I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now. You have to ask why they chose to report this, why they slant things one way or another with their choice of wording and emphasis. What is the aspect of this story that is too politically incorrect or unfashionable to be included?
I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever. The harsh truth is that generally speaking the news is almost completely useless. You might as well just never watch it.
I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued. The main tool they use to do this is the emotion of fear, and it was for this reason and no other that they created a COVID death counter. And every single one of those points is explicitly, literally and plainly stated on video by a very senior employee of CNN for all to see. so I’m afraid that I can’t be brushed aside as a Russian bot. It’s right there on YouTube.
And what about all the other media companies? This CNN leak, which is maybe the very embodiment of a scoop, was not on the front page of any major newspaper or news website. It was not elaborated on. It was basically not reported.
>I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now.
I used to subscribe to The Economist. I then realized, after they kept getting a lot of things wrong over the years, that in my humble opinion, a lot of their headlines should be read prepending the phrase "We would like you to believe that..."
A lot of "movements" these days are completely astroturfed.
There's a few foundations that sponsor thousands of institutions all with the same mission statement to make things look like they're a grassroots movement, but nobody really wanted any of it. That's what disconnecting from the media gets you. All that astroturfing flooding in from everywhere stops infecting one's understanding of the world with useless B.S. I've given up almost all mainstream media for podcasts because they can be produced for nothing and spend a long-time looking deeply into issues. They cost nothing to produce and host, so it's really hard to cancel them as well. It's not like video. Hosting audio costs very little.
Listening to random podcasts I find from guest appearances on other people's podcasts and on and on almost feels like eavesdropping on real people talking instead of the same simple message broadcast over and over again via every notable news outlet.[1]
Without having watched all of the CNN "leak" linked below, I'd like to point out two things that will color my viewing of it:
1 - Project Veritas has a history of misleading / baiting subjects into saying things that sound bad, and of taking pieces of conversation out of context.
2 - A "technical director" in television isn't an editorial role, nor is it very high ranking. The job of a technical director is to physically operate things like the video switcher to choose which camera is on screen or to put up a lower third; their job typically would not be to decide who to interview, what to ask in an interview, direct the on screen talent, etc.
I am sure CNN, like most workplaces, has employees with varied opinions and political views. Seeing any one of those employees statements as evidence of the overall views of the company is kind of ridiculous.
It's not bias that bothers me. Attempts at neutrality can create their own bias-ish issues. Variety and independence is the best help here, IMO. Independence of outlets from one another. Independence of journalistic voices within outlets, etc.
What does bother me is quality, effort even. The majority of high visibility reporting is mostly commentary. Factual accuracy isn't even applicable.
They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc. A good example is the latest G7 meet. Every summary of the underlying tax problems I read was substandard. The speculation about what G7 decisions would mean was substandard.
No one actually understood what they were writing about. They dig just far enough to strike emotional or partisan content: "Apple paid just %X tax, because tax havens, cheating & stuff." Tax is all about details. You have t
The average engaged reader who has read dozens of articles on the topic has not learned anything, besides good guys, bad guys and moral outrages. I don't think the journalists do either. If you want to actually know something about the topic, you need to go to wikipedia or hunt down a good blog article.
Counterpoint (as someone married to a journalist): most news outlets do not have the time, resources and intent to further any special interest agenda except for their front page and op-eds. To achieve Murdoch-level disinformation is hard work. It requires so much work, that most news outlets cannot compete. There just isn't enough time and money in the news business. Remember this isn't science where there is time for research. Many news outlets have individual journalists contribute 3 to 5 articles per day. Do you think this allows for a lot of spinning an agenda?
No, the reality is different. Lots of news is just repeating what others report (news agencies to online news to news papers) because there aren't that many original sources anyway.
I believe what you think is (malicious?) agenda, is really just news outlets trying to survive. Murdoch/Springer/FoxNews to the contrary, but these are easy to avoid.
This sounds like a pretty childish take to be honest.
Of course there is no such thing as objective news, but that's because reality isn't that simple either. CNN and most mainstream news are indeed trash (more like entertainment), but there is very good news out there. You have to find the right news source for the right topic.
