoming increasingly biased and even outright and completely false and/or misleading. There is almost no tolerance for asking even the most basic critical questions of the prevailing narrative or having an honest conversation with dissenters of mainstream views. Watching mainstream news feels increasingly like watching propaganda instead of "news".
There is not even an attempt to be fair anymore to all sides of any given issue, and the editorial contempt for the average viewer/reader leaks through much more often than it used to. The natural response from many people is simply to stop watching, and to get their news elsewhere. Thus far, mainstream news networks have not seemed to care or do any introspection at all as to why they are losing so much viewership and credibility.
We need to go back to the regulated news model. I.e. when independent news organizations were mandated for broadcast channels.
Dry facts.
Balanced commentary.
They're doing it wrong if it's not boring, because it shouldn't be playing your emotions.
If the for-profit sector wants to continue to air partisan-pro-wrestling-masquerading-as-news... fine. But the average viewer/reader needs to have an easily accessible and comprehensive alternative.
Most countries have some form of this, but it needs to be recognized as a critical democratic institution in a post-gen-AI world, and funded as such.
This perception of a dichotomy in news is a brain worm that needs to be excised from everyone's mind.
What's the "balanced" commentary for something like the JFK assassination, for example?
LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because LHO was a communist.
LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because LHO was crazy.
LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because the CIA paid him to (and then killed him).
LHO was a patsie and the president was shot by a second gunman from the grassy knoll because the CIA wanted to invade Cuba.
Off the top of my head those are the stories that would need "balanced commentary".
News organization don't need to be unbiased and they don't need to be balanced. What they need is a to stop catering to rabid political fanbases who've got involved in the team sport of politics not out of some sense of civic duty to their fellow man but out of loneliness and a need to belong[1]. News organizations are the mirror reflecting us, not the other way around.
Balanced means making the strongest argument in favor of a position.
Or, as the HN guidelines put it: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Balance critically does not mean making disingenuous straw man or strong man arguments to advance a specific agenda.
Which is the guise it usually appears in today.
E.g. 'parineum is against balance in news because they believe there is one truth and other ideas shouldn't be given merit'
vs
'parineum is concerned about the de facto realization of balance as a covering for expressedly partisan viewpoints, themselves stemming from and catering to the polarization of a poorly informed audience'
One of those presupposes the answer. The other makes me curious and has multiple answers.
Making a bad argument on behalf of a group you dislike isn't balance. Making the strongest argument and debating it is.
There was never a regulated news model in the USA. For a while we did have the "Fairness Doctrine" under which the FCC required some radio and TV broadcasters to present balanced viewpoints as a condition of spectrum licenses. But that never applied to print media, cable channels, or online services.
If you want non-profit, government funded news then NPR and VOA exist. The quality is generally pretty good, although they're not free of bias either.
A bigger source of effective (at driving division and getting Your Side riled up) slant isn't when the same story is covered differently, but when an outlet or set of related outlets cover a "story" that evaporates entirely if you fill in basic, deliberately-omitted context. There's not another side to cover, because it's not even a story.
Example: I see "[Administration] transporting migrants from the border to cities around the country, in secretive nighttime flights" receiving heavy coverage on a certain news channel (you can probably fill in the gaps here, but I'll leave the specifics out because that's not important for the illustration). Like, it's most of what they're talking about, for the entire hour or so I happen to be in a room with them on the TV, and not during an opinion segment.
Quick google:
1) Not secret,
2) Some are at night, but that's just because of, like... flight scheduling, same way some commercial flights are after sundown and others aren't, plenty are during the day, and it's not as if nighttime flights are somehow significantly harder to track than daytime ones or like it's weird for passenger planes to fly at night, so that whole bit was silly to begin with, worst evil plan ever if that was a deliberate part of it (as was implied), and
3) It's part of longstanding, ordinary operation of immigration control, isn't a new thing, and is happening for non-crazy (and certainly not secret) reasons—though one could disagree with them and say something else should be done instead, sure, but that's not how it's being covered, it's being covered as (implicitly) a new program (not new) being carried out for mysterious reasons (not mysterious) in secret (not secret).
Is this "story" receiving similar heavy coverage with a different slant on perceived-as-opposing channels? No, the info on it's mostly to be found on simple factual sites that published info on these activities from before it was "a story", and sites dedicated to debunking "fwd: fwd: fwd:" crap, because it's, emphatically, not even news, so how would an ordinary news program cover it? It's simply absent.
The less-brazen version of this is to not cover or downplay something that is news but that you'd rather bury but this stuff is... on another level. The "other side" can't provide a different slant, or uncover a story you're hiding, because it's not even a story. (the evolved version of this tactic, of course, is that your opinion-focused programs accuse the "other side" of burying the story and use it as Yet More Evidence that they can't be trusted, which story they can't even responsibly cover because it's made-up, unless their story is to report that you're inventing news) Bonus points that this gives you stuff to talk about if you're the ones trying to avoid a real story that's inconvenient. It's brilliant, really.
I think this is a natural consequence when you optimize for eyeballs. It leads to spammy crap that give you whatever it thinks you want to consume. News is now entertainment.
> Thus far, mainstream news networks have not seemed to care or do any introspection at all as to why they are losing so much viewership and credibility.
Fox News still tops the basic cable charts. It saw less viewers in 2023 but so did all of cable together. It's unclear to me at all that they are "losing so much viewership" vs. people just leaving cable and getting their news/entertainment elsewhere.
I'm sure Fox News's marketing department sees what their cable numbers, streaming numbers and online reader numbers all look like together and I really doubt their style of reporting that got them to where they are today suddenly became irrelevant when everyone else in the industry seems to have followed suit, rather than find success with another strategy.
