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If the bulk of journalism outlets went out of business along with their advertisers, I'd consider that a win/win. I know that in the age of Trump we're supposed

If the bulk of journalism outlets went out of business along with their advertisers, I'd consider that a win/win. I know that in the age of Trump we're supposed to venerate journalism as some kind of selfless civil duty, but the vast majority of it is throwaway punditry and apologia for an illegitimate order. Actual investigative work like the kind of stuff Shane Bauer has done would still have legs on subscription/donor based platforms.

rayiner 9y ago
> I know that in the age of Trump we're supposed to venerate journalism as some kind of selfless civil duty, but the vast majority of it is throwaway punditry and apologia for an illegitimate order. QFT. Journalism has been awful at least for decades. > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. - Michael Chrichton In a complex world, the very idea of generalist journalists is broken.
- tptacek 9y ago
  From what I can tell, journalism has continually improved since the founding of the Republic. It's useful to correct unrealistic expectations we have about it: that its practitioners are selfless volunteers serving out of civic obligation. It's a profession like anything else, with good members and bad ones, almost always under the same masthead. I think it would be tough to argue that modern institutional journalism is somehow worse than that of, say, the World War 2 era. Crichton's "amnesia effect" is a vivid example of how people get this wrong. Are newspapers wrong about Palestine? Quite often. But it's not for the same reason that they're wrong about show business. Show business is a specialized beat with specialized reporters and not every newspaper has someone dedicated to it. Everyone understands that about reporting Palestine, but fewer people understand that about show business, and so Crichton sounds incisive when really he's just making a banal observation: different journalism outlets are strong on different topics.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    I don't think it's that banal an observation. Most media consumers don't subscribe to all the relevant trade pubs. Which means most of the journalism they consume comes from outlets that are weak.

rayiner 9y ago

> I know that in the age of Trump we're supposed to venerate journalism as some kind of selfless civil duty, but the vast majority of it is throwaway punditry and apologia for an illegitimate order. QFT. Journalism has been awful at least for decades. > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. - Michael Chrichton In a complex world, the very idea of generalist journalists is broken.

tptacek 9y ago
From what I can tell, journalism has continually improved since the founding of the Republic. It's useful to correct unrealistic expectations we have about it: that its practitioners are selfless volunteers serving out of civic obligation. It's a profession like anything else, with good members and bad ones, almost always under the same masthead. I think it would be tough to argue that modern institutional journalism is somehow worse than that of, say, the World War 2 era. Crichton's "amnesia effect" is a vivid example of how people get this wrong. Are newspapers wrong about Palestine? Quite often. But it's not for the same reason that they're wrong about show business. Show business is a specialized beat with specialized reporters and not every newspaper has someone dedicated to it. Everyone understands that about reporting Palestine, but fewer people understand that about show business, and so Crichton sounds incisive when really he's just making a banal observation: different journalism outlets are strong on different topics.
- tedunangst 9y ago
  I don't think it's that banal an observation. Most media consumers don't subscribe to all the relevant trade pubs. Which means most of the journalism they consume comes from outlets that are weak.