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> The news, ultimately, is just stories. It's not a definitive or objective account of what's happening in the world, it's just industrialized gossip with a ven

> The news, ultimately, is just stories. It's not a definitive or objective account of what's happening in the world, it's just industrialized gossip with a veneer of legitimacy Or it may be that people have a hard time to figure out what matters at any given moment in time - you never quite know how a news item will play out - will it become part of History or will it turn out to be just another detail? go figure when it is happening... Maybe grandparent is just right: when it is all happening people may be more honest than after the fact, when positions are clear and everyone has to justify his own stake in the grand puzzle.

jdietrich 8y ago
>Or it may be that people have a hard time to figure out what matters at any given moment in time It's called "the news", not "the importants". Unusual, shocking and lurid stories are much more likely to be newsworthy, but by definition they aren't representative of what is actually happening in the world. Our perception of the world is much more strongly influenced by emotive anecdotes than cold hard facts. Violent crime rates in the western world have been significantly declining for decades, but most people believe that the opposite is true; multiple studies have found a correlation between news consumption and the perception of high crime. It's very difficult for the news media to usefully communicate important but gradual trends - rising incomes across the developing world, wage stagnation in the developed world, the impact of climate change, demographic shifts, the erosion of civil society etc. I think that most journalists are well-intentioned and genuinely believe that they are seekers of truth, but they operate in a system that reflects our innate perceptual biases, our acquired cultural biases and the commercial exigencies of media organisations. Another useful experiment is to exclusively consume another country's news media for a week or two, preferably a country you know very little about. A week of reading a Ugandan or Nigerian newspaper provides a very different perspective on world events.

jdietrich 8y ago

>Or it may be that people have a hard time to figure out what matters at any given moment in time It's called "the news", not "the importants". Unusual, shocking and lurid stories are much more likely to be newsworthy, but by definition they aren't representative of what is actually happening in the world. Our perception of the world is much more strongly influenced by emotive anecdotes than cold hard facts. Violent crime rates in the western world have been significantly declining for decades, but most people believe that the opposite is true; multiple studies have found a correlation between news consumption and the perception of high crime. It's very difficult for the news media to usefully communicate important but gradual trends - rising incomes across the developing world, wage stagnation in the developed world, the impact of climate change, demographic shifts, the erosion of civil society etc. I think that most journalists are well-intentioned and genuinely believe that they are seekers of truth, but they operate in a system that reflects our innate perceptual biases, our acquired cultural biases and the commercial exigencies of media organisations. Another useful experiment is to exclusively consume another country's news media for a week or two, preferably a country you know very little about. A week of reading a Ugandan or Nigerian newspaper provides a very different perspective on world events.