For American foreign policy, read The Intercept; for American domestic issues - Propublica, for middle eastern news - Al Jazeera English, and so on and so forth.
News is never "objective facts" and neither should it be. Good journalists put news in the context of reality.
It's also interesting to check who owns a media outlet and what companies are its largest customers by placing ads. I find Russell Brand's YT Channel frankly speaking surprisingly illuminating on many subjects like deep state*, corona, environmentalism, data protection. According to him most of the largest news papers in the States are basically controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Guess who they will be catering to.
*: I know this is a trigger word and I don't use it exactly in the sense of AJ or reptiloids. But it has its merit as a concise term refering to invisible power structures in the government.
To be fair I learned that at 7 in civic education class in Normandy...
The media is a counter power but a power nonetheless. Just like you cant trust the president to judge a criminal, you shouldn't trust the media to judge the president. Just let everyone speak, make your soup yourself and split responsibilities: the executive lead the police and military, the judiciary protects criminals as much as society , the media warns of big and small events and they each compete and drag the carpet to themselves.
This is healthy. The alternative is hanging liars and people with difficult truths rather than letting them both speak. Or: detecting lies from truth is only possible by opposing several (and not just two or the border is skewed towards the most sensational) views.
CNN will say there a radioactive event south of China, China will say there s absolutely nothing wrong, the minority owner of the plant will say it s worrying but the problems lies in China moving the red line regulation, experienced people will say this probably warrant waiting, panicked people will say it must shut down now, ecologists will say any nuclear plant is too risky for the cost, and the truth is somewhere in the merging of all these but you can only have a gradually improving view of the event as pawns position themselves over time.
And this is why state sponsored, but _not_ controlled media is what you want.
In most countries that have these institutions, these media outlets are consistently rated, by both sides of the local spectrums, as being the most balanced.
Note, that this is _not_ the same as saying that they cannot be biased, since at the end of the day every decision is the result of some bias or another, but their mandate is to serve the greater public, and so they don't try to carve out and to chase a specific demographic.
The internet destroyed the business model for old-school media.
So now they just generate a never-ending stream of fake controversy to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
Basically every single story was either placed by an interested party or hits our emotions in a way to keep us clicking. Lots of companies, political campaigns and advocacy organizations have highly skilled media relations departments that know exactly how to get a story printed on any topic. I have been on that side and basically have seen our talking points published word for word without being challenged or examined, which was the goal.
For awhile last year I felt like I needed the news to keep my family safe. After a while stewing in the fear factory, I realized that that the reporting didn't bare much relation to the actual scientific studies it claimed to be based on when I bothered to actually go and read them. I unplugged and only check niche interest news now.
I was becoming a worse citizen and person for reading the news, not a better one.
I think that news stories are more about the 'story' than the 'news'. They are about framing some perhaps genuine facts (but perhaps not) in a specific way, in such a way that a genuinely independent assessment is impossible for anyone taking their information from these sources.
I think when the stories and angles are so detached from reality, it is fair to wonder what is going on. You can call it conspiracy, or companies working together in a co-ordinated way for their best interests, fascism (with corporations and governments working in tandem), etc but its hard to dispute that there is an agenda to prevent the general population from receiving information that would allow them to make straightforward judgements.
I could easily find a lot of reporting on the "CNN leak", even in German online media, and from my understanding, we cannot, at this point in time, be sure that this leak is legit.
Right now, it's simply a news story that is very difficult to confirm.
In any case, my recommendation would be to apply "I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now." here, too. Everything else would be a bit inconsistent.
Why can't you just report facts and be done with it?
Something I always wondered, why journalists, news and journalism is always about the "story", the narrative, the emotion ? That would take away a lot of scope for manipulation, harder to misinterpret and easier to spot the culprits.
Till few years ago, it was brought to my attention, they, like all surviving orgs, adapt and simply give what "the people" want.
You used CNN as an example but these tactics apply to most media outlets. Isn’t this the thesis of Manufacturing Consent? Crafted mass messages to sway public opinion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
I don’t know how you learned about how media worked, but when I was taught about it in elementary school in Italy, I clearly remember my teacher explaining the concept of Agenda and News Cycle. Maybe I just had an amazing teacher (she is, indeed).
