The News Is Information Junk Food (2022)
chuck.isI started my career as a reporter a decade ago. I can't tell you how many stories I filed that an editor twisted into something different to fit their narrative.
There were also stories I was directed away from because they would alienate our audience.
It's a narrative business.
People really need to understand how journalism works as a business model. When you only consume news that reinforces your beliefs, that creates an incentive to produce news that conforms to your beliefs. This doesn't mean your beliefs are wrong, just that you should be aware of your own biases and guard against them.
Excessive cynicism is a real danger too. Democracies rely on an informed electorate to guide decisions. If you throw up your hands and say the truth is unknowable so nothing matters anyway, you're giving into autocracy. There absolutely are forces that would like you to give up on the notion of being able to tell truth from falsehoods.
You may not know absolute truth for absolute certainty, but if you live in a democratic society and you'd like to keep it that way, you really ought to make an attempt to know what's going on.
What if our aversion to pursuing absolute truth, insisting on stopping at true enough (like democracy being our most sacred institution) is the problem though?
I would like us to strive for better, not keep it the way it is now.
It's an optimization game, and far too many people care far too much.
You could spend every waking hour reading news, it wouldn't improve your or anyone else's life much, and it definitely wouldn't be better than putting that effort into a whole lot of other things.
You care for democracy and politics? Excellent. Get involved in your local politics. won't take one tenth of the time and will pay off orders of magnitude more than reading stuff constantly.
What if omniscience is an illusion though?
I've been working in a PR-type space recently. That narrative is the subject of war between so many different actors.
The worst thing is watching everyone around me, even very intelligent people, get so angry over a space that is so heavily fabricated, optimised even for that very same outrage.
I think the idea that news does things for ratings and therefore money is not really true. Control of the narrative is vastly more lucrative for other stakeholders in these organizations. Some of these news organizations like the Washington Post for example lost $77 million last year. Fox news fired Tucker Carlson, the most popular news anchor in the channel's history. This is not an economically driven business, at least in terms of the news outlet's own profit and loss.
Non-profits give away billions and billions for non-economic reasons, they'd probably fund these loss making news outlets, and they indeed fund many non-economic advocacy organizations because they help them change the widely believed narratives to support their respective missions.
> Fox news fired Tucker Carlson, the most popular news anchor in the channel's history. This is not an economically driven business
Nonsense example. Carlson was the figurehead for a narrative that cost Murdoch $800 million in defamation.
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/26/tucker-carlson...
Carlson has not been a news anchor his entire time at Fox News - he would be more fairly called a commentator or show host.
He was a commentator when he was on CNN as well. He has never been a news anchor.
I would swear as well in court Fox News claimed he was an 'entertainer' at some point.
I know some very famous people and have been in the press myself a few times. The general attitude among people the press covers is that reports of them, their business, and the reason they are in the press is distorted to the degree it's fabrication. The news is cat herding of economic waves various industries and power brokers are trying to create for their advantage. There is no "news" only economic manipulation, of every possible kind.
I contracted sat TV for a while. I had to pay extra for movies but news channels were free. It was like someone was paying for me to watch that movie
Actual investigative on the ground journalism costs more money and time and nuances. All of these are expensive. So why not feed the people junk.
It’s better to read novels then, at least I’m not disappointed that it’s all fake.
> I started my career as a reporter a decade ago. I can't tell you how many stories I filed that an editor twisted into something different to fit their narrative.
I think it's important to read news with that in mind, but almost treat it as game of spotting and anticipating the way things will be twisted to fit the narrative. It's helpful to familiarize oneself with concepts such as "burying the lede," and read some snarky media criticism from a perspective that cuts against the typical bias of the mainstream media.
Technically, how the narrative is established? What is the procedure?
When several news organizations follow the same narrative in a coordinated manner, is it because their editors just advertently sense "the party line"? Or the are some meetings where they are instructed? Or some written instructions distributed among them?
In Russian and Ukrainian practice I heard the term "themnik" - brief written instructions of how to present various themes.
Given that in the early post-soviet times, when this started, they all hired and learned from western (mostly american) political technologists, maybe this practice came from the west?
Have you ever saw or heard of such instructive, narrative establishing docs?
> Technically, how the narrative is established? What is the procedure?
> When several news organizations follow the same narrative in a coordinated manner, is it because their editors just advertently sense "the party line"? Or the are some meetings where they are instructed? Or some written instructions distributed among them?
In the US, I think it's mostly due to shared individual biases causing the organizations to coalesce around a "party line." IIRC, a large majority of journalists have personal beliefs that are for one party and against the other, and even a very strong sense of professionalism can't fully neutralize bias like that.
Does "Manufacturing Consent" ring a bell? Sounds right up your alley:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent?useskin=...
Yes, thanks. I am (superficially) aware of this as well as of the Lippman and Bernays work.
I am just curious about specific details or material artifacts of the media narrative control.
Herman and Chomskiy, as I understand, describe more conceptual model, that media orgs depend on their owners, on advertizers, etc, and thus influenced or biased.
But how does it work, if reallly present?
Pure self-censorship when people don't want to harm the interests of those who they depend on? This alone may not be enough, because requires clear understanding of the interests, which may not always be transparent.
Personnel policy, when only people with right beliefs are hired? May be not flexible enough, if the narrative needs to be changed quickly.
The blending of comedy/entertainment with news, going back to the GWB era with the Daily Show is a good example of this problem. People consuming junk food thinking they are getting their vegetables.
Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
I think you do political satire - because that's what the Daily Show is - a disservice. Spitting Image (for example) massively shaped people's perceptions of British politicians in the 80s. That Maggie puppet is still an iconic image of the woman herself.
I'm not even British (I'm Canadian), but am a geopolitical nerd. Spitting Image is one of the best examples of satire that's ever existed in the TV era.
There was a great documentary where a lot of the politicians who were satirized on it explained how much they loved and loathed their portrayals which often affected their prospects: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xiafmh
What do you think about political cartoons in newspapers and elsewhere?
https://firstamendmentmuseum.org/exhibits/virtual-exhibits/a...
I'd prefer people still had the attention span to read the news, including the cartoons.
Wanting people to have longer attention spans is not an actionable choice on the menu. But it can be a goal/target.
This is where preferences meet reality. How do you influence the world to work the way you want it to?
Is it’s not an either/or proposition. There is a dearth of informed populace. But many of the problems in a modern society are very complex and boring to the majority of people. There is a very small population of informed people. Getting things done requires swaying public opinion and “motivating your base”. Real reporting (presenting or revealing facts), op-ed, comedy, satire are all part of a healthy media ecosystem. But I think one reason for the political divide in the United States is not necessarily a disagreement on policy, but rather the very issues that motivate people on either end of the spectrum are different. It would be great if the population was less impressionable and more informed. But that requires ongoing effort and flies against human nature.
Frankly the Daily Show/Last Week Tonight are the best news, because the news isn't vegetables to begin with, it's alluring toxic slop that makes us feel like shit when we consume it. At least TDS/LWT make us feel good while getting mildly (and mostly unnecessarily) informed.
One problem with mixing comedy with serious news is we undermine the gravity or seriousness with which we should respond. Hardtalk on BBC should be common format so that people go into the show with belief that these are not laughing matter
The other problem was the overwhelming bias. There was one approved narrative, and the comedians always made jokes that promoted it and disparaged the opposite.
John Stewart rips into the democrats all the time, just not for being rapacious hypocritical monsters.
As long as you remember that it's quite possible for a series of true facts to give you a less accurate model of the world.
What's your opinion of John Oliver? I just watched a YouTube video of his show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY. It seemed pretty good, but I'm also very ignorant.
What's the best way to become informed about a topic? Or, is it better to stay ignorant?
If you just want a medium-intensity tip, whenever a newsman reports on what someone said, look up what that person actually said (in context and with a charitable "best possible interpretation" lens). If the two match up then the reporting is about as good as you'll find anywhere. If you can't find a primary source then there is a very real question of how the newsman figured it out that deserves some reflection.
