> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages.
I have a better idea. The news has always been shit.
There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market.
It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs have adapted to fill in all those remaining hours. Consolidation hasn't helped, but I can look at any news clipping from the early 20th century and see the same level of bullshit I see today.
In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse!
And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.
In the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why he got into the printing business. It's been common knowledge for a very long time that the primary purpose of political reporting is to persuade and not to inform.
Yes. But it, and other mass media like it, generated unifying narratives, narratives that weren't hermetically sealed from conflicting narratives.
That meant you could talk to your relatives at Christmas and perhaps have different ideas about the same facts, rather than completely different sets of facts.
Absolutely. Time was just as guilty of misinformation, exclusion, blackouts, appeal to vague authorities, and maintaining the Overton window for the establishment. Yeah, sure, it had a much more professional sheen and you had to pay attention to notice, but it was still shit.
As with any field in a capitalist society, good things can only really come from those who care more about what they're working on than about any associated profit-motive.
I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks.
And of course some people like this still exist, but:
Anecdotally, it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity or civic duty and towards cynical profit-motive. You can see it in everything from hospitals, to universities, to technical companies like Boeing.
I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge. I don't know if centralization/acquisition is to blame, or stock market pressures, or private equity, or some cultural phenomenon. But it feels like we're only careening further down this path with each passing year.
But that isn't true with the examples the author proposes. It has degraded a lot, although we forgot about changes in media. Nobody knew in yesterdays world which articles were read and which were not. Newspapers were bought as a whole. Today analytics show us that the most bullshit articles generate the most clicks, either out of rage or affirmation. Content is seriously drifting that way because for any business that is a sensible choice. But for quality this is misinterpreting data. A case were less data leads to better results. Rare, but a misinterpretation can be more damaging than remaining inconclusive.
Online news is compared to its paper versions, many outlets still have significant differences here. Of course there was a lot of bullshit too, but today almost everything is bullshit. We even built bullshit-thrones for those that produce the most.
The author starts by comparing the news from newspaper/magazine to modern online news to call it shit and I agree.
In spite of being a business I feel printed newspapers at large struck to a code of ethics and used that "freedom of the press" judiciously.
In India Newspapers played a crucial role in organizing against colonial rule, Many freedom fighters were themselves a publishers/editos of such newspapers. At the later part of the freedom struggle such newspapers came under heavy attack, editors jailed and unspoken horrors imposed upon them.
Even today printed news papers which survived from those era does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.
But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.
Yes, but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists. Local journalism pays rates that make teachers look like kings, and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work a week. It's a job that requires passion, because there are far more of them who are making under minimum wage at an hourly rate than there are who are making six figures.
The trouble with news today is that the ratio of publicity and punditry to data collected in the field is too high.
Try to find out what's happening in Kabul right now. What have we got?
Vast amounts of commentary are available, all resting on a very narrow base of facts. There's a little bit of cell phone video leaking out. Large numbers of people at the airport, out on the tarmac, hanging around planes that aren't going anywhere. Aljazeera has a reporter embedded with the Taliban, and he got a tour of the presidential mansion, showing lots of guys with rifles exploring the place and having meetings.
On the PR side, we have statements from the US State Department that the US embassy has been evacuated, civilian flights out of Kabul have stopped, military flights are continuing, the US has a few thousand troops at the airport, and more troops are coming in. There's a Taliban Twitter feed.[1] "The situation in Kabul is normal".
So what do we really know.?
- General agreement that there was no substantial fighting in Kabul.
- General agreement that the US holds the airport and the Taliban holds most of the rest of the city.
That's about it for hard facts. Yet there's a huge volume of published bullshit on all major media of all persuasions.
I don’t have to watch the coverage to also know they’re not going to talk about the wider context in any useful way. No real insight into why the taliban saw so little opposition, no discussion of how drug money underpins much of their power and what the geopolitical ramifications of that are, no reflection of why the major international governmental bodies are unwilling or unable to go to afghanistan and other places and protect human rights, and how we could reform the system of the world to actually be capable of protecting human rights. In short, all we’re going to get is a lot of poorly informed discussion of what is going on right there right now, which is probably the least important aspect of this whole situation for anyone not actually living there.
Uh-huh, because if something is bullshit then anything that disagrees with it is anti-bullshit. Fauci says masks are bad? That clearly self-serving bullshit entitles you to any reality you want. Don't think Covid is real? Well, some liberal elite once told you a false thing and they also believe Covid is real, so it's the bullshit. You're standing up to the bullshit. They only have to step in their own once to entitle you to spend your entire life head-over-heels in your own bullshit and it's fine because it's not THEIR cowpie.
