5 ms·

I'm not sure it's true though. Look at any polls about trust in the media. It's been falling for a long time. People are becoming aware that journalists are sys

I'm not sure it's true though. Look at any polls about trust in the media. It's been falling for a long time. People are becoming aware that journalists are systematically unreliable and it's having an impact.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
Or they're being told that all news is fake news in order to convince them to switch to the official state apparatus for information disbursement.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  NPR?
- rayiner 8y ago
  The media made its bed and now it can lie in it.
m12k 8y ago
And unfortunately the alternative people have found is random hearsay on the web. The dieticians lost our trust and now we're just eating junk food instead.
- CM30 8y ago
  They've been finding random hearsay for a while now. Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Is the Daily Mail or Sun or Mirror or Express more accurate than some clickbait farm? Probably not. Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news, it was low quality tabloids with a helping of TV and radio pundits.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Outside of NYC, the US has basically no daily tabloids. > Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news Most people in the US that were reading any daily news were probably reading the dominant local newspaper or one of the latter reputable metropolitan or national papers, because that covers pretty much all the daily written news outlets they would have had access to.
    - CM30 8y ago
      Hmm, you may have raised an interesting point there, namely that the quality of the media is very location specific and some countries had better media outlets than others as a rule. Unfortunately, it seems coverage of journalism and its decline and what not is very US centric, which likely confuses the hell out of people from other countries where their media outlets got worse much earlier on/didn't have a golden age in general. Kind of like how US media outlets and YouTubers assume the Great Video Game Crash was some worldwide thing, whereas it really only affected the US market and left the European and Japanese ones almost untouched. It may also explain some of the comments on local journalism, since that stuff over here in the UK isn't exactly fantastic itself. Maybe there's more ambition in local US newspapers than in UK ones, in that they actually did some journalism at some point rather than merely covering what local businesses were up to or what not. Huh, guess there's a cultural divide in how the news is presented too.
    - jrumbut 8y ago
      I'm not sure how often the National Enquirer and it's supermarket checkout line cousins publish but they are certainly available and fairly popular (very popular histically) outside of NYC. Our disagreement could be a dialect thing though, when I say tabloid I mean a printed paper that consists entirely of stories about UFOs and lurid celebrity gossip. I believe in other parts of the world tabloid has something to do with the format of the paper and the content is considered somewhat but not totally disreputable. I'm not sure which meaning the other posters are using.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  FWIW, I think a new alternative has been brewing for a while: long form interviews on YouTube and podcasts. Whether you’re a fan or not, I think Jordan Peterson has some pretty insightful things to say about this on his last interview with Joe Rogan.
- sievebrain 8y ago
  Yes but newspapers are basically random hearsay on paper. The web is not necessarily less reliable and can often be more reliable. Dieticians lost trust because they kept changing their advice about what to eat and clearly aren't reliable either. That's unrelated to newspapers.
Retric 8y ago
People tend to accept what other people say as true on some level. Journalists, Con men, and Religions benifit from that same bias. Consider the odds of any one random thing say a Tiger in a top hat sitting on the other side of a random door being true is very very low. However, even if I think someone is lying 99.99% of the time when they say a Tiger in a Top hat is behind the door that still raises the odds immensely.
CM30 8y ago
I think the internet may have shattered the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. People can now hear how inaccurate the media are about every topic, since experts in various fields are coming forward and calling them out online. The big thing that kept the effect going was that people didn't have an easy way to find out the truth about various specialist fields outside of the media.

pavel_lishin 8y ago

Or they're being told that all news is fake news in order to convince them to switch to the official state apparatus for information disbursement.

WillPostForFood 8y ago
NPR?
rayiner 8y ago
The media made its bed and now it can lie in it.

m12k 8y ago

And unfortunately the alternative people have found is random hearsay on the web. The dieticians lost our trust and now we're just eating junk food instead.

CM30 8y ago
They've been finding random hearsay for a while now. Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Is the Daily Mail or Sun or Mirror or Express more accurate than some clickbait farm? Probably not. Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news, it was low quality tabloids with a helping of TV and radio pundits.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Outside of NYC, the US has basically no daily tabloids. > Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news Most people in the US that were reading any daily news were probably reading the dominant local newspaper or one of the latter reputable metropolitan or national papers, because that covers pretty much all the daily written news outlets they would have had access to.
  - CM30 8y ago
    Hmm, you may have raised an interesting point there, namely that the quality of the media is very location specific and some countries had better media outlets than others as a rule. Unfortunately, it seems coverage of journalism and its decline and what not is very US centric, which likely confuses the hell out of people from other countries where their media outlets got worse much earlier on/didn't have a golden age in general. Kind of like how US media outlets and YouTubers assume the Great Video Game Crash was some worldwide thing, whereas it really only affected the US market and left the European and Japanese ones almost untouched. It may also explain some of the comments on local journalism, since that stuff over here in the UK isn't exactly fantastic itself. Maybe there's more ambition in local US newspapers than in UK ones, in that they actually did some journalism at some point rather than merely covering what local businesses were up to or what not. Huh, guess there's a cultural divide in how the news is presented too.
  - jrumbut 8y ago
    I'm not sure how often the National Enquirer and it's supermarket checkout line cousins publish but they are certainly available and fairly popular (very popular histically) outside of NYC. Our disagreement could be a dialect thing though, when I say tabloid I mean a printed paper that consists entirely of stories about UFOs and lurid celebrity gossip. I believe in other parts of the world tabloid has something to do with the format of the paper and the content is considered somewhat but not totally disreputable. I'm not sure which meaning the other posters are using.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
toasterlovin 8y ago
FWIW, I think a new alternative has been brewing for a while: long form interviews on YouTube and podcasts. Whether you’re a fan or not, I think Jordan Peterson has some pretty insightful things to say about this on his last interview with Joe Rogan.
sievebrain 8y ago
Yes but newspapers are basically random hearsay on paper. The web is not necessarily less reliable and can often be more reliable. Dieticians lost trust because they kept changing their advice about what to eat and clearly aren't reliable either. That's unrelated to newspapers.

Retric 8y ago

People tend to accept what other people say as true on some level. Journalists, Con men, and Religions benifit from that same bias. Consider the odds of any one random thing say a Tiger in a top hat sitting on the other side of a random door being true is very very low. However, even if I think someone is lying 99.99% of the time when they say a Tiger in a Top hat is behind the door that still raises the odds immensely.

CM30 8y ago

I think the internet may have shattered the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. People can now hear how inaccurate the media are about every topic, since experts in various fields are coming forward and calling them out online. The big thing that kept the effect going was that people didn't have an easy way to find out the truth about various specialist fields outside of the media.