13 ms·

I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. When I see reports from the country where I live (be it my home country or country where

I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. When I see reports from the country where I live (be it my home country or country where I currently live) I see lots of distortion, omissions of very important news that don't fit the current media paradigm, or even obvious lies. I don't see a point in spending my money and my time to read fake news. I've just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better. Social networks and Internet in general are much worse in this respect. There's immense amount of bots/government agents (from every government in the world) spreading all kinds of fake information. Then real people start reposting that. You still can do fact-checking but if you'd fact-check everything, it would require as much time as a full-time job. So I'm planning on stopping reading the social networks also because in most social networks there's no way of blocking reposts or filtering out the politics-related messages.

RickJWagner 8y ago
Yes, I agree. My personal technique for dealing with this is try to look at multiple online news sources, not just one. I'll look at one from each side of the political spectrum and try to triangulate what a reasonable person should think.
- skilled 8y ago
  Think about what? A system that doesn't care about you? A reasonable person should think for himself and not on the basis of soulless news columns.
  - untog 8y ago
    What are you saying, that people should read no news sources at all? That's absurd. You need to know actual information if you're going to make an informed choice.
    - sigstoat 8y ago
      an informed choice about what? the news is full of things you can't have an impact on. focus on things you can impact, like your own life and the people around you.
      - untog 8y ago
        An informed choice about, oh, I don't know... voting? Whether they support the actions of their local politician? What they should protest? What causes they should support? These are foundational elements of how democracy functions, it would be nice for them to work well.
      - bksenior 8y ago
        This is deeply intellectually disingenuous and a bit masturbatory even. News isn't only events you can or cannot effect, it is context setting, value creating and signal driving. The idea that your local culture is superior to foreign also is problematic, not in a normative way, but in that it almost certainly limits new ideas and general diversity. The solution is more likely that information is hard to parse and more information is harder. The thing not mentioned in this that I think is the most critical part of the "change" is that historically fringe and minority ideas were kept in check because of basic principals of attention economy. If 10 people believed things, there was most often a limit as to how many those 10 would reach. Now fringe ideas can speak to MANY people, and can be dynamiclly adjusted to catch. Previously the only real organization that had huge reach was the government and we built a Rube Goldberg machine to insure that one voice didnt dominate. Facebook, Twitter and Google are all bigger than all governments and there is no checks and balances other than one dudes whims in each case. Im all for free market, but this information delivering system is too large, too unregulated and probably for better and worse is going to deliver a deeply different world than we all grew up in. That new world seems more reactive.
    - roenxi 8y ago
      Are you absolutely sure that making an informed choice is a useful thing? Speaking politically, the correlation between spending more and achieving political office is very high. Getting your information from friends and family is not going to be worse than sourcing it from talking heads in a studio or newspaper editors. Anyone who, eg, gets their political information from me is going to get information sourced largely from reading parliamentary documents. How is that going to be worse than what they get from the media? There are politically interested people in every community to pick up the slack. A radical view, but politics would be better off without mass, coordinated outrage. Compromise and thought should be the order of the day.
      - untog 8y ago
        > Getting your information from friends and family is not going to be worse than sourcing it from talking heads in a studio or newspaper editors Of course it is. Especially these days, your friend is just as likely to have gotten the news they're giving you from a Facebook meme page than from anything with on the record quotes from officials involved. > There are politically interested people in every community to pick up the Slack Yes there are. Journalists! That's what a journalist is. They're interested, they research, they present their findings. If you are reading parliamentary papers and reporting the contents to your friends, you are a journalist. Just deferring to individuals in the community you know is a nice idea but it doesn't cover it. For instance, who was looking into Theranos other than journalists at WSJ? Best I can tell, no one was. Their reporting on the company was invaluable.
      - barry-cotter 8y ago
        The reason the correlation between spending and winning is high is because people donate to politicians they think can win. If advertising spend could buy elections Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg would be president and politicians would usually be rich before they got elected, not as a consequence of getting elected. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867 > the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1 > Because campaign spending correlates strongly with election results, observers of American politics frequently lament that money seems to buy votes. However, the apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: The best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. Acting strategically, campaign donors direct their funds toward the “best” candidates, who would be more likely to win even in a moneyless world. These donor behaviors spuriously amplify the correlation between spending and votes. As evidence for this argument, I show that (non-strategic) self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results, whereas (strategic) externally-financed spending does.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  I built Read Across The Aisle to help people do this. It's totally free, with no tracking or PII monetization — just a side project I decided to launch. It also includes free WSJ access, thanks to a generous partnership they offered us. http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com
  - DiabloD3 8y ago
    This seems to require a browser plugin. There is no Firefox plugin, so I'm not sure how you're going to get as many users as you hoped.
    - gnicholas 8y ago
      We're on Chrome and Brave, and iOS. Firefox will happen eventually, but since this is a free side project we can't develop for every platform.
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
Indeed. For me, the traditional newspaper now falls into a kind of uncanny valley. I still follow it, because it's the best thing I can find at being not-shitty, but it's still a weird local maximum. * If I want hyper-updated "news" (ie: hot-takes), I can follow basically anyone on the scene of anything on Twitter. Of course, this has no filter: the more people "on the ground" I follow, the greater the likelihood I ingest bullshit, personal biases, misreporting, misinformation, and just general hot-takes. * If I want the bird's eye view, I can subscribe to magazines that have long-form, multi-page articles covering a story or issue over its history and range. However, when I read a "bird's eye view" story on something I know intimately, I tend to tear it to pieces as a "Hollywood" misrepresentation, written chiefly to narrate the story the reader already expects to hear on the subject, not to challenge or inform. * If I want strictly local affairs, I can follow everyone from City Hall to my state or provincial legislators on social media. This exposes me to fewer hot-takes than following randos on social media, but still means I'm basically hearing whatever a public official wants me to hear. * Newspapers fall in the middle: a bit local, a bit national, a bit of real reporting, a bit of reprinting press releases and AP stories, usually crappy at international affairs, often still just quoting the mayor and being done with a local story, short-term enough to "refresh" every day and every weekend, long-term enough to sometimes cover events a week at a time or even issue a correction.
untog 8y ago
"all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony. I'm not trying to suggest that the industry is not without problems, but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not "fake". There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. They also do themselves no favours (IMO) by publishing absurd opinion columns alongside actual news in a way that devalues the overall proposition. And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report - that's why it is in your benefit to maintain a varied news diet from different sources. None of this means they are all "fake news". I'm not particularly wedded to today's media outlets. If something new is going to come along and blow them out of the water, bring it on. But I'm yet to see an alternative that improves on what they offer. All I see is amateurishness (Reddit crowd sourcing the wrong identity for terrorists multiple times) and all-out propaganda efforts.
- nerdbaggy 8y ago
  I think most news is over exaggerated, not so much fake.
- swiley 8y ago