That said, this is not a new development. Mainstream media today are doing this in subtler ways because they are forced to transparency by the rise of the Internet.
As long as media organization need to turn a profit, this will always be the case.
By having a rich media landscape, with different point of views, we were always able to keep a general balance despite the singular imbalances. The radicalization of opinions and the outrage economy, along with the Internet, have disrupted that general balance, with mostly right-wing leaning medias seizing that unethical advantage, and liberal left-leaning media trying to decry it, while having a hard time swiping their own conflicts of interest under the rug.
Surprisingly enough, this is mostly true for generalist media, though. I’m lucky enough to be a tech journalist, and despite having to deal with a lot of companies and a lot of products that they want to ultimately sell, I feel that our conflicts of interest are way easier to navigate, and easier to address.
Picking your news from carefully selected sector-specific publications, and putting together your own media diet, is the equivalent of eating organic and cooking your own meals vs eating out at McDonald’s every night.
The equivalence, sadly, is true also for the level of education and income (and time) you need to have to do that, though.
> I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever.
Maybe that's because of the stories you select for checking. Did you ever deeply research something non-sensational? Like a feature about new-years celebrations in Nepal?
> I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever.
This applies to a lot more than just media, including important to mundane issues inside of an organization. Path of least resistance (aka bullshit) and all that.
I think of them as PR firms now. Unfortunately, journalism has probably been like that for a long time since special interests can pitch stories to journalists. They've put a lot of effort into making themselves seem like mere unbiased reporters of what is newsworthy but it's becoming apparent that they can and do push certain viewpoints on behalf of their 'clientele' which may include political parties.
> I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now. You have to ask why they chose to report this, why they slant things one way or another with their choice of wording and emphasis. What is the aspect of this story that is too politically incorrect or unfashionable to be included?
You say this like it’s a bad thing. That’s exactly what everyone needs to be doing.
I think "the technical director" and "very senior" bits are misleading. You can google "cnn" "technical director" site:linkedin.com and find lots of people with that job title, some as "senior technical director" and so on. It's like "vice presidents" at banks.
> I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued.
For anyone who may not be aware of the contents of the actual recordings, here are some quotes.
Trump was — his hand was shaking, he was losing it. He’s unfit. We were creating a story there. I think that’s propaganda.
[Trump's] hand was shaking or whatever, I think. We brought in so many medical people to tell a story that was all speculation -- that he was neurologically damaged, and he was losing it. He's unfit to - you know, whatever.
We had nothing else to run with at that time. We were like, just taking shots off a bow, just hoping something would hit, you know?
We were creating a story there that we didn't know anything about. That's what - I think that's propaganda
Look what we did, we got Trump out. I am 100 percent going to say it, and I 100 percent believe that if it wasn't for CNN, I don't know that Trump would have got voted out.
Like our focus was to get Trump out of office, right? Without saying it, that's what it was, right? So, our next thing is going to be climate change awareness.
Anyone else burnt out from the outrage cycle in recent times?
I don’t know if it’s selfish but I just don’t have the energy anymore to care about what bad thing person X or company Y did this week.
My current philosophy is to treat news/Reddit/social media like email in the old days.
That is: log on to a desktop computer once a week and read the highlights. It is not accessible except through the desktop computer.
The funny thing is this approach is completely opposite the “stories” trend in social media. It makes you really aware of the FOMO-by-design pattern these days.
I feel like this post has a lot of hindsight bias in it. People are going to get things wrong sometimes. I think there's a lot of things to legit criticize mainstream media for, but not having 100% accurate crystal ball isn't one of them.
If the thesis of this piece is that newswriters sometimes get things wrong, or sometimes write sensationalized things, all i can say is, no duh.
Bill Ackman runs a hedge fund and was a guest on CNBC right at the beginning of the US getting hit with the pandemic proclaiming travel industry going to go downhill while having made bets on that happening. [0] For those outside the US, CNBC is a business/financial/stock market news channel.
> “America will end as we know it. I’m sorry to say so, unless we take this option,” he told CNBC on March 18, five days before ending his bet against the market. “We need to shut it down now. ... This is the only answer.”
He then made $2B a week later. I would assume most guests on that network are there to make statements to try and sway the market in some way to their favor. You just don't know if they are long or short on whatever they are talking about so without those disclosures.
If you think more online based news is better like Motley Fool. They are also registered as a Hedge Fund with the SEC [1]. I can't see/find what their specific holdings are on the SEC site but isn't that a conflict of interest to publish "news" or investment information and manage over $100M?
Ignoring news outright seems like a terrible idea for the stock market. Focus more on objective news, especially from areas that impact stocks. In Jan. 2020, once news came out about Chinese factories shutting down and whole cities being locked down, it was pretty easy to see the effect that would have on the market. Now, I definitely didn't foresee amazon and tech's meteoric rise, but it wasn't hard to predict what would happen in other areas.
It's been covered, but unsurprisingly I've never seen a news segment go after the Sackler family. Probably because the 24/7 news channels are flush with medication ads.
+1 for using the term "storytellers". I call "journalists" Schreiberlinge in German, which has a similar conotation. If I have learnt one thing during the pandemic, that even supposedly serious media is not to be trusted. I always knew (from first hand experience of being interviewed) that newspapers are really not much more worth then other things you use to whipe stuff... After the pandemic, I know you can basically ignore all the media outlets. All they do is generate interactions and spread badly researched lies.
If you don't trust news sources, why would you trust this person?
At least news sources have editorial processes, reputations, trained, experienced, professional journalists. They aren't perfect, but they're much better than random bloggers.
I mostly avoid the news.
However opinion articles on newspapers bother me a lot. The fact is most people will interpret these articles as the newspapers own view, increasingly so when this view is repeated again and again. However when you point out the
typical faults of the opinion article then defenders insist it's 'just an opinion'.
On a related note I hated an opinion article that came out of the guardian yesterday debunking the theory that that the Wuhan lab was responsible for covid-19. The main reason being it totally ignored all the evidence and just smugly insisted it wasn't true. It's fine to disagree but let's hear the reasons why.
I generally avoid all newspapers. The Economist does seem better.
Reading news is an addictive habit with the downside of strong political indoctrination. I could see it in some of my family members, unfortunately.
I really would like to have a tool that can automatically put labels on news headers: clickbait, drama, speculation, she-said-he-said, or rumor. It's pretty easy to detect such headlines when reading, so training an ML model shouldn't be a problem. Removing tagged articles automatically would've made my news feed so much better.
If you actually speak to journalists they're very honest about how their job isn't reporting facts but it's interpreting the information and reporting it in a way with omissions or embellishments that make sure the general public, whom they look down on, have the correct takeaway from the story.
They see themselves as the chosen few who's job it is to do this and who's job it is to make the general public think and believe the things that are best for them and the believe it's a privilege to be in the position that they are to be in charge of doing that and are proud that is what they do.
> I also looked at charts of its stock price. I saw signs that sellers were less patient than buyers. That usually indicates an ordinary fluctuation in business, but whatever, it counted as evidence that I could safely postpone buying, so I decided to wait
Any traders in the audience care to shed some light on how they would go about this?
Remember the CTS Labs thing where some Israelis from across the hall from Intel’s facility there did a giant smear job on a fake AMD vulnerability and then Bloomberg picked it up? The same Bloomberg who sells little information services which people are supposed to rely on as conveying factual information?
> Doing so helped me to make lots of money in the second half of 2020 betting on pandemic-sensitive stocks (not Hertz), since most investors were too pessimistic about vaccines for much of that period
Sounds like a Monday-morning quarterback to me. I am guessing he lost money as the maret crashed due to covid unless he was in cash. if he truly had a sure-fire system of filtering out bad narratives, he would have gotten out before the crash in jan-feb as the virus was getting media attention, and then bought near the bottom. He would have known beforehand that Covid was different from SARS or Bird Flu and sold, anticipating a crash.
I take umbrage at the use of the word storytelling to describe news media. Stories have narrative arcs of growth and resolution. Most of what the author is talking about is a repetitive information game with society, a form of social entertainment that hooks people into a feeling of participation. The “narratives” of the day are better described (as they’re coming to be) as memes.