There are basically 3 grades of reporting - trashy lies, very biased and informative. Misreporting what people actually said is a strong tell of the first two - which can still be fun to read but ultimately they're trying to sell you on something that is probably against your interests.
> trashy lies, very biased and informative. Misreporting what people actually said is a strong tell of the first two
For "biased" rather than outright lies, I think the two most common easily observable techniques I see are:
- Quoting known unreliable sources: "Black people eat human babies! (say KKK leadership)"
- Using passive and active voices to shift blame: "Police shoot and kill bystander during drug bust" vs. "Shots fired during drug bust fatally injured potentially uninvolved man"
Read don't watch. Reading is a faster way to ingest information.
Read disparate sources knowing they each have their political biases. That is - explicitly read some right (or left) wing news you don't like as a check & balance on the flavor of news you do like to read.
Understand the difference between the news & editorial side of papers.
I would also note that "business news" (WSJ/Bloomberg/etc) tend to be more just-the-facts than your median WaPo/NYT/Fox/MSNBC/NYPost/LAT.
He is funny, but only while promoting one side. He will never tell a joke that embarrasses one of his own, he will never point out the idiocy of his own party, just the other.
> What's your opinion of John Oliver? I just watched a YouTube video of his show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqK3_n6pdDY. It seemed pretty good, but I'm also very ignorant.
"Between the years 1939 and 1945 more than 6,000,000 Jews died amid a global surge of fatal diseases." is roughly the level of factual accuracy in that specific episode.
In general, I think even without familiarity of the topics discussed it is easy to see how in every episode John Oliver cherry-picks statistics, presents the opinions of individuals as facts or as widely held opinions and slathers the whole show in adjectives so you know exactly what is the correct opinion you are supposed to hold.
I quite enjoy the show as entertainment, but I would not turn to it as a source of truth or to become better informed about a topic.
> What's the best way to become informed about a topic?
If that question exist, the answer is: be ignorant. If you are involved into the topic, you will be pretty informed. So the question is: should you be involved into the topic in he first place. If true, you go to the Uni, join NGO, join related job or research program and get informed pretty quickly, otherwise it's not worthy. Besides, with contemporary media all you can hope for is getting misinformed.
John Oliver's program is both funny and informative. "Infotainment" as it's sometimes called.
I think its success can be attributed to how it presents things that are often inherently worrying, controversial or critical. By partially presenting it in a funny way, it's easier to digest.
The reports typically present verifiable sources and quotes - at least in part. But I don't think he is suggesting that he's the arbiter of unbiased truth. There are clear biases, exaggerations and so on. What they choose to cover is also impacted by these biases.
Given all that, it seems more honest and authentic rather than less.
Compare that to (non-satirical) news media that _does_ act as if it's objectively truthful (except for example if pressed in court). Where claims are made _without_ verifiable sources but via punditry and half-truths.
Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers.
Cable news is the junk food, and TDS showed it to be so bad that even a parody news show could do a better job of informing people, a point made very often by the host. Using it as an example of junk news is missing the point by a rather wide margin.
> Better to simply turn off your brain and honestly watch real junk without the false sophistication.
It's all coming from the same six companies, as per the article. It all has a lot of the same messaging - trust the police, the good guys always win, torture is bad but if you have a good reason it's ok, Islam is super scary yo, capitalism is cool actually, being too smart isn't cool, and leave the status quo the fuck alone or get Avengered.
... Turn your brain off at your peril. Junk food can kill. If you really feel the need to watch absolute garbage and ignore the news, you probably need to work less and/or sleep more.
> Multiple studies over those years showed that The Daily Show watchers were significantly better informed on issues than cable news viewers.
This comment only makes sense if you're trying to imply the Daily Show increases how informed people are.
It seems plausible that causation runs the other way: more informed people are more likely to watch the Daily Show, because then they get all the jokes.
Precisely. The Daily Show was a predecessor to Twitter political culture and remains the offline version of it. Blue Flavored Fox News with more laughs.
It's the same political culture of preaching to the already converted and mostly shouting about how bad the other side is. No attempts at persuasion.
It definitely doesn’t have as big a problem with manufacturing outrage “news” out of nothing at all, like Fox does (and its pal, AM radio). They’ll routinely report ordinary things without history or context in order to imply they’re both new and bad (and they may be bad, but not for the reasons they imply, which often simply aren’t real)
I sometimes wonder if people who compare things like the daily show or John Oliver to Fox News have watched Fox News at all in the last 15 years or so.
There is no doubt a blue bent, but I think the fact that it says on the tin that it is satire gives it a leg up on fox news which purports to be, ya know, news. And I think you’ll find that Jon Stewart at least tries to acknowledge the argument of the other side even more than say CNN. For example he was very willing to acknowledge early on that the concerns about Joe Biden’s age were legitimate before a lot of the other blue leaning media realized they could’nt deny it any more. I’d say Bill Maher and some of the talk shows that have gone political are closer to twitter offline, more focused on gotcha moments than real arguments.
The correlation vs causation question is interesting, but not the original topic. Whether smart people avoid corporate news, or corporate news makes people dumber, either way the problem is corporate news.
And TDS is not a great example of that, because from the start it was an explicitly self-aware reaction to the awfulness of corporate news.
Wasn't there a study which showed that UK tabloid readers were worse informed than people who simply didn't pay attention to the news at all?
It's not a new observation. More than a century ago, Mark Twain observed: "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."
The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." -Thomas Jefferson, 1807
As a result of this thread I looked into the first US newspaper and discovered it was shut down after one issue because they printed something a governor didn't like, lol. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publick_Occurrences_Both_Forre...
The more I think about the state of news, the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism. Something similar to a health inspection score. With considerations like:
- News needs to be verifiable. Direct links to data sources.
- News need to have history of modifications to their article.
- Factual errors will cause dings to their score.
- Revenue sources/tax forms need to be public to find conflicts of interest.
If a news site wants to sell it's soul to make ad money, that's fine, but I want to see some sort of "F" rating on that site. There's no incentive for news sites to make good news right now.
Edit: Or, linking to this article: a sort of "nutrition facts" label for news
I think you're going about this in a way that won't make sense to anyone but individuals like yourself.
People watching Fox News all day can't possibly think that it's a picture of reality, unless they use their intuition and rational systems in exactly the opposite sense that you are doing here (and this system of ratings would serve). People are not interested in more information, they are interested in the right information. Information that's belief affirming.
These individuals are using their "survival mode" default setting of understanding reality, not the scientific, rational, system 2 type thinking you're using here.
They feel like they're constantly under attack, so they join a system-world where constantly being under attack is validated for them.
There's no overlap between "let's give people more information" and fixing the actual problem. The actual problem isn't lack of information, but the overwhelming lack of emotional balancing and maturity to take in information you don't like.
I can't say for certain but I'm not so sure the people you're describing are a sizeable majority. I think most people are just watching news and doing their best. If a news site has a "C" rating on it -- which would require some sort of government regulation to enforce which would be a whole other thing -- which is then clickable and let's you see "exactly" what it has that rating ( eg "17 inaccuracies in last month [links] > 10" ), it could help (a) incentivise the news site to have better standards, (b) incentivise the watcher that they might have to be more diligent. The main thing is: provide any incentive to news to be more reputable.
If they weren’t a sizeable majority, I don’t think we’d be having the same kind of leaders we’re getting in the west tbh.
I large part of it is that the leader selection is highly oligopolized, and you are partially in denial about how undesirable the other candidates are. (Probably because you see the need to pick them, as they are the rational choice, but you can't feel aligned with their actual values, because they are horrible.)
It's all connected. The oligopoly of leader selection is highly influenced by the owners of media, which usually are aiming to influence national policy to their preference.
The destruction of the newspaper and the "liberty of information" of the internet is now compressed through information warfare, or as Steve Bannon puts it "flooding the zone with shit".
You flood the main channels (social media now) with disinformation and misinformation, or even information calculated to create as much anger as possible (Cambridge Analytica knew that making people angry was the easiest way to make them change their minds). You use bot networks and sockpuppets to spread it.
