4 ms·

This is what scares me about the slow death of old media. As newspapers and cable news become less and less profitable, they'll have to rely on more and more ex

This is what scares me about the slow death of old media. As newspapers and cable news become less and less profitable, they'll have to rely on more and more extreme headlines to draw people in. And as proven here, there's a lot of "true in the sense that this happened, but false in the sense that there's a trend." Extreme headlines aren't a terrible thing, but it doesn't help that old media in particular is seen as the arbiter of truth, the lone warrior fighting against the forces of evil. And I'm even more conflicted, because in some cases, that description isn't even wrong.

quanticle 8y ago
Ryan Holiday talks about this a lot in Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. His take is that in the old days, the media used to lie by omission: it would choose not to cover certain stories, even though they were important. Today, the media "lies by transmission" -- they cover unimportant but sensational stories, and that drowns out the coverage of important but less eye-catching events.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  It goes even further nowadays. Get into niche media journalism, and you see groups of journalists who collude to purposely create emotional impressions which bend the "truth" in whichever direction they've agreed on. Niche media journalism also acts as a filter for mainstream media's coverage of their niche, which amplifies their narrative. I see this as an extension of post 2000's web forum culture, which was often censorious and authoritarian in nature. You toe the line, or you get the banhammer, two orders of magnitude faster than the cold war eastern bloc secret police even dreamed. Posts that go against the mods were deleted in a brazen fashion that would've made Pravda blush. It's the generations who were kids and high school students when exposed to those modes of behavior, awash in online mini-regimes of instant totalitarian power, who are now getting into their 30's and are rising in power. Freewheeling obnoxiousness has its downside online. There were parts of that chaotic side of the internet that I absolutely hated. However, I now see that the fakeness of the totalitarian version is ultimately worse. In future years, we'll look back on these years like we looked back on the 50's. The cultural milieu that bought all that "Midcentury Modern" furniture thought themselves fantastically "progressive."
malvosenior 8y ago
Another symptom of the old media death spiral is an unrelenting stream of attacks on the “enemy”, mostly Facebook and other platforms that remove their gatekeeper status and push the value of data (articles) to zero. For instance right now on HN there is a NYT article about a journalist quitting Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706254 Definitely a non-story but old media will use any chance it can get to tarnish internet brands.
- matt4077 8y ago
  It’s heavily upvoted on HN, so it would seem that, maybe, people disagree about it being a “total non-story”.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    A good portion of the comments on that thread are people wondering why a journalist quitting Facebook is a story.

quanticle 8y ago

Ryan Holiday talks about this a lot in Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. His take is that in the old days, the media used to lie by omission: it would choose not to cover certain stories, even though they were important. Today, the media "lies by transmission" -- they cover unimportant but sensational stories, and that drowns out the coverage of important but less eye-catching events.

stcredzero 8y ago
It goes even further nowadays. Get into niche media journalism, and you see groups of journalists who collude to purposely create emotional impressions which bend the "truth" in whichever direction they've agreed on. Niche media journalism also acts as a filter for mainstream media's coverage of their niche, which amplifies their narrative. I see this as an extension of post 2000's web forum culture, which was often censorious and authoritarian in nature. You toe the line, or you get the banhammer, two orders of magnitude faster than the cold war eastern bloc secret police even dreamed. Posts that go against the mods were deleted in a brazen fashion that would've made Pravda blush. It's the generations who were kids and high school students when exposed to those modes of behavior, awash in online mini-regimes of instant totalitarian power, who are now getting into their 30's and are rising in power. Freewheeling obnoxiousness has its downside online. There were parts of that chaotic side of the internet that I absolutely hated. However, I now see that the fakeness of the totalitarian version is ultimately worse. In future years, we'll look back on these years like we looked back on the 50's. The cultural milieu that bought all that "Midcentury Modern" furniture thought themselves fantastically "progressive."

malvosenior 8y ago

Another symptom of the old media death spiral is an unrelenting stream of attacks on the “enemy”, mostly Facebook and other platforms that remove their gatekeeper status and push the value of data (articles) to zero. For instance right now on HN there is a NYT article about a journalist quitting Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706254 Definitely a non-story but old media will use any chance it can get to tarnish internet brands.

matt4077 8y ago
It’s heavily upvoted on HN, so it would seem that, maybe, people disagree about it being a “total non-story”.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  A good portion of the comments on that thread are people wondering why a journalist quitting Facebook is a story.