24 ms·

I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. "Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but thi

I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. "Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's helping to shape what becomes a story. I think a lot of it is probably a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle — social media is in easy reach and available at whatever point you're writing your article. Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news', but would be interesting if a newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles.

secondcoming 6y ago
> newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles. The entire internet should take this advice, firstly for the reason you stated, and also because the Twitter website UX is appalling.
neilwilson 6y ago
When I did media training years ago they told us that the media isn't there to inform. It's there to sell imprints. And that journalists have knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Their job is to file copy to strict deadlines.
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires. They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the issue with their participation, but they didn't create it. >Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news' We can't, but just like smoking cigarettes or shooting up opioids we can recognize it as a source of damage and addiction and start changing things to combat it.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Do you have any evidence for that point? Like sure, I'd love to blame Twitter and Facebook for all of our societal ills, but they aren't new. Culture wars didn't just suddenly happen in the early 00s. Cue the 1960s and 70s long before any social media and the amazing amount of not just protests but bombings, assassinations and so on that make the current culture war seem like a mere shouting match.
  - andrew_ 6y ago
    "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix touches on this - in part, the algorithms that run these platforms and govern (guide?) user interaction are responsible in large part for pitting people against each other. It's in their best interest to keep eyeballs on their respective sites as much has humanly possible.
    - TheKarateKid 6y ago
      Yes algorithms contribute, but the media is the reason these problems go from being just an argument on social media, to an actual societal issue. Before the media started using social media as “facts” for their reporting, these arguments would just be another online “flame war.” Remember when we used those terms? Remember when online arguments remained as just that? Now, when 1000 people on Twitter try to cancel someone the media reports it as if it’s an actual popular opinion, thus amplifying the problem for better or worse.
      - bobthepanda 6y ago
        There are legitimately things on social media that become much bigger and become a story in and of itself though. Breonna Taylor's case was not covered in MSM initially, and the continued pressure on it is largely due to social media self-sustaining it.
      - arrosenberg 6y ago
        I think this conflates two separate, but equally damaging issues. (1) Social media sites have been optimized in the same way tobacco was, to take advantage of human chemistry to make it as addictive as possible; and (2) news companies are run for a profit, and the profits all started going to online advertisers, so the news companies had to follow. Thus things that are important on social media, become important to news companies, which becomes mainstream news. I find it tough to blame the news for this — the social media companies were making deliberate design choices and the news companies were reacting in an attempt to stay in business in a rapidly changing market.
_jal 6y ago
So, as in most market-driven things with negative impacts, it is more complicated than just one thing. You can think of it as a security issue. Alice wants to read the news, Bob wants to write it. Mallet wants to foster discussion of an idea of dubious worthiness to further nefarious but unstated aims. Alice is attracted to lurid, weird and scary, even though she mostly knows better, because we all are. Bob is attracted to easy stories, because it is hard to run a paper today. Mallet doesn't care too much about how his poison gets out there, only that it does. Among other things, this suggests that any one thing, like not embedding Twitter quotes, is unlikely to make much difference - Mallet will shift to something else.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Don't forget about Evelyn, who makes money by exposing people to ads, and Steve, who provides a platform to do it and gets paid by Evelyn. Together, they create the primary pressure that forces stories to be attractive to the likes of Alice and Bob, and they'll more than happily enable Mallet, as long as his poison has a side effect of getting more Alices and Bobs to view stories filled with ads. That's the problem here. Kill the advertising dependency, and Mallet will find it much harder to spread their poison.
rmrfstar 6y ago
In Orwell's Oceania, the inner and outer party made up around 10% of the population. Minitrue was a small subset of that apparatus, and developed such wonderful products as "the two minutes hate". It's not like we weren't warned.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Neil Postman wrote in 1985: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism." "Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with [indulgences]." "As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” "In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” -- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
