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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

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).
- minimuffins 6y ago
  Political alignment isn't the problem. Every outlet will spin the same facts differently, sometimes intentionally sometimes not, because of this or that ideological commitment. They will choose which facts to foreground and which to background ("framing"), etc, etc, all that media studies stuff. Bias is fine. There is no such thing as an unbiased media outlet. I'm talking about a different problem, which is that increasingly, the basic facts don't even enter into the discourse at all! That's the case because the institutions that used to carry out the basic functions of journalism are now facing tons of pressure to cut their costs, and all of that. Disruptive "decentralization" pressure from the tech industry, often discussed as a "solution" to this mess, is actually a major cause. And it's of course not a solution at all because it has no answer to the basic material problem: once we've defunded traditional journalism, who is actually going to do the work? News is basically the production of information about the facts of unfolding world events. Now that we have no foreign correspondents etc, news ends up just being the production of information about the news itself (the only part left is the bias!). How long can we keep doing this, I wonder?
jariel 6y ago
Handy tip: to get the politics of a nation, read the news on it by some paper outside the nation. So reading the BBC for US news gives you something fairly readable.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  What I see is that foreign news have no idea of what is happening in my country, they all just repeat some superficial and normally wrong pieces. At the same time, domestic media is all lying through their teeth. With some work one can disecate the news, separate what can't possibly be lies (because it would lead to problems), and reassembly something into an overall picture. (Who has the time for all this?) But one can never know what is being omitted, either intentionally or by incompetency.
  - jariel 6y ago
    The BBC is not 'wrong' - it's maybe just superficial and doesn't have enough detail. The anecdotes about 'lying press' on this thread are misleading. 'Respected' news entities do not just 'make stuff up'. Definitely no the BBC, they have standards. The problem with the bigger agencies is narrative bias, and yes, if 'within America' the narrative is pushed to 'one side' hard by the local press, then the international press will be influenced by that, but it's not as bad. Edit: got to CNN.com right now and give some examples of their 'blatant lying'. Because they're not. Editorial bias, of course, but 'making up stories' - this is wrong. The onus would be on you to provide evidence they are doing this consistently.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Would you consider leaving out key facts that drastically alter the conclusion one might draw, lying? I would. How about covering one news story, then not covering another on the same topic, such that you form a very different opinion about “what is going on”?
      - jariel 6y ago
snarf21 6y ago
I think the best approach is to read a story from a left, right and centrist source. The intersection of "facts" is probably all true and the things that point far one direction or the other are probably in the middle somewhere.
- staplers 6y ago
  I've found that even "liberal" media is heavily biased to favor corporate sponsors. Sometimes journalists can sneak small (actually) progressive articles through but are often followed up by large front-page hit pieces on those same ideas.
  - necrotic_comp 6y ago
    That's because "liberal" in the U.S. typically means "neo-liberal", so the focus on corporate sponsors shouldn't be a surprise.
    - dependenttypes 6y ago
      Liberal globally refers to economic liberalism - that is, capitalism.
- TheDong 6y ago
  This reads to me like saying "the best way to determine if god exists is to read the hebrew bible, the koran, and the book of mormon and take the average". It starts with the assumption left, right, and centrist sources all have biases, but those biases cancel out. That the "middle" of those things is meaningfully better. I see no evidence that that's the case. All popular news sources these days seem to be biased towards corporate profit. "Left" and "right" both exist relative to each other more than they exist relative to the truth. Reading several news sources to find the truth begs the question of if modern news sources, regardless of political bent, are meaningful sources of factual information vs sources of advertisements and outrage. For the sake of presenting a counter argument, I think that keeping up with the constant inflow of news doesn't get you meaningfully closer to the truth compared to reading well-regarded books on recent history around the world, and using that as a lens to understand the present. Well-regarded non-fiction books are generally better researched than stories on "this senator just had a haircut", and the recent past shapes the present significantly, not to mention repeats itself shockingly often. By reading left and right sources, you're assuming you can find similar stories on similar matters, when the most important matters are not "the president tweeted X" (which both sources will report on), but rather information about the structure of cities, the human condition, and changes thereof ("a postmortem on this transit project shows that we, as a society, should think in this way"), which usually no news agency will report on. It's just too dry, unless the researcher dresses it up and makes it flashy.
neonate 6y ago
What if it was always impossible, and we're just now finally realizing it? In that case this may be a positive development. But we're just at the beginning of learning how to adapt to it.
- minimuffins 6y ago
  Yeah, that is a kind of postmodern take on the situation that I have some sympathy for. I do think this attitude could lead to a kind of quietism about a problem we could actually make a dent in though, if we did some things differently. I think we should think about the destruction of traditional journalism not as some inevitable natural evolution, like the tide coming in washing away our sand castle, but instead as a historical, political development with high stakes, winners and losers. We should fight against it, not just passievly "adapt." That doesn't mean replicate exactly what was there before, but I don't think we have to just acquiesce before a now permanently incomprehensible world and give up on ever understanding it, either.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  > we're just now finally realizing it We're all commenting on a post from 1807 saying the same thing. Maybe it was always impossible, but we think that people used to not realize it. If that's the case, we're definitely not at the beginning and it doesn't bode particularly well.