The idea to avoid the news and that news are biased is not new nor revolutionary. But I like this “information arbitrage” idea — most people get their news from X, Y, Z so if you can research an event more objectively you maybe able to profit from it.
"Whereas today, we have storytellers that specialize in peddling outrage."
I'd guess that media has known for ever that outrage is a potent driver of engagement. Technology today enables outrage delivery to be highly sculpted and surgically delivered. In my opinion this is a major driver of the increasing polarization of America.
The depth of our natural predilection to focus on threats has been discovered by neural networks and their systems optimized for profit, not truth and relevance.
[+] [-] seaorg|4 years ago|reply
I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever. The harsh truth is that generally speaking the news is almost completely useless. You might as well just never watch it.
I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued. The main tool they use to do this is the emotion of fear, and it was for this reason and no other that they created a COVID death counter. And every single one of those points is explicitly, literally and plainly stated on video by a very senior employee of CNN for all to see. so I’m afraid that I can’t be brushed aside as a Russian bot. It’s right there on YouTube.
And what about all the other media companies? This CNN leak, which is maybe the very embodiment of a scoop, was not on the front page of any major newspaper or news website. It was not elaborated on. It was basically not reported.
[+] [-] narrator|4 years ago|reply
I used to subscribe to The Economist. I then realized, after they kept getting a lot of things wrong over the years, that in my humble opinion, a lot of their headlines should be read prepending the phrase "We would like you to believe that..."
A lot of "movements" these days are completely astroturfed. There's a few foundations that sponsor thousands of institutions all with the same mission statement to make things look like they're a grassroots movement, but nobody really wanted any of it. That's what disconnecting from the media gets you. All that astroturfing flooding in from everywhere stops infecting one's understanding of the world with useless B.S. I've given up almost all mainstream media for podcasts because they can be produced for nothing and spend a long-time looking deeply into issues. They cost nothing to produce and host, so it's really hard to cancel them as well. It's not like video. Hosting audio costs very little.
Listening to random podcasts I find from guest appearances on other people's podcasts and on and on almost feels like eavesdropping on real people talking instead of the same simple message broadcast over and over again via every notable news outlet.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yshJn7lgVsY
[+] [-] HanShotFirst|4 years ago|reply
1 - Project Veritas has a history of misleading / baiting subjects into saying things that sound bad, and of taking pieces of conversation out of context.
2 - A "technical director" in television isn't an editorial role, nor is it very high ranking. The job of a technical director is to physically operate things like the video switcher to choose which camera is on screen or to put up a lower third; their job typically would not be to decide who to interview, what to ask in an interview, direct the on screen talent, etc.
I am sure CNN, like most workplaces, has employees with varied opinions and political views. Seeing any one of those employees statements as evidence of the overall views of the company is kind of ridiculous.
[+] [-] dalbasal|4 years ago|reply
What does bother me is quality, effort even. The majority of high visibility reporting is mostly commentary. Factual accuracy isn't even applicable.
They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc. A good example is the latest G7 meet. Every summary of the underlying tax problems I read was substandard. The speculation about what G7 decisions would mean was substandard.
No one actually understood what they were writing about. They dig just far enough to strike emotional or partisan content: "Apple paid just %X tax, because tax havens, cheating & stuff." Tax is all about details. You have t
The average engaged reader who has read dozens of articles on the topic has not learned anything, besides good guys, bad guys and moral outrages. I don't think the journalists do either. If you want to actually know something about the topic, you need to go to wikipedia or hunt down a good blog article.
[+] [-] oezi|4 years ago|reply
No, the reality is different. Lots of news is just repeating what others report (news agencies to online news to news papers) because there aren't that many original sources anyway.
I believe what you think is (malicious?) agenda, is really just news outlets trying to survive. Murdoch/Springer/FoxNews to the contrary, but these are easy to avoid.
[+] [-] greendude29|4 years ago|reply
Of course there is no such thing as objective news, but that's because reality isn't that simple either. CNN and most mainstream news are indeed trash (more like entertainment), but there is very good news out there. You have to find the right news source for the right topic.