The idea that they've lost viewership and credibility is, imo, wishful thinking on your part.
> The natural response from many people is simply to stop watching, and to get their news elsewhere.
I'm sympathetic to your description of mainstream news (which is a bit of a nebulous term, I must admit; "legacy" might be a better description), but, in my experience, the news you get from "elsewhere" is often unabashedly biased. So, is the fall in popularity of mainstream news a result of the lack of neutrality, or because it's not partisan enough? After all, wildly biased news is wildly popular online and mainstream news has to compete. There's a network effect to that. Social media has made the ability to curate one's newsfeed to a degree of ideological specificity that is pretty incredible. Bias sells.
Personally, I don't think it's "neutrality" or even "bias" that is the issue with most news these days. A lot of news orgs have simply abdicated themselves from the vital role of journalism in a functioning liberal democracy: accountability. Most people follow the news incessantly but actually know next to nothing about what is actually happening in government or politics. All they get in the news is a slice of a soap-opera instead of insight into governance or politicking, backstage where the sausage is actually made and where crime, graft, negligence, corruption, stupidity, and brazen cruelty in the pursuit of power, is endemic by both parties.
Journalism has also become a "status" job that is often only attainable and maintainable as a career by people from elite education or with connections to the industry. You end up with a particular class of people as journalists interacting with politicians or executives or other people from the same class. This leads an effect whenever they try to cover lower class people that is similar to that famous image of Hilary Clinton walking into that small apartment.
> So, is the fall in popularity of mainstream news a result of the lack of neutrality, or because it's not partisan enough?
I don’t think those two explanations are at odds with each other. People may prefer listening to a news source that tries to be neutral. But if the reporters can’t hide their personal leanings, they would rather go with a news source where the reporters’ personal leanings agree with their own.
People aren’t stupid. They can tell the difference between someone who is trying to overcome their personal leaning and be neutral, and someone who is so affected by their personal leaning that they can’t even conceal it. People can trust the former person even if they disagree. People can’t trust the latter person.
I largely agree, but I think it speaks to a larger point about the news landscape and how people access and use the news. How people use the news has shifted. Instead of a way of getting informed in order to hold elected officials accountable, for instance, it's used to confirm one's personal leanings --- essentially to make their reader/viewer comfortable. There's the story and the news, and then there's how it is presented. Comforting and confirming someone's personal leanings is a much more effective business strategy than a recipe for good journalism, and yet here we are.
It's possible for someone to trust and agree with the presentation of the news; to distrust, but agree; to trust, but disagree; or to distrust and disagree (there's also not caring at all, which is another issue all together). In TV, you might call these segments. In my view, most news organizations have become hyper focused at catering to the "trust and agree" segment so much so that it has become the majority of what they do. All they work on is comforting that segment. I think much of the popular dissatisfaction and distrust with news orgs in general, is really that in 2024 the news is actually not very useful. Instead, people are starting to see that it's kind of more like an imaginary friend who never disagrees who and who offers you comfort almost on demand.
I agree with that too, but “accountability” is a loaded concept. Hold politicians accountable for what? That depends on your vision for what America should look like.
Well, ideally, in a liberal democracy, hold politicians accountable for whether they do what they say they will do. They are elected on a certain set of promises ("I will do x", "I will support value y") and, ideally, people made informed decisions based on that when voting. Whether they get reelected is a way of holding elected officials accountable in a blunt sense. One way for voters to be informed of whether politicians are doing what they said they would do (even, really on what politicians are doing at all) is to have journalists write accounts of what politicians said and then did, because normal everyday people are not paid to follow politics all day figuring out whether they're actually doing what they said they would do---journalists do that for us. They report on what happened.
> That depends on your vision for what America should look like.
That's also why I think people are way too hung up on things like "neutrality" and "objectivity" in their news. It's not clear cut and not a science, journalists tell stories which are factual to the degree possible by them. They are useful. When they don't do that well, or dishonestly, they lose credibility as stand-ins for us following politicians around. We hold journalists to account in the same way. Ideally, they do the same by retracting or publicizing their errors as well. That's also why a diverse news environment is a good thing. But, as we know, it can also easily become hyper polarized to the point where it stops really becoming useful at all, just comforting, and in some cases practically a blatant ideological tool in service of certain politicians, which for many years was considering deeply embarrassing for a journalist.
> Well, ideally, in a liberal democracy, hold politicians accountable for whether they do what they say they will do.
I agree with that, but consider this hypothetical: Trump’s travel ban. He campaigned on banning travel from certain countries with high levels of Islamic fundamentalism. And then he did that. I think a reporter could say those facts without interjecting their view of whether that promise was a good thing or a bad thing. But Trump’s promise was deeply offensive to the value system a certain segment of society, which deems multiculturalism as axiomatically valuable. They couldn’t help themselves from reminding their viewers that they found Trump’s values abhorrent.
I think that’s where it matters whether the media attempts to maintain ideological neutrality. If CNN reported the facts, I’d watch it. But if they interject moral assessments of the facts, then I’ll watch Fox News instead. If neutrality isn’t an option, I’ll go watch the outlet that I at least agree with.
Even my dad, who is a blue dog democrat—one of the few people who thought Carter was a great president—has characterized CNN as propaganda” these days. He doesn’t understand why they’re giving Trump so much free airtime, and why they’re trying to convince people the economy is great under Biden.
i was thinking about something similar last night: that what we call "news" is obsolete. this narration of human-social-events. we have the tech to observe the world as it is, and if something interesting happens, save that.
like, the only important news is scientific discovery. read about an experiment that someone did and what was proved or disproved or gained by that experiment. watch a video of the experiment, look at the data, whatever.
idk, there is an ideal state of affairs that i'm thinking of where "geopolitics" isn't really a thing, because we no longer find the concept of a "country" useful, because we've established an optimal method of resource allocation and distribution. but that would only really happen once everyone becomes enlightened i guess.