  - neonate 6y ago
    It's new in the post WWII period though, which was characterized by a few newspapers and TV networks basically holding a consensus, with a bit of wiggle room for debate, but no outlier views. Uncle Walter and all that.
godzillabrennus 6y ago
Here is what goes on in a day: 1.) Bad things 2.) Good things 3.) Things that might be both bad and good Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things.
- tines 6y ago
  > Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things. The obvious counter is "but you learned this from headlines" (assuming you're not like Hitchens with a bunch of intercontinental friends to be your eyes and ears.
  - crispyporkbites 6y ago
    No the headlines state the opposite. You learn this by reading history and looking at recent events through reasonable sources. And yes this is the safest period in human history, and it continues to get safer by the day.
    - Wohlf 6y ago
      My personal favorite example to get some perspective is from the book Days of Rage. During the 1970s domestic bombings were a daily occurrence, and at the peak there were over 2000 a year. Even the massive amount of violence in modern day Chicago is nothing in comparison to what was happening as recently as the 90s.
      - megameter 6y ago
        It's an interesting thing how crime rates in the US peaked right after the fall of the Soviet Union and then went into deep decline: It's as if having the visible external enemy was the factor that allowed it to increase, and the post-Cold War paralysis deescalated this process. The Soviet bogeyman was replaced in turn with terrorists, but this too is increasingly seen as a domestic issue of "right wing militia v. antifa", lacking in credible affiliations abroad as the Mid-Eastern interventions have wound down. And that is perhaps the real source of the frantic polarization: Look anywhere, just not in the mirror.
krmmalik 6y ago
I've had a slow descent not getting away from reading the news over the last several years. It's been incredibly gradual, but further to your point about firsthand experiences from people I know personally, I have to admit that has been truly transformative. I've now made it a point to find any which way I can to find friends or make acquaintances in other countries and actively nurture a relationship with them in order to get a better picture of what's going on. It's been truly refreshing. That said, I'm still not sure what a technical, automated and scalable solution accessible to the masses for this would look like and if it could or would even work, but nonetheless, there's definitely something in this idea.
aeternum 6y ago
I think the best solution is to cast a wide net, gather information from as many viewpoints as possible, and then look for correlations to narrow down on the truth. The human brain is surprisingly good at this. The brain is constantly doing this with our various senses. None of those senses is perfect and they are fooled easily yet by examining the overlap we are able to create a surprisingly accurate picture of reality.
- klyrs 6y ago
  > The human brain is surprisingly good at this. Is it, though? Confirmation bias is a pretty big factor in how we parse incoming information. I try to read a variety of sources and see where different folks are coming from, but I wouldn't delude myself to think that I'm some ultra-rational arbiter of truth. We need only look as far as the growing(!) popularity of the flat-earth conspiracy to see that the population at large is no better at this than I think I am.
- minimuffins 6y ago
  > cast a wide net, gather information from as many viewpoints as possible, I agree that's the best thing to do. It's a rational choice. I do it and recommend others do it. But there's still this historical problem of divestment from traditional journalistic practices (going out into the world, gathering facts, interviewing people, observing -- it's expensive). Without that factual raw material it doesn't matter how diverse your set of sources is, your ability to know your own world is impoverished.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    I find that Youtube is a very underrated source for those traditional journalistic practices. It's amazing how many great interviews there are with formats that allow interviewees to actually answer a question rather than provide a TV sound-bite. There's such a huge variety of content creators that you can often find a primary-source for major events. It also helps the recommendation algo if you use separate accounts for watching entertainment vids vs. this more serious content.
icelancer 6y ago
>> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. Is it? Why? Does it meaningfully change your life to know what's going on everywhere from the mundane to the impactful? Our lives are lived in the present, locally. You interact with people in your community thousands of times more than people you read about thousands of miles away. Be where your feet are.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  I personally view it as a duty. Part of being a citizen in a (kind of) functioning democracy is understanding the nuances of the stuff that is screwed up around you to the best of your ability so that when the time comes to vote or have a meaningful discussion with others around you, you can be a voice of reason. Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. I may not know everything, but I'm trying and putting an honest effort into learning as much as I can every single day. Reading NYT, WaPo, etc. is my version of putting an American flag out front, or a Support the Troops sticker on my car, or singing the National Anthem or whatever people do to feel like they're doing their part. That being said, your approach is probably a lot healthier in the long-run. I always get really depressed after reading the papers. Usually I just call a buddy after and we both rant about things and afterwards everyone feels ok.
  - dragonsky 6y ago
    I do understand your feelings of a responsibility to be up to date on news, especially when it is regarding political events. It's easy to get the facts from a report on the weather, a tornado devastated a town, you know this is true because you can see the photos (selected for drama) taken of the damage. It's more difficult when reporting is on things that are a little more fluffy. Claims a politician did something are almost impossible to verify and reporting on this ends up being an exercise in spin. One of the best things about politicians taking to twitter to directly communicate is that you have an unfiltered direct message. If something is in a tweet from a politician then you can be pretty sure that is the message they want to get out. If they same something stupid or ill considered at least you can judge them on that, not so much the actual facts of the content. So media of all types allow you to judge the messenger, less so the message.
ycombinete 6y ago
