9 ms·

To be honest, I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything. On

by rdudek 5y ago

To be honest, I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything. One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour. Most boring, non-sensational broadcast there is and yet, they fill it up with sold content and reporting. Also, no advertising.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything. The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it. It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  This is also my suspicion, although I've heard that NYT's subscriptions are doing as well as they've ever done and while I wouldn't describe NYT's journalism as "click-bait", they've certainly engaged in more than their share of overt ideological propagandism (which isn't unique to them, but part of a landscape shift away from aspirationally objective reporting).
  - busterarm 5y ago
    The best sign of click bait is posting obviously false, inflammatory articles and then silently putting out a retraction days later after the clicks have come in. The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      Perhaps the avid reader would say that they are most disappointed in papers like the NYT. You cannot really be disappointed by FOX or CNN. Different medium, but I think it still applies.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I think we have different notions of "clickbait". Personally I think NYT's particular brand of dishonesty is a bit more subtle than what I normally think of as "clickbait", but I won't argue the point. They are certainly and frequently guilty of publishing overt falsehoods and then quietly retracting (or even stealth-editing) days or weeks later.
      - themitigating 5y ago
        Did they publish falsehoods knowingly? Every news source is going to make mistakes and retracting the story is normal.
        throwaway894345 5y ago
        Yes. The example that springs to mind (and I get downvoted without explanation every time I mention this, so goodbye Internet Points) was the Covington Catholic affair--the still photo of the kid in a MAGA hat apparently smugly smirking at a Native American elder (the media reported that he was a Vietnam veteran which was an outright falsehood). The whole of the media developed the same narrative around the still photo which was directly contradicted by a widely-circulated, publicly available 2 hour video. The narrative was that some racist white kids disrespected a Native American elder while the 2 hour video makes it clear that kids had been subjected to a lengthy racist and homophobic tirade.
        snowron6 5y ago
        I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is: >Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial. and then a link to an article from the very next day[2] explaining what happened in fuller detail after more videos came out. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-high-school-nathan-phillips.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-hig... [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-covington.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...
  - qsort 5y ago
    > overt ideological propagandism As an outsider watching from across the ocean, the 2016 election (the race itself and its media coverage, I'm not talking about the result) really hurt you guys. The NYT still does world-class journalism, but not even a paper with that kind of rock-solid journalistic tradition fully recovered from the moralistic crusade it had become. I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I share your perspective about a ~2016 inflection point, but the cracks were showing even earlier. I remember in ~2014 things like the Michael Brown shooting coverage across the board parroted activists' talking points which were invariably and conclusively disproven by the evidence (MB wasn't shot in the back as he ran away, etc). This isn't a wider commentary on BLM, although I think BLM coverage provides a really interesting perspective on media coverage. This is all to say that the phenomenon isn't fully explained by Trump, although I think the phenomenon really accelerated as a result of Trump (I'm not positing a causal relationship, if I had to speculate I'd guess it's an intense feedback loop).
      - freedomben 5y ago
        From some articles I've read[1], and discussions I've had (aka mostly anecdata) I really think that it's because views among journalists are changing. They view "just the facts" as potentially misleading because just the facts can lead to incorrect conclusions. Adding in color words that have a touch of opinion/speculation in them is ok if it helps the reader to reach the correct conclusion. Tis is also coupled with a strong sense of moral obligation on the part of journalists to lead people to the right conclusions. [1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-times-heated-reckoning-with-itself.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-...
        AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        But that requires that the journalist knows what the right conclusions are. They're skeptical about other peoples' claims; they're not nearly skeptical enough about their own positions.
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    This is all true, but the key point here is that NYT is one of, if not the most, valuable brand in US print media. They had the money to hire a world-class engineering team to pioneer the print news experience online (the creator of D3js and Svelte have both held engineering positions there), but the vast majority of print publications did not. It's not really accurate to extrapolate NYT's digital success across print media as a whole.
- busterarm 5y ago
  For those that have been alive long enough to witness the transition, the internet shift to clickbait is just continuing a trend that was ushered in by 24 hour news cycles. News being "all the time" is the true villain here. When news was infrequent and on a schedule, stories had to compete for relevance and often wouldn't dominate airtime and our thoughts nearly as much as today.
  - mc32 5y ago
    Yep, “breaking news” used to mean “major disaster” or item of major import. Now it just means “something we found out happening now and don’t have a lot of information about, but a couple of Tweeters “report” blah blah blah…
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    I disagree. I think that the 24-hour news cycle does contribute to the problem, absolutely. However, the critical aspect you're forgetting here is that the internet conditioned us to not pay for content because the ability to distribute content became commoditized. Once that happened, one of the largest sources of revenue for print publications disappeared, which forced print publications to rely more on ads, and therefore stories with headlines that drove more ad impressions (i.e. clickbait).
