[julian37]

If you follow the link, it says Americans spend that amount of time daily with "major media", and no mention of news only. So that would presumably include reading/watching fiction, listening to music etc.?

> included are digital (online on desktop and laptop computers, mobile nonvoice and other connected devices), TV, radio, print (offline reading only), newspapers, magazines, radio, and television

Pretty big blunder in an article about media trustworthiness if you ask me.

[florkle1]

This article is a freelance health/wellness writer dumping a spec pitch that didn’t sell on Substack to try to recoup a little of the invested work. The article was written toward an expected outcome starting from a Twitter poll, which means by the end of the lede it’s basically worthless because it exists only to confirm the author’s presupposition. That’s the polar opposite of journalism, despite what some folks would have you believe, and it’s why every editor she called presumably passed on this. Blunders throughout should surprise you next to zero because it’s basically a writer with Word open, a point to make (noticeably from a bad personal experience), and no support to keep it on track. And this is the kind of gun you want to make sure you’re aiming well. She isn’t.

Seriously, leading off with a Brandeis quote comes across as so horrifically pretentious it hurts. That the next graf is about a crisp November day almost made me close the tab immediately, and I’ve read some really bad work. The TL;DR being that long and then the article starting like that is a big, neon sign upon which is written “I badly need an editor.” And this is part 1! The horror!

Another blunder: the duplicated scripts are because lazy local producers take fully-produced packages off their network sources to fill time. I know because I’ve done it. If I’m three minutes light in my B block, I’m looking at the network’s stuff or CNN or whatever to get what I can. Something on trade relations? Cool. Throw it in! It’s already done! (Sinclair must-runs use the same mechanism and are just pushed on producers.) It’s not a local news producer watching a competitor’s air and writing it down word for word, as she seems to think it is with her “hence” behind that YouTube embed. An interesting oddity of news, but not the malevolent machine she’s implying.

(Yes, I ended up reading the whole thing. It’s an interest area; I was a local news director in TV and an assignment editor before my start in tech. The author understands next to nothing about the incentives nor economics of particularly newsgathering. I’d rebut it but I’d run out of room here. Why it’s on HN is beyond me, since not even Good Housekeeping would pick this drivel up. She’s onto something of course, and it’s a subject that deserves better study than this.)

[chrisseaton]

Right, so an 8-hour work shift with the radio on in the background, for example.