Sounds good. Those close to us are the most likely to have news that has actual significance to us. And are probably the most trustworthy.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Sounds good. Those close to us are the most likely to have news that has actual significance to us. And are probably the most trustworthy. So third-hand information from my InfoWars-reading brother and workplace rumors (or even worse, official workplace corporate communications)?
  - ycombinete 6y ago
    Fair enough. I think I worded my sentiment badly.
oblio 6y ago
I think that the best thing, which is really hard to do with the internet, is to let time pass. If you're 1-2 weeks, 1 month behind the news, you will probably get only the important news. Following daily news is madness and useless unless you're making money out of it. As someone I know said when I mentioned a new revolutionary battery technology has been discovered: I'll believe it when the researchers get the Nobel prize for it, in 10 years.
- minimuffins 6y ago
  This is good advice but I want to clarify that the problem I'm trying to highlight here is structural - historical and political, and we should be thinking about it that way too, as well trying to figure out how to cope with the situation as individuals.
KoftaBob 6y ago
The vast vast majority of news isn't actionable in our daily lives, at all. At the core of it, we read the news to satisfy our human curiosity. Once I came to realize this, it was like a weight was lifted off me. For the last few months, I've only been reading news regarding specific topics I'm genuinely interested in (new gadgets, tech/startups in general, new skyscraper projects, etc). This way, it's like I'm reading books about my interests that were written very very recently. General news seems to add a net negative to my life with very little upside, so I just stopped reading it.
- mitchdoogle 6y ago
  As they say, "Ignorance is bliss"
ardy42 6y ago
> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. Honestly, I think the standards you seem to be setting for yourself are too high. As far as I know, none of us are God, so it is completely impossible for us to know what's going on in the world. > according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material into maximally entertaining spectacle. Which ones are you referring to, specifically? While there are certainly some companies that just want to turn the news into "entertaining spectacle," I think it's over-cynical to say they all do. I try to focus on the ones that seem to feel they have a duty to report on the news and columnists who seem to feel they have something important to say (and whose columns are interesting enough that that may actually be true). > 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 totally agree with you here about de-professionalization, but I'm less dejected about traditional news gathering institutions. They're definitely on the decline, but they're not dead yet. Some are still soldiering on and functioning reasonably well, especially if you're interested in national/international news or live in a major city.
- andreilys 6y ago
  ” I try to focus on the ones that seem to feel they have a duty to report on the news” Can you share an example? I have trouble coming up with any which aren’t burdened with profit or idealogical motives.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    I think wire services are generally pretty good, and Wikipedia Current Events Portal has a decent roundup of wire reports (AP, BBC, Reuters, etc) for stuff going on in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events Everyone has profit motives and stuff, but if you're well-read and keep an eye on what's going on you can usually subtract any bias you detect.
fapi1974 6y ago
My solution is I read the Economist and the Sunday NYT (which admittedly skews too much these days but then I guess so do I). The 1 week lag gives things time to settle. And I love the ritual of the paper.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> 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. But now the people they were gathering the facts from are connected to the internet. Local newspapers often had a police blotter publishing the police reports in the locality. Now you can get that directly from the police department, because they have a website. Once upon a time if you wanted to get stories from Turkey and Israel and Brazil then you had to send reporters to those places to collect the stories of the people there. Now the people there are on the internet and can post their stories themselves. You're getting closer to the sources instead of having a "professional" as an intermediary. But you're also getting access to more sources, with more differing opinions, and it's driving people nuts because they don't know who to believe. But there weren't any fewer sources before, you just weren't hearing from so many of them because the traditional gatekeepers decided for you what you got to hear. If you assume they were doing a good job of that then we've lost something, but what evidence is there of that?
- throwawayinfo 6y ago
  This is why I'm convinced independent journalists are the future. Fact finding itself is a shrinking part of the job. Fact checking the monunental amount of data out there is increasingly important. As such, the need for these megacorp publishers is going away. Edit: Just look at the BLM movement. Lots of people believe these are peaceful civil disobedience and lots of people believe they're communist race riots. Right now, the question is basically "who do you want to believe?" I don't claim to have an answer but I just hope that the right ideas will win in an open space with small creators.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    When there's enough conflicting information out there, fact checking just turns back into fact finding, doesn't it?
    - throwawayinfo 6y ago
iagovar 6y ago
Specialized publications. But you have to pay for them, and they typically aren't really the news, and use some jargon.
- NortySpock 6y ago
  "The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free..." https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalle...
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    I am surprised at how few people understand this basic bit of economics - perhaps marketers are to blame for the obvious being inconceivable. Just because you are paying more doesn't mean you will get more for it. If you go with a niche specialization you may well pay through the nose for very expensive lies. See Spectrum, the HIV-AIDS Denialism magazine that went defunct after all editors died of AIDS for an example.
bromuro 6y ago
It is your perspective, similar to “The World as Will and Representation” by Schopenhauer: > Schopenhauer argues that the world we experience around us—the world of objects in space and time and related in causal ways—exists solely as ‘representation’ (Vorstellung) dependent on a cognizing subject, not as a world that can be considered to exist in itself (i.e. independently of how it appears to the subject’s mind). Our knowledge of objects is thus knowledge of mere phenomena rather than things-in-themselves. I like to think that the recent physics discoveries are crossing the same line. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Repres...