When the metric becomes the target, nothing else matters.
The entire modern ad industry was built on false metrics and measures.
Attention is the currency of media. When sensationalism is not only acceptable, it's profitable, all boundaries are lost.
The entire news media has been perverted by the metrics and the measurements used in modern advertising and media. It's all about attention, measured to the individual and paid accordingly. No standards, no oversight, no limit.
The current title ("News could end up as Art important to few elites marginal to the rest") is difficult to parse. An improvement would be "News could end up like Art, important to few elites, marginal to the rest".
News is already of marginal utility to most people, except as entertainment.
The top headlines on my version of Google News are:
* an update on Trump's trial-- marginal utility, unless you are involved in the trial, with only its outcome being of use to the masses
* a story about France's new prime minister-- marginal utility, unless you live in France
* more trump trial
* more trump trial
* a piece on Age of Emprires
* whoever Nicole Eggert is has breast cancer
* an iPhone survived the drop from the Boeing 737 decompression event-- the story about the decompression has utility but the phone surviving is useless info
* news about the Peregrine moon lander-- useful to me because I'm an aerospace engineer and benefit from failure analysis of other projects, although its main utility is keeping it in my consciousness until actual in-depth analysis is available
* crime story out of Florida a state over 700 miles away-- useful to Floridians I guess
Minimally important.
The only news that is useful to people is that which can be used to inform their decisions: weather, stocks, local and national politics related to their jurisdiction, hyper-local (neighborhood level) crime, upcoming local events, and any safety or culture news related to destinations one is planning on visiting.
Everything else is just information/misery/voyeurism pornography.
It is frustrating to me because I want to know about what is going on in my area, not about some missing persons case in a state 1,400 miles away, and local news is either dead or worse than national news.
That being said, I like hacker news-- an aggregator that claims to be about anything that good hackers would find interesting whose main purpose actually seems to be providing an outlet for people to complain about Apple, Amazon, and copyright law.
Agreed. Even the "news" listed on this site is usually of dubious value. I enjoy it, but I couldn't claim that a large percentage of it is "important."
I think people are under the odd impression that news used to be akin to national intelligence. But that was always far more detailed than news agencies were able to report. And, hopefully, more actionable. But most of the "actionable" comes from the greater agency of the government. Not from knowing the data.
I don't know the condition in worldwide, but in my hometown newspaper companies spend more resources collecting news from everywhere. TV news rely on newspapers, YouTube "news channels" rely on TV. I don't what will happen when everything fail apart.
This article seems as out of touch about the real problems with journalism. All he observes is "much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer", yet all he talks about is election coverage.
News outlets have crumbled under the profit incentive. Staff cuts, outlets shutdown or merged into larger organizations[1]. Some outlets have zero staff, and just publish stories sent out from the mothership, such as Gannett, and no local news at all.[2]
What I increasingly see is that mainstream news is in it's own bubble, they report on things that they think are very relevant from their point of view, but the rest of the country really couldn't give a damn about.
The two shining example of this in my mind are: Claudine Gay and Jan 6. The right is very up in arms about the whole Claudine Gay situation but in reality she is just one president of one school and that piece of news really doesn't matter to anyone outside of that small bubble around Harvard and higher ed. Likewise on the left we have Jan 6 which they constantly push as a terrible thing to happen to our democracy.
Again if you are in DC then it's an important issue but if you're the rest of the country, it was a terrible thing that happened one day and then the government continued to operate normally.
And this goes for the vast majority of issues the news covers these days and the shame in all of this is these stories that seem important but in the end aren't really that important take the spotlight away from stories of actual importance.
I think there are three levels for looking after prod
- monitoring
- modelling
- machining
This applies here I think
Firstly it’s reporting - a kind of event logging for society. It’s our timelines, it’s who bombed whom. And by far and away it’s the most common and frankly the most useless, because it needs to be interpreted through a model
What does it mean that your disk is 80% full? What does it mean that Huthi attacks on Red Sea mean shipping is diverted? Whose model
You use determines what kind of alerting you get - does your model mean you add a new server when the disk is full? Or just ignore it?
Machining is the final part - what action to take. What to build or chnage - and this depends on the model you have. A lot of politics these days seems to be arguing over the alerting levels - when does this light go red?
Today in the UK we finally have Post Office post masters being pardoned for having been jailed - because the Post Office corporate body covered up
Bugs in a central accounting system. Jailed because of bugs.
This has been “news” for 15+ years. But it only became “mainstream” this week.
News as Edward R Murrow knew it was all three parts at once. He scanned the horizon, found the story and told people that this person was not a communist (monitoring / reporting) and in the same time told them why this was wrong (liberty, freedom) and what action to take (remove senator)
But Murrows news has been disaggregated.
The OP is thinking news is this Murrow like idea where the elite choose a model, and find facts around that model. It’s not great (but done with integrity it works generally well)
The thing is now we have choices of models and reporting and actions and most people have not got a good model of the world and even if they did the flood of information barely allows them to adjust the model
We will always need Ed Murrow and others like them to curate the timeline and challenge the models.
We could make them explicit and testable (but that’s science) and we could build and validate our own but that’s hard work
Or we could seek out people of integrity to curate the models on our behalf and presenst their view for us to consume - with their doubts and uncertainties ans their opinions
On a related thought, the model approach would be a interesting OSINT feature - imagine a Snow Crash style CIA Factbook containing a Wikipedia like feed of continuous real time data - not stock prices but shipman’s airplane movements, estimates of cargo and bills of material for cars being shipped.
