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There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low: https://www.washingtonex

There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trust-in-media-hits-bottom-60-percent-say-sources-pay-for-stories https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trust... It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs... Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to that.

projektfu 7y ago
All modern forms of yellow journalism.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?
- iagovar 7y ago
  Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us! I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awful job. I felt that the story they made up was only tangentially related to reality.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Ultimately, both views are true. We do not "demand" it with regular market means, but it's important to remember that free markets tend to structurally favor incrementally cutting corners. Even assuming we've demanded good journalism in the past (which is doubtful), we'd still end up where we are. As for media self-inflicting it upon itself, well, they shouldn't have started cutting corners. But since "media" is really a lot of competing actors, "not cutting corners for short-term gain" was an impossible outcome anyway - the whole thing has dynamics of a Prisoner's dilemma. My conclusion is that it's less about demanding - the way we fund news, i.e. open and competitive market, is structurally unable to support good journalism. Usually problems like these are solved by governments setting standards and giving funding, but journalism is a special case (it's perceived by many as protection against government overreach), so with that option out, I have no idea how to even begin solving it.
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    > Maybe not, but it's still a problem. Of course it's still a problem. The point is that it's actually a much bigger problem than you implied. People blame the media like it's all just down to some greedy jerks making malicious decisions, and if only we could replace them with someone with integrity, everything would be okay. The fact is that we've created an environment where it's nearly impossible for honest, non-sensationalized news to exist. Putting all the blame on the media is like blaming a starving man for stealing bread. They're culpable, certainly, but you're missing the root cause.
- sb057 7y ago
  That's part of the issue; there is no need for commercial first-hand accounts anymore. If someone on social media is talking about a news event and provides a video documenting their presence, that is about as verified and accurate as you can hope for.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    There absolutely is a need for multiple, verified, consistency and fact checked first hand accounts. One person on social media does not provide an objective and difficult to falsify viewpoint.
  - emiliobumachar 7y ago
    Deepfakes are getting more and more accessible... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Which is incredibly susceptible to someone with an agenda who wants to spin an narrative and knows how to leverage social media. It's tailor made for propaganda. Joe Schmoe who is actually there doesn't know how to inflate his likes and SEO his account. His voice gets drowned out by the people who are getting paid to push a particular viewpoint. There is no editor providing oversight. No ethics board. No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first.
    - brokenkebab 7y ago
      No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first. And that's exactly how news industry worked always, since invention of press (actually even before, though it wasn't industry back then).
  - CM30 7y ago
    You're being downvoted, but to a large extent, you're probably right here. For many topics journalists used to cover, you genuinely don't need them any more, since enthusiasts posting Patreon/donation funded content is at least as good in terms of quality. Tech, games, TV, music, sports, celebrity gossip, all of them can be covered just as well or better by some random guy on YouTube or some online blog site. And that in fact be another reason why the media as a whole is doing so poorly. In the old days, a fair few people read the papers for this stuff. Nowadays they can get the same information elsewhere, without the stories they're less interested in taking up space.
ipython 7y ago
Perhaps it's more a reflection of the incentives at work? How do you drive engagement with your content? Clearly 'clickbait' is (was?) successful at driving traffic, otherwise it wouldn't be called clickbait. Polarization is used successfully by other 'non-political' sites such as YouTube to drive engagement statistics (and hence ad impressions), and so forth. If you're trying to stay afloat in a competitive media environment, what would you do? There is no mass incentive for thought-out, contemplative, long-form journalism. In my opinion, we have dug our own grave - the truth is that the primitive, animal parts of our brain vastly overpower the analytical parts of our brain, and so your 'outrage bait' is a news (or tech) executive's bonus for the year. If the only metric by which we measure anything is $$$, then, well...
- parasar1983 7y ago
  "Journalism" has a "push" element in addition to "pull"
0815test 7y ago
