27 ms·

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

387 points by apsec112 6y ago

dimitrios1 6y ago
> The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day Well ain't this the cold, hard truth, eh HN? How many times have we seen science and technology just completely butchered, twisted, manipulated, or sometimes, all three, by the "truth-seeking journalists" over there at the establishment media companies? Yet we [willfully] ignorantly turn the page to the next section, say on sports or local affairs, and assume we are being fed facts.
- altcognito 6y ago
  More dangerous are the people who would implore you to ignore all sources from what they perceive are enemies and pay attention only to their (or your own) bubble and prejudices. Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag. This submissions feels more like launching point for arguing, little value to community.
  - throwaway212135 6y ago
    How nice of you to choose what what you think we are capable of discussing.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    Lot's of assumptions in this here reply that I would be happy to report back to you are incorrect (such as the one that I or others who feel this way subscribe to a certain particular "bubble", or that I am suggesting in any way shape or form you ignore anything) And since you brought up feelings, this reply to my post feels like I may have struck a nerve with one of the aforementioned "establishment media companies" that you may hold near and dear to your heart. Is this how constructive conversation works? How about this: let's talk about the situation I alluded to in my original comment, something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Something that has countless documented occurrences in (sorry to use this word again) establishment media companies. Does this meet your criteria for providing value to the community?
    - altcognito 6y ago
      Claiming someone is responding to you is "triggered" is tiresome. Another red flag, and yes, you're fitting a particular profile. A constructive conversation can still be had, but I'm not particularly interested in Gell-Mann Amnesia which you alluded to in your last post because I [don't] think a focus on "newspapers" is very accurate or interesting. Newspapers are no different than anything else. Errors are found in all writing. My only points are: Evaluating truth based on the identity of the source instead of the content in question is not a good approach. Journals, thesis can and are all written with errors and misleading information. I stand by original comment that this thread and the content was put here to cause injury to the a persons confidence that they can know what is happening in the world from reading the news. Which is a very particular viewpoint.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Best to look at raw data and original sources whenever possible. The media is an unreliable middleman.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      on finding primary sources and analysing secondary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897577
  - liability 6y ago
    > Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag. That's pretty flimsy evidence to accuse somebody of wrongthink.
    - altcognito 6y ago
      It's an ill defined phrase. I didn't accuse anyone of "wrongthink", whatever that means.
      - liability 6y ago
        By 'wrongthink' I'm refering to the insinuation that people who use such a phrase might be suspected of being 'dangerous'. Dangerous as in "More dangerous are the people who would [...]" Use of the phrase "establishment media companies" seems like poor evidence for accusing somebody of being dangerous. But perhaps I misread your comment and the remark about red flags had nothing to do with your previous remark about dangerous people?
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    Tell me honestly please. Would you rather trust a media company that is funded by the government or one that is not? The whole "establishment media companies" thing is not just a joke but rather actual companies that try to portray narratives that work out for them.
  - disown 6y ago
    > More dangerous are the people who would implore you to ignore all sources from what they perceive are enemies and pay attention only to their (or your own) bubble and prejudices. Okay. > Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag. Wait. Aren't you doing what you say is the "more dangerous"? > This submissions feels more like launching point for arguing, little value to community. So lets nip it in the bud and prevent discussion? Your comment feels like an attempt to curtail an interesting discussion before it happens because it threatens your own bubble and prejudices.
    - altcognito 6y ago
      I'm labeling specific content based on reason, not using weakly defined identity as a flag for concern. So, similar concerns, different approaches that yield very different results.
      - dimitrios1 6y ago
        Ah yes, the "I'm really the one being reasonable here" deflection.
- onorton 6y ago
  There's a name for this cognitive bias but I always forget what it's called. Something to do with the reader's expertise in one field being able to pick out flaws but not in other fields from the same source.
  - waihtis 6y ago
    Gell-Mann Amnesia: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
draw_down 6y ago
Every generation thinks they invented sex, and lying.
mrfusion 6y ago
As an exercise, go read the front page of cnn.com right now. Do you still believe all of it?
- busterarm 6y ago
  Conspiracy-theories and fear-mongering. Tribalism coming out in force with these downvotes. This is why there's a walkaway movement. This is a network that literally had to settle a libel suit and has more coming.
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  I get the impression that cnn.com looks like an entertainment site, not a news site.
  - alpha_squared 6y ago
    I think this sort of holds true for any modern news org in the west (and possibly world-wide). Look at the profit incentives and it makes sense which way reporting trends will go. The more outrageous/unbelievable the story, the more eyeballs; the more eyeballs, the more ad revenue. Some news orgs definitely take more liberty than others in bending the facts of a story just enough to carve out a demographic niche that they can depend on to keep coming back.
    - glial 6y ago
      Business models based on advertising revenue are ruining the world.
      - rs999gti 6y ago
        > Business models based on advertising revenue are ruining the world. What else do news agencies have to make money? The could sell stories and news for a subscription. But the news can be had for free in other places. They can't really sell classifieds anymore since Craigslist, Facebook, and forums have taken those posting monies away.
goodluckchuck 6y ago
> Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. Damn. > I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; Double Damn.
gxqoz 6y ago
By the American Revolution, newspapers were getting closer to our modern perception of them. But for the hundreds of years between their ostensible invention in Germany and the late 18th century they were quite different. Many only reported foreign news (in part to avoid domestic topics that may have been more sensitive). They offered very little in terms of editorial. In France, one particularly dull one was granted a monopoly, stopping competition. Andrew Pettegree's Invention of the News covers this in much greater detail: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/19/invention-news-andrew-pettegree-alain-de-botton https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/19/invention-news... One other interesting anecdote from the book: For quite some time, the identity of who was conveying the news was paramount. A nobleman's wild story would be given more stock from contemporary audiences than several eyewitness accounts from commoners.
- dublin 6y ago
  Fake News is far more common than people think (not just the Gell-Mann effect, but that helps...) I quit trusting anything I saw in the media in 1998, when my wife and I saw NBC totally faking a hurricane report in Corpus Christi. The reporter was in a rain slicker, and there was a lackey standing off-camera with a hose spraying water. Corpus was on the dry side of a hurricane deep in the Gulf that wound up hitting near Yucatan - winds were up, but there wasn't a cloud for 400 miles. Fake News then, even faker news now.
  - war1025 6y ago
    Actual news these days comes from message boards such as this. TV / Radio news is little better than entertainment. The trouble the news industry is having is that you can get an equal amount of information from social media without all the holier-than-thou garbage coming from news anchors.
    - Loughla 6y ago
      I don't know why, but the thought that 'trustworthy' news sources are pseudo-anonymous or actually anonymous sources on a message board scares the ever-loving-shit out of me.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
082349872349872 6y ago
Credibility of seventeenth century publications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859546 === Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon have the day off from Hell, so they go up to check out the Washington DC military parade. "Look at those M1s," says Alexander, "if only I'd had them I wouldn't have had to prematurely declare victory in southern asia!" "Look at those F-35s," says Caesar, "if only I'd had them I would've captured all of persia!" "Look at this cable station," says Napoleon, peering into the window of the Union Trust Bar, "if only I'd had it no one would ever have heard of Waterloo!" Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVbH1BVXywY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVbH1BVXywY
InfiniteRand 6y ago
The fact that no information sources can be trusted completely should be a call to humility both in individual decisions and public decision making. On a side note, I wonder if Thomas Jefferson had so low an opinion of the press pre-1800 (before he was elected and when he was defending the right of the press to be critical of the Adams administration)
dalbasal 6y ago