Laying bare this world trade, will have an impact on similar way laying bare the politicking of parliaments did.
For CIA Factbook and Wiki, the focus is on All Information about a subject.
For News orgs the focus is on New Infotmation.
So even though news orgs have professional trained info collectors, and have good access to networks that produce Info they don't think of them selves as a Wiki or Factbook. Why?
Cause legacy + they are taught media theory not information theory + tech platforms are not taught either and control distribution of info.
But things change as people learn the system is a waste and noise generating. Learning takes time.
>However gratifying, no amount of speechifying about how journalism serves the public interest will save the profession and the business if the public isn’t interested.
A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that's not a functioning democracy.
In public, I've had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don't care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad.
But it's problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more.
>So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge.
We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don't see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadWe were taught that the first paragraph of a story should summarize the entire story because most people won't read past that.
Also, people tend to think they are informed about a story even when they just read the headline alone, despite that being obviously nonsensical.
Well, when the headline is "Lost hiker found using Apple Watch" or "Airline grounds fleet due to loose bolts" or "potential presidential candidate says something that sounds stupid" or "AMD says their new chips are faster than last year's chips", then I don't really need to read anything further to know the gist of the story, do I?
Thinking that the headline is a summary of the story or accurately reflects what the story says is risky.
The two primary ways that bias sneaks into news reporting are through story selection and through the choice of headline.
Also because it's better writing. For that purpose, anyway.
One can find readable images of e.g. late 19th and early 20th century papers that followed this style like it was the word of God, and they are so nice and effortless to read.
Is this a parody? I thought it was serious until here.
Even if all only people who are affluent, highly educated, privileged (aren't all affluent people privileged?), and middle-aged or older read the news, that's still way more people than care about art. Plenty of people I know who fit these criteria don't care at all about art, but definitely read the news.
TLDR journalism is expensive. Accurate journalism even more so, investigative 10 x that. if its only for rich people, then only rich people problems will get exposed.
Longer:
As you know journalism costs, "journalism" is cheaper, and often more popular. What do I mean?
Big paid for news systems have the budget to let people investigate stuff, peer in, check sources and generally have specialists in different areas (transport, health, science, trade, business, environment, law , etc). This means that its harder to sneak bullshit past them, and use that platform as a free advertiser.
What does this mean in practice? Well, lets look at tech coverage. the free sites are basically a thin veneer over tech company's PR. Certain sites will be given exclusive access if they are nice and well behaved. Tech companies are almost never tackled on their bullshit. Thats down to financial news sites or the like.
Theranos was obviously pulling some bullshit, but it wasn't until the WSJ put some effort in before consequences actually happened. but how could that be? because up until the finance news papers got involved, Theranos was operating in a pull model, sending invites to tech journalists who know that if they say bad things, they won't be called back. Apple and Tesla do this as well, along with others. This means that if you want eyeballs, you need to be nice to the tech companies and print bullshit.
So what does that mean?
It means that rich people's news sources are doing the majority of investigative journalism, which means there are scandals that affect the average person, going unpunished.
For the UK that means things like the collapse of the NHS, Adult and social care, the halfing of all local council budgets, along with education for kids with any kind of extra need. Most of that is known, but its never a front of centre by the news sources. Which means the government can ignore it. (see the post office scandal, it was known about, but never front page. it took a fucking drama to shame the state into action.)
But I do consider myself in the elite of my country, considering wealth and education. I am not a millionaire, but my monthly income put me in the top 5%. I only have a bachelor degree, but that also puts me in the top 20%. Is that the elite they meant?
This usually means the top 0.01%.
It’s used variously. In terms of elite overproduction, it’s anyone with an education. In terms of social policy, it’s anyone with philanthropic wealth; top 1% is easily in this category. Top 5%, depending on one’s community.
For example, I’m not in the 0.01%, but as a corporate attorney I make multiples of what I would make in Europe. Is that because American lawyers are smarter? No. It’s because the sheer profitability of American companies means they have a ton of money to fight legal battles with each other. The same is true for everyone from accountants to software engineers. Why are Silicon Valley salaries so high? Because Google and Facebook have profit margins comparable to Standard Oil back in the day.
And whether they think about it or not, all of these people have a strong incentive to maintain the system that enables them to capture an outsized share of the economy. Thus, properly defined, the elites include the ordinary wealthy whose livelihoods are intertwined with those of the super wealthy. In Scandinavian countries, the top tax bracket starts around 1.5x the median income. I think that’s a pretty fair definition of “elite”—these are people who would be worse off under a more equitable system.
The term also properly includes the educational elites who staff various bureaucracies and organizations that have high degrees of social influence. If you look at the folks who exercise decision making authority over the lives of ordinary people (everyone from judges to regulators), they overwhelmingly come from a handful of elite schools. DOJ attorneys might not be rich, but they went to school with and are friends with the CEOs and hedge fund guys. The same is true for journalists at national-level outfits like the New York Times.
In the UK it means anyone a speaker doesn't like. For example:
o Someone who lives in london
o Someone who went to university (50% of 18 years olds in 2017 went to uni)
o Someone who has expressed an opinion on brexit (either way)
o Someone who _doesn't_ vote
o Anyone with a house
the list goes on
Many issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time and discussion in the news or by our elected representatives.
Other reporting brings to mind the expression that’s something like: the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting.
Why should they? In the news, I mean. (With electeds is a separate question.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
Most journalism nowadays is like pop music: it does not really provide anything new.
You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed.
