Comment by openasocket
6 hours ago
One thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes from other officials/politicians saying the opposite. As an example, how many times has the strait of Hormuz been declared open by the US, when it turns out it really wasn't? And every time these low-effort articles just echo that statement without even trying to evaluate if that is true. I mean, the transponder data on shipping is publicly available, there's a dozen websites you could use to actually see passage through the strait to verify the claim. If you don't do even the most basic follow ups, is that even a news article? Or is it just a more elaborate form of re-tweeting?
How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?
News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:
1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)
2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online
Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.
Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear what AI adoption in companies looks like for non technical people.
Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.
I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.
Whenever I encounter someone who jumps at the first opportunity to criticise "mainstream media", I ask them what their preferred outlets are. I tend to not get a response, which to me is quite telling.
I suspect the third reason might be that most media is owned by a handful of people. If there's no money in news, why are these companies owned by billionaires?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...
you dropped 3. its more valuable to pay for propaganda
I don't know what qualifies as "mainstream media" here, but I feel various public broadcasters have served me well over the years: CBC[0] in Canada, BBC[1] in United Kingdom, NPR[2] in America, ABC[3] in Australia, NHK[4] in Japan... switching around the world also gives reprieve from local politics letting you tune into someone else's local politics practically recreationally, which seems more and more necessary in the modern world of today. Streaming radio is one of the best things about the contemporary internet.
[0] https://cbc.ca/
[1] https://bbc.com/
[2] https://npr.org/
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/
[4] https://www.nhk.or.jp/
The ABC in Australia feels so opinionated and tilted to the “left” side of politics whenever I’ve watched it on the TV. And it may just have been that news show or the specific host but it makes it not enjoyable to watch when it seems there’s always an “angle” and negative undertones and people constantly having an axe to grind. I’d personally like a bit more neutral news that also leans a little more on the positive and inspiring side.
I was glad to see a bit of a decline in the “Worrying Trend: (a dozen) People (on Twitter) are saying [controversial thing]!” type of articles filter down through whatever algorithm I was subject to at the moment, but notes they’ve just replaced it with TikTok.
This always felt like way to work around libel laws. Where they can claim "People on twitter are saying x", as an indirect way of making a claim without having to be liable for it.
I swear to God there are articles on news sites (glorified blogs, but you know) that are along the lines of "people on twitter are saying this" and then if you actually look there is literally one (or perhaps two if you're lucky) person saying it and their post isn't even that popular. It's not that I'm surprised it's just that I know 98-99% of people are just going to take that at face value, and either allow it to confirm their pre-existing notions, or perhaps they will see it and shake their heads disapprovingly. I think this over time leads to people having distorted views of sentiment on issues, sometimes leading to really weird situations where literally most people disagree but nobody wants to be the one to say it.
Yeah it really flips things upside down when a journalist has so much access to info that they can essentially pick their own story from the data.
Maybe they can't credibly fudge the numbers, but they can find enough data to agenda-set pretty much anything.
Yeah it’s really just depressing. It’s like every news outlet wants to be just a ‘little bit’ “national enquirer” but still have everyone take them seriously. Our news industry is abjectly sensationalist.
This is not exactly a new criticism. See e.g. Fisk's complaint from decades ago r.e. "US Officials Say"
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...
How can we measure if things are worse now? Potentially asking/training an LLM on news stories from different eras might be a fairer comparison than human intelligence at this point.
For what its worth, I'm a former journalist looking to automate this. Getting on those newsmaking lists, and automating the rest.
Free, consumer website: https://www.forth.news Paid site with custom notifications and feeds: https://pro.forth.news
Your 'personal' site in your bio is giving me a browser-warning not to visit. Maybe expired certificate?
Btw, nice initiative with Forth! That's why I clicked.
Thank you!
Looks like I didn’t rotate my certificate. Eek
Neat. Bookmarking to revisit. Does your team do any headline writing and or manual section? Your site reminds me of Techmeme.
Right now, no.