When I was 15, there was a bus bombing near my school. A kid in my class was the grandson of a well known politician. A newspaper ran with a completely made up story about how it was his bus line, and how the grandfather had panicked. A few days later a fact checker called his mom. Not sure if they ran a retraction. It seemed incredibly disrespectful to those who were on the bus. Two died. About a year after that, some kids that I knew were arrested for cannabis use. The story made the news. Some of it was true, but some was made up. The made up parts were embellishments, they made the story better. Age gaps were exaggerated, romantic narratives inserted... I think most people who are in the vicinity of a news story irl have such experiences. Often the lies are minor, but just like with ordinary people who tell lies... the little lies make you disbelieve everything they say. We kind of expect this from book authors and documentarians. Their job is to get a good narrative going. No one thinks "Tiger King" is an honest telling. IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient. TJ should have understood this. He was a pamphleteer after all. The rights of man is pure fiction, to quote Yuval Noah Harari. If you dissect a person, you will find no rights inside. Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  I don't quite follow how the narrative makes it more important than the facts. I guess we have define what ideas we expect the news to deliver.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Many people die every day. This isn't news, nor is it meaningful to us on more than an ambient level. The narratives that these deaths fit into make them meaningful. The stories of people dying of covid. People dying of political violence. If drug deaths or suicide rates are increasing, and it's been making news then associated deaths are a part of this narrative.
- metalliqaz 6y ago
robomartin 6y ago
Here's the full text of the letter between Jefferson and Norvell. Very interesting. http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl179.php http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letter... I've often wondered if the protections afforded to the press in the first amendment of the US Constitution could have benefited from greater clarity. What I mean by this is that I sincerely doubt the authors intended to protect lies, deceit and libel. It would make no sense whatsoever to create a law that effectively says "You can lie cheat and steal all you want and this shall be protected by the highest law in the land". Here's the text from the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Some might say: Well, libel is addressable through other legislation. Well, yes and no. It just so happens I was involved in a libel case many decades ago. In this case a newsletter (this was before internet days) had given a competitor a monthly column to author. This competitor decided to dedicate one column to attack our company and print a bunch of outright lies about our products. Things like "they don't test", "they ship their customers untested products", etc. I mean, this guy knew nothing about us and yet he focused an entire page to defaming me and my company. A meeting with my attorney resulted in letters to the publication's entire board as well as the author/competitor. The only way I can characterize the reaction from the other side was "they shit in their pants". I came to learn a libel lawsuit is a very serious and potentially financially crippling event for someone without the means. Large companies can manage them but individuals can lose their home, savings, job, etc. I wasn't interested in destroying lives or taking their home and savings. They agreed to print a solid retraction, fire the competitor/author and hire someone without skin in the game to pen that column. Here's the problem: Retractions don't work. We saw an immediate and lasting hit to product sales. It took about a year to recover from the hit piece. Reputation is something that is hard to regain, particularly when people enter a fearful mental state. In retrospect I should have been smarter and should have gone for a financial settlement of sorts to compensate for the damage they caused. Our competitor actually gained sales and status in the industry as a result of this hit piece. My point is that lies are like climbing to the top of a hill with a feather pillow, ripping it open and letting the winds take the feathers in all directions. Fixing the damage caused by lies requires finding every single feather, which is impossible. Sometimes I think we need to rethink this one aspect of the first amendment and either modify it or bolster it externally (through separate legislation) in order to prevent the kinds of lies and manipulation that have been a part of the press since, well, according to Jefferson, the very founding of this nation.
smolder 6y ago
This of course has echoes in the present. I think the public may not be better informed/closer to the truth than 20 years ago, but not much worse either. A lot of things probably just weren't widely reported or could stay under the radar before the internet and social media took over. Now when "undesirable news" inevitably gets out, it has to be countered with contradictory narratives and misinformation. It's gotten to the point that aligning yourself politically one way or the other implies you must adopt a volume of their favored fiction in addition to a shared interpretation of the real facts.
- clairity 6y ago
  > "It's gotten to the point that aligning yourself politically one way or the other implies you must adopt a volume of their favored fiction in addition to a shared interpretation of the real facts." being truly independent is a lonely row to hoe in my experience. nobody likes or trusts you, because you're not all in on their side. despite this very real cost, more and more people are adopting an indepedent stance, which i find hopeful.
  - swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
    Those that adopt an independent stance are often much more agreeable to get along with. After all, they aren't usually the ones interjecting political nonsense into discussions every chance they get.
jungletime 6y ago
"If You Don’t Read the Newspaper You Are Uninformed, If You Do Read the Newspaper You Are Misinformed" Mark Twain
danielam 6y ago
In this vein, "The Free Press" by Hilaire Belloc[0]. [0] https://archive.org/details/freepress00bellgoog/page/n12/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/freepress00bellgoog/page/n12/mod...
WheelsAtLarge 6y ago
News organizations have to compete for people's attention so they present the news in a way that impacts people's emotions most strongly. Fear is a favorite subject. Most news is framed in a way that highlights how it MAY negatively effect the reader. FEAR is a very effective way to get and keep people's attention. Also, the news has to compete with entertainment so it's entertaining. It's the first "Reality TV." You may get some information that you can use but the goal is to keep your attention by entertaining you. Most people would be better informed by reading a newspaper once a week and spending the other free time reading a good book. Everyday news is a waste of time.
- minimuffins 6y ago
  This post is unfairly downvoted. Downvoting is for content that violates community norms. This post doesn't do that. If you don't agree, just say why. Don't downvote.
  - minimuffins 6y ago
    This post is unfairly downvoted. Downvoting is for content that violates community norms. This post doesn't do that. If you don't agree, just say why. Don't downvote.
    - krapp 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
quacked 6y ago
A primary concern with "the news" is that it has no incentive to be correct, especially when it is reporting on predictions. Consider a situation where a respected economist releases a report that predicts a high likelihood of economic recession. "The news" will circulate something like "HIGH PROBABILITY OF RECESSION, SAYS FAMED ECONOMIST". The impending recession will be the talk of the people for the next several weeks. If the recession arrives, "the news" will report on the economic bloodbath, credit itself for reporting on the prediction of the recession in a timely manner, and give itself awards for accuracy in reporting. If the recession does not arrive, "the news" will report on the surprising market strength and why economists predicted the future incorrectly, credit itself for reporting on the inaccuracy of our once-great financial system, and give itself awards for accuracy in reporting.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  A related aspect is that a nice, solid, impartial fact-based news organization will often report on what various public figures have said. Since they are impartial, objective, and just reporting the facts, they will of course refrain from commenting on the truth of said declarations - that would be the reporter's biases showing! "X says Y" is objective news. "Y is actually not true" is journalists showing their biases!
  - quacked 6y ago
    You're right. It gets really gnarly, really quickly. "X says Y" is objective news, but it is extremely difficult to evaluate Y without deep knowledge of both the background of Y and the reliability of X. "Y is actually not true" is partial, biased journalism, but can also serve as critical information about the truth of Y, or the reliability of X! The safest bet is to be aware of what the news is claiming, but remember at all times that the news is a signal repeater, not a signal generator. Whenever possible, one must find primary documents or videos.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
“ I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. “ This is the best quote, because they sensed to be true what we now know is true for pew research data. The more you watch and read the news, the more likely you are to be less informed about the state of things. This is obviously the case when you recognize that the media focuses on the long tail of interesting topics. The average is never interesting enough to sell clicks/papers, so the entire focus is on outlier events (this is how Trump got focused on and eventually elected).
loughnane 6y ago
This dovetails with something I've been thinking much about recently: providing a classical education, or at least a dose of it, to my kids. Jefferson was a big proponent of this as well [0] My reasoning is that there are few other venues that young people, in their formative years, encounter such examples of deep critical thinking. I used to think it snobbery to reference Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, etc. But reading the Republic, Apology, Ethics, etc. really prompts you to think about your life and how it relates to other in a society in a very meaningful way. It also teaches you to be more critical of all ideas. It seems to me that such perspectives are more important now than they've ever been. Jefferson and others have espoused the idea that an educated populace is required for a functioning democracy. While that may have been true in the 18th century, it is certainly more poignant in a world where people have an instant and unending stream of comment and opinion coming to them wherever they are. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_education#Views_on_classical_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_education...
- simonsarris 6y ago
  A classical and a mythological education are both important and missing today. I wrote recently: > A mythological education is distinct from the common school subjects. It builds in the mind intuition for second-order effects, for the first lesson a child learns from one hundred stories is that every thing you do will have unintended consequences, something years of schoolwork fails to teach. Myths give us shared art and common culture—a set of characters with which we can play in and enjoy together. In any culture rich with myths, their vocabulary is enlarged far beyond words, to allegories and metaphors. The quality of thought follows. (To this end I've been writing a book of fables, mostly for my children, but serializing them by newsletter right now, which is turning out more popular than I expected.)