Through that you get the same overall effects as when newspapers were a thing - even with "unlimited" channels, they're all showing what you want them to show. You flooded the zone with what you want people to see, and you made it so that it follows the response that the algorithm will propagate it even more (sharing, liking).
Overall the effect is the same. And for the same reason. Those controlling the information want to control leadership, leadership choices, and leadership selection. That's the target.
This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is why Bob Mercer bought Cambridge Analytica (an information warfare firm that was doing counter terrorism work for NATO) and put Steve Bannon in charge. Influencing elections.
Yes, it's a complex self-reinforcing system.
But blaming the consequences on the capacity of random people to decide for themselves is a completely wicked and wrong conclusion to take from it.
Im not sure I follow. Blaming the consequences of the capacity of random people? Could you expand and clarify what you mean there?
I suspect part of this is that "news junkies" are also more inclined to be "likely voters" and vice-versa, so you have some selection bias towards these people in the electorate.
Our "good" leaders are only good because they are "measured" (perceived) on an absolute scale. This is due to our heavily ingrained cultural norms and beliefs.
Yeah, and lots of people eat junk food despite the nutritional labels. But no one in their right mind would suggest scrapping the those labels. We should always push for more information for consumers.
Junk food makes people fat.
It has a noticeable, immediate effect.
Accuracy ratings for news would just make people say your rating is biased, I think.
I think with news we have a benefit that it's generally all online, so we can link to the rating page and further link to the places where they failed. Unlike a nutrition label where you have to like buy a mass spectrometer to verify their accuracy, with news checks you can view the failed checks and links to the articles that caused them to fail and verify it yourself. But that does require the checks being really basic; things that could be open to a lot of interpretation wouldn't work, cause folks could then argue the interpretation is biased.
We should start understanding that "independent" rankings won't ever work. Let's not even get started with "fact-checking" places which we can count by dozens per country now, as they all have their own interpretations (or otherwise a single one alone would be enough).
For such a thing to work, it needs to be funded. At the end, it doesn't matter if it comes from public or private hands, it's going to be leaning towards one direction or another, then a group of people will consider it the absolute truth and other group of people will create their own site for "fact-checking".
If humans cannot possibly be objective and independent (yes, that's what I believe after 30+ years in this planet and having met multiple people), then news cannot possibly be. Bearing in mind such a limitation, let's think how this can be possibly improved.
I personally gave up on news being informative and just see it as entertainment - it's a narrative business.
I think it can work, but will require a very well designed set of rules.
For example, with fact checking, some fact checking is easy. Eg if an article says "the unemployment rate last year was X%". You have to do some research to determine what measure of unemployment they're using, but boom, you can say it is factually incorrect if no measure lists that number. This process is even easier if it's linked to the data source. These are likely the only types of facts that can be checked. This is limiting, but at least it creates some sort of check on what feels like a runaway industry.
Statements like "he was the best president since X" is an unverifiable statement. "best" isn't qualified. An article with a statement like this should immediately be dinged. And it's fine to have a site that makes statements like this! But just not a news site.
Things like bias or swing are not really possible to do as part of this. This is mostly trying to make it matter when news sites drop their standards.
The unemployment rate is far from straightforward. Things like "who is counted as part of the workforce" and "what is employment" - the definitions change pretty often, and a well-rounded source would also have to look at something like COVID and explain how it might have affected unemployment. In many cases, saying "the unemployment rate was X%" with no context would be journalistic malpractice.
But why would you bother with this? If you want to know last year's unemployment rate objectively speaking, then you just head to wherever the statistics are published by your government and see it yourself. Well, if you can trust your government's statistics that is (and this is an extremely important "if").
So I doubt people are coming to a news site to read a one-liner with some statistic, they want more development, perhaps adding some opinions in between, comparing it with previous governments, whatever.
But yeah, there's not much business in a "news site" that'd just copy-paste statistics.
This is just the bare minimum standards level that a news organisation should meet. And this isn't based on a hypothetical; here's an article from the CBC: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-records-its-...
The graph is entirely incorrect and contradicts the numbers in the paragraph just before it. And good luck finding the source for that statistic I spent half an hour trying to! And all the discussion about this article online was incredibly confused since people were drawing the wrong conclusions from the graph.
I think this journalist and this newspaper should be dinged when errors like this are made. (And also dinged since it hasn't been corrected months after the article was published).
This is just one of many checks that help differentiate lower quality news from higher quality news.
Well, step one requires the news receiver to have critical analysis capabilities they apply to the news they receive. That means education which instills critical thinking, which if you've noticed these days is treated like satanic worship by those in control of the entire education vertical.
> If humans cannot possibly be objective
What if we were to try?
Humans also could not run a 4-minute mile, or build a machine that can fly.
And in that sense, we can't.
One person doing something and that something being the norm are wildly different asks.
I agree: if something requires trying, and we are unable to try, then we will surely not succeed. (And I agree we do not try, but perhaps it requires trying to try, or something weird like that.)
But then look at all we've achieved, and sometimes all it takes is one or two people to try and a new movement is catalyzed, gaining steam over time.
Optimism can also be helpful.
I also want news organizations to be more transparent and honest. The incentives are complicated. Perhaps some sort of ratings system could help.
I think I’d be willing to go further. Purely from an economic perspective, there are negative externalities that result from poor quality news organizations. Current market mechanisms seem to reward polarization.
So what do we do?
A common response is: let’s educate people to pay more attention to their critical thinking and media diet. This can work if people change habits to align with higher level thinking. With more high-quality aggregation options, the easier this gets for individuals.
An uncommon response (that would attract the ire of many) would be to impose economic penalties on the organizations that correspond to their negative externalities. Perhaps tax them like cigarettes. It is hard to think of targeted policy interventions that don’t have all sorts of loopholes.
In broad strokes, perhaps the best solutions I know about at present are carrots. Spend generously on high-quality news organizations.
(This is just a first draft and could stand a lot of improvement.)
There's a problem that traditional news gathering regards it as valid to print X if they can find a source saying X and print "X said ...". They consider that to have done their duty. In an era where political figures have neither a sense of honour nor an obligation to the truth, and therefore routinely lie about everything, this leads to the newspaper repeating and amplifying those lies.
(a recent example: a lot of places had to issue apologies and corrections over Imane Khalif due to quoting disreputable sources at face value)
I love the idea of nutrition facts. AllSides has sort of started doing this. They measure left/right lean for articles and news sources. Newsweek has now included a left/right lean indicator in all of their articles from AllSides.
While the lean of an article is not a measure of factual errors. It at least is a move in the right direction. Maybe one day they will include a nutrition facts.
The other problem I see is who does the fact checking? That cannot be cheap.
You can't have news be a business. Period. It's really that simple. It's like having schools be a business, or healthcare, roads, regulation agencies, etc.
You can't produce a system where the EPA gets its funding from the amount of pollution it stops for example. That's a perverse incentive. These types of organizations are by definition cost centers. And must be treated as such.
In Germany, public (öffentlich-rechtlich) media are generously financed with a household tax. Unfortunately, the quality of reporting is still poor. Most of the money is spent on stupid entertainment and sports reporting.
The reduction of direct state/party influence (2014) has also achieved little.
Yea, Sweden has a similar system and problem. A bit part is that the public broadcasters think they are competing on views. Which is rather wrongheaded I think. They should focus on quality and education, not on just getting views without substance.
That gets tricky fast. News as nonprofit might work, but would likely have even more severe resourcing issues than smaller newsrooms are having today.
If news sources were publicly funded like schools, that compromises the very important news function of reporting on the government.
> If news sources were publicly funded like schools, that compromises the very important news function of reporting on the government.
Not necessarily. In Sweden the public service system has independent right to basically tax the population. So it's not the government paying the news, it's the news taxing the country directly. I'm not saying that doesn't have its own issue, of course it does, but it's a smart tradeoff I think.
If the news is a cost center, who pays for it? I'm assuming your implied solution is to roll-up news production/curation to be under the federal government? (Assuming U.S. here, since you mentioned EPA.) Aren't the strings of government ultimately pulled by forces leading back to businesses? Isn't lobbying more influential than individual tax payers in how their taxes are spent? Do you really think the end result would be materially better (in the U.S.) if news were only provided by the government?