The main problem, as I see it, is that there's just too much of it. There's no need for daily news and journalists produce formulaic content because it's the only way to produce so much content.
We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped.
Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected.
Make it filterable. Searchable. Etc.
A raw event log is definitely useful tool in the toolbox, allow people who interested to perform deep level analysis.
To engage with different generations, we need different tools that engage with them and yet provide verifiable information.
Cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC as well as their online competitors serve as propaganda wings of the political parties in general and typically the most corrupt wing of that political party in particular. They misinform their audience on purpose to create hyper-partisan voters who hate the other party and reliably vote for the donkey or the elephant no matter how unqualified, corrupt or unhinged the candidate may be.
We would likely be much better off if the people who base their identity on hating the other political party or who worship specific politicians would find a different hobby because the news was "boring" to them. If having tons of poorly informed or outright misinformed "vote {party} no matter who" voters participating in the political process wasn't to the benefit of large corporate interests, there wouldn't be an enormous corporate media industry intent on making sure they vote and telling them who to vote for.
All of that's journalism work, which we could all do ourselves, of course, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and most people are pretty bad at that kind of thing (though, granted, so are plenty of journalists—regardless, the work is journalism).
1. The event log -- in many places, this still doesn't exist in digital, structured, usable format. It's gotten better, but there's still a ways to go
2. Referencing the underlying event log -- there needs to be interpretation, summarization, and commentary, for the average viewer/reader. However, all of that should come with a reference to the underlying event log
We've gotten to the place we've gotten because (1) is impenetrable to the average person (or non-existent) and (2) doesn't happen.
Consequently, a bag of words has become more and more confused with facts.
We've had hyperlink technology for a while, journalism needs to fucking use it. :/
Journalists are biased though, like any human, but I don't see how it can be fixed. Even an AI digesting the events will have some bias, though it might be aware of much more things than a simple humain brain.
Sometimes things need to be explained. Now, long-winded magazine articles that exist for the writer to show off the virtuosity of their prose? That's niche for people who enjoy those things.
But otherwise raw brute-force data encourages raw brute-force policy.
For example, data point of prevailing home prices indicates a problem - that housing has gotten very expensive. Dumb brute-force policy = price caps. Analysis explains that houses are expensive because of supply and demand and the supply has plummeted while demand is rising, and that price caps would make that worse. Where does that connection live in your event-log?
Hey Google, how much worse is everything this year?
According to Eventscore.com, national despair increased by 34.2%, a slight uptick compared to last year. School shootings have proceeded as expected, political corruption is within norms, and economic marginalization has followed modeled trends. Climate change and wars continue, planes are falling apart again, the courts made bad decisions, protestors are angry. But a new VR headset is coming out soon and a sportsball team somewhere won a game. Happy new year! Your next update is in 2025.
TV and free news, yes. Paid journalism, per the article, no; it’s for elites.
The Financial Times and Politico’s reporting tend to be concise, timely and actionable. It’s just that the whip for a Schumer-Sinema-Johnson-other guy grind around the finer points of a budget negotiation, or jobs numbers vis-à-vis rates forecasts, aren’t relevant for most people. (Or the, for that matter.)
- This is the most important election of our times. The other candidate wants to send you and your children to the gulag.
- Person X had sex with person Y and laundered PAC money.
- Government shutdown unless item X gets funded and item Y doesn’t. X supporters say Y supporters are holding the country hostage. Y supporters say they just want America to get back to work.
- ...
It would be journalistic malpractice not to report those things when there is evidence to support the allegations.
What the journalists should report and what I should read are separate questions.
The OP was making a statement about what journalists should report on, not what people should choose to read.
Of course anyone can individually choose to not read a repeated story, just like they can choose not to watch the same weather forecast repeatedly.
The news only started sounding like that very recently.
You can check this for yourself, go look at some archived newspapers from the early 1990s.
Vox claims "the most important election ever" started in 2000 and has continued since, but I think that has more to do with when the author became politically aware than anything else.
https://www.vox.com/21504729/most-important-election-bush-go...
Consider Johnson's TV spot from the 60s, tacitly telling Americans that the election was a contest between L.B.J. and nuclear apocalypse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDypP1KfOU
I encourage anyone to look back further for more extreme elections.
The peaks of the unrest seem to happen near times when there's a shift in "Party System." We're currently in the US's Sixth (or is it Seventh?) Party System:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System#Campaign_fi...
Yes, I know, I lived through it. If you did too then you'll recall that the difference is that it wasn't considered important by average people, nothing like today anyhow. We paid plenty of attention to it, but it was like rubbernecking at a carwreck -- very interesting in the moment, but not earth shattering. It was important in an "oooh, fascinating hahaha" way, not in an "oh no, how anxiety inducing" kind of way, and that summarizes the difference between the 90s and the 20s.
I haven't listened to 7 O'Clock News/Silent Night in years, but I always felt the news in it were timeless. Maybe I'll give it a try tonight to see if 1966 news still sound fresh in 2024.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_O%27Clock_News/Silent_Nigh...
I think your second sentence is bullshit because why would any "they" care what "we" feel like. The news industry is built around making money from peoples attention. Like many other things in this world that seem planned it's just the product of business satisfying a human desire.
To expand on the second sentence, centuries ago news was little more than propaganda to appease the peasant classes - "we've invaded the next village and won, we're great" - all delivered by a town crier or equivalent. I don't believe we ever really went beyond that too much. Here in the UK, there's no such thing as a non-partizan newspaper - every newspaper is pushing an agenda, people buy the newspaper that the rest of their tribe reads, they all get enraged about the same things and those are the things that someone, somewhere, wants them to get enraged about because it serves some need that the proles don't need to worry their silly little heads about.