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Newspapers were always funded mostly by ads. You could argue that internet ads are worse than print ads because tracking, but I don't see that argument here. Newspaper headlines, particularly on the front page, have always been designed to catch the eye. Cable news has many of the same features.
      - Clubber 5y ago
        Classifieds were a big portion of income. Craigslist effectively killed that in the mid 90s. It's been a slow steady decline to stay solvent. They had to switch to the "print what your audience wants to read," type of infotainment. Emotion, particularly fear is very effective to keep asses in seats (and eyes on screens). I occasionally like to go back 10 years or so and read some of the ridiculous fear mongering of the time, now that it's well out of context. https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-killed-newspapers-golden-goose/ https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  >The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Nah anyone old enough knows this shift happened with cable news and a shift to 24/7 news. You cannot find enough content to make that interesting without filling it full of sensationalist bs. This was an issue far before the internet was a ever a major news source.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
droopyEyelids 5y ago
I don't think the clickbait is the real problem. The media in America is 100% dependent on Gell-Mann Amnesia (https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/) and some have pushed it so far that it's starting to wear off.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  I think this is quite relevant, but for the opposite reason that you're implying. Yes, news has always had the unreliability problem, and maybe it is especially bad today, but the corollary problem is the topic of the OP: Americans distrust the news. You claim the reason for increased distrust is the obvious one: The increased badness of the news - that reporting has gotten so incompetent and/or misleading that people are now seeing it through the Gell-Mann amnesia. My experience, however, is that more and more people are using Gell-Mann amnesia (or just general knowledge of reporting incompetence) as a blanket excuse to dismiss media that disagrees with their social/political feelings. They are clinging to this new idea that they know better than those fools reporting the news, and so they throw the baby out with the bath water to serve their preconceptions.
peakaboo 5y ago
No, they actually lie, distort and censor. Once you realise how insane they are, you will never be able to trust any news from the mainstream media.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  Boosting, de-boosting, and narrative shifting are also intentional strategies
systemvoltage 5y ago
Similarly, for product reviews skip Verge, MKBHD, etc and head straight to Mobile Tech Review (yes strange name). Zero bs, all content: https://www.youtube.com/user/mobiletechreview https://www.youtube.com/user/mobiletechreview
themitigating 5y ago
Just CNN?
tootie 5y ago
I don't think that's it. CNN is very broad. They report politics, world news, economics, but also celebrity gossip, human interest, lifestyle, opinion. That's their brand and they're actually pretty good at it. Their website hosts an enormous volume of content very reliably and without a paywall. Hatred for CNN and other mainstream news is fed to a huge swath of the population by conservative politicians and pundits. They also heap scorn on excellent news sources like the NY Times and Washington Post because their factual reporting is damaging to their dishonest campaigns. Meanwhile, conservative media has shed any semblance of civility and just run blatantly agenda-driven stories. There's no both sides to this. It's almost entirely due to conservatives.
- Grim-444 5y ago
  Here's a good test - if you find yourself in general almost always agreeing with / aligning with all of the stories that your favorite news source runs - that's how you know it's not a real news source. Real, impartial, objective, news, would report on everything, and give voice to other opinions than your own. They'd report things you agree with, and things you disagree with. They'd report things that further your agenda in the eyes of the public, and things that don't. They'd give others a chance to share their viewpoints as well as your own. When all you read on CNN are stories you personally resonate with, that's how you should know that you're not actually receiving the news, you're receiving an ideology. I can guarantee you that you don't just happen to hold the "right" viewpoints across all areas, removing the need to ever be exposed to other ideas. (And no, having CNN set up caricatures of other's ideas to make a mockery of them is not being exposed to other viewpoints). The idea that you're so right and everyone else is so dumb/wrong/evil/etc. that they're not allowed a voice, is really not a good position to hold.
  - tootie 5y ago
    Real news is not subjective. There is no agree or disagree. News outlets running stories on climate denial, election lies, covid denial are driving an agenda of untruths. Most of my point of view is driven by an aggregate of credible sources. And I don't generally watch or read opinions.
milkytron 5y ago
> One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour. I just started watching this over the past year, not every day, but when something interesting happens and I want a mindless way to follow developments. PBS broadcasts and uploads to various places, which makes consumption so much easier than others that are seeking profits. Between NewsHour, FrontLine, and their local broadcasts, PBS has done a great job compared to other media outlets.
mercy_dude 5y ago
I think it’s more than just click baits. Many Journalists have essentially become “activists”, you can see their Twitter feed and it would basically make you question whether they are some party affiliate or journalists. So in stead of telling the news as is, they would add their own twists bringing in partisan commentators. Essentially news has become so opinionated, on a given topic depending on who is covering it you would get an entirely different picture. That has nothing to do with click bait and more to do with keeping loyal user base inflamed and plugged in. That’s why NYT doesn’t even bother how 50% of the country would feel when they blatantly call the worst pandemic in century “red COVID”. Or when Fox News cheers at the sitting presidents inability to answer a question without completely losing the thread as if it is a win for the side they are in. Real loser is the American people as always.
bradgessler 5y ago
I attempted to list out all of the insane things that news does today at https://legiblenews.com/about/ https://legiblenews.com/about/ and yes, breaking is so overused to the point of abuse. I too like PBS NewsHour and modeled https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/ off the idea of being non-sensational with no ads. Another thing I did that this crowd would appreciate: I made sure that each page would have one and only one web request. Check it out in your network activity area in your browser—its fast!

