Comment by nomilk
2 years ago
> The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc
That's a feature, not a bug. The 'news' is 90% useless, if not descrutive, information. Ask yourself: what percentage of the news is optimal to maintain your worldly wisdom? I'd guess about 1%. So getting it down to 10% is half way there, on a logarithmic scale.
I'd bring it down to 0%. Thomas Jefferson explained why as well as any could [1]:
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To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that 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 & errors. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Thomas Jefferson, 1807
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The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now? It sounds completely reasonable. Like so many things in history show, the era we're entering into is not some wild uncharted domain, as it sometimes feels. Rather the era we all lived and grew up in was the weird one. Now we're simply returning to 'normalcy.'
[1] - https://www.founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-...
> The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now it sounds, at the minimum, completely reasonable.
Ironically, it was more reasonable 10 years ago, and even more reasonable 30 years ago. The difference is that the alignment between the ideological and institutional biases throughout the media (in the US) was more uniform 10 years ago, and even moreso 30 years ago, so if you ran into lies (including lies of story selection and detail omission, as well as the more direct falsehoods), they’d be more likely to be the same lies from every source, leaving no reason to question them.
Can you offer any examples? In modern times I'd appeal to something like the lies surrounding the death of Officer Sicknick [1] as an example of exactly what you are describing. The entire story that he was murdered, let alone in the precise and brutal fashion described, could have been trivially falsified by any journalist doing the most basic things every journalist does: speak to the family, call the coroner, look at police records, and so on endlessly. Seemingly none did, which rather blunts Hanlon's razor.
That razor goes from blunted to decimated once one also looks to the media response once those lies were definitively revealed. Instead of seeking explanation, and reckoning, over a death being exploited and politicized with the most cynical of lies, the media simply moved onto a new lie about the story (that he was killed by pepper spray) before ultimately just burying it. I'd contrast this against something like Iraq in that one could, at least plausibly, claim ignorance on part of the media. I'd also note that there was some serious push-back from the media once the lies were revealed, and also much less homogeny even in the interim.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick