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You've heard of the thin blue line, well this is the thin grey line. There's no attempt to stop any downhill trend. If they wanted that, they'd write to infor
by Natsu 6y ago
You've heard of the thin blue line, well this is the thin grey line.
There's no attempt to stop any downhill trend. If they wanted that, they'd write to inform and attempt to give all relevant facts. Instead, they curate what the public is allowed to be showed, happily trumping up juicy anonymous rumors one moment and then failing to report well-documented, relevant facts the next.
They're losing because that information is getting out anyhow and every time it does, they lose a little more of the public trust. Gell-Mann amnesia remains in full effect, but a lot more people are simply unplugging. Legacy media is facing something much worse for them than a "war"--they're facing utter irrelevance as people figure out that they're mostly using unlinked online sources anyhow and we can completely bypass the middlemen.
Constant outrage porn is terribly unhealthy for your heart, anyhow, and if you have any friends, you'll hear about anything big enough to be important anyhow and can look into the original sources (if any).
I don't bother with science reporting at all, for example. I hear about anything worth noticing on HN or similar channels and then I read the actual scientific paper should I care to, rather than some journalist's half-baked summary thereof.
- wutbrodo 6y ago> I don't bother with science reporting at all, for example. I hear about anything worth noticing on HN or similar channels and then I read the actual scientific paper should I care to, rather than some journalist's half-baked summary thereof. It's utterly shocking how often news articles summarize a paper incorrectly in some central, significant way. It's gotten to the point that, as you say, reading the paper and the comments on a sufficiently informed forum is my baseline for getting information about science one might care about. That's obviously a lot of work, so you can't do it for everything, but the second-place option is to accept that you're not informed about the topic and don't consider it worth informing yourself about. Reading science reporting is often literally worse than not being informed on the topic at all.
- thu2111 6y agoPart of this is not the journalists fault, though. Or it is, but only in the sense that they should be more adversarial. Very often when I read bad journalism, it's based on a bad academic paper in which the university press or even the paper's abstract has lied about what's actually inside it. To fix this would require journalists to both read and understand the contents of every paper they base a report on. Arguably they need to do that, but, I don't believe that's ever been the standard used before. They generally don't expect "respectable" people like academics, institutional spokespeople etc to flat out lie to them even though it keeps happening.