  NYT is notoriously bad and often omits and slants things.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    I was an NYT subscriber for a long time (years) and during the 2016 primaries and elections I learned how crappy they were. They tried to misinform me! I was paying them and they were lying to me. First about the Bernie campaign and then about the Trump campaign. I don't pay the news to bullshit me. For a period of six months I read both the NYT and the WSJ. The WSJ editorials are clearly written by morons but otherwise their news had higher predictive value. I agree entirely with you. It's no wonder people reading the NYT were constantly surprised. My fault entirely after Judith Miller but no longer. Purged them from my rotation.
    - 8y ago
temp231239 8y ago
I too stay away from mainstream reporting that's always filled with propaganda. Are there any alternative source of genuine news? So far I haven't found any.
- rdtsc 8y ago
  There is not much I am afraid. You might for example find a foreign outlet like Al-Jazeera reporting about some country it doesn't have interest building a narrative about, but anything about it's corner of the world or especially Qatar is just not going to be unbiased by any means. Then maybe BBC or Reuters, but always compare coverage of the same event and you'd see there is always a slant or spin involved.
- dexen 8y ago
  There are good independent journalists out there [1]. While they are naturally biased individuals, you quickly learn their biases and apply correction. If you subscribe to a few of them, their coverage averages out to about neutral. IMO a hallmark of honest journalist is ability to openly discuss the journalistic process & toolkit. Call it journalism's equivalent of Kerckhoff's principle. Another good check mark is ability to criticize errors in the media and issue correction and retractions. [1] for example Tim Pool, https://twitter.com/Timcast https://twitter.com/Timcast
- pl1234 8y ago
  there is no objective source since everyone has their biases. For an alternative perspective, check out the unz review
- kiliantics 8y ago
  Democracy Now is good for US news
gammateam 8y ago
There was a Canadian sentenced to death in China recently It took me ALL DAY before it clicked in my head that this wasnt either of the Canadian diplomats recently arrested I looked around and nobody seemed to notice this All the outlets and discussions were fixed around an escalation in the trade war, and this convicted drug dealer had nothing to do with that. It was like how can I point that out while still disagreeing with a Chinese municipal level capital punishment. Damn, people are going to think I’m making excuses for The China. This whole thing is built to ostracize thought.
- masonic 8y ago
  WaPo, for one example, might not wish to alienate the government of the country which sources much of its owner's economic activity.
dariusm5 8y ago
Aaron Swartz wrote an interesting piece on why he didn't read the news: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
arduanika 8y ago
> I've just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better. Your experience is consistent with this article: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... > So I'm planning on stopping reading the social networks also Yeah, you and me both. Isn't it interesting, though, how much more addicting the scrolling feeds are?
- shdh 8y ago
  Ignorance is bliss
sametmax 8y ago
I think there is some kind of illusion that the previous generation of medias were impartial and fair. But news always had an agenda. People with power always affected news. And even without that, the sheer imperfection of human nature makes any kind of communication a distored version of reality. It does feel like it's getting worse though, but I think it's just a feeling: we now have so many sources, and points of view, that we can see more clearly how much BS we are being fed with.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  A while ago a Ukranian coworker drew my attention to the case of Pulitzer prize winning NYTs journalist Walter Duranty, who during the 1930s wrote numerous fraudulent articles denying the existence of famine in Soviet territories and particularly the deliberate man-made famine in Ukraine (recognized as a genocide by 16 countries including well respected first world countries such as Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question#Other_countries_and_international_organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question#Ot...) The NYTs didn't admit error until the 1990 when they called his work "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." (https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-trenchcoats-then-and-now.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-not...) By then the damage to public opinion was already done, to the extent that even today I worry somebody will respond to this post telling me that Walter Duranty was in the right for one reason or another. Why did it take them nearly 60 years to fess up?