  - rmrfstar 6y ago
    It's a great book, but that excerpt reflects a pretty shallow read of 1984. It doesn't account for this specific example, the use of outrage as an instrument of social control.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      I think fear will always be a more powerful means of influence than desire: "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." Although said by one of the Nazi leaders - I don't think it is any less true.
alex_c 6y ago
Sometimes I wish I had a way to block Twitter from my life completely. I don't even use it, but I wish for an AdBlock-like tool that would: - block Twitter content in news articles - block links to articles with Twitter content from ever being shown to me in the first place Most news articles provide little value to my life anyway, but I don't think I've ever read an article referencing Twitter quotes that was worthwhile. While I'm dreaming, if I had any way to filter all the news about what public figures say, and keep only the news about what they actually do...
- jimbokun 6y ago
  One of the absolute laziest ways to write a "news" article is the "here are a list of things people tweeted about this topic" compilation.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I see this a lot in an attempt to smear a candidate or public figure: “Here are some abhorrent Tweets from their followers”. Of course, it’s an enumeration fallacy—there’s no way of knowing whether those Tweets accurately represent the candidate’s followers or not. That said, journalists are happy to find real life followers of candidates/etc with abhorrent views, but I suppose Twitter makes it easier to create the desired spin.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > One of the absolute laziest ways to write a "news" article is the "here are a list of things people tweeted about this topic" compilation. It's definitely less work that investigative journalism, but to the extent that twitter is influential, it's a topic that should be covered. IMHO, the media has (at least) two important jobs: 1) conduct novel investigations and 2) summarize the firehose of events and ideas into a form concise enough for someone to read on a daily/weekly basis. "What people are saying on social media" falls squarely into the second category.
    - alex_c 6y ago
      I very very strongly reject the idea that "What people are saying on social media" is worth summarizing or covering by the media. I can list many reasons, the top few would be: 1. It is too easy to game "what people are saying" on social media 2. Loudest voices / most extreme positions get picked up, amplified, and passed off as "what people are saying" 3. It is too easy / predictable to game what kind of messages the media chooses to summarize 4. None of it matters (see my original post about what people say vs. what people do) If an idea is worth discussing, it is worth discussing regardless of its source (social media or otherwise). Conversely, and I know this is open for debate, but Twitter is not a great medium for discussing ideas. Social media regularly reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote: “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” That is, on average, what people are saying on social media. It is not worth summarizing and covering.
dboreham 6y ago
>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. It's driven by any participant who is making money from the political process. This includes MSM, Social Media, Political Consultants, and on and on.
mmastrac 6y ago
This is nothing new. Journalists were cribbing from blogs and Reddit before social media, and from usenet before then (although the latter to a lesser degree). Agree with your statement of this being a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle. The push for free news on the internet may have also contributed.
zests 6y ago
Read the Economist or probably any "content is paid by subscriptions and not advertisements" news sources.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  It is possible to collect money from both subscriptions and advertisers. Arguably, people willing to pay for subscriptions are a more interesting target for the advertisers.
hrktb 6y ago
I am curious about how do you see street corner enquetes and random telephone sampling before SNS. Thoses enquetes were done on somewhate crowded yet non busy places for convenience, and tended to sample a specific part of the population: e.g. people going to shopping districts at off hours, or people coming out of church for the most biased samplings. Telephone checks were similar in that you had a very high percentage of at home caregivers responding to them. Do you the past journalistic methods as that much more sophisticated than nowadays ?
- another-dave 6y ago
  I wouldn't say I think that they're more sophisticated but conducting a telephone sample, or doing a vox-pop on street corners with a TV camera requires more effort than just typing a hashtag into a searchbox and pulling out a few responses. I think the lower friction of skimming social media, plus the added pressure of having more air-time / articles to fill means there's an over-reliance on it in a way that there wasn't before.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