For American foreign policy, read The Intercept; for American domestic issues - Propublica, for middle eastern news - Al Jazeera English, and so on and so forth.
News is never "objective facts" and neither should it be. Good journalists put news in the context of reality.
[+] [-] 271828182846|4 years ago|reply
*: I know this is a trigger word and I don't use it exactly in the sense of AJ or reptiloids. But it has its merit as a concise term refering to invisible power structures in the government.
[+] [-] xwolfi|4 years ago|reply
The media is a counter power but a power nonetheless. Just like you cant trust the president to judge a criminal, you shouldn't trust the media to judge the president. Just let everyone speak, make your soup yourself and split responsibilities: the executive lead the police and military, the judiciary protects criminals as much as society , the media warns of big and small events and they each compete and drag the carpet to themselves.
This is healthy. The alternative is hanging liars and people with difficult truths rather than letting them both speak. Or: detecting lies from truth is only possible by opposing several (and not just two or the border is skewed towards the most sensational) views.
CNN will say there a radioactive event south of China, China will say there s absolutely nothing wrong, the minority owner of the plant will say it s worrying but the problems lies in China moving the red line regulation, experienced people will say this probably warrant waiting, panicked people will say it must shut down now, ecologists will say any nuclear plant is too risky for the cost, and the truth is somewhere in the merging of all these but you can only have a gradually improving view of the event as pawns position themselves over time.
[+] [-] taeric|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddxxdd|4 years ago|reply
I will happily listen to other recommendations.
[+] [-] pwagland|4 years ago|reply
In most countries that have these institutions, these media outlets are consistently rated, by both sides of the local spectrums, as being the most balanced.
Note, that this is _not_ the same as saying that they cannot be biased, since at the end of the day every decision is the result of some bias or another, but their mandate is to serve the greater public, and so they don't try to carve out and to chase a specific demographic.
[+] [-] lazyeye|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vecinu|4 years ago|reply
Could you link this out please?
[+] [-] dougmwne|4 years ago|reply
For awhile last year I felt like I needed the news to keep my family safe. After a while stewing in the fear factory, I realized that that the reporting didn't bare much relation to the actual scientific studies it claimed to be based on when I bothered to actually go and read them. I unplugged and only check niche interest news now.
I was becoming a worse citizen and person for reading the news, not a better one.
[+] [-] re-al|4 years ago|reply
I think when the stories and angles are so detached from reality, it is fair to wonder what is going on. You can call it conspiracy, or companies working together in a co-ordinated way for their best interests, fascism (with corporations and governments working in tandem), etc but its hard to dispute that there is an agenda to prevent the general population from receiving information that would allow them to make straightforward judgements.
[+] [-] ManuelKiessling|4 years ago|reply
Right now, it's simply a news story that is very difficult to confirm.
In any case, my recommendation would be to apply "I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now." here, too. Everything else would be a bit inconsistent.
[+] [-] gofreddygo|4 years ago|reply
Something I always wondered, why journalists, news and journalism is always about the "story", the narrative, the emotion ? That would take away a lot of scope for manipulation, harder to misinterpret and easier to spot the culprits.
Till few years ago, it was brought to my attention, they, like all surviving orgs, adapt and simply give what "the people" want.
[+] [-] fumar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camillomiller|4 years ago|reply
That said, this is not a new development. Mainstream media today are doing this in subtler ways because they are forced to transparency by the rise of the Internet. As long as media organization need to turn a profit, this will always be the case. By having a rich media landscape, with different point of views, we were always able to keep a general balance despite the singular imbalances. The radicalization of opinions and the outrage economy, along with the Internet, have disrupted that general balance, with mostly right-wing leaning medias seizing that unethical advantage, and liberal left-leaning media trying to decry it, while having a hard time swiping their own conflicts of interest under the rug.
Surprisingly enough, this is mostly true for generalist media, though. I’m lucky enough to be a tech journalist, and despite having to deal with a lot of companies and a lot of products that they want to ultimately sell, I feel that our conflicts of interest are way easier to navigate, and easier to address.
