5 ms·

The press is lazy and incurious. They don't pursue stories, they reprint press releases. And the even sadder part is they believe the press releases and report

The press is lazy and incurious. They don't pursue stories, they reprint press releases. And the even sadder part is they believe the press releases and report accordingly. The press assures us they'd be better if we gave them a bunch of money (even begging for government money), but the truth is that it has always been like this.

revolvingocelot 5y ago
I upvoted this, but it's not quite true. It's not wrong to say that the press has always incuriously reprinted the press releases of the powerful, but in days of yore there also used to be a thing called "investigative journalism", largely snuffed out now, thanks to the consolidation of media ownership. What that's done to the structure of newsrooms, the compensation offered therein, and hell, the whole mission of print media, is only obvious to those old enough to remember what local papers used to look like.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Depends on the posters age, many people grew up in an age of poor journalistic standards, not all of us remember the golden age.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  "News" and large facets of "journalism" have now, unfortunately, become nothing more than propoganda platforms filled with opinionated narratives to paint stories. Even when they're not, they often use selection bias to choose what they do and don't report on to tote some agenda. Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for. Like pretty much all professions, it's also become far more demanding to be a good journalist or investigative journalist due to how many stories reported on require more specialized knowledge to understand and portray correctly. The bar used to be lower and a journalist could better grasp a situation or understanding. Now, with a lot of technology and science, you pretty much need a pretty deep and well rounded background to properly understand and address issues. The general bar of education has risen, including that of deceitful people, which places even higher demands on journalists to put them in check. Could dig further into the point but the moral of the story is that the bar is raising to a point where misinformation and disinformation have an edge due to the sheer volume of information, lack of ability for any one person to have enough understanding, and incentives to be deceitful. That means the barrier to entry cost to dig out deceit has often become too high. I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this.
  - yeetaccount 5y ago
    > Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for. This should be an entire discussion thread. Even scrupulous journalistic outlets have to stay competitive on the business side. And people don’t want facts, they want a story; something to spawn feeling instead of thought.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    I disagree. There is still investigative journalism and plenty of good news sources. They are imperfect but you get to know where they excel and where they don’t, plus perfect news sources have never existed in the history of history. What happened instead is that the bottom fell out. There are so many newer sources of information today but most of them are very poor so the average quality of news has precipitously dropped. But as it always goes, the good stay good. I currently pay about $40/month in news and magazines (but borrow Netflix/Hulu/HBO/etc. from friends, lol) and I enjoy the news I get. It’s a range of current events to policy analysis. I think a bigger change is that previously what people thought of events didn’t honestly matter as much in day to day policy dealings either. People weren’t any more informed back then — they just didn’t even know what was going on, for better and worse.
  - trs8080 5y ago
    > I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this. lol WHAT? - https://www.propublica.org/ https://www.propublica.org/ - https://themarkup.org/ https://themarkup.org/ - https://revealnews.org/ https://revealnews.org/ - https://www.kqed.org/ https://www.kqed.org/ - https://www.motherjones.com/ https://www.motherjones.com/ - https://www.themarshallproject.org/ https://www.themarshallproject.org/ the problem is that folks like yourself want to sit back and have news come to you as a consumptive activity, and you expect it for free. you have to actively go out and seek valid sources of information -- you can't have your worldview shaped for you.
- JamisonM 5y ago
  I am constantly baffled at the sweeping statements that get made about modern journalism. In the "days of yore" the quality of journalism was higher? Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country". Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism. Look at the Pulizer Won by the Boston Globe for 2021, lifesaving investigative journalism that is expensive and difficult- and exactly the sort of thing that the Golden Age would have never dug up.
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    >Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country". To paraphrase Mitch Hedburg, sure, they used to. They still do, but they used to, too. But now there are fewer of them. >Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism. This strikes me as kind of a crazy claim, but in the grandparent I was bemoaning the decline of functional local journalism. The rot hasn't really, truly hit big newspapers in big cities; the parent's citation of the continued existence of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting kinda doesn't change the realities of the local news, the decline of which is evident, well-studied, and heralds corruption of both democracy and mere finance.[0][1][2] I've linked blog-level readings, but feel free to scrutinize the links in the Global Anti-Corruption Blog article [0] for more academic analysis on the topic. Look to groups like Alden Capital [3], which buy up and destroy small-town American news sources. You'll find that those disappearing local papers used to pen most of the original reporting in the US. It's so fucking evident that mainstream institutions like PBS and NPR and even Netflix recognize it -- namely, "The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" [4] on exactly what I'm talking about. [0] https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-of-small-newspapers-means-higher-risk-of-local-corruption-in-the-u-s/ https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-... [1] https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-less-democracy/ https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-les... [2] https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-measures-the-cost-of-corruption-when-the-local-newspaper-dies https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-... [3] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-of-when-a-hedge-fund-buys-newspapers https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-o... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA
dagw 5y ago
The press is lazy and incurious. "The Press" is also who exposed Theranos (and Holms) as a fraud.
- royjacobs 5y ago
  It was John Carreyrou at the WSJ who did so. The rest of the press printed all of Holmes' lies verbatim (and some retracted after the scandal came to light).
  - foobarian 5y ago
    I feel like most technical people knew Theranos' claims were not real, similar to any fusion-type startup claims. Sure they may sound good but it takes extraordinary evidence to really prove. I can't figure out how most commercial partners and especially a major pharmacy chain fell for the fraud. Do they not have ongoing QA via statistics etc.? If they didn't monitor Theranos do they not monitor other providers either? Theranos' big claim was they could do tests on a much smaller amount of blood. Perhaps they didn't end up doing that for Walgreens since they used externally sourced hardware, in which case they were just another test provider and if they tested out OK in ongoing QA, I don't see a problem with that from partner POV, but just from the investor POV who expected a new technology to get an edge over the competition. IIRC they were using smaller than usual blood samples and feeding them into external testing hardware by watering down to required size. This sounds bad; but if it doesn't show up in QA - then maybe it's a legitimate advancement. If it makes testing less reliable and it doesn't show up in QA - then QA needs to be fixed. If it does show up in QA - Walgreens never should have agreed. If it does show up in QA but Walgreens never noticed - that is a problem to address. I guess the initial deal was done on salesmanship and promises, so maybe they would have found out sooner or later.
    - royjacobs 5y ago
      The podcasts "Bad Blood" (by Carreyrou) and "The Dropout" (about the currently ongoing trial against Holmes) cover these questions and more. I can highly recommend them.
    - 5y ago
Zenst 5y ago
> The press is lazy and incurious. They don't pursue stories, they reprint press releases. And the even sadder part is they believe the press releases and report accordingly. Mostly true, and sad part if enough do that, then the rest follow. Kinda also gets down to how many likes a press release gets upon social media and we all know how that is a rose-glassed slant of the full public opinion.
Workaccount2 5y ago
The press would improve drastically if they could just get their "journalists" off fucking twitter.
kesselvon 5y ago
Tech press is basically PR for venture-backed startups. Don't expect techcrunch and the like to actually do serious reporting.