by rdudek 5y ago

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

> I think the biggest issue with news media are the click-bait and flashy headlines/animations all over. CNN loves Breaking News on everything. The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Sure, the cable news cycle started before the internet went mainstream, but the shift towards digital media hollowed out print media's subscription base and never recovered. The shift towards clickbait was a survival strategy and we have all suffered for it. It's also worth pointing out that PBS is largely funded by the government and has strict requirements on ensuring broadcasts are balanced politically.

throwaway894345 5y ago
This is also my suspicion, although I've heard that NYT's subscriptions are doing as well as they've ever done and while I wouldn't describe NYT's journalism as "click-bait", they've certainly engaged in more than their share of overt ideological propagandism (which isn't unique to them, but part of a landscape shift away from aspirationally objective reporting).
- busterarm 5y ago
  The best sign of click bait is posting obviously false, inflammatory articles and then silently putting out a retraction days later after the clicks have come in. The NYT is just as guilty of this as anyone else today.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Perhaps the avid reader would say that they are most disappointed in papers like the NYT. You cannot really be disappointed by FOX or CNN. Different medium, but I think it still applies.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I think we have different notions of "clickbait". Personally I think NYT's particular brand of dishonesty is a bit more subtle than what I normally think of as "clickbait", but I won't argue the point. They are certainly and frequently guilty of publishing overt falsehoods and then quietly retracting (or even stealth-editing) days or weeks later.
    - themitigating 5y ago
      Did they publish falsehoods knowingly? Every news source is going to make mistakes and retracting the story is normal.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        Yes. The example that springs to mind (and I get downvoted without explanation every time I mention this, so goodbye Internet Points) was the Covington Catholic affair--the still photo of the kid in a MAGA hat apparently smugly smirking at a Native American elder (the media reported that he was a Vietnam veteran which was an outright falsehood). The whole of the media developed the same narrative around the still photo which was directly contradicted by a widely-circulated, publicly available 2 hour video. The narrative was that some racist white kids disrespected a Native American elder while the 2 hour video makes it clear that kids had been subjected to a lengthy racist and homophobic tirade.
        snowron6 5y ago
        I checked their story[1] on the incident you mentioned, and the first paragraph is: >Interviews and additional video footage have offered a fuller picture of what happened in this encounter, including the context that the Native American man approached the students amid broader tensions outside the Lincoln Memorial. and then a link to an article from the very next day[2] explaining what happened in fuller detail after more videos came out. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-high-school-nathan-phillips.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/us/covington-catholic-hig... [2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-covington.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/nathan-phillips-coving...
- qsort 5y ago
  > overt ideological propagandism As an outsider watching from across the ocean, the 2016 election (the race itself and its media coverage, I'm not talking about the result) really hurt you guys. The NYT still does world-class journalism, but not even a paper with that kind of rock-solid journalistic tradition fully recovered from the moralistic crusade it had become. I don't know if that's a bias of my own (I'm open to hear a counterpoint!), but 2016 really stands out as an inflection point in my mind.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I share your perspective about a ~2016 inflection point, but the cracks were showing even earlier. I remember in ~2014 things like the Michael Brown shooting coverage across the board parroted activists' talking points which were invariably and conclusively disproven by the evidence (MB wasn't shot in the back as he ran away, etc). This isn't a wider commentary on BLM, although I think BLM coverage provides a really interesting perspective on media coverage. This is all to say that the phenomenon isn't fully explained by Trump, although I think the phenomenon really accelerated as a result of Trump (I'm not positing a causal relationship, if I had to speculate I'd guess it's an intense feedback loop).
    - freedomben 5y ago
