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> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. I have a better idea. The news has always been shit. There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press

• brundolf 5y ago
  As with any field in a capitalist society, good things can only really come from those who care more about what they're working on than about any associated profit-motive. I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks. And of course some people like this still exist, but: Anecdotally, it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity or civic duty and towards cynical profit-motive. You can see it in everything from hospitals, to universities, to technical companies like Boeing. I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge. I don't know if centralization/acquisition is to blame, or stock market pressures, or private equity, or some cultural phenomenon. But it feels like we're only careening further down this path with each passing year.
  • tomnipotent 5y ago
    > They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important They operated the same way they do now, and worked on whatever their bosses told them to work on. It's just romantic to think they were unburdened by our mortal contrivances and somehow had the wherewithal to pick out "important" stories.
    • brundolf 5y ago
      Do you push for good engineering practices at your job, even when they go beyond the quarterly business goals? I know I do. It doesn't have to be just one or the other. You can have principles and push for what you believe to be good, even if your boss is ultimately profit-driven (even if you have some profit-incentive of your own!). Multiple factors come together. It's incredibly cynical of you to paint that sort of basic integrity as nothing but a romantic fantasy. What I feel like I'm seeing today is that people are either less willing or less able to enact higher principles in their work. It could very possibly be a power-dynamic thing, or it could just be the spread of general cynicism like yours.
      • tomnipotent 5y ago
        All professions have a distribution of competence, whether you're looking at programmers or journalists. There's no evidence that the distribution of good journalists has fundamentally changed over time other than the effects of just a larger pool of eligible candidates. A quick glance through Peabody and Pulitzer winners over time can quickly confirm this. If anything, I'd argue people are far more principled today than any other point in recorded history. Maybe they're just not your principles.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity It starts with the meaning of "professional". I know of two opposite ones: 1. "Professional" as in doing high quality work, no corner cutting, having respect for the problem and the customer. 2. "Professional" as in putting business first, with the implication that any possible corner will be cut, any possible sacrifice on quality will be made, if it makes the business more money. The second meaning is what I've been seeing increasingly often over the years. It's a frequent sentiment in our industry - it's professional to keep applying subpar tooling and methods to a problem, because upskilling costs money short-term. It's professional to bloat your product and make your users pay an implicit tax, because it's saving fraction of those costs for the company. > I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge (...) I sometimes wonder if the answer is: none of those, things have always been as shitty - it's you and me who are growing up and discovering the world for what it is (and/or growing more cynical in the process).
    • strogonoff 5y ago
      As a journalist or a publication, you do need money to survive, and if you don’t survive then how can you make a positive impact with fair reporting? The choice is then between ads, financing, and truly surviving off your subscribers by being so expensive that only the top 1% can afford to read you. Any option compromises you in some way, choose your poison to the extent possible. Despite all that being one huge grey area ethically speaking, I still think that without professional reporting all we’d have is a network of mini-influencers misrepresenting reality into their respective bubbles on Twitter/Substack/TikTok, either for likes or to further whatever hidden agenda they or their friends may have. It’s a good thing to have a job description and years of education that ingrain certain principles[0]. It’s doubly bad, though, when you betray those principles; being a journalist is (or ought to be) much like being a cop or a doctor—for the mechanism to work properly, people should be able to trust you to act in their interest rather than own personal gain (and you should deserve the trust). Unfortunately, I don’t see a good way for such a model to persist. We’re losing trust in traditional affordable mass media, often for good reasons. [0] Most importantly, to be cognisant of your biases—which indeed includes selecting which story to report on, selecting which aspects to mention, etc.—and to compensate for them.
  • tlarkworthy 5y ago
    My theory is its data driven decision making. It's messed up the corporation to be purely metrics driven. Everyone hunts the metrics and misses the qualitative reasons for anything. We distrust internal models now, and try to be purely empirical, which is a mistake. We are overly technology now, but the technology lacks nuance and long term reasoning.
    • TeMPOraL 5y ago
      What irks me about data-driven decision making are two things: 1. Correctly reasoning from data is a very difficult task, needing advanced skills, requiring deep understanding of statistics. Most companies have nobody with such skill set on board. 2. It provides a fake air of legitimacy to otherwise arbitrary decisions. Whether by mistake (confirming your own biases with data) or on purpose, you can use data to justify whatever decision you already want to make, few people know enough statistics to call you on your bullshit.
      • prox 5y ago
        I think you are right. The amount of people I know that even know the word “data driven” is surprisingly low. Maybe one, and that’s not even a specialist. Heck I don’t think I am one, although my analytic skills are usually why people hire me.
    • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
      I've seen this too. It seems like it would be better to do "strategy driven decision making" and use data to help inform.
  • savanaly 5y ago
    >They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. If you're going to water the statement down to that level, how does it not still apply today?
    • spfzero 5y ago
      I think it’s implied that the “many” today, is a much smaller “many” than before.
• MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Yes, but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists. Local journalism pays rates that make teachers look like kings, and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work a week. It's a job that requires passion, because there are far more of them who are making under minimum wage at an hourly rate than there are who are making six figures.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    Yes, but there are barely any of this type of journalist anymore, and barely any outlets for them to be published in. What there are are a lot of connected people who went from elite schools to exclusive unpaid internships, jobs in prestige nonprofit PR departments, and consulting firms, then to national outlets at very high salaries. Their coworkers are ex-politicians and campaign flacks, and people who worked at massive hedge funds and investment banks, who decided that they preferred punditry and socializing to their jobs. The people you're talking about are bloggers/substack people now, and are generally denigrated by mainstream outlets.
    • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Oh, you mean other than about 90% of journalists in America. I worked around multiple newsrooms. It's clear that you have not. There is a very big world outside of the corner of the internet that you live in. And it still exists despite the internet trying to kill it off. Most "hometown" papers still exist. Go find some of them. Read them. What you'll see is that most of them are staffed by about 5-6 people, a few freelancers, and then a bunch of bylines that are simply the name of the paper, because they don't want you to realize how short-staffed they are (these are also written by those same journalists and editors). That's the reality of the modern newsroom for the VAST majority of news outlets in the US.
  • tomnipotent 5y ago
    > but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists So do accountants. And actuaries. And doctors. And programmers. And artists. And pretty much most every other profession. There's nothing special about clergy or journalists or doctors because they chose the career they did. > and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work This is just more romanticism. I'd wager that the distribution of hours of journalists looks very similar to most professionals.
• User23 5y ago
  In the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why he got into the printing business. It's been common knowledge for a very long time that the primary purpose of political reporting is to persuade and not to inform. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_Franklin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...
  • Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    American journalism in the aftermath of WW2 had a brief moment where it became both a unifying idea (largely sharing and building shared cultural values) and was largely seen as high-integrity. This perception began collapsing around the start of the internet news age, and now has pretty much totally collapsed. But it's important to remember that the WW2 consensus around the press was just an artifact of its times and that Franklin is talking about the press from a very different lens. To him the "press" was more like the Federalist Papers or Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". If you want to see what journalism _used_ to be like in the US, read about Yellow Journalism [1], or just read some news from the 1800s industrial era in the US. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
• roenxi 5y ago
  In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse! And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.
  • tomnipotent 5y ago
    We have unrealistic expectations of news publishing. Modern TV and movies has made certain professions far more glamourous than they are (journalists, police, doctors) because it makes for good media. But most doctors are not ER doctors. Most journalists are not breaking news. Most police never fire their service weapon. But to somehow think the moral distributions of people are superior from the average population, just because of career selection, is dubious at best. Something being protected by law doesn't somehow make its practice exalted.
    • cyberge99 5y ago
      This was largely due to the repeal of The Fairness Doctrine (USA).
  • teflodollar 5y ago
    I always thought PBS and NPR were pretty good. What am I missing?
    • p_j_w 5y ago
      Yeah, not sure what that guy's on about. PBS, NPR, and other not for profit news orgs like BBC aren't perfect, but then what is? If I had to choose a single news source to try to stay informed, I'd take any one of those three over any of their for-profit competition.
      • workinghard 5y ago
• paulpauper 5y ago
  The 24-7 news is more of a misnomer. Most networks switch to infomercials past midnight or so. Its not like there are reproters the hq 24-7. .
• colordrops 5y ago
  Absolutely. Time was just as guilty of misinformation, exclusion, blackouts, appeal to vague authorities, and maintaining the Overton window for the establishment. Yeah, sure, it had a much more professional sheen and you had to pay attention to notice, but it was still shit.
  • bsanr2 5y ago
    My father refused to read Time for decades - decades - because they'd manipulated their cover photo of OJ Simpson to make him look darker-skinned than he actually is. It was, I'm told, A Thing, along with All-American restaurant Denny's having to pay out millions in damages over racial discrimination (Wells Fargo having to do the same 20 years later does much for my suspicion that the 2010s are something of an echo of the 90s). This is what is on my personal radar; I'm sure someone with other priorities can name similar, fact-based grievances with other institutions that ostensibly design their products for general American consumption. For news, in many cases, the issue isn't so much the veracity of what's being reported, but... what's being reported. You only have so many pages and only so much reader mental bandwidth.
• barrkel 5y ago
  Yes. But it, and other mass media like it, generated unifying narratives, narratives that weren't hermetically sealed from conflicting narratives. That meant you could talk to your relatives at Christmas and perhaps have different ideas about the same facts, rather than completely different sets of facts.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  But that isn't true with the examples the author proposes. It has degraded a lot, although we forgot about changes in media. Nobody knew in yesterdays world which articles were read and which were not. Newspapers were bought as a whole. Today analytics show us that the most bullshit articles generate the most clicks, either out of rage or affirmation. Content is seriously drifting that way because for any business that is a sensible choice. But for quality this is misinterpreting data. A case were less data leads to better results. Rare, but a misinterpretation can be more damaging than remaining inconclusive. Online news is compared to its paper versions, many outlets still have significant differences here. Of course there was a lot of bullshit too, but today almost everything is bullshit. We even built bullshit-thrones for those that produce the most.
• Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  The author starts by comparing the news from newspaper/magazine to modern online news to call it shit and I agree. In spite of being a business I feel printed newspapers at large struck to a code of ethics and used that "freedom of the press" judiciously. In India Newspapers played a crucial role in organizing against colonial rule, Many freedom fighters were themselves a publishers/editos of such newspapers. At the later part of the freedom struggle such newspapers came under heavy attack, editors jailed and unspoken horrors imposed upon them. Even today printed news papers which survived from those era does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices. But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.