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The second complaint seems to be complaining about Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap); historically, Sturgeon's law has been nearly as inviolable as con
by ecuzzillo 16y ago
The second complaint seems to be complaining about Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap); historically, Sturgeon's law has been nearly as inviolable as conservation of angular momentum.
If anything, I suspect that mainstream journalism has never been orders of magnitude better than it is now. It's just that back in the day, we didn't have bloggers with photo essays showing us what we could be reading instead, so our standards were different.
- khill 16y agoI disagree with your second point in one sense - overall, journalism might be worse than in years past. However, the problem is that the editorial standards for journalism have been relaxed because the news organizations need to publish news stories 24/7 on tv and the Internet to compete. There are still great journalists doing excellent work. However, their contribution has less impact because of the overall signal-to-noise ratio and also because we don't have enough great journalists to fill up a 24-hour news day. It's similar to expansion in professional sports leagues. It's wonderful that new markets may get teams but that waters down the quality of the overall product because adding more teams doesn't mean you're adding more great players.
- beefman 16y agoI never consume or discuss things in the mainstream media. I got my news coverage of 9/11 entirely from the Onion. But distortions about this topic are far too damaging to our future to go unchallenged. Energy policy failure is the only credible existential threat to post-Malthusian society I can think of.