New has always been a business. The 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution was put in place precisely to prevent government from controlling the press.
I think, like the junk food analogy implies, it's up to the end consumer to decide what to purchase. Yes, there are psychological and neurological factors at play... sugar is addicting, and there is a dopamine hit in anticipating what's behind the click-bait... but if enough individuals realize there are better things to eat and better information to consume, these business peddling junk would go out of business.
Or, another possible solution, while I'm spitballing... ban paid advertising in some ways. Let local community advertising by local business through, by all means, but ban ads to consumers by conglomerates who operate outside of some radius?
(Corrected typo.)
The US has basically removed laws and taboos against theft and bribery for corporations. So yea, I agree while that stands the country will have trouble doing anything useful with government.
Whoever does the scoring will do so based on whether they agree with the sites bias or not instead of any of those criteria. So you're back to square one but now with a false sense of legitimacy
There is a strong chance that bias will affect rankings, to some degree, but:
1. Bias is not all or nothing.
2. There is a large degree of commonality about baseline ethics and quality of life. Polarization accentuates wedge issues disproportionately.
3. There are classes of statements which can be factually assessed.
4. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A step in the right direction combined with other forces can make a positive difference.
My objection isn't that its good but not perfect, I don't think itd be good at all. So far everyone who's tried to be a neutral arbiter of truth has been a political hack, like politifact and groups like that. Training the public to trust things just because they got a good score from some agency is not going to improve their ability to think critically and be informed, the false sense of legitimacy (and the ability to apply the rules unevenly to make your enemies look illegitimate) would make the problem even more odious
What if the agency included a detailed description of the high quality thinking process (assuming they had one, no current sites do) that led to the conclusion, in turn teaching people how to think?
This comment section, in this smarter than usual community, is chock full of lazy, heuristic thinking. We can't even try to not make errors on certain/most subjects, it is our nature, suggesting we do not is socially punished.
That would help, laying out the process used to reach the conclusion in a clear methodical way would be essential. But in general it feels like a technical solution to a social problem- so much of what goes on in the world isn't clear or methodical, so many events that cant possibly be quantified or verified 100% by a third party- and setting the expectation that they can is IMO placing too much trust in the journalistic process. The reader should always have a seed of doubt, always question the motives of the messenger, and I just don't want that doubt to be assuaged while its still warranted.
This approach may work well for reporting that deals with data and science, things that can be incontrovertibly proven, which counts for a lot. But I think that same approach might fall apart when applied to reporting on complex social and political issues.
Then again, the camera has been a technical solution to the same social problem to some extent. Vietnam was a culture shock for a lot of Americans because they could see real firsthand footage of the events for a change, and that increase in awareness through reporting caused a social reckoning. So maybe its just a question of visibility, seeing is believing
> But in general it feels like a technical solution to a social problem- so much of what goes on in the world isn't clear or methodical, so many events that cant possibly be quantified or verified 100% by a third party- and setting the expectation that they can is IMO placing too much trust in the journalistic process. The reader should always have a seed of doubt, always question the motives of the messenger, and I just don't want that doubt to be assuaged while its still warranted.
I think it would be a good thing if people were introduced to the concept of the unknown, and learned for the first time in their life to be able to reliably identify it.
And it wouldn't be journalists doing this work, this would have to be an entirely new job role, blending skills from several disciplines (philosophy, psychology, geopolitics, etc).
If a rater has a clear set of evaluation criteria and a moderation log, does that do enough to change your view on the value add?
Maybe- there are just so many variables, and the trust has been so eroded already. It'd have to be super strict for me to be on board, to the point where it's less journalism and more technical writing. "Just the facts ma'am" to the extreme, every sentence is a statement of verifiable fact- no conjecture or interpretation, all that is left to the reader. You won't get many clicks that way, though.
That's why the key is verifiability. The org doing this should have a fixed list of checks they do, and every violation will be linked. This will limit the types of checks it can do, eg "bias" is a hard check that might not be possible. _but_ something like "every statistic most be supported by direct links to data sources" is, and raised the quality level. Checks like "misleading headlines" would help curb things like clickbait as well.
I just don't think there's a clean systematic answer to the problem, its a trust issue. Even if links to data sources are required you can find a data source with statistics to support almost anything. Especially when it comes to non-rigorous survey statistics that can be gamed to death or interpreted in a million ways, and that type of junk data is the bread and butter of political hacks
> the more I'm convinced that we need independent rankings of news sites and journalism.
How much do you personally spend subscribing to independent journalism? There are great outlets and journalists closing down and moving on every day, because when push comes to shove, people don't want to pay a dollar to read important news that they care about, even in their own communities.
I pay $150 a year for my local paper, but really I only pay $75 because it’s tax-deductible where I live.
The hope is these ratings could more systematically help support good journalists, since news orgs will keep those journalists employed in order to keep their ranking up.
Oh so news should work like science? Citations, references, peer reviews! I approve
Yeah cause no peer reviewed publications have ever committed fraud.
I think most journalists these days are not much more than poorly informed and poorly paid professional sh*tposters/provocateurs who learned how to write an inverted pyramid in j-school. I can easily find poorly informed and attention-grabbing opinions from a number of places, including even here :).
Disclosure: I learnt to write an inverted pyramid in j-school but dropped out after a year, I didn't want to work in this industry. Also maybe I just wouldn't have been a good journalist.
An interesting book on this subject is Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it's where the term "Churnalism" was coined.
I think this makes a common mistake that this has anything to do with "journalists these days" or editorial slants or anything else.
I mean, go back and read some random New York Times issues from the 1950s and you'll see the same thing.
The simple reality is that there is not enough happening every day that is relevant to our lives that people actually need to pay attention to.
If you're not actually making some change your life, your diet, your finances... SOMETHING...then the news is just entertainment same as watching a Sunday morning cartoon.
>I mean, go back and read some random New York Times issues from the 1950s and you'll see the same thing.
I've got to really disagree and I can provide proof.
This is The New York Times, today: https://www.nytimes.com/
This is The New York Times, May 3rd, 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20010503145505/https://www.nytime...
This is The Washington Post, today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/
This is The Washington Post, October 3rd, 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20011003085017/http://www.washing...
The difference in style of writing, specifically headlines, is more than noticeable.
I feel like you and I focusing on different things. I don't care what the headline says. I'm saying the entire content of the article is pointless.
Who cares that Snyder backs his coach? What are you going to do with that information? Who cares that Hollywood holds in breath? How do you change your life based on that?
(From your Oct 3 2001 link.)
No amount of "less clickbait headline" will fix the fundamental pointlessness of those articles to anyone's family, career, or daily life.
You're right, "these days" isn't correct, it's something I added without really thinking about it.
After all, the earliest sources of "Journalism" were not much more than PR rags for the local lord. "Yellow Journalism", is over a century old. There is an amount of romanticism for the era around Watergate, and the Fairness Doctrine though which a lot of people harken to for "the good old days"
However I think the situation has gotten incredibly worse for journalism in general because of there simply not being the money in it any more. Journalists are must produce more for less, quality slips even further, the attention economy becomes even more acute (although that aspect was always there to a degree in the tabloid news)
This is a pretty bad take.
For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom _does_ improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information _does_ allow them to get up to more behind our backs.
I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about.
Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues.
For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too.
Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed.
It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?
The key is to focus on local news: these are updates that a person can take action upon.
Seeing the latest tragedies on the other side of the world catches headlines, but rarely actionable by regular people.
We all have foreign policies. For example, in the US, our government is heavily involved in Gaza and Ukraine. It's far away, but it's also highly relevant to how our representatives work on our behalf.
Should we give aid to other countries? How should we think about global society? Those things are all relevant, too.
Do you need to check the national news every day? Twice a day? Term time a day, like many people do?
Once can form an opinion by catching up on major events once a week or less.
They’re relevant, but I claim that a quick skim of magazine like the economist once a month is sufficient to get you up to speed.