peterpeppers 6y ago
Friends, there is a solution! - If you're a CONSERVATIVE, read liberal. - If you're a LIBERAL, read conservative. - If you're a proclaimed CENTRIST, read everything. Schools don't teach us how to read and process information objectively but hopefully your first history professor explained that historical bias and bias in writing well...is human and old as history itself. Embrace it! 1. Check the veracity of claims and statements made in popular news stories, social media posts and political statements. - https://www.snopes.com/ https://www.snopes.com/ - https://www.factcheck.org/ https://www.factcheck.org/ - https://www.politifact.com/ https://www.politifact.com/ 2. Additionally, there is a separate body, International Fact-Checking Network, that checks the common fact-checking organizations above for bias and truth as well in their fact checking. - https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/ https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/ - https://www.poynter.org/major-funders/ https://www.poynter.org/major-funders/ 3. There's also the independently run MediaBiasFactCheck site which has found that the fact-checking sites above are pretty close to the center in their fact-checking and myth-busting. - https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ - https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Or simply ignore everything that isn't local? The problem seems to be more centralisation of power and decision making. Consume information to act rather than sit and tweet.
- pydry 6y ago
  The stuff you really have to worry about is the stuff that the liberal, right wing and centrist billionaire owned media outlets all agree upon or agree isn't important enough to talk about. It's an interesting exercise to read contrasting viewpoints from opposing sides though (e.g. Russian media vs. American media on a us-russia conflict).
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > Check the veracity of claims and statements made in popular news stories using fact-checkers of even more dubious veracity? https://www.politifactbias.com/ https://www.politifactbias.com/
NicoJuicy 6y ago
I found a nice video recording the issue, the term is coined: firehose of falsehoods https://youtu.be/nknYtlOvaQ0 https://youtu.be/nknYtlOvaQ0
Natsu 6y ago
I don't think we can know everything by any means, but I've started getting my news from subject matter experts who show their work & give full access to their research vs. the spectacle of corporate news. I'll still skim for anything important, but I'm not even reading what they say, I'm looking for actual sources. Outlets that don't bother to give any sources are generally not worth reading.
BrandonM 6y ago
> 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!). For a concrete example of that, Deadspin in 2013 spelled out how ESPN created its own narrative to report on: https://deadspin.com/how-espn-manufactures-a-story-colin-kaepernick-edition-1185400028 https://deadspin.com/how-espn-manufactures-a-story-colin-kae...
elihu 6y ago
> There is not a technical solution to any of this. I don't quite agree with that. In general, our best means of knowing with reasonable confidence whether some event being reported on is true is our confidence in the person telling us of the event. If it's someone we know personally, that's best. In a world of billions of people, that's not possible for most world events, so we can think of trust as being transitive. I can put more confidence in something that's reported by someone who is personally vouched for by a friend of mine, than something that's three steps removed, and so on. The trouble is that our human brains are incapable of understanding social networks with more than a hundred or so people (i.e. Dunbar's number) and even those we have very imperfect understanding of. Computers don't have that limitation. Supposing you have a directed graph of every human who is willing to publicly vouch for the credibility of some other human, you can run something like PageRank on that to determine the degree to which you should trust some random reporter. Better yet would be something like PageRank, but modified to handle anti-endorsements as well. There are ways to handle distrust in PageRank-like systems, but that's a little outside the scope of the point I'm trying to make. Of course, collecting this directed graph of endorsements is outside the ability of a normal human, but sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have something like it. If they wanted to re-use that to create a news filtering service they probably could. On the other hand, the rest of us users would have no particular reason to believe they don't have their thumb on the scale, promoting news that serves their interests, or that they were paid to promote. So, I wouldn't say what I'm suggesting is purely a "technical solution", there are social and cultural aspects to it as well, but the one aspect of the problem -- that are human brains can't cope with large social networks -- is one that we can use computers to solve, if we have the right data.
- Rayhem 6y ago
  Wouldn't this directed graph endorsement approach just devolve into more followers = more endorsements? There's nothing built into the system to ensure quality whatsoever.
  - elihu 6y ago
    That's why I mentioned anti-endorsements. Pure PageRank doesn't have any notion of negative reputation, so by itself it's more of a popularity metric than a quality metric.
princeb 6y ago
> he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. i cannot even be sure that my version of truth is the truthiest version of the truth out there. i cannot say much more about the people i know, even those personally affected by various events around the world. every time i feel confident about my beliefs, i remember rashomon. everyone is affected by bias. the only way to avoid bias is to avoid observation.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  You can't avoid bias, but there are certainly mitigation techniques.
  - princeb 6y ago
    how do you know those bias mitigation techniques are not skewed by bias? and if you verified it/came up with it yourself, how do you know you are not skewed by your own bias?
vmladenov 6y ago
You could read wire services like Associated Press, Reuters, and United Press International, which are the sources from which mainstream outlets buy their news. Just be warned that the stories are exceptionally dry
deleted 6y ago
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ainiriand 6y ago
I had exactly the same problem in Spain back then, then I started watching DW and the quality is superb. Give it a try, let me know what you think.