  - sixstringtheory 6y ago
    I think this is very insightful, and is touched on quite a bit in Harari's Sapiens, which is alluded to in a sibling to parent post, which also mentions Jefferson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364993 I picked up an old copy of Grimm's Tales on a whim and read some every now and then before bedtime. Also Aesop's fables just to refresh my memory of them. I enjoy them both and think it's a worthwhile format.
pryelluw 6y ago
Same can and should be applied to websites (including this one).
lqet 6y ago
This reads like it is a statement about today's press > Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
hprotagonist 6y ago
It is always, always worth remembering the truly vituperous hatred of the election of 1800. (and the fact that newspapers were truly partisan outfits) "don't vote for that guy, he's a french traitor who burns bibles! if you elect jefferson, rape and murder will be legal!" "oh yeah? well, my opponent's gunning to marry his kid off to the british crown and make us colonists again and establish an Adams dynasty!"
blhack 6y ago
It's just so sad. The biggest one lately for me has been watching the riots which are happening all over the US. The really crazy thing is that all of these things are livestreamed usually by 10s of people in every city, who are standing a few feet from the people burning buildings and attacking people. You can virtually attend all of these things from your office. To watch buildings burning, people chanting that they want to abolish the police, or burn peoples homes "fire fire gentrifier.", "out of your homes and into the streets" (while throwing things at windows, spray painting the outsides of homes, and shooting fireworks at homes), "all cops are bastards" etc. And then to see reported in the news that these people are "peaceful". It's a sort of paranoid schizophrenia that I think we're seeing. People are watching their own cities burn, then reading CNN say that it's all fake, and that there is such a thing as peaceful arson, or a peaceful riot, that somehow looting is justified, and repeating that. The news isn't just wrong at this point, they are actively trying to mislead people. It's really, really awful.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  I would bet the press is talking about different people than the ones you are watching.
  - refurb 6y ago
    It’s not that hard to find examples. There are even left leaning reporters who are truly dumbfounded by the spin. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1300243540497166341?s=20 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1300243540497166341?s=20
    - djur 6y ago
      Which examples and which left-leaning reporters?
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Don't think that just because you're your own editor you can't be deceived by editing. You're feeding yourself with the material that you're seeking out. edit: just spend a day only looking up the millions peacefully marching, rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams. (Also, give me some information about the people you've seen attacking and burning private residences, because I don't know of a single example of this.) After the day you can go back to watching what you normally watch, but if you can't find all of these boring people walking through the streets with signs, I don't know what to tell you. If the millions protesting actually had the aim of burning middle-class people out of their homes, middle-class people would have been burned out of their homes. If there's any problem imo, it's that the protests are generally unfocused street wandering. If there were a specific focus or target, they would be effective at accomplishing that target. But when the target becomes anything other than generalized racism, the ad-hoc coalitions fall apart.
insidepgsmind 6y ago
I love this part: “I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.“ When I read the headlines or scan articles here on HN I’m under the impression that I know things and understand things, but it’s really just surface level. I like the idea of ignoring news and instead read quarterly long form magazines or books. The really important stuff will bubble to the surface and be examined more intelligently.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 6y ago
  Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to. I realize it's a borderline case, but a username like that is going to forever exert a trollish skew on every thread (especially on this site, given the particular celebrity you're referencing) and we've learned that it's better to deal with this earlier than later, so I've banned the account. Happy to rename and unban it if you want to pick a more neutral username. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20trollish%20username https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
tantaman 6y ago
picture of the original writing: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=text https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
njarboe 6y ago
I would pay quite a bit for a newspaper in Jefferson's proposed format. To be quite certain that something is true for current events, the reports on those events would likely have to be delayed days or weeks after they broke. I would be fine with that and is the complete opposite of today's instant, viral seeking, click-bait, emotionally charged media landscape. Edit:It would be even better if this paper was connected to a prediction market where people could bet real money on if the "Truths" and "Probabilities" events will be shown to be false at certain time steps in the future.
- Shoreleave 6y ago
  The closest thing might be the bloomberg terminal. It costs 2k a month, but you can get a news feed of the topics you care about and it will be accurate and factual. And then people instantly make bets based on that news.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    > it will be accurate and factual We're still waiting for the Supermicro retraction.
    - njarboe 6y ago
      That was a "hard to believe this is true, but it is in Bloomburg" moment for me. A nice summary of the situation a year after the article came out in 2018 can be found here[1]. I wonder what their rational for not retracting the story. Just one little line somewhere that few would notice would have put the controversy to rest, but if they did it now. so late after the fact, it would just add to the intrigue instead of diffuse it.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    2k a month is not in my current (one can dream) budget for news sources, but I would like to check one out sometime. I don't need the real time option, which is much of what people pay the 2k for, so maybe a 15 minute delay option, like there used to be with free stock quotes, could be a lot cheaper.
abrbhat 6y ago
Whenever I think of media, I keep going back to Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter. It seems a very appropriate metaphor that there is no personal ill-will on the part of the reporter but still the quill just keeps writing in a scandalous way.
minimuffins 6y ago
The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material into maximally entertaining spectacle. The factual raw material can even be done away with sometimes as evidenced by how much of the news is just media reporting on itself (often centering on Twitter!). There is not a technical solution to any of this. "Decentralization" into forums and social media and whatnot is not a solution. At best it's a good way for some of us to discuss the problem among ourselves as it unfolds. Decentralization is better termed "de-professionalization." The institutions which used to, at the very least, dedicate serious resources to going out into the world and gathering facts no longer function properly or just don't exist. I remember seeing an interview with Christopher Hitchens where somebody asked him how he informed himself about the world, what news he liked to read. He said, not much. Mostly he relied on people he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. Must be nice!
- screye 6y ago
  > Mostly he relied on people he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. Must be nice It is not that difficult. In the world of internet, there are many prolific writers who have lived very public lives. There are quite a few specific opinion/news writers who I've read long enough to know their biases or the lack there of, depending on what they are reporting. These individual actors being the feet-on-the-ground lends a large amount of credibility to them as well.
- andi999 6y ago
  Customers of newspaper pay for the political aligned viewpoint, most people like their viewpoint confirmed. Look out for people needing information to make money. Money does not care about political bias. E.g. I think the "financial times" quite unbiased (of course there is no perfection).
maynman 6y ago
Reminds me of Ecclesiastes. "There is nothing new under the sun".
air7 6y ago
I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately. It seems to me that the nefarious ways in which modern media operates are responsible for a large portion of the problems we see in the world today. That's because the world in general is doing better than ever in almost any measurable parameter, yet the general notion is that everything is going to shit. This has real world consequences such as violent riots, couples deciding not to bring a child into "this terrible world", depression etc. The mere choice of what is news worthy and how much coverage any one item gets already warps the mind's heuristics about how often this type of event occurs and thus how important it is. Add to that the "artistic licence" that reporters take (maliciously or otherwise) and the situation becomes really dire. The reason for this problem is that society has decided that news should be a form of entertainment, and news outlets are for-profit companies. Considering these incentives the current state seems inevitable. This has also led me to think of hypothetical solutions. I would argue that "The News" should be a non-profit, state funded entity (or entities). However, these must very much not be state controlled but rather allowed to operate independently. A similar institution is the Judicial System, which doesn't need to worry about clickbaiting titles for its rulings in order to fund itself, yet it has, ideally, full autonomy to procecute people in power if the need arises and we (society) take any attempt of collusion between state and court to be unacceptable. Similarly, an independent yet tax funded news agency can deliver boring, unentertaining news and facts to help save us from ourselves.
- kaesar14 6y ago
  I think there are plenty of things going wrong in the world as it exists today, at least as an American, that would dissuade me from having children. The exploding costs of childcare, healthcare, and education, let alone the impending crisis of climate change and ecological collapse, are all pretty scary. None of those things need to be exaggerated by the media.
  - ledauphin 6y ago
    I tend to think this proves the point. Healthcare and childcare and education are in fact (largely though not comprehensively) nonessential goods that are already in very many ways far better than they were 50 years ago. Childcare wasn't even a thing except for the incredibly wealthy until pretty recently. It would be very difficult to argue that the overall options for post-secondary education (and the number of people taking advantage of them) are not better than 30 years ago, even though their costs are known to be rising much faster than their quality. Most of the kinds of healthcare that are clearly price-gouging were not even categories of healthcare 50 years ago, and most of the ones that were are so qualitatively better now that we're comparing apples and oranges. Etc. Climate change is the one where by almost any objective measure we're headed for potentially irrecoverable catastrophe, and yet this one doesn't actually receive media coverage commensurate with the weight of the potential risk and its probability.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
The fundamental problem with news reporting is that so much of it has political implications, and political opinion among the public is bimodal. You can look at the two left-right humps on a spectrum of political beliefs and see two different worldviews. If you try to report the facts on any story that has a political angle, you're probably going to alienate one of those worldview modes. And god forbid the facts fall right in the middle and you alienate both.
joshjs 6y ago
"The lies of the day" is a great phrase. Stealin' it. Thanks, TJ.
notadoc 6y ago
You can experience this directly yourself on a near daily basis right now, here's all you need to do. - Go on social media and find the endless streams of videos showing mayhem and violence at many of the protests / riots going on throughout the country - Read the 'news' stories about those events, which rarely describe anything resembling what you see in the videos Do you believe the regurgitator who likely wasn't at the scene and probably has bias, or your lying eyes?
erikig 6y ago
I had a chuckle at this proposal: "...Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters: heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies"
m0zg 6y ago
Fiery, but mostly peaceful article, written by an austere scholar and revered military leader.
monkeynotes 6y ago
I don't understand how we as a society turn a blind eye to being surrounded by lies and misdirection. It's well known to be a folly and well documented that governments the world over abuse their position of first hand knowledge to redirect and re-cast truth, and manipulate public opinion in their favour[1][2]. Perhaps at my age I have come to see patterns and have come to understand that pretty much everything I don't have first hand experience of is likely to be distorted to a lesser or greater extent. This is not only true of news and public discourse, but also in my personal life. People naturally bend reality to fit their beliefs, world views, and often to just tell a good story. I am sure many adults are aware of this, but we never really talk about it. Children are not educated about the nature of this problem. We are not taught to think about the nature of information we consume, and yet many of us know our lives are surrounded by lies and manipulators. Manipulative advertising and government deception, both of which have reams of psychological research backing their strategies, dominate a majority of our lives and yet we don't educate each other as such. I am very sad to come to realize that TV shaped my beliefs growing up, and it was mostly based on myths driven by advertising dollars. Obviously entertainment is not going away, and nor should it, but we should have discourse highlighting who drives the narrative. One of the few facts we can know is little of what we learn is truly verifiable - knowing that is hugely helpful and allows us to make better decisions about what we value in life. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/who-lied-to-whom https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/who-lied-to-wh... [2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/february/truth-about-tonkin https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/f...
- lemonlizzie 6y ago
  Well stated.
mellowdream 6y ago
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson "Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists." Norman Mailer "Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." George Bernard Shaw "In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has." Mark Twain "I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets." Napoleon "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X "The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." Oscar Wilde "The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word journalist." Soren Kierkegaard "Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends." - Wittgenstein "The newspaper epitomises the goal of today’s educational system, just as the journalist, servant of the present moment, has taken the place of the genius, our salvation from the moment and leader for the ages." - Nietzsche https://web.archive.org/web/20180327031901/http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180327031901/http://www.aarons...
blueridge 6y ago
Good books to read on the subject: 1) Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle 2) Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America 3) Jacques Elull, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes
toss1 6y ago
Modern Analog in USA: those watching the most politically oriented sources, Fox & MSNBC are actually WORSE informed than those who watch no news at all.[1] And those who watch actual sources (in the case of this study, the Sunday AM interview shows) are best informed. [1] http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/ http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/
elwell 6y ago
Nor can UberEats ETA's be trusted
tdeck 6y ago
Most of the comments here are missing a big part of the context: newspapers in the early 1800s didn't do journalism as we know it today. Most relied entirely on rumors and letters that crossed their desk, combined with cribbing old stories from the foreign press. Newspaper staff was often just one or two people doing the writing, marketing, and distribution (and often the typesetting too). There wasn't this idea that a journalist should be conducting interviews or investigating stories or even arriving at the scene of anything. Most papers were funded largely by political patronage as well. For a great book on the history of American journalism I recommend "Infamous Scribblers" by Eric Burns.
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refurb 6y ago
What’s more insidious than the accuracy of what you read in the media is the control the media has on what they actually cover. If you cast a wide enough net, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that the media is very selective about what they cover. One human rights issue may get front page coverage, while another is completely ignored. The vast majority of people think they are focused on important issues, when in fact, they are just focused on what the media tells them is important.
- deleted 6y ago
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kitotik 6y ago
“We’ll Know Our Disinformation Program Is Complete When Everything the American Public Believes Is False.” —- Former CIA Director William Casey
refurb 6y ago
One source of geopolitical information I've found to be head and shoulders above the mainstream media is Stratfor. Now before you hit the downvote button and reply "You idiot, it's run by the CIA", hear me out. I got a free trial a few year back and was pretty impressed with: 1) the level of detail, 2) the attempt at focusing on facts 3) the lack of "this is what it means". I was reading an article on stability in Afghanistan and it read like "There are 5 warlords...the warlord in Eastern Afghanistan is X, and used to be aligned with Y, but is now aligned with Z, because of...". It didn't hesitate to go back 50 years to provide context for a given fact. And there wasn't a lot of "this person is good and this person is bad". If you're not interested in the topic it's pretty damn dry reading, but if you are interested, the level of detail is impressive and I came away actually knowing more than when I started. Now of course there is bias in the reports and it will be presented through the filter of Western intelligence agencies, but if they do cover a topic you want more information on, I highly recommend checking it out.
ajkjk 6y ago
Surprised to find this uses "it's" in ways that we would today is are incorrect. Is this letter just wrong or did which is correct change in the last two centuries?
deleted 6y ago
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totetsu 6y ago
This reminds me of the 99pi podcast episode that just re-aired about how the American post office was first set up mostly to share news papers between colonies and build an informed connected population https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-revolutionary-post/transcript https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-revolutionary-pos...
bohrasd 6y ago
Can't believe the mainstream media? Maybe. But you know what's even worse? Social Media. If a newspaper lie to you once a day, social media do that a thousand times a day. And people on social network be like: oh we cant trust the newspaper anymore!
bvinc 6y ago
The problem with this line of thinking isn't that it's wrong. I could complain about the media all day. The problem is that main stream establishment media: NYTimes, APNews, The Guardian, Reuters, etc are the best we have. The people that complain about the media are the people that seek out alternative media. Alternative media is infinity more misleading and misinformed. Thomas Jefferson surely didn't mean that you should turn to alternative media like Twitter and YouTube for your news.
- aero-glide 6y ago
  I like APNews and Reuters. Gaurdian and NYTimes are pretty inaccurate, atleast when they report about my country.
fortyrod 6y ago
I think you can still extract a small amount of useful input from todays media. I usually go with the "inverted axe-grind" metric that upvotes info that goes against an outlet's normal bias. So, anything good CNN says about Trump or anything positive that Fox says about Obama. Those are bad examples as you would wait a while for anything to leak through. Someone needs to point their magic NLP / sentiment thingy at this and automate it. That will give the SEO optimizers something else to work on, anyhow.
tamaharbor 6y ago
Does anyone else fear that this is the very problem that will start ‘Civil War 2’? (Or will journalists call it ‘Civil War II’?)
winter_blue 6y ago
This letter is truly amazing, considering it was written in 1807. I'd say the major mainstream publications have definitely gotten better at having more journalistic integrity. E.g. the NYTimes does check/verify stuff before publishing as far as I'm aware.

387 points by apsec112 6y ago

> The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day Well ain't this the cold, hard truth, eh HN? How many times have we seen science and technology just completely butchered, twisted, manipulated, or sometimes, all three, by the "truth-seeking journalists" over there at the establishment media companies? Yet we [willfully] ignorantly turn the page to the next section, say on sports or local affairs, and assume we are being fed facts.

altcognito 6y ago
More dangerous are the people who would implore you to ignore all sources from what they perceive are enemies and pay attention only to their (or your own) bubble and prejudices. Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag. This submissions feels more like launching point for arguing, little value to community.
- throwaway212135 6y ago
  How nice of you to choose what what you think we are capable of discussing.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  Lot's of assumptions in this here reply that I would be happy to report back to you are incorrect (such as the one that I or others who feel this way subscribe to a certain particular "bubble", or that I am suggesting in any way shape or form you ignore anything) And since you brought up feelings, this reply to my post feels like I may have struck a nerve with one of the aforementioned "establishment media companies" that you may hold near and dear to your heart. Is this how constructive conversation works? How about this: let's talk about the situation I alluded to in my original comment, something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Something that has countless documented occurrences in (sorry to use this word again) establishment media companies. Does this meet your criteria for providing value to the community?
  - altcognito 6y ago
    Claiming someone is responding to you is "triggered" is tiresome. Another red flag, and yes, you're fitting a particular profile. A constructive conversation can still be had, but I'm not particularly interested in Gell-Mann Amnesia which you alluded to in your last post because I [don't] think a focus on "newspapers" is very accurate or interesting. Newspapers are no different than anything else. Errors are found in all writing. My only points are: Evaluating truth based on the identity of the source instead of the content in question is not a good approach. Journals, thesis can and are all written with errors and misleading information. I stand by original comment that this thread and the content was put here to cause injury to the a persons confidence that they can know what is happening in the world from reading the news. Which is a very particular viewpoint.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Best to look at raw data and original sources whenever possible. The media is an unreliable middleman.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    on finding primary sources and analysing secondary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897577
- liability 6y ago
  > Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag. That's pretty flimsy evidence to accuse somebody of wrongthink.
  - altcognito 6y ago
    It's an ill defined phrase. I didn't accuse anyone of "wrongthink", whatever that means.
    - liability 6y ago
      By 'wrongthink' I'm refering to the insinuation that people who use such a phrase might be suspected of being 'dangerous'. Dangerous as in "More dangerous are the people who would [...]" Use of the phrase "establishment media companies" seems like poor evidence for accusing somebody of being dangerous. But perhaps I misread your comment and the remark about red flags had nothing to do with your previous remark about dangerous people?
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  Tell me honestly please. Would you rather trust a media company that is funded by the government or one that is not? The whole "establishment media companies" thing is not just a joke but rather actual companies that try to portray narratives that work out for them.
- disown 6y ago
  > More dangerous are the people who would implore you to ignore all sources from what they perceive are enemies and pay attention only to their (or your own) bubble and prejudices. Okay. > Posts with catch phrases like "establishment media companies" are usually a red flag. Wait. Aren't you doing what you say is the "more dangerous"? > This submissions feels more like launching point for arguing, little value to community. So lets nip it in the bud and prevent discussion? Your comment feels like an attempt to curtail an interesting discussion before it happens because it threatens your own bubble and prejudices.
  - altcognito 6y ago
    I'm labeling specific content based on reason, not using weakly defined identity as a flag for concern. So, similar concerns, different approaches that yield very different results.
    - dimitrios1 6y ago
      Ah yes, the "I'm really the one being reasonable here" deflection.
onorton 6y ago
There's a name for this cognitive bias but I always forget what it's called. Something to do with the reader's expertise in one field being able to pick out flaws but not in other fields from the same source.
- waihtis 6y ago
  Gell-Mann Amnesia: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

draw_down 6y ago

Every generation thinks they invented sex, and lying.

mrfusion 6y ago

As an exercise, go read the front page of cnn.com right now. Do you still believe all of it?

busterarm 6y ago
Conspiracy-theories and fear-mongering. Tribalism coming out in force with these downvotes. This is why there's a walkaway movement. This is a network that literally had to settle a libel suit and has more coming.
intotheabyss 6y ago
I get the impression that cnn.com looks like an entertainment site, not a news site.
- alpha_squared 6y ago
  I think this sort of holds true for any modern news org in the west (and possibly world-wide). Look at the profit incentives and it makes sense which way reporting trends will go. The more outrageous/unbelievable the story, the more eyeballs; the more eyeballs, the more ad revenue. Some news orgs definitely take more liberty than others in bending the facts of a story just enough to carve out a demographic niche that they can depend on to keep coming back.
  - glial 6y ago
    Business models based on advertising revenue are ruining the world.
    - rs999gti 6y ago
      > Business models based on advertising revenue are ruining the world. What else do news agencies have to make money? The could sell stories and news for a subscription. But the news can be had for free in other places. They can't really sell classifieds anymore since Craigslist, Facebook, and forums have taken those posting monies away.

goodluckchuck 6y ago

> Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. Damn. > I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; Double Damn.

gxqoz 6y ago

By the American Revolution, newspapers were getting closer to our modern perception of them. But for the hundreds of years between their ostensible invention in Germany and the late 18th century they were quite different. Many only reported foreign news (in part to avoid domestic topics that may have been more sensitive). They offered very little in terms of editorial. In France, one particularly dull one was granted a monopoly, stopping competition. Andrew Pettegree's Invention of the News covers this in much greater detail: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/19/invention-news-andrew-pettegree-alain-de-botton https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/19/invention-news... One other interesting anecdote from the book: For quite some time, the identity of who was conveying the news was paramount. A nobleman's wild story would be given more stock from contemporary audiences than several eyewitness accounts from commoners.

dublin 6y ago
Fake News is far more common than people think (not just the Gell-Mann effect, but that helps...) I quit trusting anything I saw in the media in 1998, when my wife and I saw NBC totally faking a hurricane report in Corpus Christi. The reporter was in a rain slicker, and there was a lackey standing off-camera with a hose spraying water. Corpus was on the dry side of a hurricane deep in the Gulf that wound up hitting near Yucatan - winds were up, but there wasn't a cloud for 400 miles. Fake News then, even faker news now.
- war1025 6y ago
  Actual news these days comes from message boards such as this. TV / Radio news is little better than entertainment. The trouble the news industry is having is that you can get an equal amount of information from social media without all the holier-than-thou garbage coming from news anchors.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    I don't know why, but the thought that 'trustworthy' news sources are pseudo-anonymous or actually anonymous sources on a message board scares the ever-loving-shit out of me.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

082349872349872 6y ago

Credibility of seventeenth century publications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859546 === Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon have the day off from Hell, so they go up to check out the Washington DC military parade. "Look at those M1s," says Alexander, "if only I'd had them I wouldn't have had to prematurely declare victory in southern asia!" "Look at those F-35s," says Caesar, "if only I'd had them I would've captured all of persia!" "Look at this cable station," says Napoleon, peering into the window of the Union Trust Bar, "if only I'd had it no one would ever have heard of Waterloo!" Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVbH1BVXywY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVbH1BVXywY

InfiniteRand 6y ago

The fact that no information sources can be trusted completely should be a call to humility both in individual decisions and public decision making. On a side note, I wonder if Thomas Jefferson had so low an opinion of the press pre-1800 (before he was elected and when he was defending the right of the press to be critical of the Adams administration)

dalbasal 6y ago

When I was 15, there was a bus bombing near my school. A kid in my class was the grandson of a well known politician. A newspaper ran with a completely made up story about how it was his bus line, and how the grandfather had panicked. A few days later a fact checker called his mom. Not sure if they ran a retraction. It seemed incredibly disrespectful to those who were on the bus. Two died. About a year after that, some kids that I knew were arrested for cannabis use. The story made the news. Some of it was true, but some was made up. The made up parts were embellishments, they made the story better. Age gaps were exaggerated, romantic narratives inserted... I think most people who are in the vicinity of a news story irl have such experiences. Often the lies are minor, but just like with ordinary people who tell lies... the little lies make you disbelieve everything they say. We kind of expect this from book authors and documentarians. Their job is to get a good narrative going. No one thinks "Tiger King" is an honest telling. IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient. TJ should have understood this. He was a pamphleteer after all. The rights of man is pure fiction, to quote Yuval Noah Harari. If you dissect a person, you will find no rights inside. Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously.