  - iguy 8y ago
    Indeed, there was a lot of bias in the past which was harder to see, because getting alternative sources was hard. Only a few NYT-size organisations could have a foreign correspondent & foot his telegram bills. But I think there's something else too: Now that raw facts are a commodity, the value that NYT etc add (for their fan base) is the filtering and the opinions.
paganel 8y ago
> all news are fake news now. "Fake news" is as old as the newspaper industry itself. Vlad the Impaler got his (in-)famous renown because at some point he dared impose some extra trade taxes on the Transylvania Saxons who were doing business in his native Walachia. As it happens, the print thing had just gotten off the ground so that those Saxons and their business partners further to the West used the newly created medium in order to propagate most of the "fake news" for which Vlad is now known.
matt4077 8y ago
That’s just destructive cynicism. If It were true, it’s the end of democracy, because the process of deciding needs information. That would be a severe thread to your life, and you should be mobilizing everything you have to stop it, by, for example, founding your own “unbiased” news.
Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
My local city's best-selling, and supposedly most prestigious, newspaper is always publishing pretentious opinion pieces about the problem with fake news and how we must trust well-established outlets with professional ethics, etc. like themselves. They have even organized debates on fake news and so on. Then you open that newspaper, and most of what they publish about the city is inflammatory pieces bashing the current city government, which are based mostly on lies. For example, blaming on it decisions from other administrations where it has no competence at all, or even decisions from the previous, opposing city government (which they praise because that party gives newspapers more subsidies). I have even read news about physical objects (a pedestrian crossing, a streetlight or whatever) that you could just go and see with your own eyes that they were plain false, describing things that just outright hadn't happened, no discussion possible. In national or international newspapers it's more difficult to calibrate the trustworthiness of a news piece, because they involve stuff that happens far away, but every time I see a media outlet riding the high horse of "the internet is full of fake news, trust us instead", I cannot help thinking about the case of this newspaper and not trusting at all. I'd rather read opposing opinions from people who at least acknowledge to be biased, and then form my own view, than trust supposedly unbiased news that are probably as fake as whatever bots spew. Disclaimer: I'm not even much of a supporter of the current major, I didn't even vote for him, although next election I probably will just out of disgust for that paper's shameless manipulation.
programmertote 8y ago
I 100% agree. I was born in Myanmar (Burma) and in the last few years, the news that I've been reading on NYT and BBC (the only two sources that I used to respect) are exaggerated and/or biased and/or inaccurate. Some of the HN readers will be very skeptical about my comment and this may get removed/buried, but I can only say that only when you have lived in a place and experienced the culture and dynamics between different ethnic/racial/religious groups there, you will understand what I mean. E.g., Some people outside of the US can see the current president and think the country is pretty stupid to have elected him. But we all know that the reality is not that simple. The gist is to not trust the news outlets with blind faith and get riled up, even if they are 'reputable' that they are reporting unbiased/non-exaggerated/agenda-filled news. There are a lot of interested/invested parties that benefit from conflicts like that, so if the article is quoting just one side of the story (e.g., if the story is only presented by the INGOs, UN and NGOs that receive funding), I usually take it with a big grain of salt. Just my two cents.
gerbilly 8y ago
> I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. This 'fake news' thing is just a recent meme that people strengthen through confirmation bias, and then pass around to justify their irrational behaviour. One example of irrational behaviour: working class conservative voters voting against their interests for generations, and then blaming the country's problems on the 'deep state.' The thing that is worrisome, is that we seem to be in a post truth era. We have gone beyond disagreeing about our opinions and our values, and are starting to solipsistically disagree on plain facts now.
swoongoonz 8y ago
"I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now." Can't tell if Russian troll farm agent or just someone with poor English skills...