That's the relevant differentiation here. Local news are practically relevant and lack the potential for mental abuse that is found with inter/national events and news.
What news sites could you recommend? If not perfect, then at least of decent quality?
I think there should be a middle ground where you dont have to completely remove yourself from the news, just the endless feeds and opinions. It does seem helpful to know what is going on with the world. Whether thats socially or just understanding other events. I fully agree there is a limit and most of what is out there is junk but not all of it.
I have been actively trying to build something to get away from the endless feeds of news.
Essentially a modern day newspaper. So you can read what is important and then be done for the day.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
It just occurred to me that my grandfather used to watch the news only once a week, and the program was called something like "Weekly News." I think it's a good approach.
In Quill I am planning on incorporating something like this over the weekend. A single recap so that, if you choose, you only need to read it once.
You might like Axios: https://www.axios.com/
Ya im a big fan. The way they break down topics is great. But I was still left scrolling and scrolling.
I am using LLMs for what I am building and i'm envisioning a system that understands what you read yesterday so its able to give you more concise and direct information.
I also enjoy the completeness of a set amount of stories.
Your app is awesome. I’m going to use this from now on.
Thanks! I appreciate the support.
Is there any way it can be localised? I’m in the UK. I’ve been refreshing today (Friday) but it’s still showing Thursdays news.
Very well executed app. I have lots of questions about how it even works.
Bite-sized articles have their value. I don't know how many mobile tabs I have open, Chrome stops displaying the number when you reach 100. Most of the tabs contain a deep dive into a particular topic and it's not feasible to actually read every one of them.
However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.
I can see the value of news articles and short videos like those from Fireship: It might be educational and/or entertaining, but if not, it hasn't been a serious time investment, so it doesn't matter anyway.
> However, every unread tab I close feels like a personal failure to keep up.
I used to think so about books... but after some thought... why?
If you still read enough articles/books/whatever (so it's not your attention span failing), and if the article/book wasn't "good enough" to keep you reading it, why does it matter if you didn't finish it? There are many more articles and books than you are able to read, keep with the 'good ones' and forget about the rest.
How many of them do you remember? How many of them have had an impact in your life?
"News" is such a huge category though. I just try to be more selective to subjects which may have some effect on me. Bookmark some articles as potential trends. Bookmark some as potentially important reading. Put a budget on it.
One interesting idea I have been toying with is to use prediction markets as a filter. Like, ask myself if I can make a prediction based on this. Then go to a prediction market and actually put a bet on a prediction. Either find one which already exists, or make one. What I have found interesting is how the situation develops into me being wrong. And how hard it is to get above zero. If I can't gain by making predictions on a situation I'm somewhat interested in, then how might being in the red on less informed topics be messing with my thinking?
Probably not realistic, but I have been thinking about how I could make it work.
100%. Very insightful.
Follow the money.
I used to be a huge news junky. After a while I realized it's all designed as entertainment to drive ad revenue. Gave it up and I've been happier ever since.
A decade ago I switched from my local morning news to a French show. Instead of violence, traffic accidents, and soccer, the French show talked about recipes, books, travelling, etc. It didn't really try to be a news show, just something light to start off the day.
Nowadays I prefer silence during breakfast.
We watch classic cartoons during breakfast. It's an amazing way to start your day.
I cut out news (except here) about three years ago. My life has not changed, except that I'm not pissed off as much. Turns out all that the 24 hour news cycle really doesn't teach you very much.
> except that I'm not pissed off as much
There's a radio show in the mornings in my country that I call "the hour of indignation". A "news" presenter rants on for many minutes about something that is very wrong with the nation. There's another one later in the day, so I think this radio station has a lot of success making people mad.
I don't read news but I read too much twitter. I curated my following base carefully so now almost everything on the timeline is interesting/insightful/funny. Problem is it's still junk food and of little long term value. I really need to step away for a while.
I curated twitter in a similar style with following in my niche interest categories of academics and others with a really good signal-to-noise ratio but post musk purchase most of the accounts I followed either got off the platform, tweet much less frequent and with paid subscribers getting priority the replies feature much less relevant tweets than before. I so desire a space similar to my little corner of twitter but not able to find one anywhere after having tried with X, Mastadon(multiple servers) Bluesky, Threads. Does it still work for you?
When I figured out that you can disable individuals retweets but keep their actual direct tweets, that saved my feed.
I know a fair number of people who post fascinating things, but also retweet a lot of news and politics I don't want.
I haven't watched the news for my entire adult life (almost 20 years). Why would I? I have countless other things I could do with my time and I have no idea why I'd allocate some of that to daily news. I skim over headlines and read articles that look interesting but only in heavily curated places like this very website.
People I know who do consume news interestingly only bother telling me about super shocking stuff that I don't need to know, e.g. "someone got murdered", "a celebrity said so and so" etc. They rarely tell me stuff I might need to know like "income tax is changing next year".
I have struggled with the negative aspects of news as well and personally think there is a middle route over cutting it out.
I built attabit.com to summarize the news for friends, family, and myself to remove as much sensationalism, bias, and 'junk food' as possible.
The site has been having all kinds of problems today with the claude 3.5 sonnet outage but outside of that, its become the main news source of high level news for me and a lot of my friends and family.
It lets you know what's happening without getting sucked into it. If you check it out, let me know what you think?
Part of the premise sounds appealing. Is it only using AI summarization? If so, I wouldn't go for it.
I agree that social media is largely junk, especially getting news from social media. Personally, I have just eliminated any _real time_ source of news. I control (instead of an algorithm controlled by corporate policy) what I want to catch up on.
Want to catch up on Olympic event medal status for my home country? Sub to the email newsletter.
Want to follow politics in your state? Sub to the email newsletter at local and state orgs.
Want to follow updates in tech industry in general or a specific subfield (ie, nanotechnology, or the latest hype?). Sub to the email newsletter.
With this method, I can choose when to catch up on these topics. Sure, I might be 1-2 days out of sync compared to the news junkie. But with this method I can at least guarantee a variety of sources come out and get a much better view of the issue. Rather than the often sensationalized version presented at _real time_.
One very hilarious instance of where real time junkies got it very wrong: JD Vance, the VP choice for GOP, was allegedly sexually involved with a couch. Original author of post cited a random page in JD Vance’s autobiography in tweet. What was clearly supposed to be a joke, but turned very viral.
“Influencers”, comedians, and I think even some mainstream news outlets ran with it.
I don’t recall _when_ it was debunked, but had to have been within 24 hours of that tweet.
It always has been. It always will be. But you have a choice to stop eating this junk food and turn to fine dining (non-profit info sources) or home cooking (books and own research). https://offstream.news/longread/2017/04/4/the-post-truth-and...
Are we sure the non-profit sources don't also have an agenda?
I am sure they often do. And ultimately you always end up doing your own research. But cooking yourself is the cost of reducing junk food consumption.
To me it always seemed that reading a good, weekly news paper would help. The lack of real time news would make it focus on broader trends and I would not be distracted with the breaking news that is not important. For a while it seemed the Economist was close. But they have breaking news, what happened today and they publish articles that appear in the weekly edition already during the week.
Is there something better out there?
Financial Times is still pretty good. The ultimate in sound, realtime news is of course the Bloomberg terminal, but that's very expensive.
What do those and the Economist have in common? They're oriented at business users who are using the news to make decisions on, not to maintain their sense of identity, stoke their rage, or share on Facebook.
Maybe force yourself to only read the Economist in paper form?
Definitely considered that. I'm a tad nomadic, but I guess I can just change the addresses.
Do they offer an offline viewing option to subscribers?
Apple News does offline reading FWIW.
I'm a subscriber and read the Economist on my phone almost entirely - sometimes on desktop - I dropped the print subscription as it takes nearly a week to be delivered to me. I read pretty much only the weekly (which is made available late on Thursdays UK time) on the app- it's a button at the bottom of the app - and very often do so offline. I mostly ignore the articles suggested during the week.