All of this is not to say that some individual people within the news machines are not incredible, hard working, honest people doing extremely important work. There are many. But when that hard work conflicts with the wishes of the puppeteer, it's bumped to page 28 and quickly dropped.
The Horizon / Post Office scandal is a perfect, and timely, example of this. Some journalists were banging that drum for years, yet it never hit the front pages despite being the biggest miscarriage of justice the UK has ever seen. Only when a terrestrial TV channel turned it into a drama, coincidentally in an election year, is it suddenly on the front pages with our politicians blaming the other side and our newspapers happily printing the talking points fed to them. Now the few elites want us to know about it, specifically so that they can score some points and use it for electioneering.
But it does feel like there is a lot of "content" that isn't there for that reason and is just included as part of the news for the purpose of distraction. Maybe there's a question of what section of the newspaper/site we are looking at and the type of story in it.
Not because the job of a good journalist would be easy to replace, but because there are no longer good journalists around.
They have already been replaced by people who just regurgitate content. That kind of "journalism" is easy to replace with AI.
Therefore, the content will be even cheaper to produce. Therefore I don't see it disappearing, because the consumers of the "news" provide value to those who have an agenda to push.
There are some good investigative journalists in my country, but that is about it. I have seen very close (family member) how even the excellent investigative journalists have difficulties, because they are making power structures uncomfortable, and media ownership is too close to the power structures.
In my country, there is even a platform for deep and slow journalism, but the content is crap, because even when journalists get the resources to do quality journalism, they are no longer able to do it. It appears to me that they are so used to pushing agendas, that the only kind of journalism they can do is agenda journalism.
Some newspapers already have no local staff, and just publish content generated at some distant office by the owner, like Gannet. Give Gannet access to sufficient LLM resources and they'll churn out crappier crap. Even Sports Illustrated was caught using generated, complete with fake author biographies.[1].
1. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/28/sports-illustr...
Sports Illustrated was what I had in mind when I said that it has already partly happened.
It is going to be interesting if people will eventually realize that there is very little substance in the content, especially if the content continues to detoriate. At least Sports Illustrated was ashamed they got caught, and removed the articles.
There is not even an attempt to be fair anymore to all sides of any given issue, and the editorial contempt for the average viewer/reader leaks through much more often than it used to. The natural response from many people is simply to stop watching, and to get their news elsewhere. Thus far, mainstream news networks have not seemed to care or do any introspection at all as to why they are losing so much viewership and credibility.
Dry facts.
Balanced commentary.
They're doing it wrong if it's not boring, because it shouldn't be playing your emotions.
If the for-profit sector wants to continue to air partisan-pro-wrestling-masquerading-as-news... fine. But the average viewer/reader needs to have an easily accessible and comprehensive alternative.
Most countries have some form of this, but it needs to be recognized as a critical democratic institution in a post-gen-AI world, and funded as such.
That not-for-profit still needs to guard against it isn't a reason that we can't immediately improve on the low bar that is for-profit news.
This perception of a dichotomy in news is a brain worm that needs to be excised from everyone's mind.
What's the "balanced" commentary for something like the JFK assassination, for example?
LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because LHO was a communist. LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because LHO was crazy. LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because the CIA paid him to (and then killed him). LHO was a patsie and the president was shot by a second gunman from the grassy knoll because the CIA wanted to invade Cuba.
Off the top of my head those are the stories that would need "balanced commentary".
News organization don't need to be unbiased and they don't need to be balanced. What they need is a to stop catering to rabid political fanbases who've got involved in the team sport of politics not out of some sense of civic duty to their fellow man but out of loneliness and a need to belong[1]. News organizations are the mirror reflecting us, not the other way around.
[1] https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2020/03/20/the_lone...
Or, as the HN guidelines put it: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Balance critically does not mean making disingenuous straw man or strong man arguments to advance a specific agenda.
Which is the guise it usually appears in today.
E.g. 'parineum is against balance in news because they believe there is one truth and other ideas shouldn't be given merit'
vs
'parineum is concerned about the de facto realization of balance as a covering for expressedly partisan viewpoints, themselves stemming from and catering to the polarization of a poorly informed audience'
One of those presupposes the answer. The other makes me curious and has multiple answers.
Making a bad argument on behalf of a group you dislike isn't balance. Making the strongest argument and debating it is.
If you want non-profit, government funded news then NPR and VOA exist. The quality is generally pretty good, although they're not free of bias either.
Example: I see "[Administration] transporting migrants from the border to cities around the country, in secretive nighttime flights" receiving heavy coverage on a certain news channel (you can probably fill in the gaps here, but I'll leave the specifics out because that's not important for the illustration). Like, it's most of what they're talking about, for the entire hour or so I happen to be in a room with them on the TV, and not during an opinion segment.
Quick google:
1) Not secret,
2) Some are at night, but that's just because of, like... flight scheduling, same way some commercial flights are after sundown and others aren't, plenty are during the day, and it's not as if nighttime flights are somehow significantly harder to track than daytime ones or like it's weird for passenger planes to fly at night, so that whole bit was silly to begin with, worst evil plan ever if that was a deliberate part of it (as was implied), and
3) It's part of longstanding, ordinary operation of immigration control, isn't a new thing, and is happening for non-crazy (and certainly not secret) reasons—though one could disagree with them and say something else should be done instead, sure, but that's not how it's being covered, it's being covered as (implicitly) a new program (not new) being carried out for mysterious reasons (not mysterious) in secret (not secret).
Is this "story" receiving similar heavy coverage with a different slant on perceived-as-opposing channels? No, the info on it's mostly to be found on simple factual sites that published info on these activities from before it was "a story", and sites dedicated to debunking "fwd: fwd: fwd:" crap, because it's, emphatically, not even news, so how would an ordinary news program cover it? It's simply absent.