RickJWagner 8y ago

Yes, I agree. My personal technique for dealing with this is try to look at multiple online news sources, not just one. I'll look at one from each side of the political spectrum and try to triangulate what a reasonable person should think.

skilled 8y ago
Think about what? A system that doesn't care about you? A reasonable person should think for himself and not on the basis of soulless news columns.
- untog 8y ago
  What are you saying, that people should read no news sources at all? That's absurd. You need to know actual information if you're going to make an informed choice.
  - sigstoat 8y ago
    an informed choice about what? the news is full of things you can't have an impact on. focus on things you can impact, like your own life and the people around you.
    - untog 8y ago
      An informed choice about, oh, I don't know... voting? Whether they support the actions of their local politician? What they should protest? What causes they should support? These are foundational elements of how democracy functions, it would be nice for them to work well.
    - bksenior 8y ago
      This is deeply intellectually disingenuous and a bit masturbatory even. News isn't only events you can or cannot effect, it is context setting, value creating and signal driving. The idea that your local culture is superior to foreign also is problematic, not in a normative way, but in that it almost certainly limits new ideas and general diversity. The solution is more likely that information is hard to parse and more information is harder. The thing not mentioned in this that I think is the most critical part of the "change" is that historically fringe and minority ideas were kept in check because of basic principals of attention economy. If 10 people believed things, there was most often a limit as to how many those 10 would reach. Now fringe ideas can speak to MANY people, and can be dynamiclly adjusted to catch. Previously the only real organization that had huge reach was the government and we built a Rube Goldberg machine to insure that one voice didnt dominate. Facebook, Twitter and Google are all bigger than all governments and there is no checks and balances other than one dudes whims in each case. Im all for free market, but this information delivering system is too large, too unregulated and probably for better and worse is going to deliver a deeply different world than we all grew up in. That new world seems more reactive.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Are you absolutely sure that making an informed choice is a useful thing? Speaking politically, the correlation between spending more and achieving political office is very high. Getting your information from friends and family is not going to be worse than sourcing it from talking heads in a studio or newspaper editors. Anyone who, eg, gets their political information from me is going to get information sourced largely from reading parliamentary documents. How is that going to be worse than what they get from the media? There are politically interested people in every community to pick up the slack. A radical view, but politics would be better off without mass, coordinated outrage. Compromise and thought should be the order of the day.
    - untog 8y ago
      > Getting your information from friends and family is not going to be worse than sourcing it from talking heads in a studio or newspaper editors Of course it is. Especially these days, your friend is just as likely to have gotten the news they're giving you from a Facebook meme page than from anything with on the record quotes from officials involved. > There are politically interested people in every community to pick up the Slack Yes there are. Journalists! That's what a journalist is. They're interested, they research, they present their findings. If you are reading parliamentary papers and reporting the contents to your friends, you are a journalist. Just deferring to individuals in the community you know is a nice idea but it doesn't cover it. For instance, who was looking into Theranos other than journalists at WSJ? Best I can tell, no one was. Their reporting on the company was invaluable.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      The reason the correlation between spending and winning is high is because people donate to politicians they think can win. If advertising spend could buy elections Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg would be president and politicians would usually be rich before they got elected, not as a consequence of getting elected. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867 > the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1 > Because campaign spending correlates strongly with election results, observers of American politics frequently lament that money seems to buy votes. However, the apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: The best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. Acting strategically, campaign donors direct their funds toward the “best” candidates, who would be more likely to win even in a moneyless world. These donor behaviors spuriously amplify the correlation between spending and votes. As evidence for this argument, I show that (non-strategic) self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results, whereas (strategic) externally-financed spending does.
gnicholas 8y ago
I built Read Across The Aisle to help people do this. It's totally free, with no tracking or PII monetization — just a side project I decided to launch. It also includes free WSJ access, thanks to a generous partnership they offered us. http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com
- DiabloD3 8y ago
  This seems to require a browser plugin. There is no Firefox plugin, so I'm not sure how you're going to get as many users as you hoped.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    We're on Chrome and Brave, and iOS. Firefox will happen eventually, but since this is a free side project we can't develop for every platform.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

Indeed. For me, the traditional newspaper now falls into a kind of uncanny valley. I still follow it, because it's the best thing I can find at being not-shitty, but it's still a weird local maximum. * If I want hyper-updated "news" (ie: hot-takes), I can follow basically anyone on the scene of anything on Twitter. Of course, this has no filter: the more people "on the ground" I follow, the greater the likelihood I ingest bullshit, personal biases, misreporting, misinformation, and just general hot-takes. * If I want the bird's eye view, I can subscribe to magazines that have long-form, multi-page articles covering a story or issue over its history and range. However, when I read a "bird's eye view" story on something I know intimately, I tend to tear it to pieces as a "Hollywood" misrepresentation, written chiefly to narrate the story the reader already expects to hear on the subject, not to challenge or inform. * If I want strictly local affairs, I can follow everyone from City Hall to my state or provincial legislators on social media. This exposes me to fewer hot-takes than following randos on social media, but still means I'm basically hearing whatever a public official wants me to hear. * Newspapers fall in the middle: a bit local, a bit national, a bit of real reporting, a bit of reprinting press releases and AP stories, usually crappy at international affairs, often still just quoting the mayor and being done with a local story, short-term enough to "refresh" every day and every weekend, long-term enough to sometimes cover events a week at a time or even issue a correction.

untog 8y ago

"all news are fake news now" is such an obviously false statement the whole thing drowns in irony. I'm not trying to suggest that the industry is not without problems, but the stories broken by NYT, WSJ, Washington Post etc. each day are assuredly not "fake". There are, on occasion, factual errors in a story. When it happens they issue a correction. They also do themselves no favours (IMO) by publishing absurd opinion columns alongside actual news in a way that devalues the overall proposition. And yes, they have biases, because there is no such thing as an entirely unbiased news report - that's why it is in your benefit to maintain a varied news diet from different sources. None of this means they are all "fake news". I'm not particularly wedded to today's media outlets. If something new is going to come along and blow them out of the water, bring it on. But I'm yet to see an alternative that improves on what they offer. All I see is amateurishness (Reddit crowd sourcing the wrong identity for terrorists multiple times) and all-out propaganda efforts.

nerdbaggy 8y ago
I think most news is over exaggerated, not so much fake.
swiley 8y ago
NYT is notoriously bad and often omits and slants things.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  I was an NYT subscriber for a long time (years) and during the 2016 primaries and elections I learned how crappy they were. They tried to misinform me! I was paying them and they were lying to me. First about the Bernie campaign and then about the Trump campaign. I don't pay the news to bullshit me. For a period of six months I read both the NYT and the WSJ. The WSJ editorials are clearly written by morons but otherwise their news had higher predictive value. I agree entirely with you. It's no wonder people reading the NYT were constantly surprised. My fault entirely after Judith Miller but no longer. Purged them from my rotation.
  - 8y ago

temp231239 8y ago

I too stay away from mainstream reporting that's always filled with propaganda. Are there any alternative source of genuine news? So far I haven't found any.

rdtsc 8y ago
There is not much I am afraid. You might for example find a foreign outlet like Al-Jazeera reporting about some country it doesn't have interest building a narrative about, but anything about it's corner of the world or especially Qatar is just not going to be unbiased by any means. Then maybe BBC or Reuters, but always compare coverage of the same event and you'd see there is always a slant or spin involved.
dexen 8y ago
There are good independent journalists out there [1]. While they are naturally biased individuals, you quickly learn their biases and apply correction. If you subscribe to a few of them, their coverage averages out to about neutral. IMO a hallmark of honest journalist is ability to openly discuss the journalistic process & toolkit. Call it journalism's equivalent of Kerckhoff's principle. Another good check mark is ability to criticize errors in the media and issue correction and retractions. [1] for example Tim Pool, https://twitter.com/Timcast https://twitter.com/Timcast
pl1234 8y ago
there is no objective source since everyone has their biases. For an alternative perspective, check out the unz review
kiliantics 8y ago
Democracy Now is good for US news

gammateam 8y ago

There was a Canadian sentenced to death in China recently It took me ALL DAY before it clicked in my head that this wasnt either of the Canadian diplomats recently arrested I looked around and nobody seemed to notice this All the outlets and discussions were fixed around an escalation in the trade war, and this convicted drug dealer had nothing to do with that. It was like how can I point that out while still disagreeing with a Chinese municipal level capital punishment. Damn, people are going to think I’m making excuses for The China. This whole thing is built to ostracize thought.

masonic 8y ago
WaPo, for one example, might not wish to alienate the government of the country which sources much of its owner's economic activity.

dariusm5 8y ago

Aaron Swartz wrote an interesting piece on why he didn't read the news: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

arduanika 8y ago

> I've just stopped consuming news and felt a lot better. Your experience is consistent with this article: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... > So I'm planning on stopping reading the social networks also Yeah, you and me both. Isn't it interesting, though, how much more addicting the scrolling feeds are?

shdh 8y ago
Ignorance is bliss

sametmax 8y ago

I think there is some kind of illusion that the previous generation of medias were impartial and fair. But news always had an agenda. People with power always affected news. And even without that, the sheer imperfection of human nature makes any kind of communication a distored version of reality. It does feel like it's getting worse though, but I think it's just a feeling: we now have so many sources, and points of view, that we can see more clearly how much BS we are being fed with.

darkpuma 8y ago
A while ago a Ukranian coworker drew my attention to the case of Pulitzer prize winning NYTs journalist Walter Duranty, who during the 1930s wrote numerous fraudulent articles denying the existence of famine in Soviet territories and particularly the deliberate man-made famine in Ukraine (recognized as a genocide by 16 countries including well respected first world countries such as Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question#Other_countries_and_international_organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question#Ot...) The NYTs didn't admit error until the 1990 when they called his work "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." (https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-trenchcoats-then-and-now.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-not...) By then the damage to public opinion was already done, to the extent that even today I worry somebody will respond to this post telling me that Walter Duranty was in the right for one reason or another. Why did it take them nearly 60 years to fess up?
- iguy 8y ago
  Indeed, there was a lot of bias in the past which was harder to see, because getting alternative sources was hard. Only a few NYT-size organisations could have a foreign correspondent & foot his telegram bills. But I think there's something else too: Now that raw facts are a commodity, the value that NYT etc add (for their fan base) is the filtering and the opinions.

paganel 8y ago

> all news are fake news now. "Fake news" is as old as the newspaper industry itself. Vlad the Impaler got his (in-)famous renown because at some point he dared impose some extra trade taxes on the Transylvania Saxons who were doing business in his native Walachia. As it happens, the print thing had just gotten off the ground so that those Saxons and their business partners further to the West used the newly created medium in order to propagate most of the "fake news" for which Vlad is now known.

matt4077 8y ago

That’s just destructive cynicism. If It were true, it’s the end of democracy, because the process of deciding needs information. That would be a severe thread to your life, and you should be mobilizing everything you have to stop it, by, for example, founding your own “unbiased” news.

Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago

My local city's best-selling, and supposedly most prestigious, newspaper is always publishing pretentious opinion pieces about the problem with fake news and how we must trust well-established outlets with professional ethics, etc. like themselves. They have even organized debates on fake news and so on. Then you open that newspaper, and most of what they publish about the city is inflammatory pieces bashing the current city government, which are based mostly on lies. For example, blaming on it decisions from other administrations where it has no competence at all, or even decisions from the previous, opposing city government (which they praise because that party gives newspapers more subsidies). I have even read news about physical objects (a pedestrian crossing, a streetlight or whatever) that you could just go and see with your own eyes that they were plain false, describing things that just outright hadn't happened, no discussion possible. In national or international newspapers it's more difficult to calibrate the trustworthiness of a news piece, because they involve stuff that happens far away, but every time I see a media outlet riding the high horse of "the internet is full of fake news, trust us instead", I cannot help thinking about the case of this newspaper and not trusting at all. I'd rather read opposing opinions from people who at least acknowledge to be biased, and then form my own view, than trust supposedly unbiased news that are probably as fake as whatever bots spew. Disclaimer: I'm not even much of a supporter of the current major, I didn't even vote for him, although next election I probably will just out of disgust for that paper's shameless manipulation.

programmertote 8y ago

I 100% agree. I was born in Myanmar (Burma) and in the last few years, the news that I've been reading on NYT and BBC (the only two sources that I used to respect) are exaggerated and/or biased and/or inaccurate. Some of the HN readers will be very skeptical about my comment and this may get removed/buried, but I can only say that only when you have lived in a place and experienced the culture and dynamics between different ethnic/racial/religious groups there, you will understand what I mean. E.g., Some people outside of the US can see the current president and think the country is pretty stupid to have elected him. But we all know that the reality is not that simple. The gist is to not trust the news outlets with blind faith and get riled up, even if they are 'reputable' that they are reporting unbiased/non-exaggerated/agenda-filled news. There are a lot of interested/invested parties that benefit from conflicts like that, so if the article is quoting just one side of the story (e.g., if the story is only presented by the INGOs, UN and NGOs that receive funding), I usually take it with a big grain of salt. Just my two cents.

gerbilly 8y ago

> I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now. This 'fake news' thing is just a recent meme that people strengthen through confirmation bias, and then pass around to justify their irrational behaviour. One example of irrational behaviour: working class conservative voters voting against their interests for generations, and then blaming the country's problems on the 'deep state.' The thing that is worrisome, is that we seem to be in a post truth era. We have gone beyond disagreeing about our opinions and our values, and are starting to solipsistically disagree on plain facts now.

swoongoonz 8y ago

"I have failed to find one important reason: all news are fake news now." Can't tell if Russian troll farm agent or just someone with poor English skills...