nickthemagicman 6y ago
I don't quite follow how the narrative makes it more important than the facts. I guess we have define what ideas we expect the news to deliver.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Many people die every day. This isn't news, nor is it meaningful to us on more than an ambient level. The narratives that these deaths fit into make them meaningful. The stories of people dying of covid. People dying of political violence. If drug deaths or suicide rates are increasing, and it's been making news then associated deaths are a part of this narrative.
metalliqaz 6y ago

robomartin 6y ago

Here's the full text of the letter between Jefferson and Norvell. Very interesting. http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl179.php http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letter... I've often wondered if the protections afforded to the press in the first amendment of the US Constitution could have benefited from greater clarity. What I mean by this is that I sincerely doubt the authors intended to protect lies, deceit and libel. It would make no sense whatsoever to create a law that effectively says "You can lie cheat and steal all you want and this shall be protected by the highest law in the land". Here's the text from the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Some might say: Well, libel is addressable through other legislation. Well, yes and no. It just so happens I was involved in a libel case many decades ago. In this case a newsletter (this was before internet days) had given a competitor a monthly column to author. This competitor decided to dedicate one column to attack our company and print a bunch of outright lies about our products. Things like "they don't test", "they ship their customers untested products", etc. I mean, this guy knew nothing about us and yet he focused an entire page to defaming me and my company. A meeting with my attorney resulted in letters to the publication's entire board as well as the author/competitor. The only way I can characterize the reaction from the other side was "they shit in their pants". I came to learn a libel lawsuit is a very serious and potentially financially crippling event for someone without the means. Large companies can manage them but individuals can lose their home, savings, job, etc. I wasn't interested in destroying lives or taking their home and savings. They agreed to print a solid retraction, fire the competitor/author and hire someone without skin in the game to pen that column. Here's the problem: Retractions don't work. We saw an immediate and lasting hit to product sales. It took about a year to recover from the hit piece. Reputation is something that is hard to regain, particularly when people enter a fearful mental state. In retrospect I should have been smarter and should have gone for a financial settlement of sorts to compensate for the damage they caused. Our competitor actually gained sales and status in the industry as a result of this hit piece. My point is that lies are like climbing to the top of a hill with a feather pillow, ripping it open and letting the winds take the feathers in all directions. Fixing the damage caused by lies requires finding every single feather, which is impossible. Sometimes I think we need to rethink this one aspect of the first amendment and either modify it or bolster it externally (through separate legislation) in order to prevent the kinds of lies and manipulation that have been a part of the press since, well, according to Jefferson, the very founding of this nation.

smolder 6y ago

This of course has echoes in the present. I think the public may not be better informed/closer to the truth than 20 years ago, but not much worse either. A lot of things probably just weren't widely reported or could stay under the radar before the internet and social media took over. Now when "undesirable news" inevitably gets out, it has to be countered with contradictory narratives and misinformation. It's gotten to the point that aligning yourself politically one way or the other implies you must adopt a volume of their favored fiction in addition to a shared interpretation of the real facts.

clairity 6y ago
> "It's gotten to the point that aligning yourself politically one way or the other implies you must adopt a volume of their favored fiction in addition to a shared interpretation of the real facts." being truly independent is a lonely row to hoe in my experience. nobody likes or trusts you, because you're not all in on their side. despite this very real cost, more and more people are adopting an indepedent stance, which i find hopeful.
- swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
  Those that adopt an independent stance are often much more agreeable to get along with. After all, they aren't usually the ones interjecting political nonsense into discussions every chance they get.

jungletime 6y ago

"If You Don’t Read the Newspaper You Are Uninformed, If You Do Read the Newspaper You Are Misinformed" Mark Twain

danielam 6y ago

In this vein, "The Free Press" by Hilaire Belloc[0]. [0] https://archive.org/details/freepress00bellgoog/page/n12/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/freepress00bellgoog/page/n12/mod...

WheelsAtLarge 6y ago

News organizations have to compete for people's attention so they present the news in a way that impacts people's emotions most strongly. Fear is a favorite subject. Most news is framed in a way that highlights how it MAY negatively effect the reader. FEAR is a very effective way to get and keep people's attention. Also, the news has to compete with entertainment so it's entertaining. It's the first "Reality TV." You may get some information that you can use but the goal is to keep your attention by entertaining you. Most people would be better informed by reading a newspaper once a week and spending the other free time reading a good book. Everyday news is a waste of time.

minimuffins 6y ago
This post is unfairly downvoted. Downvoting is for content that violates community norms. This post doesn't do that. If you don't agree, just say why. Don't downvote.
- minimuffins 6y ago
  This post is unfairly downvoted. Downvoting is for content that violates community norms. This post doesn't do that. If you don't agree, just say why. Don't downvote.
  - krapp 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

quacked 6y ago

A primary concern with "the news" is that it has no incentive to be correct, especially when it is reporting on predictions. Consider a situation where a respected economist releases a report that predicts a high likelihood of economic recession. "The news" will circulate something like "HIGH PROBABILITY OF RECESSION, SAYS FAMED ECONOMIST". The impending recession will be the talk of the people for the next several weeks. If the recession arrives, "the news" will report on the economic bloodbath, credit itself for reporting on the prediction of the recession in a timely manner, and give itself awards for accuracy in reporting. If the recession does not arrive, "the news" will report on the surprising market strength and why economists predicted the future incorrectly, credit itself for reporting on the inaccuracy of our once-great financial system, and give itself awards for accuracy in reporting.

tsimionescu 6y ago
A related aspect is that a nice, solid, impartial fact-based news organization will often report on what various public figures have said. Since they are impartial, objective, and just reporting the facts, they will of course refrain from commenting on the truth of said declarations - that would be the reporter's biases showing! "X says Y" is objective news. "Y is actually not true" is journalists showing their biases!
- quacked 6y ago
  You're right. It gets really gnarly, really quickly. "X says Y" is objective news, but it is extremely difficult to evaluate Y without deep knowledge of both the background of Y and the reliability of X. "Y is actually not true" is partial, biased journalism, but can also serve as critical information about the truth of Y, or the reliability of X! The safest bet is to be aware of what the news is claiming, but remember at all times that the news is a signal repeater, not a signal generator. Whenever possible, one must find primary documents or videos.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

“ I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. “ This is the best quote, because they sensed to be true what we now know is true for pew research data. The more you watch and read the news, the more likely you are to be less informed about the state of things. This is obviously the case when you recognize that the media focuses on the long tail of interesting topics. The average is never interesting enough to sell clicks/papers, so the entire focus is on outlier events (this is how Trump got focused on and eventually elected).

loughnane 6y ago

This dovetails with something I've been thinking much about recently: providing a classical education, or at least a dose of it, to my kids. Jefferson was a big proponent of this as well [0] My reasoning is that there are few other venues that young people, in their formative years, encounter such examples of deep critical thinking. I used to think it snobbery to reference Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, etc. But reading the Republic, Apology, Ethics, etc. really prompts you to think about your life and how it relates to other in a society in a very meaningful way. It also teaches you to be more critical of all ideas. It seems to me that such perspectives are more important now than they've ever been. Jefferson and others have espoused the idea that an educated populace is required for a functioning democracy. While that may have been true in the 18th century, it is certainly more poignant in a world where people have an instant and unending stream of comment and opinion coming to them wherever they are. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_education#Views_on_classical_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_education...

simonsarris 6y ago
A classical and a mythological education are both important and missing today. I wrote recently: > A mythological education is distinct from the common school subjects. It builds in the mind intuition for second-order effects, for the first lesson a child learns from one hundred stories is that every thing you do will have unintended consequences, something years of schoolwork fails to teach. Myths give us shared art and common culture—a set of characters with which we can play in and enjoy together. In any culture rich with myths, their vocabulary is enlarged far beyond words, to allegories and metaphors. The quality of thought follows. (To this end I've been writing a book of fables, mostly for my children, but serializing them by newsletter right now, which is turning out more popular than I expected.)
- sixstringtheory 6y ago
  I think this is very insightful, and is touched on quite a bit in Harari's Sapiens, which is alluded to in a sibling to parent post, which also mentions Jefferson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364993 I picked up an old copy of Grimm's Tales on a whim and read some every now and then before bedtime. Also Aesop's fables just to refresh my memory of them. I enjoy them both and think it's a worthwhile format.

pryelluw 6y ago

Same can and should be applied to websites (including this one).

lqet 6y ago

This reads like it is a statement about today's press > Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

hprotagonist 6y ago

It is always, always worth remembering the truly vituperous hatred of the election of 1800. (and the fact that newspapers were truly partisan outfits) "don't vote for that guy, he's a french traitor who burns bibles! if you elect jefferson, rape and murder will be legal!" "oh yeah? well, my opponent's gunning to marry his kid off to the british crown and make us colonists again and establish an Adams dynasty!"

blhack 6y ago

It's just so sad. The biggest one lately for me has been watching the riots which are happening all over the US. The really crazy thing is that all of these things are livestreamed usually by 10s of people in every city, who are standing a few feet from the people burning buildings and attacking people. You can virtually attend all of these things from your office. To watch buildings burning, people chanting that they want to abolish the police, or burn peoples homes "fire fire gentrifier.", "out of your homes and into the streets" (while throwing things at windows, spray painting the outsides of homes, and shooting fireworks at homes), "all cops are bastards" etc. And then to see reported in the news that these people are "peaceful". It's a sort of paranoid schizophrenia that I think we're seeing. People are watching their own cities burn, then reading CNN say that it's all fake, and that there is such a thing as peaceful arson, or a peaceful riot, that somehow looting is justified, and repeating that. The news isn't just wrong at this point, they are actively trying to mislead people. It's really, really awful.

082349872349872 6y ago
I would bet the press is talking about different people than the ones you are watching.
- refurb 6y ago
  It’s not that hard to find examples. There are even left leaning reporters who are truly dumbfounded by the spin. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1300243540497166341?s=20 https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1300243540497166341?s=20
  - djur 6y ago
    Which examples and which left-leaning reporters?
pessimizer 6y ago
Don't think that just because you're your own editor you can't be deceived by editing. You're feeding yourself with the material that you're seeking out. edit: just spend a day only looking up the millions peacefully marching, rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams. (Also, give me some information about the people you've seen attacking and burning private residences, because I don't know of a single example of this.) After the day you can go back to watching what you normally watch, but if you can't find all of these boring people walking through the streets with signs, I don't know what to tell you. If the millions protesting actually had the aim of burning middle-class people out of their homes, middle-class people would have been burned out of their homes. If there's any problem imo, it's that the protests are generally unfocused street wandering. If there were a specific focus or target, they would be effective at accomplishing that target. But when the target becomes anything other than generalized racism, the ad-hoc coalitions fall apart.

insidepgsmind 6y ago

I love this part: “I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.“ When I read the headlines or scan articles here on HN I’m under the impression that I know things and understand things, but it’s really just surface level. I like the idea of ignoring news and instead read quarterly long form magazines or books. The really important stuff will bubble to the surface and be examined more intelligently.

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dang 6y ago
Trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to. I realize it's a borderline case, but a username like that is going to forever exert a trollish skew on every thread (especially on this site, given the particular celebrity you're referencing) and we've learned that it's better to deal with this earlier than later, so I've banned the account. Happy to rename and unban it if you want to pick a more neutral username. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20trollish%20username https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

tantaman 6y ago

picture of the original writing: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=text https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...

njarboe 6y ago

I would pay quite a bit for a newspaper in Jefferson's proposed format. To be quite certain that something is true for current events, the reports on those events would likely have to be delayed days or weeks after they broke. I would be fine with that and is the complete opposite of today's instant, viral seeking, click-bait, emotionally charged media landscape. Edit:It would be even better if this paper was connected to a prediction market where people could bet real money on if the "Truths" and "Probabilities" events will be shown to be false at certain time steps in the future.

Shoreleave 6y ago
The closest thing might be the bloomberg terminal. It costs 2k a month, but you can get a news feed of the topics you care about and it will be accurate and factual. And then people instantly make bets based on that news.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  > it will be accurate and factual We're still waiting for the Supermicro retraction.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    That was a "hard to believe this is true, but it is in Bloomburg" moment for me. A nice summary of the situation a year after the article came out in 2018 can be found here[1]. I wonder what their rational for not retracting the story. Just one little line somewhere that few would notice would have put the controversy to rest, but if they did it now. so late after the fact, it would just add to the intrigue instead of diffuse it.
- njarboe 6y ago
  2k a month is not in my current (one can dream) budget for news sources, but I would like to check one out sometime. I don't need the real time option, which is much of what people pay the 2k for, so maybe a 15 minute delay option, like there used to be with free stock quotes, could be a lot cheaper.

abrbhat 6y ago

Whenever I think of media, I keep going back to Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter. It seems a very appropriate metaphor that there is no personal ill-will on the part of the reporter but still the quill just keeps writing in a scandalous way.

minimuffins 6y ago

The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it. By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material into maximally entertaining spectacle. The factual raw material can even be done away with sometimes as evidenced by how much of the news is just media reporting on itself (often centering on Twitter!). There is not a technical solution to any of this. "Decentralization" into forums and social media and whatnot is not a solution. At best it's a good way for some of us to discuss the problem among ourselves as it unfolds. Decentralization is better termed "de-professionalization." The institutions which used to, at the very least, dedicate serious resources to going out into the world and gathering facts no longer function properly or just don't exist. I remember seeing an interview with Christopher Hitchens where somebody asked him how he informed himself about the world, what news he liked to read. He said, not much. Mostly he relied on people he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. Must be nice!

screye 6y ago
> Mostly he relied on people he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. Must be nice It is not that difficult. In the world of internet, there are many prolific writers who have lived very public lives. There are quite a few specific opinion/news writers who I've read long enough to know their biases or the lack there of, depending on what they are reporting. These individual actors being the feet-on-the-ground lends a large amount of credibility to them as well.
andi999 6y ago
Customers of newspaper pay for the political aligned viewpoint, most people like their viewpoint confirmed. Look out for people needing information to make money. Money does not care about political bias. E.g. I think the "financial times" quite unbiased (of course there is no perfection).

maynman 6y ago

Reminds me of Ecclesiastes. "There is nothing new under the sun".

air7 6y ago

I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately. It seems to me that the nefarious ways in which modern media operates are responsible for a large portion of the problems we see in the world today. That's because the world in general is doing better than ever in almost any measurable parameter, yet the general notion is that everything is going to shit. This has real world consequences such as violent riots, couples deciding not to bring a child into "this terrible world", depression etc. The mere choice of what is news worthy and how much coverage any one item gets already warps the mind's heuristics about how often this type of event occurs and thus how important it is. Add to that the "artistic licence" that reporters take (maliciously or otherwise) and the situation becomes really dire. The reason for this problem is that society has decided that news should be a form of entertainment, and news outlets are for-profit companies. Considering these incentives the current state seems inevitable. This has also led me to think of hypothetical solutions. I would argue that "The News" should be a non-profit, state funded entity (or entities). However, these must very much not be state controlled but rather allowed to operate independently. A similar institution is the Judicial System, which doesn't need to worry about clickbaiting titles for its rulings in order to fund itself, yet it has, ideally, full autonomy to procecute people in power if the need arises and we (society) take any attempt of collusion between state and court to be unacceptable. Similarly, an independent yet tax funded news agency can deliver boring, unentertaining news and facts to help save us from ourselves.