It's not just media, but the education system as well. More educated people are significantly more, not less likely to fail Intellectual-Turing-Tests about people with opposing views. i.e. far from increasing openness to experience, education itself is functioning much like indoctrination into a fundamentalist religion! The effect starts already at a High-School level and becomes worse and worse as educational attainment rises: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republicans-and-democrats-dont-understand-each-other/592324/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republican... If this doesn't scare the s--t out of you, I don't know what would.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to, and that very few people actually do. Seems to me to be a problem with the teams.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    > What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to I'm not sure that's consistent with the evidence. People are actively getting worse and worse at modeling the other "team", which strongly suggests that polarization is quite real indeed and not just a matter of different labels.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      I'd like to see a comparison between a survey of espoused party values and the oppositions understanding - I wonder if someone was to look at the values that the political leaders are saying and voting for would there be as wide a gap, or would it fall more in line with what people believe of a party and it's members? On a person per person basis there's dehumanizing caricature, but I wonder if you compare it to the party to which the person claims to belong, if it would be as out to lunch.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Democrats with higher education are getting worse and worse at modeling Republicans. I think that means that, in higher education, Republicans get exposed to real Democrats, and Democrats get exposed to a caricature of Republicans.
rchaud 7y ago
What you see is the clickbait. What you don't see are the structural changes to the media landscape over the past 20 years that led to this. Newspapers per 100 million people fell from 1200 (in 1945) to 400 (in 2014). This is from a Brookings study cited in a Wikipedia article on the topic [0]. In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its photographers and tasked journalists to take photos as well as provide the research and writing [1]. How would the quality of your work be affected if you had to do the job of 2 people? The classifieds ads business is dead, and subscriptions have been declining for years because "news on the Internet is free". The only "media" that makes serious money is talk radio, which isn't journalism so much as diatribes of political invective. As it turns out, that's what people are willing to pay for, or at least sit through ads for. If anything, "the media" is giving the people what they want. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performance_in_the_market_(2000%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performa... [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-sun-times-lays-off-all-its-full-time-photographers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-su...
- blueboo 7y ago
  > The only “media” that makes serious money is ... > Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-news-industry-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new... Hmm
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Obviously rchaud is referring to people that create media, or in this case, the journalists. I don't see what relevance Google's revenue is to this conversation. They found a way to make money by directing people to other people's work.
    - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
      While those "other people" were doing unpaid internships, freelancing, and filing for unemployment insurance. Something seems very profoundly wrong with this picture.
RankingMember 7y ago
It's unfortunate, because while there are many bad actors, there are some outlets that don't employ these tactics that get painted with the same brush. I'm not sure how to make that better.
e40 7y ago
The Washington Examiner is a horrible source for anything. Maybe that was your point? (That link in your comment doesn't work for me.)
lowdose 7y ago
Fabricating attention.
mtberatwork 7y ago
> It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs... The media isn't one unified conglomerate. It's like equating the entire tech industry to just SV gig economy startups.
scarejunba 7y ago
The truth is the opposite. They always lied. Then we did not know they lied. Now we know. It is not they who changed, but us.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
It's a totally self inflicted wound too. No, it's really not. In a nutshell, the root cause is the currently pervasive idea that good writing should be available completely for free.
- flukus 7y ago
  The rot had set in long before they were giving away free content on the web. Before then people were paying for the distribution and not the content, the web destroyed the ability to profit off the distribution.
- chongli 7y ago
  Ideas follow from reality. Supply and demand would dictate that infinite supply should drive prices to zero. Isn't that what we're seeing? The other problem is that most people can't tell good writing apart from bad, but that problem is far older than all technology (apart from writing itself, of course).
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    That's a two-way street. Reality also follows from ideas. Perhaps most people can't tell good writing from bad, but the HN crowd is more able than average to distinguish the two. Yet the attitude here boils down to "writing isn't a real job -- if you don't like working for peanuts, then STFU and get a real job!" HN members actively find ways around pay walls, more aggressively than most use ad blockers etc. Most people here are well heeled and can afford to pay for subscriptions, but the dominant attitude is "fuck no to that -- writing should be free!"
    - chongli 7y ago
      It isn't just a dichotomy that bad writers produce bad writing and good writers produce good writing. Good writers are even better at producing bad writing, because they produce bad writing that masquerades as good. We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.