In the US, it seems these 13% receive outsize political attention as well. I recall at the run up to the 2016 election, one of the main issues was gender and public bathroom usage. I couldn't help wondering at the time why that issue received so much attention vs. the 42,000 opioid overdose fatalities that year alone, which got virtually zero attention.
- kevindong 6y ago
  Personally, I think the reason is just another take on the bike shed effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- mobilejdral 6y ago
  It wasn't about bathroom usage, but about getting a voting base to vote. Religious groups don't care about opioid issues, but they do like talking about and voting against LGBT+ issues. As for the issue itself, the wikipedia article has a pretty good overview of the whole thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  If you started talking about deaths of despair, you'd have to start talking about de-industrialization and how the Fed lied about it to give Congress political cover [1]. Can't go there. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-12/shares-of-real-gdp-don-t-give-the-real-story-of-manufacturing https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-12/shares...
  - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    Well in 2016, to talk about de-industrialization would have helped the designated "outsider" candidates, despite the fact that one of those, Bernie Sanders, was not Donald Trump.
    - rmrfstar 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
liveoneggs 6y ago
"news" about tweets is the most ridiculous thing to happen in the last decade.
- corin_ 6y ago
  Is it really new? Some news about tweets is justified - for example the president of the US has at times announced policies on Twitter first. It's a modern equivalent of making an brief announcement to the press or sending out a very sparse press release. And the tweets that you (and I) hate to see reported, those of random people and especially headlines like "Twitter goes mad about (whatever)" somehow making an entire article out of quoting 6 random Twitter users... it's a digital form of voxpops on TV or reader's letters in newspapers. All of them can be a nice addition at times, but in my opinion the vast majority shouldn't be part of a "news" medium.
KaiserPro 6y ago
> I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. Much as this is reassuring, its not the whole story. Yes, the "MSM", well parts of them report chaff because its cheap. But why bother? because it sells. In some cases there are editors that push a certain stance or opinion. even more rare are the cases where they manage to actually shift a section of society's world view permanently. The problem is perfectly illustraited by the german newspaper "DER SPIEGEL" it literally means "the mirror" Both social, print and to a lesser extent tv news(the uk is highly regulated) are a mirror on society. They push what sells, and if its comfortable lies, then it so be it. So no, the main problem is not "the media" its us for consuming shit. If we stop reading gossip, junk and "punditry" then they'll stop making it. Its as simple as that.
ggggtez 6y ago
> journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. I'm surprised that you say that the main culprit is the main stream media. I see this kind of reporting in all news outlets, especially non-MSM. It's cheap and trivial to write an article that highlights some comments from four people with 15 twitter followers a piece, and claim that "People are saying". You even hear the POTUS frequently use "people are saying" and then quoting whackadoos from Twitter. Can we really hold MSM to a higher standard than the president of the free world?
randomsearch 6y ago
Minor point about rowing back on the need for constant news updates - I happily rely on checking high quality news outlets morning evening and watching Channel 4 News at 7pm. I don’t watch 24 hour news channels, and it works just fine. It’s certainly possible for a person to go back to considered coverage.
tonfreed 6y ago
The problem with this is not many people actually use Twitter, and they actively derank content they don't like. For example just today I noticed "#donutdick" trending because the leader of the opposition down here said something stupid, but if I look literally anywhere else on the internet all I see is people criticising the premier. I think you're 100% correct, social media stories are the equivalent of the cute fluffy stories 20 years ago, but there's a huge moral hazard associated with that.
onecommentman 6y ago
“I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news'” Let’s challenge that assumption with historical precedent. A technological and social revolution of sorts in the 1800s. In the first world of the time, the masses became literate and had more leisure time. Combined with advances in the technology of printing and paper production, and in distribution of the physical book, it led to an explosion of interest in something called “the novel”. It was almost a madness at the time, cf. the popularity of Charles Dickens works. But eventually the violent boiling cooled to a simmer. A continuous simmer, but just a simmer culturally. I don’t know how or why the dynamic changed, but it did settle down. I’d guess a similar analogy could be made with “the theater”, which is even below a simmer at this point in modern culture. What will change the dynamic? Your guess is as good as mine...
gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Alexander Hamilton founded the post. It wasn’t always this way.