kaesar14 6y ago
I think there are plenty of things going wrong in the world as it exists today, at least as an American, that would dissuade me from having children. The exploding costs of childcare, healthcare, and education, let alone the impending crisis of climate change and ecological collapse, are all pretty scary. None of those things need to be exaggerated by the media.
- ledauphin 6y ago
  I tend to think this proves the point. Healthcare and childcare and education are in fact (largely though not comprehensively) nonessential goods that are already in very many ways far better than they were 50 years ago. Childcare wasn't even a thing except for the incredibly wealthy until pretty recently. It would be very difficult to argue that the overall options for post-secondary education (and the number of people taking advantage of them) are not better than 30 years ago, even though their costs are known to be rising much faster than their quality. Most of the kinds of healthcare that are clearly price-gouging were not even categories of healthcare 50 years ago, and most of the ones that were are so qualitatively better now that we're comparing apples and oranges. Etc. Climate change is the one where by almost any objective measure we're headed for potentially irrecoverable catastrophe, and yet this one doesn't actually receive media coverage commensurate with the weight of the potential risk and its probability.

jackcosgrove 6y ago

The fundamental problem with news reporting is that so much of it has political implications, and political opinion among the public is bimodal. You can look at the two left-right humps on a spectrum of political beliefs and see two different worldviews. If you try to report the facts on any story that has a political angle, you're probably going to alienate one of those worldview modes. And god forbid the facts fall right in the middle and you alienate both.

joshjs 6y ago

"The lies of the day" is a great phrase. Stealin' it. Thanks, TJ.

notadoc 6y ago

You can experience this directly yourself on a near daily basis right now, here's all you need to do. - Go on social media and find the endless streams of videos showing mayhem and violence at many of the protests / riots going on throughout the country - Read the 'news' stories about those events, which rarely describe anything resembling what you see in the videos Do you believe the regurgitator who likely wasn't at the scene and probably has bias, or your lying eyes?

erikig 6y ago

I had a chuckle at this proposal: "...Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters: heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies"

m0zg 6y ago

Fiery, but mostly peaceful article, written by an austere scholar and revered military leader.

monkeynotes 6y ago

I don't understand how we as a society turn a blind eye to being surrounded by lies and misdirection. It's well known to be a folly and well documented that governments the world over abuse their position of first hand knowledge to redirect and re-cast truth, and manipulate public opinion in their favour[1][2]. Perhaps at my age I have come to see patterns and have come to understand that pretty much everything I don't have first hand experience of is likely to be distorted to a lesser or greater extent. This is not only true of news and public discourse, but also in my personal life. People naturally bend reality to fit their beliefs, world views, and often to just tell a good story. I am sure many adults are aware of this, but we never really talk about it. Children are not educated about the nature of this problem. We are not taught to think about the nature of information we consume, and yet many of us know our lives are surrounded by lies and manipulators. Manipulative advertising and government deception, both of which have reams of psychological research backing their strategies, dominate a majority of our lives and yet we don't educate each other as such. I am very sad to come to realize that TV shaped my beliefs growing up, and it was mostly based on myths driven by advertising dollars. Obviously entertainment is not going away, and nor should it, but we should have discourse highlighting who drives the narrative. One of the few facts we can know is little of what we learn is truly verifiable - knowing that is hugely helpful and allows us to make better decisions about what we value in life. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/who-lied-to-whom https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/31/who-lied-to-wh... [2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/february/truth-about-tonkin https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/f...

lemonlizzie 6y ago
Well stated.

mellowdream 6y ago

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson "Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists." Norman Mailer "Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." George Bernard Shaw "In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has." Mark Twain "I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets." Napoleon "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X "The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." Oscar Wilde "The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word journalist." Soren Kierkegaard "Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends." - Wittgenstein "The newspaper epitomises the goal of today’s educational system, just as the journalist, servant of the present moment, has taken the place of the genius, our salvation from the moment and leader for the ages." - Nietzsche https://web.archive.org/web/20180327031901/http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180327031901/http://www.aarons...

blueridge 6y ago

Good books to read on the subject: 1) Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle 2) Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America 3) Jacques Elull, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

toss1 6y ago

Modern Analog in USA: those watching the most politically oriented sources, Fox & MSNBC are actually WORSE informed than those who watch no news at all.[1] And those who watch actual sources (in the case of this study, the Sunday AM interview shows) are best informed. [1] http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/ http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/

elwell 6y ago

Nor can UberEats ETA's be trusted

tdeck 6y ago

Most of the comments here are missing a big part of the context: newspapers in the early 1800s didn't do journalism as we know it today. Most relied entirely on rumors and letters that crossed their desk, combined with cribbing old stories from the foreign press. Newspaper staff was often just one or two people doing the writing, marketing, and distribution (and often the typesetting too). There wasn't this idea that a journalist should be conducting interviews or investigating stories or even arriving at the scene of anything. Most papers were funded largely by political patronage as well. For a great book on the history of American journalism I recommend "Infamous Scribblers" by Eric Burns.

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refurb 6y ago

What’s more insidious than the accuracy of what you read in the media is the control the media has on what they actually cover. If you cast a wide enough net, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that the media is very selective about what they cover. One human rights issue may get front page coverage, while another is completely ignored. The vast majority of people think they are focused on important issues, when in fact, they are just focused on what the media tells them is important.

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kitotik 6y ago

“We’ll Know Our Disinformation Program Is Complete When Everything the American Public Believes Is False.” —- Former CIA Director William Casey

refurb 6y ago

One source of geopolitical information I've found to be head and shoulders above the mainstream media is Stratfor. Now before you hit the downvote button and reply "You idiot, it's run by the CIA", hear me out. I got a free trial a few year back and was pretty impressed with: 1) the level of detail, 2) the attempt at focusing on facts 3) the lack of "this is what it means". I was reading an article on stability in Afghanistan and it read like "There are 5 warlords...the warlord in Eastern Afghanistan is X, and used to be aligned with Y, but is now aligned with Z, because of...". It didn't hesitate to go back 50 years to provide context for a given fact. And there wasn't a lot of "this person is good and this person is bad". If you're not interested in the topic it's pretty damn dry reading, but if you are interested, the level of detail is impressive and I came away actually knowing more than when I started. Now of course there is bias in the reports and it will be presented through the filter of Western intelligence agencies, but if they do cover a topic you want more information on, I highly recommend checking it out.

ajkjk 6y ago

Surprised to find this uses "it's" in ways that we would today is are incorrect. Is this letter just wrong or did which is correct change in the last two centuries?

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totetsu 6y ago

This reminds me of the 99pi podcast episode that just re-aired about how the American post office was first set up mostly to share news papers between colonies and build an informed connected population https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-revolutionary-post/transcript https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-revolutionary-pos...

bohrasd 6y ago

Can't believe the mainstream media? Maybe. But you know what's even worse? Social Media. If a newspaper lie to you once a day, social media do that a thousand times a day. And people on social network be like: oh we cant trust the newspaper anymore!

bvinc 6y ago

The problem with this line of thinking isn't that it's wrong. I could complain about the media all day. The problem is that main stream establishment media: NYTimes, APNews, The Guardian, Reuters, etc are the best we have. The people that complain about the media are the people that seek out alternative media. Alternative media is infinity more misleading and misinformed. Thomas Jefferson surely didn't mean that you should turn to alternative media like Twitter and YouTube for your news.

aero-glide 6y ago
I like APNews and Reuters. Gaurdian and NYTimes are pretty inaccurate, atleast when they report about my country.

fortyrod 6y ago

I think you can still extract a small amount of useful input from todays media. I usually go with the "inverted axe-grind" metric that upvotes info that goes against an outlet's normal bias. So, anything good CNN says about Trump or anything positive that Fox says about Obama. Those are bad examples as you would wait a while for anything to leak through. Someone needs to point their magic NLP / sentiment thingy at this and automate it. That will give the SEO optimizers something else to work on, anyhow.

tamaharbor 6y ago

Does anyone else fear that this is the very problem that will start ‘Civil War 2’? (Or will journalists call it ‘Civil War II’?)

winter_blue 6y ago

This letter is truly amazing, considering it was written in 1807. I'd say the major mainstream publications have definitely gotten better at having more journalistic integrity. E.g. the NYTimes does check/verify stuff before publishing as far as I'm aware.