The less-brazen version of this is to not cover or downplay something that is news but that you'd rather bury but this stuff is... on another level. The "other side" can't provide a different slant, or uncover a story you're hiding, because it's not even a story. (the evolved version of this tactic, of course, is that your opinion-focused programs accuse the "other side" of burying the story and use it as Yet More Evidence that they can't be trusted, which story they can't even responsibly cover because it's made-up, unless their story is to report that you're inventing news) Bonus points that this gives you stuff to talk about if you're the ones trying to avoid a real story that's inconvenient. It's brilliant, really.
Fox News still tops the basic cable charts. It saw less viewers in 2023 but so did all of cable together. It's unclear to me at all that they are "losing so much viewership" vs. people just leaving cable and getting their news/entertainment elsewhere.
I'm sure Fox News's marketing department sees what their cable numbers, streaming numbers and online reader numbers all look like together and I really doubt their style of reporting that got them to where they are today suddenly became irrelevant when everyone else in the industry seems to have followed suit, rather than find success with another strategy.
The idea that they've lost viewership and credibility is, imo, wishful thinking on your part.
I'm sympathetic to your description of mainstream news (which is a bit of a nebulous term, I must admit; "legacy" might be a better description), but, in my experience, the news you get from "elsewhere" is often unabashedly biased. So, is the fall in popularity of mainstream news a result of the lack of neutrality, or because it's not partisan enough? After all, wildly biased news is wildly popular online and mainstream news has to compete. There's a network effect to that. Social media has made the ability to curate one's newsfeed to a degree of ideological specificity that is pretty incredible. Bias sells.
Personally, I don't think it's "neutrality" or even "bias" that is the issue with most news these days. A lot of news orgs have simply abdicated themselves from the vital role of journalism in a functioning liberal democracy: accountability. Most people follow the news incessantly but actually know next to nothing about what is actually happening in government or politics. All they get in the news is a slice of a soap-opera instead of insight into governance or politicking, backstage where the sausage is actually made and where crime, graft, negligence, corruption, stupidity, and brazen cruelty in the pursuit of power, is endemic by both parties.
Journalism has also become a "status" job that is often only attainable and maintainable as a career by people from elite education or with connections to the industry. You end up with a particular class of people as journalists interacting with politicians or executives or other people from the same class. This leads an effect whenever they try to cover lower class people that is similar to that famous image of Hilary Clinton walking into that small apartment.
I don’t think those two explanations are at odds with each other. People may prefer listening to a news source that tries to be neutral. But if the reporters can’t hide their personal leanings, they would rather go with a news source where the reporters’ personal leanings agree with their own.
Part of this is driven by the increasing polarization of journalists. In 1971, democrats somewhat outnumbered republicans among journalists. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tiny-percentage-american-jo.... By 2022, that ratio is now 10:1 https://ustimesmirror.com/a-tiny-shrinking-percentage-of-ame....
People aren’t stupid. They can tell the difference between someone who is trying to overcome their personal leaning and be neutral, and someone who is so affected by their personal leaning that they can’t even conceal it. People can trust the former person even if they disagree. People can’t trust the latter person.
It's possible for someone to trust and agree with the presentation of the news; to distrust, but agree; to trust, but disagree; or to distrust and disagree (there's also not caring at all, which is another issue all together). In TV, you might call these segments. In my view, most news organizations have become hyper focused at catering to the "trust and agree" segment so much so that it has become the majority of what they do. All they work on is comforting that segment. I think much of the popular dissatisfaction and distrust with news orgs in general, is really that in 2024 the news is actually not very useful. Instead, people are starting to see that it's kind of more like an imaginary friend who never disagrees who and who offers you comfort almost on demand.
Well, ideally, in a liberal democracy, hold politicians accountable for whether they do what they say they will do. They are elected on a certain set of promises ("I will do x", "I will support value y") and, ideally, people made informed decisions based on that when voting. Whether they get reelected is a way of holding elected officials accountable in a blunt sense. One way for voters to be informed of whether politicians are doing what they said they would do (even, really on what politicians are doing at all) is to have journalists write accounts of what politicians said and then did, because normal everyday people are not paid to follow politics all day figuring out whether they're actually doing what they said they would do---journalists do that for us. They report on what happened.
> That depends on your vision for what America should look like.
That's also why I think people are way too hung up on things like "neutrality" and "objectivity" in their news. It's not clear cut and not a science, journalists tell stories which are factual to the degree possible by them. They are useful. When they don't do that well, or dishonestly, they lose credibility as stand-ins for us following politicians around. We hold journalists to account in the same way. Ideally, they do the same by retracting or publicizing their errors as well. That's also why a diverse news environment is a good thing. But, as we know, it can also easily become hyper polarized to the point where it stops really becoming useful at all, just comforting, and in some cases practically a blatant ideological tool in service of certain politicians, which for many years was considering deeply embarrassing for a journalist.
I agree with that, but consider this hypothetical: Trump’s travel ban. He campaigned on banning travel from certain countries with high levels of Islamic fundamentalism. And then he did that. I think a reporter could say those facts without interjecting their view of whether that promise was a good thing or a bad thing. But Trump’s promise was deeply offensive to the value system a certain segment of society, which deems multiculturalism as axiomatically valuable. They couldn’t help themselves from reminding their viewers that they found Trump’s values abhorrent.
I think that’s where it matters whether the media attempts to maintain ideological neutrality. If CNN reported the facts, I’d watch it. But if they interject moral assessments of the facts, then I’ll watch Fox News instead. If neutrality isn’t an option, I’ll go watch the outlet that I at least agree with.
