4 ms·

Saying that $5 billion is "chump change" is silly in any context and on a related note I keep hearing newscasters and prodcasters bemoaning the fact that Facebo

Saying that $5 billion is "chump change" is silly in any context and on a related note I keep hearing newscasters and prodcasters bemoaning the fact that Facebook is thriving and it disturbs me to no end that these people are publicly and loudly advocating for an important and unique company to be killed off, and I'm not sure about the psychology or the motives behind it. What's clear is that they are blaming facebook for political outcomes that are divergent from the mainstream and are conflating that with all that is negative and upsetting in the zeitgeist

wutbrodo 7y ago
As with doctors, journalism has an aura around it of being populated solely by noble, honest, and impartial folk. Unlike doctors, there's far less-buyin to this mythos from people not working in the industry, but it still exists: think about how many people you know whose "beliefs" consist largely of uncritically repetition of takes from the handful of publications that they have chosen to trust deeply. In reality, any industry populated by humans (perhaps excluding those with extreme barriers to entry) is going to have people on most points of the spectrums of stupidity/intelligence and honesty/dishonesty. There's no bar that means you have to be particularly smart or intellectually honest to be a journalist. The upshot of this is that when you see issues that systemically[1] affect an entire industry, you can expect to see this bias to a pretty blatant degree. A banal example is that of Google Reader: its loss was perhaps worth bemoaning, but the sustained hysteria from the media was insane (hilariously, this was around the same time they were pronouncing Google+ as dead, despite it having a multiple of in-stream DAU compared to Google Reader). So, to finally get to my point: the upheavals that the media industry has been going through the past decade is (fairly) blamed on tech and (perhaps less fairly) personified by large tech companies. That doesn't mean dismissing any criticism of tech, as there are plenty of valid ones, but reading coverage critically is always valuable, and particularly so on topics where they have an incentive (emotional or otherwise) to dissemble. [1] or even statistically: the claims of both pro-Democrat and pro-corporate bias in large media are IMO exaggerated but are also likely true to at least some degree: they're an unavoidable consequence of the industry being heavily skewed towards people/entities identifying as Democrats working for/being large corporations.

wutbrodo 7y ago

As with doctors, journalism has an aura around it of being populated solely by noble, honest, and impartial folk. Unlike doctors, there's far less-buyin to this mythos from people not working in the industry, but it still exists: think about how many people you know whose "beliefs" consist largely of uncritically repetition of takes from the handful of publications that they have chosen to trust deeply. In reality, any industry populated by humans (perhaps excluding those with extreme barriers to entry) is going to have people on most points of the spectrums of stupidity/intelligence and honesty/dishonesty. There's no bar that means you have to be particularly smart or intellectually honest to be a journalist. The upshot of this is that when you see issues that systemically[1] affect an entire industry, you can expect to see this bias to a pretty blatant degree. A banal example is that of Google Reader: its loss was perhaps worth bemoaning, but the sustained hysteria from the media was insane (hilariously, this was around the same time they were pronouncing Google+ as dead, despite it having a multiple of in-stream DAU compared to Google Reader). So, to finally get to my point: the upheavals that the media industry has been going through the past decade is (fairly) blamed on tech and (perhaps less fairly) personified by large tech companies. That doesn't mean dismissing any criticism of tech, as there are plenty of valid ones, but reading coverage critically is always valuable, and particularly so on topics where they have an incentive (emotional or otherwise) to dissemble. [1] or even statistically: the claims of both pro-Democrat and pro-corporate bias in large media are IMO exaggerated but are also likely true to at least some degree: they're an unavoidable consequence of the industry being heavily skewed towards people/entities identifying as Democrats working for/being large corporations.