This essay has a grain of truth, but then he stretches it way too far.
The grain of truth is that mainstream news doesn't live up to the standards they like to claim they do. The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs.
Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants. The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right, so if one's worldview contradicts the literal basic facts, then that person is wrong. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs, but no worse than blogs either; so if an opinion piece makes a valid argument, that's just as valid as an argument made by any other source.
>This essay has a grain of truth, but then he stretches it way too far.
Does it? If anything it's quite tame. The truth is worse, and has been for a long time.
>Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants
The post never makes that claim.
>The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right
You'd be surprised, and seldom when it matters most.
At best they'll offer some retraction of their errors afterthey're caught with their pants down, and when it's too little, too late (as with the WMDs or the Contra affair).
Nowadays, that they don't even have to do that (e.g. Steele dossier), since their errors are lost in the barrage of new BS news anyway, and the public, bombarded by all that, has developed the memory and attention span of a proverbial goldfish.
> The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative.
> The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right, so if one's worldview contradicts the literal basic facts, then that person is wrong.
Without clarity as to what constitutes literal basic facts vs facts that are distorted, this is just more plain bullshit.
Also people often forget that journalists are people who are paid to interpret facts, form a story, and present it so the audience doesn't have to do this intellectual work.
In my opinion this is entirely unreadable. Not for what it has to say, but how it says it.
The word "bullshit" is a burden. It is a painful, unscientific term that chips away our objective neutrality every time we encounter it.
The author knows. The author is emotional. The author is trying to make US emotional. I don't want to be rashly emotional, I want to be neutral, cautious, objective, thoughtful, and deliberate. Every point I take from a piece I want to double-check the reasonableness and the implications of, to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.
But not if it requires wading through so much frustration.
Part of the excellent article was about how death puts a lot of things into new perspective. Like how useless it often is to take every point from a piece and double check the reasonableness and the implications of or to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.
I feel a bit privileged, and in a dangerous way, because feeling like you're special can be an illusion that is easily shattered.
Here's what I mean. If I was born earlier, like say a baby boomer, I'd have less education in critical thinking, but I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced. They'd acknowledge other viewpoints and think properly about how to fit in their own perspectives.
If I was a gen Z kid, it was and is all a blur. Just loads of crap mixed in with everything. Chaos, no particular authority is obvious. More time spent in education but also more noise. Fewer cultural lighthouses since everyone is watching different things (both news and wider culture) and able to stay within whatever they already believe.
When I grew up I had a leg in each era. I still think some papers are better than others. But I also see the cacophony of crap for what it is.
Boomers have ended up in this world too and it's horrifying. My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US. They come up with crazy things from time to time, like they're missing a critical thinking inoculation.
> My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US.
Democracy is like science. If you don’t constantly doubt at least a little bit and check the outcome continuously, but instead just trust blindly, you’re doing it wrong.
> I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced.
It's no longer a credible business model to simply report what you see to a wider audience. We have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every person on the planet with a smartphone for that. (See the fall of Kabul for the latest example.)
When people read the news they expect a lens upon the world that they agree with, that connects to everything else in a coherent narrative that confirms what it was they thought they knew. This fakeness (or 'bullshit') is a form of hypernormalization for the consumerist society.
Yes, of course there's bullshit everywhere. But what can you do with that knowledge exactly? Knowing that something is fallacious and full of BS doesn't give you some advantage. It makes it worse. Knowing that the system is full of lies and corrupt doesn't provide a means to get some good from that knowledge or take advantage of knowing the "truth". It's just depressing to know that the takers will always be taking, the fakers will always be faking, and those who know how to work the lies keep winning while those who know the truth of the BS just self-congratulate their own knowledge. Does the BS always win?
Say one knows for a "fact" who killed JFK or the origins of the pandemic, or one knows the actual mechanism by which startups are funded or big deals won (it's never the way it's portrayed to be). What does knowing the truth of any of those facts do other than provide one with some self-satisfaction of knowing? Is it better to live in self-deception and believe the simple lie versus know the hard truth? Does knowing the "actual truth" even provide that self-satisfaction given that the lies and untruths win out so much of the time? Confronting the lies never seems to provide the expected win that those who seem to possess the truth would expect.