The Pro site is all self-curated by the user, and forth.news is a series of LLMs doing grouping, summarization/headline writing, measuring urgency, categorization, etc.
isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases. Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y. Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-depth research and risking your own rep every time you put more than 'facts' out there just don't give any incentive to do more than pick out the quotes you want to use.
> isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'?
Neutral journalism is not presenting the claims of all opposing parties, it's fact-checking the claims of both sides without a bias for any of them.
If one party says the truth and the other side is not, it's still neutral to repeat only the claims of the first one.
Exactly. As the saying goes, if one side says it's raining and the other side says it's not, it's not the job of the journalist to report both. It's the job of the journalist to look out the fucking window to see if it's really raining or not.
> a need for immediate reporting
This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.
Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.
This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.
"current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases"
The facts chosen to include in a report are chosen with bias. There's no neutral subset of facts about any event.
No. Knowingly reporting lies (including lies by omission) isn't "neutral".
> isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'?
Yes.
> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases
No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.
I’ve also seen a trend of news organizations sane washing statements when they are too crazy, which is modifying the facts. Take this AP news article for instance[1].
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
[1] https://apnews.com/article/correspondents-dinner-trump-shoot...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/democrats-senate-fisa-trump-pulte...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/california-tank-leak-explosion-ga...
> regurgitated without any additional effort.
Wrong. Great effort goes into ensuring only the desired statements are regurgitated, and the undesirable ones omitted: https://www.foxnews.com/media/ap-report-slain-north-dakota-t...
This is not a cherry-picked example, but the policy of most major media, explicitly outlined in their style guides: https://jfulford.substack.com/p/hiding-the-race-of-criminals...
I suspect this is more due to cost cutting and the fact that context would likely paint the people who own these media outlets in a bad light. Keeping their readers underinformed is win-win for them.
I follow the New York Times, as well as being an avid news follower and have found them to be of poor reporting quality a handful of times over the past year.
> I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort.
The 2020 tune sang, worldwide, comes to mind: "Anyone believing SaRS-COV2 may have originated in a lab is a conspiracy cracknut, like those who believe we didn't land on the moon".
This was everywhere and very few, including here on HN, did dare to question the official version.
Now the official report mandated by US Congress says the virus has non-zootropic properties and the "expert" who explained it couldn't possibly be a lab-leak is prevented from ever getting funding from the US. And it's not just US congress: the CIA changed its stance too and publicly said it's leaning towards a lab-leak after all. The examples are countless.
And yet the bile spilled and the attacks on those disputing the mainstream media version were incessant.
I posted links, back then, to an article by an actual investigative journalist who explained how Peter Daszak was doing gain-of-function research on bat-modified viruses only to be met with derision.
It's sickening, really.
People would do well to assume that, by default, mainstream media "journalists" aren't journalists but pawns relaying state propaganda.
If it had been a lab leak, how would that change the behaviors that everyday people would have had to take? The social distancing, masking, handwashing, quarantining would have all been identical.
Maybe it wouldn't change general hygienic practices, but it might have a impact on voting preferences to find out who was funding the research that led to the creation of the virus and the leak.
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If Joe Bloggs didn't die peacefully in his sleep as we were initially told but had in fact been murdered, how would that change where we buried him?
It wouldn't change where we buried him at all, but it would materially change many other things, at least in the minds of people opposed to murder.
That whole timespan… the absolute nonsense the “trusted media” and their “experts” were pushing with nary a single trace of critical thinking absolutely boggles the mind. How about PCR test results, “opening dates”, death counts, the almost intentional mixing of terms like IFR vs CFR, etc. the list goes on and on and on.
The media is absolutely just state propaganda.
I mean, people did try to discuss it. YouTube and Facebook actually deleted content discussing it, in possibly the most blatant act of political censorship in recent memory in this country, and barely anyone knows that.
Not that the US government has any credibility left after current admin, but the statements in here are factual, they really did take down youtube videos that were speculating about lab leak. I saw it happen.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline
Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.