I try doing that. But they are definitely trying to be a daily publication if not hourly by now
I would call it a paradox of interconnectedness. We can write, photograph or broadcast about an immediate event and have that instantly shared with a huge audience online. The stories that bubble up and make it to the top attract a disproportionate amount of our attention and blur our perception of the surrounding reality.
The comparison with junk food is an apt one.
It seems like for every human desire or appetite or source of value, there exists a quick hit, instantly gratifying satisfaction that is bad for long-term health. And there also exists a slowly-acquired, initially difficult or unpleasant, eventually-rewarding satisfaction that is good for long-term health.
Wouldn't a healthy society encourage its members to pursue the more stable, initially uncomfortable, initially difficult, but long-term good option on as many axes as possible?
We should seek out and eat nutritious, wholesome food rather than eat junk food non-stop every day. We should read books and articles rather than consume infotainment and social media. We should go to the gym rather than sitting on the couch and doing nothing. We should commit to real relationships instead of participating in infinite hookup culture. We should find real social circles to belong to and become loyal to them instead of embracing abstract political tribalism that tickles the "belonging" nerve but leaves us with no one who personally knows or cares about us when we're in actual need. We should buy things when we need them and when they're a good value rather than spending impulsively as a therapeutic exercise. The list goes on and on.
I'm concerned that the currently-most-common set of societal norms across pretty much every Western culture I'm aware of seems to encourage the opposite of all that. And I think it's gotten that way, not least at any rate, because sad, scared, addicted, unhappy, immature, overstimulated, overmedicated, physically and spiritually unhealthy humans are simply easier for corporations to make money off of than the alternative. Which suggests that this situation didn't just happen by accident—there's pressure coming from influential people and groups to make it this way. And that means there's systemic resistance to be expected when trying to swim against that current, whether for oneself or, for e.g., for one's kids.
> The comparison with junk food is an apt one.
I don't know if you used an AI chatbot for this, but this is an often used starting point.
I did not use an AI chatbot. This all-organic cliched human writing comes to you courtesy of my... all-organic cliched human brain, I guess.
Similar to this post, which I believe I saw here a decade ago: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
I agree with the article that there is a lot of low-quality "journalism" out there, designed to outrage or entertain rather than inform.
However, that does not mean that all journalism should be disregarded. I read the Washington Post and listen to NPR (regardless of how you feel about their cultural programming, their news organization is excellent.) Citizens in a free society have a duty to be informed about the issues facing that society. I reject the idea that there aren't readily available high quality sources of information about the world. Are any of them perfect? Clearly, no. But ignoring them because they're not perfect strikes me as nihilistic.
There's one quote from the article that alarmed me:
> The news is overwhelmingly about things you cannot possibly influence
In democracies, we do have elections...
Poor Chuck. I read this and think he needs more _older adults_ in his life. Kidding/not kidding. Chuck’s argument lumps social media with “the news”
>“The news (and social media use) is indicative of a poor information diet.”
When I was young my grandfather would listen to KCBS news radio in the morning and KTVU 10 o’clock news in the evening. That’s it. My dad read the local Argus newspaper. That’s it.
As a youth I didn’t, but the impression was made.
Now I listen to WNYC (NPR) radio in the morning when I get up. That’s it.
News doesn’t have to be what they offer—24/7/365–but a habit of keeping yourself informed about local, regional, national and world events. I prefer one dose in the morning (“should I go back to bed?”)
My opinion in reaction to an opinion piece.
I had a high school English/Literature teacher who used to dismiss the class by saying "Go play in the street, children!" They also said "Don't watch anything that tells you how to feel."
Anyway, I feel like the human species has arrived at a time when we have the internet, without having a great way to deal with everyone's feelings.
Some news media orgs make junk food, some news media orgs make information poison - they make it harder to understand what is going on in the world.
"It's always in the last place you look" - if you already know how you FEEL about something, you don't have to think about it in information or factual terms at all. You don't have to keep looking.
This is right on the money. I never really used social media, and I started disregarding mainstream news about 8 years ago, relapsing every once in a while when I’m boored only to be reminded the only things reported makes me feel horrible.
All it takes to ditch the news is being on the inside of a breaking story, and realizing how much information being spewed out is just plain incorrect... then the next few articles you read, you realize it's not just your article they warped for clicks, but all of them.
When newspapers were the primary news consumption, it was a bit better - journalists had a few hours to collect facts before publishing. Now there's zero time so they will publish anything. Empty calories.
My experience of being quoted by respected news organisations (Reuters and the BBC) is that quotes will be random and out of context, or just made up (I did get an apology from the BBC for the latter and they removed it from their website).
It does not even need to be a particular story. Experts in almost every field complain about how bad coverage of their field is, and you can extrapolate to coverage being bad in general. What Michael Crichton dubbed Gell_Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
I would also add knowing a country that gets covered in the news but which is not important enough to be prominent (Sri Lanka in my case) also soon shows you the media are sloppy and make huge mistakes and write with little understanding.
Definitely - basically, that's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_a...
I stopped reading the news because of this. When 90% of the articles on the BBC are irrelevant to me and have titles like "Taylor Swift Vienna concerts cancelled after attack threat", "The 'absurd' real-life sting operation that inspired a movie", or "Behave yourselves, China tells its Olympic fans", I lose all interest.
The news has become like intellectual sugar, written more for page views than for merely informing, and I find that exceptionally irritating. Writing so-called "catchy headlines" and an overwhelming bias towards bad news has made me sick with all news organizations.
Of course, I am sure some people like it. Probably most. I am in the minority for most things, but I simply hate it.
The BBC targets a general audience so it will naturally have a wide swath of topics reported on. The alternative is "Personalization" but then critics complain this keeps people in their own bubbles.
Journalism has always been a rather shady business. "Remember the Maine."
Also, most of what you hear or read is just a reflection of who is spending money to get press. For example, Taylor Swift, AI companies and the Olympics all have a formula to turn press coverage into cash, so it should be no surprise that they are constantly in the news.
It's difficult for me to completely deprive myself of the news agenda of the world. But sometimes I do a sort of detox for a month from world news and focus more on articles in scientific journals, for example. My friend likes to go to the forest for a week every six months where he has no connection at all to the outside world
Welcome to Hacker News!
Compared to all the garbage on social media, professional articles by actual journalists don’t make us dumber I think, even if they serve a narrative. Something about reading an actual article makes us think and reason in a way that a tweet or, worse, a thread of tweets just doesn’t.
It makes me angry to read news that are aimed at ignorant people, especially when you can see that the writer is smart and is using strategies to fit his narrative into the news.
I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news.
I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
> I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age
On the one hand, I agree that it’s necessary to be informed to some degree.
On the other, I think this can be done without consuming the news the way most people do, i.e. the daily dose and certainly the sensationalized stuff are not necessary.
I’ve stopped watching/reading the news on a daily basis, and instead I’ll catch up on the recent major events every week or two, sometimes less depending on the general temperature of things.
I value being informed, but also found that the majority of news changes nothing about my day to day actions, and of the news that does change my actions/help me make better decisions, it almost never needs to be consumed the instant it’s published.
Given the current landscape, personal habit change around news consumption seems like the ideal place to focus as an average person.
> taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference)
The fee instead of tax isn't to avoid political interference. It's for fee stability, without cuts whenever the budget is tight.
Politicians/the government meddle all the time. The governing body of the public broadcasters has about a third of its members from the government (the rest is the churches and certain social and political associations).
At least in Germany publicly financed broadcasters and news tend to waste a lot of money and they keep asking for more. I’d much rather have a choice to support organizations I want than to support stuff like Y-Kollektiv or STRG F that produce low quality content and sometimes straight out lie.
>than to support stuff like Y-Kollektiv or STRG F that produce low quality content and sometimes straight out lie.
After writing my comment I thought about all the influencers and thought 'yeah maybe a good portion ain't really neutral'. It's a bit frustrating, but iirc their cut is something between 1 and 5 cents, right? Which still is too much money, but hey, could be worse than that.
> where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news
They are actually funding state propaganda. There are few news on public (and private) broadcasters.