I could invoke Always Sunny in Philadelphia Frank's duper/dupee dichotomy or Carlin's rant ('it's all bullshit and its bad for ya'), but I won't. It is lazy.
Knowing something is bullshit helps. Knowing the system and understanding what the levers do is an advantage. This is also the reason there is so much bullshit. Advantage goes to those with accurate world model and ability to use it to their advantage.
All that said, I have no real answers to the posited questions as those probably have to be answered individually.
tune out. it's not like being up to date about everything going on the world is necessary. follow only the news you care about, read only the people whose work you enjoy
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping.
This is just ranting.
News isn't fundamentally that different from what it was, fifteen, thirty years ago. The difference is that its audiences are far less captive. Attention is scarce. In order to captivate Attention now, you have to "sell" it what it wants, and what a good chunk of Attention wants is to read bullshit that confirms the views of the bubble that it inhabits. You need tricks like clickbaity headlines and whatnot.
The unfettered alternatives that spew raw misinformation are not better, though.
Arguably, having to compete with all that for attention is what drags down news.
The news has always been controlled by someone. It has always had owners, and ran on advertising money.
In the pre-internet past, the news, in a manner of speaking, competed for attention with tabloids. But tabloids were obviously in a separate category. If someone started a sentence with "I read in the Enquirer that ...", you could laugh them off as a twit.
Media was once so money intensive, that no privat endeavour could provide it, thus the public media was created - payed by the public in general with a fee/taxes. When the private TV/Radio came up, the question was if they could survive. Advertisment money is good money, which we came to know much later, when those streams of revenue past over to the big internet companies (mainly Google and Facebook) and they thrived. Today we still see the first generation of media being still around ("public"), the second "private" also struggling and we have a lot of private persons (eg. "YouTubers") making big money, today. There are huge shifts and ignoring that is probably because of the "if your job depends on it". So the encumbents bent and twist themselves, like CNN ("fake news") and claiming things like "freedom of the press is in decline". No!,... times change and we need to and are all adapting and shifting. Except for those still working in the "private" and "public" news sector. With it also it's characteristics change: You rather follow the person(journalist), who is an expert in his field and someone you like and trust, like "Tim Dodd, the everyday Astronaut" (reporting on SpaceX) and others with bigger reach and smaller, weirder and less weird, with more attack surface and less. Some of them get themselves into trouble and need to move to other platforms or vanish completely. I remember Anonymous being expelled from Facebook and moving over to the Russian VKontakte network around 2015. Some stuff seems to only surface on 4chan. Bans or defunding of channels/outlets do get noticed and discussed in those "alternative" communities, or on the original platform/community itself. There is no hiding, it's getting less and less, actually. The freedom of the press got actually... democratized.
If this article piqued your interest but you want something a bit more detailed, I'd recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Good book, a bit one-sided at times, but very interesting in its analysis of the implications of TV on culture. Much of what he describes in the latter chapters seems even more applicable in the age of Twitter and Snapchat.
>The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class. They’re not the ruling class — not quite — but often they’re married to it or share therapists or drink with it at Yale Bowl football games. They’re cozy, these tribal cousins. They cavort. They always have. What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public.
I think this is thought provoking. An at the same time harmless but also horrible example was to see Jen Psaki sing Happy Birthday for a Reuters journalist. Am I alone to think this reflects bad on journalism?
Many things that used to be "the good old way" have changed. Every generation things the upcoming generation is headed for doom.
First it was TVs, then it was video games, now it's social media.
I understand the sentiment and know it's easy to think that that one time in the past was the best way. Hell I even think about those few years with that group of people were "the best", nostalgia.
But if we always look at the past and try to recreate it, then we'll not allow great things of the future to come.
There are legitimate ways the past was better, but that's usually rooted in a belief. So hold onto the belief, let go of the past? I do commend those who onto a belief and let go of the past. It's not always easy in a changing future.
Wait 30 years and then consider whether 2021 is "the good old way".
I imagine it will be for most people, just like 1969 was "the good old way" for the author of TFA, and 1736 was for Ben Franklin.
It's not that the bullshit was better back then, or even that times have changed, for the better or for the worse. It's just that the way the human mind works, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
As time goes by, we still don't see things as they are. We see them as we were.
These recent substack articles which have been posted to HN are interesting. Not because the people who write the articles are intelligent and serious thinkers, because if they are, they definitely aren't showing it via their prose.
They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap their hand or even ask for some sort of coherence.