projektfu 7y ago

All modern forms of yellow journalism.

lotsofpulp 7y ago

Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?

iagovar 7y ago
Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us! I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awful job. I felt that the story they made up was only tangentially related to reality.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Ultimately, both views are true. We do not "demand" it with regular market means, but it's important to remember that free markets tend to structurally favor incrementally cutting corners. Even assuming we've demanded good journalism in the past (which is doubtful), we'd still end up where we are. As for media self-inflicting it upon itself, well, they shouldn't have started cutting corners. But since "media" is really a lot of competing actors, "not cutting corners for short-term gain" was an impossible outcome anyway - the whole thing has dynamics of a Prisoner's dilemma. My conclusion is that it's less about demanding - the way we fund news, i.e. open and competitive market, is structurally unable to support good journalism. Usually problems like these are solved by governments setting standards and giving funding, but journalism is a special case (it's perceived by many as protection against government overreach), so with that option out, I have no idea how to even begin solving it.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  > Maybe not, but it's still a problem. Of course it's still a problem. The point is that it's actually a much bigger problem than you implied. People blame the media like it's all just down to some greedy jerks making malicious decisions, and if only we could replace them with someone with integrity, everything would be okay. The fact is that we've created an environment where it's nearly impossible for honest, non-sensationalized news to exist. Putting all the blame on the media is like blaming a starving man for stealing bread. They're culpable, certainly, but you're missing the root cause.
sb057 7y ago
That's part of the issue; there is no need for commercial first-hand accounts anymore. If someone on social media is talking about a news event and provides a video documenting their presence, that is about as verified and accurate as you can hope for.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  There absolutely is a need for multiple, verified, consistency and fact checked first hand accounts. One person on social media does not provide an objective and difficult to falsify viewpoint.
- emiliobumachar 7y ago
  Deepfakes are getting more and more accessible... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake
- jandrese 7y ago
  Which is incredibly susceptible to someone with an agenda who wants to spin an narrative and knows how to leverage social media. It's tailor made for propaganda. Joe Schmoe who is actually there doesn't know how to inflate his likes and SEO his account. His voice gets drowned out by the people who are getting paid to push a particular viewpoint. There is no editor providing oversight. No ethics board. No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first.
  - brokenkebab 7y ago
    No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first. And that's exactly how news industry worked always, since invention of press (actually even before, though it wasn't industry back then).
- CM30 7y ago
  You're being downvoted, but to a large extent, you're probably right here. For many topics journalists used to cover, you genuinely don't need them any more, since enthusiasts posting Patreon/donation funded content is at least as good in terms of quality. Tech, games, TV, music, sports, celebrity gossip, all of them can be covered just as well or better by some random guy on YouTube or some online blog site. And that in fact be another reason why the media as a whole is doing so poorly. In the old days, a fair few people read the papers for this stuff. Nowadays they can get the same information elsewhere, without the stories they're less interested in taking up space.

ipython 7y ago

Perhaps it's more a reflection of the incentives at work? How do you drive engagement with your content? Clearly 'clickbait' is (was?) successful at driving traffic, otherwise it wouldn't be called clickbait. Polarization is used successfully by other 'non-political' sites such as YouTube to drive engagement statistics (and hence ad impressions), and so forth. If you're trying to stay afloat in a competitive media environment, what would you do? There is no mass incentive for thought-out, contemplative, long-form journalism. In my opinion, we have dug our own grave - the truth is that the primitive, animal parts of our brain vastly overpower the analytical parts of our brain, and so your 'outrage bait' is a news (or tech) executive's bonus for the year. If the only metric by which we measure anything is $$$, then, well...

parasar1983 7y ago
"Journalism" has a "push" element in addition to "pull"