secondcoming 6y ago

> newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles. The entire internet should take this advice, firstly for the reason you stated, and also because the Twitter website UX is appalling.

neilwilson 6y ago

When I did media training years ago they told us that the media isn't there to inform. It's there to sell imprints. And that journalists have knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Their job is to file copy to strict deadlines.

cmdshiftf4 6y ago

>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires. They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the issue with their participation, but they didn't create it. >Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news' We can't, but just like smoking cigarettes or shooting up opioids we can recognize it as a source of damage and addiction and start changing things to combat it.

vorpalhex 6y ago
Do you have any evidence for that point? Like sure, I'd love to blame Twitter and Facebook for all of our societal ills, but they aren't new. Culture wars didn't just suddenly happen in the early 00s. Cue the 1960s and 70s long before any social media and the amazing amount of not just protests but bombings, assassinations and so on that make the current culture war seem like a mere shouting match.
- andrew_ 6y ago
  "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix touches on this - in part, the algorithms that run these platforms and govern (guide?) user interaction are responsible in large part for pitting people against each other. It's in their best interest to keep eyeballs on their respective sites as much has humanly possible.
  - TheKarateKid 6y ago
    Yes algorithms contribute, but the media is the reason these problems go from being just an argument on social media, to an actual societal issue. Before the media started using social media as “facts” for their reporting, these arguments would just be another online “flame war.” Remember when we used those terms? Remember when online arguments remained as just that? Now, when 1000 people on Twitter try to cancel someone the media reports it as if it’s an actual popular opinion, thus amplifying the problem for better or worse.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      There are legitimately things on social media that become much bigger and become a story in and of itself though. Breonna Taylor's case was not covered in MSM initially, and the continued pressure on it is largely due to social media self-sustaining it.
    - arrosenberg 6y ago
      I think this conflates two separate, but equally damaging issues. (1) Social media sites have been optimized in the same way tobacco was, to take advantage of human chemistry to make it as addictive as possible; and (2) news companies are run for a profit, and the profits all started going to online advertisers, so the news companies had to follow. Thus things that are important on social media, become important to news companies, which becomes mainstream news. I find it tough to blame the news for this — the social media companies were making deliberate design choices and the news companies were reacting in an attempt to stay in business in a rapidly changing market.

_jal 6y ago

So, as in most market-driven things with negative impacts, it is more complicated than just one thing. You can think of it as a security issue. Alice wants to read the news, Bob wants to write it. Mallet wants to foster discussion of an idea of dubious worthiness to further nefarious but unstated aims. Alice is attracted to lurid, weird and scary, even though she mostly knows better, because we all are. Bob is attracted to easy stories, because it is hard to run a paper today. Mallet doesn't care too much about how his poison gets out there, only that it does. Among other things, this suggests that any one thing, like not embedding Twitter quotes, is unlikely to make much difference - Mallet will shift to something else.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Don't forget about Evelyn, who makes money by exposing people to ads, and Steve, who provides a platform to do it and gets paid by Evelyn. Together, they create the primary pressure that forces stories to be attractive to the likes of Alice and Bob, and they'll more than happily enable Mallet, as long as his poison has a side effect of getting more Alices and Bobs to view stories filled with ads. That's the problem here. Kill the advertising dependency, and Mallet will find it much harder to spread their poison.

rmrfstar 6y ago

In Orwell's Oceania, the inner and outer party made up around 10% of the population. Minitrue was a small subset of that apparatus, and developed such wonderful products as "the two minutes hate". It's not like we weren't warned.

wombatmobile 6y ago
Neil Postman wrote in 1985: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism." "Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with [indulgences]." "As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” "In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” -- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  It's a great book, but that excerpt reflects a pretty shallow read of 1984. It doesn't account for this specific example, the use of outrage as an instrument of social control.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I think fear will always be a more powerful means of influence than desire: "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." Although said by one of the Nazi leaders - I don't think it is any less true.