It’s mind blowing to go back and watch CNN from the 1980s: https://youtu.be/T3S6cDpr3j4?si=7Fp-wfR9403_6jw_. It was just news, without all these talking heads offering opinion.
These are all TV/radio channels. Somehow newspaper brands work better on the web then TV brands.
When the metric becomes the target, nothing else matters.
The entire modern ad industry was built on false metrics and measures.
Attention is the currency of media. When sensationalism is not only acceptable, it's profitable, all boundaries are lost.
The entire news media has been perverted by the metrics and the measurements used in modern advertising and media. It's all about attention, measured to the individual and paid accordingly. No standards, no oversight, no limit.
Anyway, this got hit by the flamewar trigger and is off the front page now
Indeed, with the level of understanding and agency that most of us have, I'm struggling to see what an alternative would be.
The top headlines on my version of Google News are:
* an update on Trump's trial-- marginal utility, unless you are involved in the trial, with only its outcome being of use to the masses
* a story about France's new prime minister-- marginal utility, unless you live in France
* more trump trial
* more trump trial
* a piece on Age of Emprires
* whoever Nicole Eggert is has breast cancer
* an iPhone survived the drop from the Boeing 737 decompression event-- the story about the decompression has utility but the phone surviving is useless info
* news about the Peregrine moon lander-- useful to me because I'm an aerospace engineer and benefit from failure analysis of other projects, although its main utility is keeping it in my consciousness until actual in-depth analysis is available
* crime story out of Florida a state over 700 miles away-- useful to Floridians I guess
Minimally important.
The only news that is useful to people is that which can be used to inform their decisions: weather, stocks, local and national politics related to their jurisdiction, hyper-local (neighborhood level) crime, upcoming local events, and any safety or culture news related to destinations one is planning on visiting.
Everything else is just information/misery/voyeurism pornography.
It is frustrating to me because I want to know about what is going on in my area, not about some missing persons case in a state 1,400 miles away, and local news is either dead or worse than national news.
That being said, I like hacker news-- an aggregator that claims to be about anything that good hackers would find interesting whose main purpose actually seems to be providing an outlet for people to complain about Apple, Amazon, and copyright law.
I think people are under the odd impression that news used to be akin to national intelligence. But that was always far more detailed than news agencies were able to report. And, hopefully, more actionable. But most of the "actionable" comes from the greater agency of the government. Not from knowing the data.
News outlets have crumbled under the profit incentive. Staff cuts, outlets shutdown or merged into larger organizations[1]. Some outlets have zero staff, and just publish stories sent out from the mothership, such as Gannett, and no local news at all.[2]
1. https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/...
2. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-27/as-the-s...
The two shining example of this in my mind are: Claudine Gay and Jan 6. The right is very up in arms about the whole Claudine Gay situation but in reality she is just one president of one school and that piece of news really doesn't matter to anyone outside of that small bubble around Harvard and higher ed. Likewise on the left we have Jan 6 which they constantly push as a terrible thing to happen to our democracy. Again if you are in DC then it's an important issue but if you're the rest of the country, it was a terrible thing that happened one day and then the government continued to operate normally.
And this goes for the vast majority of issues the news covers these days and the shame in all of this is these stories that seem important but in the end aren't really that important take the spotlight away from stories of actual importance.
I think there are three levels for looking after prod
- monitoring - modelling - machining
This applies here I think
Firstly it’s reporting - a kind of event logging for society. It’s our timelines, it’s who bombed whom. And by far and away it’s the most common and frankly the most useless, because it needs to be interpreted through a model
What does it mean that your disk is 80% full? What does it mean that Huthi attacks on Red Sea mean shipping is diverted? Whose model You use determines what kind of alerting you get - does your model mean you add a new server when the disk is full? Or just ignore it?
Machining is the final part - what action to take. What to build or chnage - and this depends on the model you have. A lot of politics these days seems to be arguing over the alerting levels - when does this light go red?
Today in the UK we finally have Post Office post masters being pardoned for having been jailed - because the Post Office corporate body covered up Bugs in a central accounting system. Jailed because of bugs.
This has been “news” for 15+ years. But it only became “mainstream” this week.
News as Edward R Murrow knew it was all three parts at once. He scanned the horizon, found the story and told people that this person was not a communist (monitoring / reporting) and in the same time told them why this was wrong (liberty, freedom) and what action to take (remove senator)
But Murrows news has been disaggregated.
The OP is thinking news is this Murrow like idea where the elite choose a model, and find facts around that model. It’s not great (but done with integrity it works generally well)
The thing is now we have choices of models and reporting and actions and most people have not got a good model of the world and even if they did the flood of information barely allows them to adjust the model
We will always need Ed Murrow and others like them to curate the timeline and challenge the models.
We could make them explicit and testable (but that’s science) and we could build and validate our own but that’s hard work
Or we could seek out people of integrity to curate the models on our behalf and presenst their view for us to consume - with their doubts and uncertainties ans their opinions
What we need are great journalists.
Laying bare this world trade, will have an impact on similar way laying bare the politicking of parliaments did.
Would look cool too
For News orgs the focus is on New Infotmation.
So even though news orgs have professional trained info collectors, and have good access to networks that produce Info they don't think of them selves as a Wiki or Factbook. Why?
Cause legacy + they are taught media theory not information theory + tech platforms are not taught either and control distribution of info.
But things change as people learn the system is a waste and noise generating. Learning takes time.
A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that's not a functioning democracy.
In public, I've had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don't care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad.
But it's problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more.
>So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge.
We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don't see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.
That's it - I could care less about anything else. Sometimes I read The Hill.