0815test 7y ago

It's not just media, but the education system as well. More educated people are significantly more, not less likely to fail Intellectual-Turing-Tests about people with opposing views. i.e. far from increasing openness to experience, education itself is functioning much like indoctrination into a fundamentalist religion! The effect starts already at a High-School level and becomes worse and worse as educational attainment rises: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republicans-and-democrats-dont-understand-each-other/592324/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/republican... If this doesn't scare the s--t out of you, I don't know what would.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to, and that very few people actually do. Seems to me to be a problem with the teams.
- 0815test 7y ago
  > What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to I'm not sure that's consistent with the evidence. People are actively getting worse and worse at modeling the other "team", which strongly suggests that polarization is quite real indeed and not just a matter of different labels.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    I'd like to see a comparison between a survey of espoused party values and the oppositions understanding - I wonder if someone was to look at the values that the political leaders are saying and voting for would there be as wide a gap, or would it fall more in line with what people believe of a party and it's members? On a person per person basis there's dehumanizing caricature, but I wonder if you compare it to the party to which the person claims to belong, if it would be as out to lunch.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Democrats with higher education are getting worse and worse at modeling Republicans. I think that means that, in higher education, Republicans get exposed to real Democrats, and Democrats get exposed to a caricature of Republicans.

rchaud 7y ago

What you see is the clickbait. What you don't see are the structural changes to the media landscape over the past 20 years that led to this. Newspapers per 100 million people fell from 1200 (in 1945) to 400 (in 2014). This is from a Brookings study cited in a Wikipedia article on the topic [0]. In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its photographers and tasked journalists to take photos as well as provide the research and writing [1]. How would the quality of your work be affected if you had to do the job of 2 people? The classifieds ads business is dead, and subscriptions have been declining for years because "news on the Internet is free". The only "media" that makes serious money is talk radio, which isn't journalism so much as diatribes of political invective. As it turns out, that's what people are willing to pay for, or at least sit through ads for. If anything, "the media" is giving the people what they want. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performance_in_the_market_(2000%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performa... [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-sun-times-lays-off-all-its-full-time-photographers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-su...

blueboo 7y ago
> The only “media” that makes serious money is ... > Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-news-industry-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new... Hmm
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Obviously rchaud is referring to people that create media, or in this case, the journalists. I don't see what relevance Google's revenue is to this conversation. They found a way to make money by directing people to other people's work.
  - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
    While those "other people" were doing unpaid internships, freelancing, and filing for unemployment insurance. Something seems very profoundly wrong with this picture.

RankingMember 7y ago

It's unfortunate, because while there are many bad actors, there are some outlets that don't employ these tactics that get painted with the same brush. I'm not sure how to make that better.

e40 7y ago

The Washington Examiner is a horrible source for anything. Maybe that was your point? (That link in your comment doesn't work for me.)

lowdose 7y ago

Fabricating attention.

mtberatwork 7y ago

> It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs... The media isn't one unified conglomerate. It's like equating the entire tech industry to just SV gig economy startups.

scarejunba 7y ago

The truth is the opposite. They always lied. Then we did not know they lied. Now we know. It is not they who changed, but us.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

It's a totally self inflicted wound too. No, it's really not. In a nutshell, the root cause is the currently pervasive idea that good writing should be available completely for free.

flukus 7y ago
The rot had set in long before they were giving away free content on the web. Before then people were paying for the distribution and not the content, the web destroyed the ability to profit off the distribution.
chongli 7y ago
Ideas follow from reality. Supply and demand would dictate that infinite supply should drive prices to zero. Isn't that what we're seeing? The other problem is that most people can't tell good writing apart from bad, but that problem is far older than all technology (apart from writing itself, of course).
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  That's a two-way street. Reality also follows from ideas. Perhaps most people can't tell good writing from bad, but the HN crowd is more able than average to distinguish the two. Yet the attitude here boils down to "writing isn't a real job -- if you don't like working for peanuts, then STFU and get a real job!" HN members actively find ways around pay walls, more aggressively than most use ad blockers etc. Most people here are well heeled and can afford to pay for subscriptions, but the dominant attitude is "fuck no to that -- writing should be free!"
  - chongli 7y ago
    It isn't just a dichotomy that bad writers produce bad writing and good writers produce good writing. Good writers are even better at producing bad writing, because they produce bad writing that masquerades as good. We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.