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).

minimuffins 6y ago
Political alignment isn't the problem. Every outlet will spin the same facts differently, sometimes intentionally sometimes not, because of this or that ideological commitment. They will choose which facts to foreground and which to background ("framing"), etc, etc, all that media studies stuff. Bias is fine. There is no such thing as an unbiased media outlet. I'm talking about a different problem, which is that increasingly, the basic facts don't even enter into the discourse at all! That's the case because the institutions that used to carry out the basic functions of journalism are now facing tons of pressure to cut their costs, and all of that. Disruptive "decentralization" pressure from the tech industry, often discussed as a "solution" to this mess, is actually a major cause. And it's of course not a solution at all because it has no answer to the basic material problem: once we've defunded traditional journalism, who is actually going to do the work? News is basically the production of information about the facts of unfolding world events. Now that we have no foreign correspondents etc, news ends up just being the production of information about the news itself (the only part left is the bias!). How long can we keep doing this, I wonder?

jariel 6y ago

Handy tip: to get the politics of a nation, read the news on it by some paper outside the nation. So reading the BBC for US news gives you something fairly readable.

marcosdumay 6y ago
What I see is that foreign news have no idea of what is happening in my country, they all just repeat some superficial and normally wrong pieces. At the same time, domestic media is all lying through their teeth. With some work one can disecate the news, separate what can't possibly be lies (because it would lead to problems), and reassembly something into an overall picture. (Who has the time for all this?) But one can never know what is being omitted, either intentionally or by incompetency.
- jariel 6y ago
  The BBC is not 'wrong' - it's maybe just superficial and doesn't have enough detail. The anecdotes about 'lying press' on this thread are misleading. 'Respected' news entities do not just 'make stuff up'. Definitely no the BBC, they have standards. The problem with the bigger agencies is narrative bias, and yes, if 'within America' the narrative is pushed to 'one side' hard by the local press, then the international press will be influenced by that, but it's not as bad. Edit: got to CNN.com right now and give some examples of their 'blatant lying'. Because they're not. Editorial bias, of course, but 'making up stories' - this is wrong. The onus would be on you to provide evidence they are doing this consistently.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Would you consider leaving out key facts that drastically alter the conclusion one might draw, lying? I would. How about covering one news story, then not covering another on the same topic, such that you form a very different opinion about “what is going on”?
    - jariel 6y ago

snarf21 6y ago

I think the best approach is to read a story from a left, right and centrist source. The intersection of "facts" is probably all true and the things that point far one direction or the other are probably in the middle somewhere.

staplers 6y ago
I've found that even "liberal" media is heavily biased to favor corporate sponsors. Sometimes journalists can sneak small (actually) progressive articles through but are often followed up by large front-page hit pieces on those same ideas.
- necrotic_comp 6y ago
  That's because "liberal" in the U.S. typically means "neo-liberal", so the focus on corporate sponsors shouldn't be a surprise.
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    Liberal globally refers to economic liberalism - that is, capitalism.
TheDong 6y ago
This reads to me like saying "the best way to determine if god exists is to read the hebrew bible, the koran, and the book of mormon and take the average". It starts with the assumption left, right, and centrist sources all have biases, but those biases cancel out. That the "middle" of those things is meaningfully better. I see no evidence that that's the case. All popular news sources these days seem to be biased towards corporate profit. "Left" and "right" both exist relative to each other more than they exist relative to the truth. Reading several news sources to find the truth begs the question of if modern news sources, regardless of political bent, are meaningful sources of factual information vs sources of advertisements and outrage. For the sake of presenting a counter argument, I think that keeping up with the constant inflow of news doesn't get you meaningfully closer to the truth compared to reading well-regarded books on recent history around the world, and using that as a lens to understand the present. Well-regarded non-fiction books are generally better researched than stories on "this senator just had a haircut", and the recent past shapes the present significantly, not to mention repeats itself shockingly often. By reading left and right sources, you're assuming you can find similar stories on similar matters, when the most important matters are not "the president tweeted X" (which both sources will report on), but rather information about the structure of cities, the human condition, and changes thereof ("a postmortem on this transit project shows that we, as a society, should think in this way"), which usually no news agency will report on. It's just too dry, unless the researcher dresses it up and makes it flashy.

neonate 6y ago

What if it was always impossible, and we're just now finally realizing it? In that case this may be a positive development. But we're just at the beginning of learning how to adapt to it.

minimuffins 6y ago
Yeah, that is a kind of postmodern take on the situation that I have some sympathy for. I do think this attitude could lead to a kind of quietism about a problem we could actually make a dent in though, if we did some things differently. I think we should think about the destruction of traditional journalism not as some inevitable natural evolution, like the tide coming in washing away our sand castle, but instead as a historical, political development with high stakes, winners and losers. We should fight against it, not just passievly "adapt." That doesn't mean replicate exactly what was there before, but I don't think we have to just acquiesce before a now permanently incomprehensible world and give up on ever understanding it, either.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> we're just now finally realizing it We're all commenting on a post from 1807 saying the same thing. Maybe it was always impossible, but we think that people used to not realize it. If that's the case, we're definitely not at the beginning and it doesn't bode particularly well.
- neonate 6y ago
  It's new in the post WWII period though, which was characterized by a few newspapers and TV networks basically holding a consensus, with a bit of wiggle room for debate, but no outlier views. Uncle Walter and all that.