alex_c 6y ago

Sometimes I wish I had a way to block Twitter from my life completely. I don't even use it, but I wish for an AdBlock-like tool that would: - block Twitter content in news articles - block links to articles with Twitter content from ever being shown to me in the first place Most news articles provide little value to my life anyway, but I don't think I've ever read an article referencing Twitter quotes that was worthwhile. While I'm dreaming, if I had any way to filter all the news about what public figures say, and keep only the news about what they actually do...

jimbokun 6y ago
One of the absolute laziest ways to write a "news" article is the "here are a list of things people tweeted about this topic" compilation.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I see this a lot in an attempt to smear a candidate or public figure: “Here are some abhorrent Tweets from their followers”. Of course, it’s an enumeration fallacy—there’s no way of knowing whether those Tweets accurately represent the candidate’s followers or not. That said, journalists are happy to find real life followers of candidates/etc with abhorrent views, but I suppose Twitter makes it easier to create the desired spin.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > One of the absolute laziest ways to write a "news" article is the "here are a list of things people tweeted about this topic" compilation. It's definitely less work that investigative journalism, but to the extent that twitter is influential, it's a topic that should be covered. IMHO, the media has (at least) two important jobs: 1) conduct novel investigations and 2) summarize the firehose of events and ideas into a form concise enough for someone to read on a daily/weekly basis. "What people are saying on social media" falls squarely into the second category.
  - alex_c 6y ago
    I very very strongly reject the idea that "What people are saying on social media" is worth summarizing or covering by the media. I can list many reasons, the top few would be: 1. It is too easy to game "what people are saying" on social media 2. Loudest voices / most extreme positions get picked up, amplified, and passed off as "what people are saying" 3. It is too easy / predictable to game what kind of messages the media chooses to summarize 4. None of it matters (see my original post about what people say vs. what people do) If an idea is worth discussing, it is worth discussing regardless of its source (social media or otherwise). Conversely, and I know this is open for debate, but Twitter is not a great medium for discussing ideas. Social media regularly reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote: “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” That is, on average, what people are saying on social media. It is not worth summarizing and covering.

dboreham 6y ago

>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. It's driven by any participant who is making money from the political process. This includes MSM, Social Media, Political Consultants, and on and on.

mmastrac 6y ago

This is nothing new. Journalists were cribbing from blogs and Reddit before social media, and from usenet before then (although the latter to a lesser degree). Agree with your statement of this being a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle. The push for free news on the internet may have also contributed.

zests 6y ago

Read the Economist or probably any "content is paid by subscriptions and not advertisements" news sources.

Viliam1234 6y ago
It is possible to collect money from both subscriptions and advertisers. Arguably, people willing to pay for subscriptions are a more interesting target for the advertisers.

hrktb 6y ago

I am curious about how do you see street corner enquetes and random telephone sampling before SNS. Thoses enquetes were done on somewhate crowded yet non busy places for convenience, and tended to sample a specific part of the population: e.g. people going to shopping districts at off hours, or people coming out of church for the most biased samplings. Telephone checks were similar in that you had a very high percentage of at home caregivers responding to them. Do you the past journalistic methods as that much more sophisticated than nowadays ?

another-dave 6y ago
I wouldn't say I think that they're more sophisticated but conducting a telephone sample, or doing a vox-pop on street corners with a TV camera requires more effort than just typing a hashtag into a searchbox and pulling out a few responses. I think the lower friction of skimming social media, plus the added pressure of having more air-time / articles to fill means there's an over-reliance on it in a way that there wasn't before.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

In the US, it seems these 13% receive outsize political attention as well. I recall at the run up to the 2016 election, one of the main issues was gender and public bathroom usage. I couldn't help wondering at the time why that issue received so much attention vs. the 42,000 opioid overdose fatalities that year alone, which got virtually zero attention.

kevindong 6y ago
Personally, I think the reason is just another take on the bike shed effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
mobilejdral 6y ago
It wasn't about bathroom usage, but about getting a voting base to vote. Religious groups don't care about opioid issues, but they do like talking about and voting against LGBT+ issues. As for the issue itself, the wikipedia article has a pretty good overview of the whole thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
rmrfstar 6y ago
If you started talking about deaths of despair, you'd have to start talking about de-industrialization and how the Fed lied about it to give Congress political cover [1]. Can't go there. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-12/shares-of-real-gdp-don-t-give-the-real-story-of-manufacturing https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-12/shares...
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  Well in 2016, to talk about de-industrialization would have helped the designated "outsider" candidates, despite the fact that one of those, Bernie Sanders, was not Donald Trump.
  - rmrfstar 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

liveoneggs 6y ago

"news" about tweets is the most ridiculous thing to happen in the last decade.

corin_ 6y ago
Is it really new? Some news about tweets is justified - for example the president of the US has at times announced policies on Twitter first. It's a modern equivalent of making an brief announcement to the press or sending out a very sparse press release. And the tweets that you (and I) hate to see reported, those of random people and especially headlines like "Twitter goes mad about (whatever)" somehow making an entire article out of quoting 6 random Twitter users... it's a digital form of voxpops on TV or reader's letters in newspapers. All of them can be a nice addition at times, but in my opinion the vast majority shouldn't be part of a "news" medium.

KaiserPro 6y ago

> I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. Much as this is reassuring, its not the whole story. Yes, the "MSM", well parts of them report chaff because its cheap. But why bother? because it sells. In some cases there are editors that push a certain stance or opinion. even more rare are the cases where they manage to actually shift a section of society's world view permanently. The problem is perfectly illustraited by the german newspaper "DER SPIEGEL" it literally means "the mirror" Both social, print and to a lesser extent tv news(the uk is highly regulated) are a mirror on society. They push what sells, and if its comfortable lies, then it so be it. So no, the main problem is not "the media" its us for consuming shit. If we stop reading gossip, junk and "punditry" then they'll stop making it. Its as simple as that.

ggggtez 6y ago

> journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. I'm surprised that you say that the main culprit is the main stream media. I see this kind of reporting in all news outlets, especially non-MSM. It's cheap and trivial to write an article that highlights some comments from four people with 15 twitter followers a piece, and claim that "People are saying". You even hear the POTUS frequently use "people are saying" and then quoting whackadoos from Twitter. Can we really hold MSM to a higher standard than the president of the free world?

randomsearch 6y ago

Minor point about rowing back on the need for constant news updates - I happily rely on checking high quality news outlets morning evening and watching Channel 4 News at 7pm. I don’t watch 24 hour news channels, and it works just fine. It’s certainly possible for a person to go back to considered coverage.

tonfreed 6y ago

The problem with this is not many people actually use Twitter, and they actively derank content they don't like. For example just today I noticed "#donutdick" trending because the leader of the opposition down here said something stupid, but if I look literally anywhere else on the internet all I see is people criticising the premier. I think you're 100% correct, social media stories are the equivalent of the cute fluffy stories 20 years ago, but there's a huge moral hazard associated with that.

onecommentman 6y ago

“I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news'” Let’s challenge that assumption with historical precedent. A technological and social revolution of sorts in the 1800s. In the first world of the time, the masses became literate and had more leisure time. Combined with advances in the technology of printing and paper production, and in distribution of the physical book, it led to an explosion of interest in something called “the novel”. It was almost a madness at the time, cf. the popularity of Charles Dickens works. But eventually the violent boiling cooled to a simmer. A continuous simmer, but just a simmer culturally. I don’t know how or why the dynamic changed, but it did settle down. I’d guess a similar analogy could be made with “the theater”, which is even below a simmer at this point in modern culture. What will change the dynamic? Your guess is as good as mine...

gogopuppygogo 6y ago

Alexander Hamilton founded the post. It wasn’t always this way.