> you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
Surely, one of the key points in TFA is that almost all news is about things we have no real influence over and are removed from effect on us to a large degree. Unless you are a stock-market trader, or there's news of an approaching storm I think most of us just succumb to "Oh Dearism" and chalk it up as "no action necessary" [0]
For voting, you can probably be reasonably informed with several hours of research right before each election.
If you trade individual stocks or other asset classes directly, finance news is pretty important.
Maybe staying on top of the field you personally work in. But that's probably best served by papers and long form articles in specialty blogs and web sites.
Other than that, how does "the news" help you make good decisions?
In the Netherlands as well, and the main news source (on public broadcasters) is a cooperation between all the broadcasters, which in theory means it's an independent and neutral organization that provides the news. In theory.
There's news on commercial channels as well but it's more aimed at entertainment, often has some lighter subjects and informal newsreaders, and of course ad breaks.
Another issue is that they have a lot of nonsense on the public TV and radio, such as game shows or light comedy. These broadcasts could very well be done by commercial stations, but as these would need to compete against a state-funded entity, it creates an unfair playing field. The public channels have the advantage of guaranteed funding, which allows them to produce content without the same financial pressures faced by commercial broadcasters.
I stopped reading news around 2012, while working at a large newspaper in Switzerland. Or maybe better put, replaced it with slower forms of information.
Instead of doom scrolling news sites and social media for things that happen right now, you wait for some people to actually have time to investigate, synthesize, etc. There is just little to no actual information in the former way of consumption.
There is a good The Guardian article from back then.
“News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier” (2013
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
Yeah I've done something similar, I just buy and read the go-to books on the topic I want to know about now. Although I somtimes slip and end up scrolling through some news sites, I've churned through a lot of actual books related to current geopolitics.
this system only works in theory. in practice they still take orders from the government and money from the industry.
It's a tax in all but name.
It's not fair to the taxpayer to have to pay for a broadcaster which is biased against you. Even Media Bias agrees that the BBC is left wing: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ .
State news organizations shouldn't exist because it's impossible to build a one which is unbiased. It will always be biased toward the establishment (which is center left in the UK but varies by country).
Not clear it actually works though
Just works better than the privately owned system.
I am a german citizen and I always wondered why people hate SO MUCH on that system. Yes, there might be some corrupt people that give themselves too much pocket money, but overall the system works really good.
I didn't stop reading news, but I mostly stopped reading news that are not funded by the "Rundfunkbeitrag", because the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much weird rhetoric. All the other private news companies are just trying to clickbait with stupid headlines.
Rundfunkbeitrag is waaaay too much and they are not interested in lowering it. Compare that to the similar system in Japan which is way cheaper and they actually lowered the cost in recent years. Germany has too many public radio and tv stations where a lot of content is nearly the same. The ARD is also not as independent as they claim, just look at how many politicans are in the Rundfunkrat.
OP said it's not a tax but it is the same. You have to pay it even if you don't use it and you go to jail if you don't want to pay. Doesn't matter how they are describing it, it's a pseudo-tax.
>the funded news organizations are encouraged to be rather neutral and they don't use that much weird rhetoric
Tagesschau is all but neutral and the tone of ZDF Heute is very aggressive. At least they are consistently bad and private newspapers are even worse so you know what you get. The state of news in Germany is sad but what do you expect when journalists side with politicians and favor more censorship?
>Tagesschau is all but neutral and the tone of ZDF Heute is very aggressive. At least they are consistently bad and private newspapers are even worse so you know what you get. The state of news in Germany is sad but what do you expect when journalists side with politicians and favor more censorship?
That made me think a little. You are most likely right. Probably it doesn't bother me too much because it just fits into my world view. Maybe neutral is the wrong word here and I don't know which one fits better. Maybe it just feels good, because everyone else (like everything Springer) is so much worse. At least I don't have the feeling that they spread straight up lies or false propaganda. They might be politically biased though, you are right.
Just like the UK system, what annoys me is pretending this tax isn't a tax, and having to separately register for it instead of just paying taxes.
> I like the system in UK and Germany where taxpayers need to contribute a fee (but not a tax, to avoid government interference) to fund broadcasters and news.
In the UK it does not improve the quality of available news very much.
> I think not consuming news is not a reasonable approach in our day and age, you have be informed in order to make good decisions.
Bad information does not make for good decisions. Your argument is addressed by the article.
It is far better to read long analytical articles, and even more to read books, on the issues you wish to be informed about. A smaller number of works (i.e. books and articles) that give you real understanding, rather than a lot of superficial information that you will mostly not retrain.
Consuming lots of news, gives you a lot of information, but makes it harder retain, analyse and comprehend it.
> In the UK it does not improve the quality of available news very much.
I disagree, I don't think there's anything better than BBC news for junk food type news, an update on current affairs or the Olympics or something when you do want it.
Of course it's not hard analysis or thought-provoking opinion pieces, pay someone else directly if you want that.
But if someone mentions riots say and I just want to quickly read a couple of things for a high level understanding of what's going on, it's great.
The problem with this approach is that you think you are getting a high level understanding but in fact you are not getting the understanding at all. You just get an opinion view based on what facts are reported and what facts are not.
A lot of news is based on opinion but I feel like the BBC try more than most to be impartial see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/imparti...
In fact some of the issues may be caused by being too impartial and giving weight to opinions which many feel should be ignored.
Indeed BBC is one of the better ones, however not great judging by the 90s standard ;)
True, but for the kinds of thing I'm thinking of, and the level of understanding I want (at that point at least) I'm fine with that. (And as sibling says BBC is hardly awful in that regard.)
Take the protests/riots example, I had no awareness of it whatsoever (I don't follow the news any more, just HN really), but I heard enough to be confused and want some idea. The potential political bias in whether it's described as racist/terrorism/peaceful/righteous doesn't really matter to me, I just wanted 'oh, people are angry about things in the vicinity of X, and there are riot police out'.
If I wanted more, yeah the likes of the BBC aren't going to give me deep nourishing (to continue the junk food analogy) insight, and I'd seek out a broadsheet, an insightful blogger, books on the subject, etc. But I don't, so I can instead move on.
"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's."
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Bed of Procrustes"
I had this moment during the prelude to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
First the experts were confindent that the troop movements in Russia were just posturing and saber rattling, there's no way they'll do anything.
Next, once they'd entered Ukraine, it would be over in a few weeks. The Russians would win. When the Russians were getting their asses kicked and it looked really bad, the Ukrainians would win by the end of the summer. Next it would be over by the winter. Next the russians would run out of materiel soon. Next the russians would run out of men soon.
They confidently made every prediction except the multi-year trench war that actually ensued.
Virtually no true expert whose predictions are accurate shares their opinion with the public, because they know what their words are really worth. Virtually all news experts are clueless placeholders put there to support the daily narrative.
But that's punditry, not news.
News would be accurately reporting on where the Russian troops were and what they were doing at that moment. News isn't supposed to include prediction. That's why Opinion sections were traditionally kept separate from the rest of the paper.
News would have refused to put sugar on its porridge, too.
Technically yeah, but it's also what the news looks like today. By volume, it's mostly speculation, gossip, and politically flavored analysis.
I rather enjoy doing that. It reduced my anxiety greatly when I realized just how little anyone making news understands what is going on. Doing it for the week, month, year and decade was even more educational.
I love reading books about the future written 10 years ago
I think reading weekly news instead of daily news helps you stay in the loop, but cuts out a lot of information junk.
That being said I’m still looking for some good weekly news(papers) in English.
Would love some recommendations.
I recommend picking up "NYTimes complete front pages" from ~1850-2000. You can see for yourself how the news was so much more intelligent in the 1800's.
What happened?
In 1909, 1976, and 1998, Congress greatly expanded copyright. Instead, they should have done the opposite, and abolished it. It's mathematically dumb, and is the root cause of our toxic information environment.
I stopped reading the news, having been someone who thought it was morally "right" to be "informed".
I feel much better since I quit. I still end up hearing about things, through talking to people etc, and I will still read articles on stuff that was important enough to still be written about weeks after the event.
But daily news is just 99% not worth reading.
I had the same underlying reason to stay informed and also quit reading the news.
It's certainly jarring to hear major events like the assassination attempt from friends and family first, but it's very reminiscent of my experience before the rise of internet news.
A theory has been proposed for the structure of MSM news, called the "propaganda model," which can provide a framework for scientific investigation of ownership bias in news.
1988- PROPAGANDA MODEL
https://chomsky.info/consent01/
//The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns. The domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.//
1989- MANUFACTURING CONSENT
https://chomsky.info/19890315/
//The fact of the matter is, Ronald Reagan had a hands-off policy. In fact, Ronald Reagan probably didn’t even know what the policies were. The fact of the matter is, for the last- I mean the media had to put on a big pretense about this, but most of the population knew, that for the last eight years the country hasn’t had a chief executive. I think that’s a step forward in manufacture of consent, and in fact it’s maybe a sign of the future of political democracy. I think the United States made a leap into the future in the last eight years. If you could get to the point where voting is simply a matter of selecting purely symbolic figures, then you would have gone a long way towards marginalizing the public. And that pretty well happened. You had somebody who probably didn’t know what the policies were. His job was to read the lines written for him by the rich- what he’s been doing for the last thirty or forty years. And he seems to enjoy it and he gets well paid for it, and everybody seems happy, but to vote for Ronald Reagan is like voting for the Queen of England.//
THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB
//Let me return to the prediction of the propaganda model that I mentioned...//
//...However well confirmed it may be, it’s not going to be part of the discussion, it’s going to be outside the spectrum of discussion, it’s very validity guarantees that for the reasons that I mentioned. And that conclusion, again, is quite well confirmed, and one can assume with reasonable confidence that that will continue to be the case.//
2009- TWENTY YEARS LATER
https://chomsky.info/200911__/
// ... Ownership Advertising Sourcing Flak Anti-communism
EH/NC: What you refer to as the Propaganda Model’s ‘five filters’ requires some clarification. (a) Ownership and (b) advertising belong to straightforward institutional analysis — these are the kinds of institutional arrangements that predominate among US media firms and elsewhere. (c) Sourcing and (d) flak are two well-established processes to which any elite-serving media will adapt, whether we are talking about the elite US or British media or the elite media under Stalin and Hitler. On the other hand, (e) anti-communism, as a major theme of media production during the twentieth century, was reflective of the prevailing system of belief in the Western states, and has evolved with the collapse of the Soviet bloc since the first edition of Manufacturing Consent. In a crucial sense, and extending from the most minor comic books and cartoons all the way up to the highest academic discussions of the so-called Cold War (i.e. the system of propaganda known as the ‘Cold War’), anti-communism was a staple that provided content, narratives, heroes and villains. Since 1989, this staple has morphed into an array of substitutes. But the structural role that anti-communism and its successors have played, namely, the provision of an Enemy or the Face of Evil, remains as relevant as ever. //
So all together we have a theory of ownership and selection bias in news.
And the web is nothing if not a study of structures for attention-seeking by media.
Between agenda-setting and attention mgmt, what else do you need to understand about the structure of MSM news?
The obvious question is: what structure of news is required to further free and coherent public participation in policy?
Okay, this is interesting as I am myself now on day five of an intentional news fasting and it is amazing. So, I'm going to take some effort here; mainly for the purpose of active reflection.
===
> Reducing my intake of what is essentially junk information has significantly reduced anxiety and worry in my day to day life, and has freed up more of my time to pursue other interests and deeper reading.
Confirmed.
> My view is that "the news" primarily exists to keep consumers entertained rather than keeping citizens informed, ...
No, it exists primarily for two reasons:
1) Making a financial profit.
2) Political control over citizens.
The entertainment and dopaminergic aspects of it are simply means to those ends.
> most commonly in the form of advertisements, but also in the form of news that's constantly competing for our attention
Advertisement and news are often indistinguishable.
> I think any news junkie reading this will immediately go on the defensive.
I'm a news junkie in recovery.
> In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. The 24 hour news cycle is something to be ignored.
Harari is a very uninteresting journalist writing shallow and irrelevant books. And those borderline pun based sound bites are indicative of it. There is no meaningful "power" in knowing what to ignore.
> resulting in "alternate" sources of information being either absurd conspiracy theories or "takes" of mainstream news on social media.
I do not agree. "Alternate" sources are the only sources of some of the news I care about. Some are maybe overly conspiracy theoretical but our governments and industries are conspirative. Regular news sources are almost worthless beyond providing a very high-level idea about what happened.
> Stories themselves are often slanted to please advertisers and company shareholders.
Or governments. And that is in and of itself highly conspirative.
> a small number of companies control 90% of the media - not just "the news". That's 90% of what we read, watch, and listen to.
And that's why people flock to "alternative" media ...
> A common argument against cutting out the news is that "ignorance is bliss", suggesting that those who do not consume the news are ignorant.
Isn't that more an argument for ignorance with regard to news?
> Let that sink in.
And that's why even X is relevant here. Cause where else will I be informed about who was stabbed again by a refugee somewhere in Germany if not there - and this is something I _DO_ care about. But also one major reason why I refuse to further bother with it as I lack the power to change anything about it.
> Rather it makes one less informed of the world and distracts you from what's going on in your own physical life and your own neighborhood, while instilling a very negative view of the world that's divorced from reality.
Yes. There is only so much attention you can give and if you waste it on what happens in Israel, Westjordanland, Ukraine or Venezuela then you have no attention left to what happens with yourself, your family, your neighborhood, your town. But those are usually not as exciting.
> Information junkies often have the most extreme views (on both sides of the US political spectrum) with a strong "us vs them" mindset where "them"
That matches my personal experience. Reading about all the terrible things happening all day long will put you into a constant mode of alarm and panic for which you have to find a release.
> That said, what difference does it make if I hear about the story hours after it happens?
Several times I've been lusting for live news on some exciting event on Twitter - hitting the F5 like in a fever. Last example probably was the assassination attempt on Trump. This always wrecks my entire day. My attention is glued to this object of excitement and my dopamine is going through the roof numbing my motivation management for anything else.
> we are today and governments and corporations are still getting away with murder and exploitation.
Yes, because they'll just produce news which is going to divert the attention somewhere else if it gets too hot. And the usual news agencies (all of them) are catering to their advertisers and certain political parties.
> Who is more ignorant of the world ... ?
I don't care about whether someone maybe considers me ignorant. The author shouldn't worry about that either. I care about my time and especially my mental health.
> Sharing your outrage of said article on social media makes it feel like you're doing something; that you're taking action, that you're doing gods work by spreading the word and keeping others informed of what's really going on.
Noticed this as well. But then again many of such people also search for ways to do something practical like going on demonstrations.
> ... but it leads us to make probabilistic errors with actual risks we face in real life.
Yes, but for many people school-shootings are not just exciting out of personal fear but also due to human compassion and empathy. For example my risk of getting stabbed by some crazy guy is negligible but I'm sick of reading about it, knowing somebody lost their life because we failed to deport someone who was a criminal long before.
> The truth is that we're far more likely to die in an auto accident or heart disease than we are from being shot or dying in a plane crash ...
Yes, but it's not like the former two examples aren't also used to feed people news. The entire Corona panic was based on a minimally raised risk of dying from it. And in some countries reporting on car crashes and other fatalities by displaying all the gory details is a relevant news segment.
> I'm not advocating a nihilistic worldview and if you think I'm being too cynical, I actually believe I'm being optimistic.
I'd advocate realism and fatalism. Nihilism is nonsense as life is valuable and all nihilists share this perspective while hiding it behind a mask of indifference. And cynicism is often simply a symptom of chronic depression - which isn't desirable either.
> Do you want news reporters setting the public agenda for what's important?
Well, they don't ... politicians and billionaires set the agenda.
===
I'm powerless with regard to each and everything that makes the news. So, why bother if all it does is consume time and make me miserable. That's my perspective.
Having said that ... I would prefer to have one reliable news source which I can consume for one hour once a week. That would be fantastic. But I just don't trust any newspaper anymore.
This style of title seems purposively written to preach to the choir.