godzillabrennus 6y ago

Here is what goes on in a day: 1.) Bad things 2.) Good things 3.) Things that might be both bad and good Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things.

tines 6y ago
> Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things. The obvious counter is "but you learned this from headlines" (assuming you're not like Hitchens with a bunch of intercontinental friends to be your eyes and ears.
- crispyporkbites 6y ago
  No the headlines state the opposite. You learn this by reading history and looking at recent events through reasonable sources. And yes this is the safest period in human history, and it continues to get safer by the day.
  - Wohlf 6y ago
    My personal favorite example to get some perspective is from the book Days of Rage. During the 1970s domestic bombings were a daily occurrence, and at the peak there were over 2000 a year. Even the massive amount of violence in modern day Chicago is nothing in comparison to what was happening as recently as the 90s.
    - megameter 6y ago
      It's an interesting thing how crime rates in the US peaked right after the fall of the Soviet Union and then went into deep decline: It's as if having the visible external enemy was the factor that allowed it to increase, and the post-Cold War paralysis deescalated this process. The Soviet bogeyman was replaced in turn with terrorists, but this too is increasingly seen as a domestic issue of "right wing militia v. antifa", lacking in credible affiliations abroad as the Mid-Eastern interventions have wound down. And that is perhaps the real source of the frantic polarization: Look anywhere, just not in the mirror.

krmmalik 6y ago

I've had a slow descent not getting away from reading the news over the last several years. It's been incredibly gradual, but further to your point about firsthand experiences from people I know personally, I have to admit that has been truly transformative. I've now made it a point to find any which way I can to find friends or make acquaintances in other countries and actively nurture a relationship with them in order to get a better picture of what's going on. It's been truly refreshing. That said, I'm still not sure what a technical, automated and scalable solution accessible to the masses for this would look like and if it could or would even work, but nonetheless, there's definitely something in this idea.

aeternum 6y ago

I think the best solution is to cast a wide net, gather information from as many viewpoints as possible, and then look for correlations to narrow down on the truth. The human brain is surprisingly good at this. The brain is constantly doing this with our various senses. None of those senses is perfect and they are fooled easily yet by examining the overlap we are able to create a surprisingly accurate picture of reality.

klyrs 6y ago
> The human brain is surprisingly good at this. Is it, though? Confirmation bias is a pretty big factor in how we parse incoming information. I try to read a variety of sources and see where different folks are coming from, but I wouldn't delude myself to think that I'm some ultra-rational arbiter of truth. We need only look as far as the growing(!) popularity of the flat-earth conspiracy to see that the population at large is no better at this than I think I am.
minimuffins 6y ago
> cast a wide net, gather information from as many viewpoints as possible, I agree that's the best thing to do. It's a rational choice. I do it and recommend others do it. But there's still this historical problem of divestment from traditional journalistic practices (going out into the world, gathering facts, interviewing people, observing -- it's expensive). Without that factual raw material it doesn't matter how diverse your set of sources is, your ability to know your own world is impoverished.
- aeternum 6y ago
  I find that Youtube is a very underrated source for those traditional journalistic practices. It's amazing how many great interviews there are with formats that allow interviewees to actually answer a question rather than provide a TV sound-bite. There's such a huge variety of content creators that you can often find a primary-source for major events. It also helps the recommendation algo if you use separate accounts for watching entertainment vids vs. this more serious content.

icelancer 6y ago

>> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. Is it? Why? Does it meaningfully change your life to know what's going on everywhere from the mundane to the impactful? Our lives are lived in the present, locally. You interact with people in your community thousands of times more than people you read about thousands of miles away. Be where your feet are.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
I personally view it as a duty. Part of being a citizen in a (kind of) functioning democracy is understanding the nuances of the stuff that is screwed up around you to the best of your ability so that when the time comes to vote or have a meaningful discussion with others around you, you can be a voice of reason. Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. I may not know everything, but I'm trying and putting an honest effort into learning as much as I can every single day. Reading NYT, WaPo, etc. is my version of putting an American flag out front, or a Support the Troops sticker on my car, or singing the National Anthem or whatever people do to feel like they're doing their part. That being said, your approach is probably a lot healthier in the long-run. I always get really depressed after reading the papers. Usually I just call a buddy after and we both rant about things and afterwards everyone feels ok.
- dragonsky 6y ago
  I do understand your feelings of a responsibility to be up to date on news, especially when it is regarding political events. It's easy to get the facts from a report on the weather, a tornado devastated a town, you know this is true because you can see the photos (selected for drama) taken of the damage. It's more difficult when reporting is on things that are a little more fluffy. Claims a politician did something are almost impossible to verify and reporting on this ends up being an exercise in spin. One of the best things about politicians taking to twitter to directly communicate is that you have an unfiltered direct message. If something is in a tweet from a politician then you can be pretty sure that is the message they want to get out. If they same something stupid or ill considered at least you can judge them on that, not so much the actual facts of the content. So media of all types allow you to judge the messenger, less so the message.