I remember reading a biography of Aleister Crowley (the guy was boring), in which was put forward the theory that reading the news was a waste of time because:
1. It tended to be poorly written.
2. It was often false or at least incorrect.
3. If there was anything really important you will find out about it quickly enough.
My summary of the points may be off - I read this 30+ years ago.
He retreads an old song we're all familiar with and like, but this guy obviously has a persecution complex:
>The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom.
When someone writes about a variety of abstruse topics, I can only draw on my limited experience with a few of those to judge their reliability about the rest. In this case, I happen to read Google News sometimes. So I know he's talking nonsense. I was deluged with stories about Cubans protesting for freedom. Sure, there were a few mentions that they weren't happy with the slow vaccine rollout, but the overwhelming majority of articles trumpeted the neoliberal party line and crowed about the protest song Patria y Vida.
This kind of selective attention to what must feel like a personal insult accompanies that other signal of a persecution complex, the Poor Lost People Like Me trope
>the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons.
What he fails to understand is that the cliquishness of "his" group and the "narrative" of the "mainstream" are really one and the same phenomenon. Humans naturally try to find, redefine and support a cause or movement, which apparently reflects some primal culture-forming instinct. The idea that this is an external phenomenon -- that some outside, manipulative force is making people arrange into mobs -- is paranoia talking. Humans are natural mob-formers.
The media will always seem to be pushing a narrative because it is made of human beings who feel powerful when they support a narrative. What is necessary is to see the world as it is while aware of this phenomenon, not to delude yourself into thinking you can outrun your own nature.
The media has been notoriously lying for quite some time. Whether actively (I recently heard a story of some news anchors paying off some guys with Kalashnikovs to start shooting when their live segment on TV came up because the armed strife they were reporting on wasn't quite real enough) or passively (swallowing someone else's propaganda as if it were a fact), there has been bullshit floating around the media for decades. I think back in the day it was in some ways harder to spot - your only other frame of reference was the observable reality around you. So for instance when (in my parents time in a communist country) the TV reported that the shoe factory was exceeding its planned output by 140%, but when you went to the shop there were no shoes in your size and a line around the block you could put two and two together. But many news stories evade such simple comparisons with daily reality. Today we have the internet where both alternative facts are available (i.e. people actually on the scene taking pictures) as well as alternative journalism piecing those facts together in a completely different way. Most clever people try to triangulate between these different viewpoints to arrive at some conclusion hopefully closer to reality...
The interesting question is what are the consequence of this? I think there is a rapidly shrinking pool of trust towards our institutions and corporations. I believe that a lot of the issues with the coronavirus (especially the vaccines) are directly attributable to this. If someone who has been blatantly lying to you for decades tells you "take this medication, it's safe, trust me" and keeps repeating it over and over again, I think one can sympathise with those who feel entirely suspicious about it.
[+] [-] tomnipotent|4 years ago|reply
I have a better idea. The news has always been shit.
There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market.
It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs have adapted to fill in all those remaining hours. Consolidation hasn't helped, but I can look at any news clipping from the early 20th century and see the same level of bullshit I see today.
[+] [-] roenxi|4 years ago|reply
And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.
[+] [-] User23|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...
[+] [-] barrkel|4 years ago|reply
That meant you could talk to your relatives at Christmas and perhaps have different ideas about the same facts, rather than completely different sets of facts.
[+] [-] colordrops|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brundolf|4 years ago|reply
I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks.
And of course some people like this still exist, but:
Anecdotally, it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity or civic duty and towards cynical profit-motive. You can see it in everything from hospitals, to universities, to technical companies like Boeing.
I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge. I don't know if centralization/acquisition is to blame, or stock market pressures, or private equity, or some cultural phenomenon. But it feels like we're only careening further down this path with each passing year.
[+] [-] raxxorrax|4 years ago|reply
Online news is compared to its paper versions, many outlets still have significant differences here. Of course there was a lot of bullshit too, but today almost everything is bullshit. We even built bullshit-thrones for those that produce the most.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago|reply
In spite of being a business I feel printed newspapers at large struck to a code of ethics and used that "freedom of the press" judiciously.
In India Newspapers played a crucial role in organizing against colonial rule, Many freedom fighters were themselves a publishers/editos of such newspapers. At the later part of the freedom struggle such newspapers came under heavy attack, editors jailed and unspoken horrors imposed upon them.
Even today printed news papers which survived from those era does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.
But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
Try to find out what's happening in Kabul right now. What have we got?