      From some articles I've read[1], and discussions I've had (aka mostly anecdata) I really think that it's because views among journalists are changing. They view "just the facts" as potentially misleading because just the facts can lead to incorrect conclusions. Adding in color words that have a touch of opinion/speculation in them is ok if it helps the reader to reach the correct conclusion. Tis is also coupled with a strong sense of moral obligation on the part of journalists to lead people to the right conclusions. [1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-times-heated-reckoning-with-itself.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-...
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        But that requires that the journalist knows what the right conclusions are. They're skeptical about other peoples' claims; they're not nearly skeptical enough about their own positions.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  This is all true, but the key point here is that NYT is one of, if not the most, valuable brand in US print media. They had the money to hire a world-class engineering team to pioneer the print news experience online (the creator of D3js and Svelte have both held engineering positions there), but the vast majority of print publications did not. It's not really accurate to extrapolate NYT's digital success across print media as a whole.
busterarm 5y ago
For those that have been alive long enough to witness the transition, the internet shift to clickbait is just continuing a trend that was ushered in by 24 hour news cycles. News being "all the time" is the true villain here. When news was infrequent and on a schedule, stories had to compete for relevance and often wouldn't dominate airtime and our thoughts nearly as much as today.
- mc32 5y ago
  Yep, “breaking news” used to mean “major disaster” or item of major import. Now it just means “something we found out happening now and don’t have a lot of information about, but a couple of Tweeters “report” blah blah blah…
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  I disagree. I think that the 24-hour news cycle does contribute to the problem, absolutely. However, the critical aspect you're forgetting here is that the internet conditioned us to not pay for content because the ability to distribute content became commoditized. Once that happened, one of the largest sources of revenue for print publications disappeared, which forced print publications to rely more on ads, and therefore stories with headlines that drove more ad impressions (i.e. clickbait).
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Newspapers were always funded mostly by ads. You could argue that internet ads are worse than print ads because tracking, but I don't see that argument here. Newspaper headlines, particularly on the front page, have always been designed to catch the eye. Cable news has many of the same features.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      Classifieds were a big portion of income. Craigslist effectively killed that in the mid 90s. It's been a slow steady decline to stay solvent. They had to switch to the "print what your audience wants to read," type of infotainment. Emotion, particularly fear is very effective to keep asses in seats (and eyes on screens). I occasionally like to go back 10 years or so and read some of the ridiculous fear mongering of the time, now that it's well out of context. https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-killed-newspapers-golden-goose/ https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...
CountDrewku 5y ago
>The internet is a major culprit in the shift towards clickbait headlines. Nah anyone old enough knows this shift happened with cable news and a shift to 24/7 news. You cannot find enough content to make that interesting without filling it full of sensationalist bs. This was an issue far before the internet was a ever a major news source.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

droopyEyelids 5y ago

I don't think the clickbait is the real problem. The media in America is 100% dependent on Gell-Mann Amnesia (https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/) and some have pushed it so far that it's starting to wear off.

happytoexplain 5y ago
I think this is quite relevant, but for the opposite reason that you're implying. Yes, news has always had the unreliability problem, and maybe it is especially bad today, but the corollary problem is the topic of the OP: Americans distrust the news. You claim the reason for increased distrust is the obvious one: The increased badness of the news - that reporting has gotten so incompetent and/or misleading that people are now seeing it through the Gell-Mann amnesia. My experience, however, is that more and more people are using Gell-Mann amnesia (or just general knowledge of reporting incompetence) as a blanket excuse to dismiss media that disagrees with their social/political feelings. They are clinging to this new idea that they know better than those fools reporting the news, and so they throw the baby out with the bath water to serve their preconceptions.

peakaboo 5y ago

No, they actually lie, distort and censor. Once you realise how insane they are, you will never be able to trust any news from the mainstream media.