ycombinete 6y ago

Sounds good. Those close to us are the most likely to have news that has actual significance to us. And are probably the most trustworthy.

ardy42 6y ago
> Sounds good. Those close to us are the most likely to have news that has actual significance to us. And are probably the most trustworthy. So third-hand information from my InfoWars-reading brother and workplace rumors (or even worse, official workplace corporate communications)?
- ycombinete 6y ago
  Fair enough. I think I worded my sentiment badly.

oblio 6y ago

I think that the best thing, which is really hard to do with the internet, is to let time pass. If you're 1-2 weeks, 1 month behind the news, you will probably get only the important news. Following daily news is madness and useless unless you're making money out of it. As someone I know said when I mentioned a new revolutionary battery technology has been discovered: I'll believe it when the researchers get the Nobel prize for it, in 10 years.

minimuffins 6y ago
This is good advice but I want to clarify that the problem I'm trying to highlight here is structural - historical and political, and we should be thinking about it that way too, as well trying to figure out how to cope with the situation as individuals.

KoftaBob 6y ago

The vast vast majority of news isn't actionable in our daily lives, at all. At the core of it, we read the news to satisfy our human curiosity. Once I came to realize this, it was like a weight was lifted off me. For the last few months, I've only been reading news regarding specific topics I'm genuinely interested in (new gadgets, tech/startups in general, new skyscraper projects, etc). This way, it's like I'm reading books about my interests that were written very very recently. General news seems to add a net negative to my life with very little upside, so I just stopped reading it.

mitchdoogle 6y ago
As they say, "Ignorance is bliss"

ardy42 6y ago

> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. Honestly, I think the standards you seem to be setting for yourself are too high. As far as I know, none of us are God, so it is completely impossible for us to know what's going on in the world. > according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material into maximally entertaining spectacle. Which ones are you referring to, specifically? While there are certainly some companies that just want to turn the news into "entertaining spectacle," I think it's over-cynical to say they all do. I try to focus on the ones that seem to feel they have a duty to report on the news and columnists who seem to feel they have something important to say (and whose columns are interesting enough that that may actually be true). > 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 totally agree with you here about de-professionalization, but I'm less dejected about traditional news gathering institutions. They're definitely on the decline, but they're not dead yet. Some are still soldiering on and functioning reasonably well, especially if you're interested in national/international news or live in a major city.

andreilys 6y ago
” I try to focus on the ones that seem to feel they have a duty to report on the news” Can you share an example? I have trouble coming up with any which aren’t burdened with profit or idealogical motives.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  I think wire services are generally pretty good, and Wikipedia Current Events Portal has a decent roundup of wire reports (AP, BBC, Reuters, etc) for stuff going on in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events Everyone has profit motives and stuff, but if you're well-read and keep an eye on what's going on you can usually subtract any bias you detect.

fapi1974 6y ago

My solution is I read the Economist and the Sunday NYT (which admittedly skews too much these days but then I guess so do I). The 1 week lag gives things time to settle. And I love the ritual of the paper.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> 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. But now the people they were gathering the facts from are connected to the internet. Local newspapers often had a police blotter publishing the police reports in the locality. Now you can get that directly from the police department, because they have a website. Once upon a time if you wanted to get stories from Turkey and Israel and Brazil then you had to send reporters to those places to collect the stories of the people there. Now the people there are on the internet and can post their stories themselves. You're getting closer to the sources instead of having a "professional" as an intermediary. But you're also getting access to more sources, with more differing opinions, and it's driving people nuts because they don't know who to believe. But there weren't any fewer sources before, you just weren't hearing from so many of them because the traditional gatekeepers decided for you what you got to hear. If you assume they were doing a good job of that then we've lost something, but what evidence is there of that?

throwawayinfo 6y ago
This is why I'm convinced independent journalists are the future. Fact finding itself is a shrinking part of the job. Fact checking the monunental amount of data out there is increasingly important. As such, the need for these megacorp publishers is going away. Edit: Just look at the BLM movement. Lots of people believe these are peaceful civil disobedience and lots of people believe they're communist race riots. Right now, the question is basically "who do you want to believe?" I don't claim to have an answer but I just hope that the right ideas will win in an open space with small creators.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  When there's enough conflicting information out there, fact checking just turns back into fact finding, doesn't it?
  - throwawayinfo 6y ago

iagovar 6y ago

Specialized publications. But you have to pay for them, and they typically aren't really the news, and use some jargon.

NortySpock 6y ago
"The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free..." https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalle...
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I am surprised at how few people understand this basic bit of economics - perhaps marketers are to blame for the obvious being inconceivable. Just because you are paying more doesn't mean you will get more for it. If you go with a niche specialization you may well pay through the nose for very expensive lies. See Spectrum, the HIV-AIDS Denialism magazine that went defunct after all editors died of AIDS for an example.

bromuro 6y ago

It is your perspective, similar to “The World as Will and Representation” by Schopenhauer: > Schopenhauer argues that the world we experience around us—the world of objects in space and time and related in causal ways—exists solely as ‘representation’ (Vorstellung) dependent on a cognizing subject, not as a world that can be considered to exist in itself (i.e. independently of how it appears to the subject’s mind). Our knowledge of objects is thus knowledge of mere phenomena rather than things-in-themselves. I like to think that the recent physics discoveries are crossing the same line. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Repres...