Vast amounts of commentary are available, all resting on a very narrow base of facts. There's a little bit of cell phone video leaking out. Large numbers of people at the airport, out on the tarmac, hanging around planes that aren't going anywhere. Aljazeera has a reporter embedded with the Taliban, and he got a tour of the presidential mansion, showing lots of guys with rifles exploring the place and having meetings.
On the PR side, we have statements from the US State Department that the US embassy has been evacuated, civilian flights out of Kabul have stopped, military flights are continuing, the US has a few thousand troops at the airport, and more troops are coming in. There's a Taliban Twitter feed.[1] "The situation in Kabul is normal".
So what do we really know.?
- General agreement that there was no substantial fighting in Kabul.
- General agreement that the US holds the airport and the Taliban holds most of the rest of the city.
That's about it for hard facts. Yet there's a huge volume of published bullshit on all major media of all persuasions.
[1] https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1427101139481268227
[+] [-] Joeri|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dibujante|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilized|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_puppy|4 years ago|reply
The grain of truth is that mainstream news doesn't live up to the standards they like to claim they do. The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs.
Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants. The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right, so if one's worldview contradicts the literal basic facts, then that person is wrong. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs, but no worse than blogs either; so if an opinion piece makes a valid argument, that's just as valid as an argument made by any other source.
[+] [-] coldtea|4 years ago|reply
Does it? If anything it's quite tame. The truth is worse, and has been for a long time.
>Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants
The post never makes that claim.
>The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right
You'd be surprised, and seldom when it matters most.
At best they'll offer some retraction of their errors afterthey're caught with their pants down, and when it's too little, too late (as with the WMDs or the Contra affair).
Nowadays, that they don't even have to do that (e.g. Steele dossier), since their errors are lost in the barrage of new BS news anyway, and the public, bombarded by all that, has developed the memory and attention span of a proverbial goldfish.
[+] [-] cpu_qwerty|4 years ago|reply
Without clarity as to what constitutes literal basic facts vs facts that are distorted, this is just more plain bullshit.
[+] [-] fulafel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zug_zug|4 years ago|reply
The word "bullshit" is a burden. It is a painful, unscientific term that chips away our objective neutrality every time we encounter it.
The author knows. The author is emotional. The author is trying to make US emotional. I don't want to be rashly emotional, I want to be neutral, cautious, objective, thoughtful, and deliberate. Every point I take from a piece I want to double-check the reasonableness and the implications of, to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.
But not if it requires wading through so much frustration.
[+] [-] _moof|4 years ago|reply
Also, not everything in life is science, and emotions can be useful messengers. Ignore them at your peril.
[+] [-] croo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
Here's what I mean. If I was born earlier, like say a baby boomer, I'd have less education in critical thinking, but I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced. They'd acknowledge other viewpoints and think properly about how to fit in their own perspectives.
If I was a gen Z kid, it was and is all a blur. Just loads of crap mixed in with everything. Chaos, no particular authority is obvious. More time spent in education but also more noise. Fewer cultural lighthouses since everyone is watching different things (both news and wider culture) and able to stay within whatever they already believe.
When I grew up I had a leg in each era. I still think some papers are better than others. But I also see the cacophony of crap for what it is.
Boomers have ended up in this world too and it's horrifying. My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US. They come up with crazy things from time to time, like they're missing a critical thinking inoculation.
[+] [-] tomp|4 years ago|reply
Democracy is like science. If you don’t constantly doubt at least a little bit and check the outcome continuously, but instead just trust blindly, you’re doing it wrong.
[+] [-] rcurry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhanschoo|4 years ago|reply
Is this really true? Or is it an illusion due to you being the target audience of the MSM then? For example, there are no lack of claims and incidents of media bias for the pre-naughts in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...
[+] [-] krona|4 years ago|reply
When people read the news they expect a lens upon the world that they agree with, that connects to everything else in a coherent narrative that confirms what it was they thought they knew. This fakeness (or 'bullshit') is a form of hypernormalization for the consumerist society.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tboyd47|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denton-scratch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heydemo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rexreed|4 years ago|reply
Say one knows for a "fact" who killed JFK or the origins of the pandemic, or one knows the actual mechanism by which startups are funded or big deals won (it's never the way it's portrayed to be). What does knowing the truth of any of those facts do other than provide one with some self-satisfaction of knowing? Is it better to live in self-deception and believe the simple lie versus know the hard truth? Does knowing the "actual truth" even provide that self-satisfaction given that the lies and untruths win out so much of the time? Confronting the lies never seems to provide the expected win that those who seem to possess the truth would expect.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|4 years ago|reply
Knowing something is bullshit helps. Knowing the system and understanding what the levers do is an advantage. This is also the reason there is so much bullshit. Advantage goes to those with accurate world model and ability to use it to their advantage.