OrvalWintermute 5y ago
Boosting, de-boosting, and narrative shifting are also intentional strategies

systemvoltage 5y ago

Similarly, for product reviews skip Verge, MKBHD, etc and head straight to Mobile Tech Review (yes strange name). Zero bs, all content: https://www.youtube.com/user/mobiletechreview https://www.youtube.com/user/mobiletechreview

themitigating 5y ago

Just CNN?

tootie 5y ago

I don't think that's it. CNN is very broad. They report politics, world news, economics, but also celebrity gossip, human interest, lifestyle, opinion. That's their brand and they're actually pretty good at it. Their website hosts an enormous volume of content very reliably and without a paywall. Hatred for CNN and other mainstream news is fed to a huge swath of the population by conservative politicians and pundits. They also heap scorn on excellent news sources like the NY Times and Washington Post because their factual reporting is damaging to their dishonest campaigns. Meanwhile, conservative media has shed any semblance of civility and just run blatantly agenda-driven stories. There's no both sides to this. It's almost entirely due to conservatives.

Grim-444 5y ago
Here's a good test - if you find yourself in general almost always agreeing with / aligning with all of the stories that your favorite news source runs - that's how you know it's not a real news source. Real, impartial, objective, news, would report on everything, and give voice to other opinions than your own. They'd report things you agree with, and things you disagree with. They'd report things that further your agenda in the eyes of the public, and things that don't. They'd give others a chance to share their viewpoints as well as your own. When all you read on CNN are stories you personally resonate with, that's how you should know that you're not actually receiving the news, you're receiving an ideology. I can guarantee you that you don't just happen to hold the "right" viewpoints across all areas, removing the need to ever be exposed to other ideas. (And no, having CNN set up caricatures of other's ideas to make a mockery of them is not being exposed to other viewpoints). The idea that you're so right and everyone else is so dumb/wrong/evil/etc. that they're not allowed a voice, is really not a good position to hold.
- tootie 5y ago
  Real news is not subjective. There is no agree or disagree. News outlets running stories on climate denial, election lies, covid denial are driving an agenda of untruths. Most of my point of view is driven by an aggregate of credible sources. And I don't generally watch or read opinions.

milkytron 5y ago

> One of my favorite news source is PBS NewsHour. I just started watching this over the past year, not every day, but when something interesting happens and I want a mindless way to follow developments. PBS broadcasts and uploads to various places, which makes consumption so much easier than others that are seeking profits. Between NewsHour, FrontLine, and their local broadcasts, PBS has done a great job compared to other media outlets.

mercy_dude 5y ago

I think it’s more than just click baits. Many Journalists have essentially become “activists”, you can see their Twitter feed and it would basically make you question whether they are some party affiliate or journalists. So in stead of telling the news as is, they would add their own twists bringing in partisan commentators. Essentially news has become so opinionated, on a given topic depending on who is covering it you would get an entirely different picture. That has nothing to do with click bait and more to do with keeping loyal user base inflamed and plugged in. That’s why NYT doesn’t even bother how 50% of the country would feel when they blatantly call the worst pandemic in century “red COVID”. Or when Fox News cheers at the sitting presidents inability to answer a question without completely losing the thread as if it is a win for the side they are in. Real loser is the American people as always.

bradgessler 5y ago

I attempted to list out all of the insane things that news does today at https://legiblenews.com/about/ https://legiblenews.com/about/ and yes, breaking is so overused to the point of abuse. I too like PBS NewsHour and modeled https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/ off the idea of being non-sensational with no ads. Another thing I did that this crowd would appreciate: I made sure that each page would have one and only one web request. Check it out in your network activity area in your browser—its fast!