peterpeppers 6y ago

Friends, there is a solution! - If you're a CONSERVATIVE, read liberal. - If you're a LIBERAL, read conservative. - If you're a proclaimed CENTRIST, read everything. Schools don't teach us how to read and process information objectively but hopefully your first history professor explained that historical bias and bias in writing well...is human and old as history itself. Embrace it! 1. Check the veracity of claims and statements made in popular news stories, social media posts and political statements. - https://www.snopes.com/ https://www.snopes.com/ - https://www.factcheck.org/ https://www.factcheck.org/ - https://www.politifact.com/ https://www.politifact.com/ 2. Additionally, there is a separate body, International Fact-Checking Network, that checks the common fact-checking organizations above for bias and truth as well in their fact checking. - https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/ https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/ - https://www.poynter.org/major-funders/ https://www.poynter.org/major-funders/ 3. There's also the independently run MediaBiasFactCheck site which has found that the fact-checking sites above are pretty close to the center in their fact-checking and myth-busting. - https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ - https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/

searchableguy 6y ago
Or simply ignore everything that isn't local? The problem seems to be more centralisation of power and decision making. Consume information to act rather than sit and tweet.
pydry 6y ago
The stuff you really have to worry about is the stuff that the liberal, right wing and centrist billionaire owned media outlets all agree upon or agree isn't important enough to talk about. It's an interesting exercise to read contrasting viewpoints from opposing sides though (e.g. Russian media vs. American media on a us-russia conflict).
Chris2048 6y ago
> Check the veracity of claims and statements made in popular news stories using fact-checkers of even more dubious veracity? https://www.politifactbias.com/ https://www.politifactbias.com/

NicoJuicy 6y ago

I found a nice video recording the issue, the term is coined: firehose of falsehoods https://youtu.be/nknYtlOvaQ0 https://youtu.be/nknYtlOvaQ0

Natsu 6y ago

I don't think we can know everything by any means, but I've started getting my news from subject matter experts who show their work & give full access to their research vs. the spectacle of corporate news. I'll still skim for anything important, but I'm not even reading what they say, I'm looking for actual sources. Outlets that don't bother to give any sources are generally not worth reading.

BrandonM 6y ago

> 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!). For a concrete example of that, Deadspin in 2013 spelled out how ESPN created its own narrative to report on: https://deadspin.com/how-espn-manufactures-a-story-colin-kaepernick-edition-1185400028 https://deadspin.com/how-espn-manufactures-a-story-colin-kae...

elihu 6y ago

> There is not a technical solution to any of this. I don't quite agree with that. In general, our best means of knowing with reasonable confidence whether some event being reported on is true is our confidence in the person telling us of the event. If it's someone we know personally, that's best. In a world of billions of people, that's not possible for most world events, so we can think of trust as being transitive. I can put more confidence in something that's reported by someone who is personally vouched for by a friend of mine, than something that's three steps removed, and so on. The trouble is that our human brains are incapable of understanding social networks with more than a hundred or so people (i.e. Dunbar's number) and even those we have very imperfect understanding of. Computers don't have that limitation. Supposing you have a directed graph of every human who is willing to publicly vouch for the credibility of some other human, you can run something like PageRank on that to determine the degree to which you should trust some random reporter. Better yet would be something like PageRank, but modified to handle anti-endorsements as well. There are ways to handle distrust in PageRank-like systems, but that's a little outside the scope of the point I'm trying to make. Of course, collecting this directed graph of endorsements is outside the ability of a normal human, but sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have something like it. If they wanted to re-use that to create a news filtering service they probably could. On the other hand, the rest of us users would have no particular reason to believe they don't have their thumb on the scale, promoting news that serves their interests, or that they were paid to promote. So, I wouldn't say what I'm suggesting is purely a "technical solution", there are social and cultural aspects to it as well, but the one aspect of the problem -- that are human brains can't cope with large social networks -- is one that we can use computers to solve, if we have the right data.

Rayhem 6y ago
Wouldn't this directed graph endorsement approach just devolve into more followers = more endorsements? There's nothing built into the system to ensure quality whatsoever.
- elihu 6y ago
  That's why I mentioned anti-endorsements. Pure PageRank doesn't have any notion of negative reputation, so by itself it's more of a popularity metric than a quality metric.

princeb 6y ago

> he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. i cannot even be sure that my version of truth is the truthiest version of the truth out there. i cannot say much more about the people i know, even those personally affected by various events around the world. every time i feel confident about my beliefs, i remember rashomon. everyone is affected by bias. the only way to avoid bias is to avoid observation.

cortesoft 6y ago
You can't avoid bias, but there are certainly mitigation techniques.
- princeb 6y ago
  how do you know those bias mitigation techniques are not skewed by bias? and if you verified it/came up with it yourself, how do you know you are not skewed by your own bias?

vmladenov 6y ago

You could read wire services like Associated Press, Reuters, and United Press International, which are the sources from which mainstream outlets buy their news. Just be warned that the stories are exceptionally dry

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ainiriand 6y ago

I had exactly the same problem in Spain back then, then I started watching DW and the quality is superb. Give it a try, let me know what you think.