All that said, I have no real answers to the posited questions as those probably have to be answered individually.
[+] [-] mistermann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|4 years ago|reply
This is just ranting.
News isn't fundamentally that different from what it was, fifteen, thirty years ago. The difference is that its audiences are far less captive. Attention is scarce. In order to captivate Attention now, you have to "sell" it what it wants, and what a good chunk of Attention wants is to read bullshit that confirms the views of the bubble that it inhabits. You need tricks like clickbaity headlines and whatnot.
The unfettered alternatives that spew raw misinformation are not better, though.
Arguably, having to compete with all that for attention is what drags down news.
The news has always been controlled by someone. It has always had owners, and ran on advertising money.
In the pre-internet past, the news, in a manner of speaking, competed for attention with tabloids. But tabloids were obviously in a separate category. If someone started a sentence with "I read in the Enquirer that ...", you could laugh them off as a twit.
[+] [-] skybrian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnmmn123456|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jtsummers|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mongol|4 years ago|reply
I think this is thought provoking. An at the same time harmless but also horrible example was to see Jen Psaki sing Happy Birthday for a Reuters journalist. Am I alone to think this reflects bad on journalism?
https://youtu.be/EFyFOQTs9DI
[+] [-] irjustin|4 years ago|reply
First it was TVs, then it was video games, now it's social media.
I understand the sentiment and know it's easy to think that that one time in the past was the best way. Hell I even think about those few years with that group of people were "the best", nostalgia.
But if we always look at the past and try to recreate it, then we'll not allow great things of the future to come.
There are legitimate ways the past was better, but that's usually rooted in a belief. So hold onto the belief, let go of the past? I do commend those who onto a belief and let go of the past. It's not always easy in a changing future.
[+] [-] wombatmobile|4 years ago|reply
Wait 30 years and then consider whether 2021 is "the good old way".
I imagine it will be for most people, just like 1969 was "the good old way" for the author of TFA, and 1736 was for Ben Franklin.
It's not that the bullshit was better back then, or even that times have changed, for the better or for the worse. It's just that the way the human mind works, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
As time goes by, we still don't see things as they are. We see them as we were.
[+] [-] visarga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|4 years ago|reply
They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap their hand or even ask for some sort of coherence.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|4 years ago|reply
1. It tended to be poorly written.
2. It was often false or at least incorrect.
3. If there was anything really important you will find out about it quickly enough.
My summary of the points may be off - I read this 30+ years ago.
[+] [-] scythe|4 years ago|reply
>The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom.
When someone writes about a variety of abstruse topics, I can only draw on my limited experience with a few of those to judge their reliability about the rest. In this case, I happen to read Google News sometimes. So I know he's talking nonsense. I was deluged with stories about Cubans protesting for freedom. Sure, there were a few mentions that they weren't happy with the slow vaccine rollout, but the overwhelming majority of articles trumpeted the neoliberal party line and crowed about the protest song Patria y Vida.
This kind of selective attention to what must feel like a personal insult accompanies that other signal of a persecution complex, the Poor Lost People Like Me trope
>the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons.
What he fails to understand is that the cliquishness of "his" group and the "narrative" of the "mainstream" are really one and the same phenomenon. Humans naturally try to find, redefine and support a cause or movement, which apparently reflects some primal culture-forming instinct. The idea that this is an external phenomenon -- that some outside, manipulative force is making people arrange into mobs -- is paranoia talking. Humans are natural mob-formers.
The media will always seem to be pushing a narrative because it is made of human beings who feel powerful when they support a narrative. What is necessary is to see the world as it is while aware of this phenomenon, not to delude yourself into thinking you can outrun your own nature.
[+] [-] gampleman|4 years ago|reply
The interesting question is what are the consequence of this? I think there is a rapidly shrinking pool of trust towards our institutions and corporations. I believe that a lot of the issues with the coronavirus (especially the vaccines) are directly attributable to this. If someone who has been blatantly lying to you for decades tells you "take this medication, it's safe, trust me" and keeps repeating it over and over again, I think one can sympathise with those who feel entirely suspicious about it.