Picking your news from carefully selected sector-specific publications, and putting together your own media diet, is the equivalent of eating organic and cooking your own meals vs eating out at McDonald’s every night. The equivalence, sadly, is true also for the level of education and income (and time) you need to have to do that, though.
[+] [-] im3w1l|4 years ago|reply
Maybe that's because of the stories you select for checking. Did you ever deeply research something non-sensational? Like a feature about new-years celebrations in Nepal?
[+] [-] nickstinemates|4 years ago|reply
This applies to a lot more than just media, including important to mundane issues inside of an organization. Path of least resistance (aka bullshit) and all that.
[+] [-] onetimeusename|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|4 years ago|reply
You say this like it’s a bad thing. That’s exactly what everyone needs to be doing.
[+] [-] cousin_it|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miltondts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batushka3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Layke1123|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] IncRnd|4 years ago|reply
For anyone who may not be aware of the contents of the actual recordings, here are some quotes.
[+] [-] arduinomancer|4 years ago|reply
I don’t know if it’s selfish but I just don’t have the energy anymore to care about what bad thing person X or company Y did this week.
My current philosophy is to treat news/Reddit/social media like email in the old days.
That is: log on to a desktop computer once a week and read the highlights. It is not accessible except through the desktop computer.
The funny thing is this approach is completely opposite the “stories” trend in social media. It makes you really aware of the FOMO-by-design pattern these days.
[+] [-] bawolff|4 years ago|reply
If the thesis of this piece is that newswriters sometimes get things wrong, or sometimes write sensationalized things, all i can say is, no duh.
[+] [-] matt_s|4 years ago|reply
> “America will end as we know it. I’m sorry to say so, unless we take this option,” he told CNBC on March 18, five days before ending his bet against the market. “We need to shut it down now. ... This is the only answer.”
He then made $2B a week later. I would assume most guests on that network are there to make statements to try and sway the market in some way to their favor. You just don't know if they are long or short on whatever they are talking about so without those disclosures.
If you think more online based news is better like Motley Fool. They are also registered as a Hedge Fund with the SEC [1]. I can't see/find what their specific holdings are on the SEC site but isn't that a conflict of interest to publish "news" or investment information and manage over $100M?
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/bill-ackman-exits-market-hed...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=1512814
[+] [-] kart23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloaf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silvester23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnWhigham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlang23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
At least news sources have editorial processes, reputations, trained, experienced, professional journalists. They aren't perfect, but they're much better than random bloggers.
[+] [-] SunlightEdge|4 years ago|reply
I generally avoid all newspapers. The Economist does seem better.
[+] [-] dgudkov|4 years ago|reply
I really would like to have a tool that can automatically put labels on news headers: clickbait, drama, speculation, she-said-he-said, or rumor. It's pretty easy to detect such headlines when reading, so training an ML model shouldn't be a problem. Removing tagged articles automatically would've made my news feed so much better.
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|4 years ago|reply
They see themselves as the chosen few who's job it is to do this and who's job it is to make the general public think and believe the things that are best for them and the believe it's a privilege to be in the position that they are to be in charge of doing that and are proud that is what they do.
[+] [-] SturgeonsLaw|4 years ago|reply
Any traders in the audience care to shed some light on how they would go about this?
[+] [-] OldGoodNewBad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaimex2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
Sounds like a Monday-morning quarterback to me. I am guessing he lost money as the maret crashed due to covid unless he was in cash. if he truly had a sure-fire system of filtering out bad narratives, he would have gotten out before the crash in jan-feb as the virus was getting media attention, and then bought near the bottom. He would have known beforehand that Covid was different from SARS or Bird Flu and sold, anticipating a crash.
[+] [-] pcmaffey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elevenoh|4 years ago|reply
And once that genie is out, there's no going back.
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puszczyk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|4 years ago|reply
I'd guess that media has known for ever that outrage is a potent driver of engagement. Technology today enables outrage delivery to be highly sculpted and surgically delivered. In my opinion this is a major driver of the increasing polarization of America.
The depth of our natural predilection to focus on threats has been discovered by neural networks and their systems optimized for profit, not truth and relevance.