revolvingocelot 5y ago

I upvoted this, but it's not quite true. It's not wrong to say that the press has always incuriously reprinted the press releases of the powerful, but in days of yore there also used to be a thing called "investigative journalism", largely snuffed out now, thanks to the consolidation of media ownership. What that's done to the structure of newsrooms, the compensation offered therein, and hell, the whole mission of print media, is only obvious to those old enough to remember what local papers used to look like.

newsclues 5y ago
Depends on the posters age, many people grew up in an age of poor journalistic standards, not all of us remember the golden age.
Frost1x 5y ago
"News" and large facets of "journalism" have now, unfortunately, become nothing more than propoganda platforms filled with opinionated narratives to paint stories. Even when they're not, they often use selection bias to choose what they do and don't report on to tote some agenda. Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for. Like pretty much all professions, it's also become far more demanding to be a good journalist or investigative journalist due to how many stories reported on require more specialized knowledge to understand and portray correctly. The bar used to be lower and a journalist could better grasp a situation or understanding. Now, with a lot of technology and science, you pretty much need a pretty deep and well rounded background to properly understand and address issues. The general bar of education has risen, including that of deceitful people, which places even higher demands on journalists to put them in check. Could dig further into the point but the moral of the story is that the bar is raising to a point where misinformation and disinformation have an edge due to the sheer volume of information, lack of ability for any one person to have enough understanding, and incentives to be deceitful. That means the barrier to entry cost to dig out deceit has often become too high. I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this.
- yeetaccount 5y ago
  > Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for. This should be an entire discussion thread. Even scrupulous journalistic outlets have to stay competitive on the business side. And people don’t want facts, they want a story; something to spawn feeling instead of thought.
- thrashh 5y ago
  I disagree. There is still investigative journalism and plenty of good news sources. They are imperfect but you get to know where they excel and where they don’t, plus perfect news sources have never existed in the history of history. What happened instead is that the bottom fell out. There are so many newer sources of information today but most of them are very poor so the average quality of news has precipitously dropped. But as it always goes, the good stay good. I currently pay about $40/month in news and magazines (but borrow Netflix/Hulu/HBO/etc. from friends, lol) and I enjoy the news I get. It’s a range of current events to policy analysis. I think a bigger change is that previously what people thought of events didn’t honestly matter as much in day to day policy dealings either. People weren’t any more informed back then — they just didn’t even know what was going on, for better and worse.
- trs8080 5y ago
  > I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this. lol WHAT? - https://www.propublica.org/ https://www.propublica.org/ - https://themarkup.org/ https://themarkup.org/ - https://revealnews.org/ https://revealnews.org/ - https://www.kqed.org/ https://www.kqed.org/ - https://www.motherjones.com/ https://www.motherjones.com/ - https://www.themarshallproject.org/ https://www.themarshallproject.org/ the problem is that folks like yourself want to sit back and have news come to you as a consumptive activity, and you expect it for free. you have to actively go out and seek valid sources of information -- you can't have your worldview shaped for you.
JamisonM 5y ago
I am constantly baffled at the sweeping statements that get made about modern journalism. In the "days of yore" the quality of journalism was higher? Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country". Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism. Look at the Pulizer Won by the Boston Globe for 2021, lifesaving investigative journalism that is expensive and difficult- and exactly the sort of thing that the Golden Age would have never dug up.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  >Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country". To paraphrase Mitch Hedburg, sure, they used to. They still do, but they used to, too. But now there are fewer of them. >Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism. This strikes me as kind of a crazy claim, but in the grandparent I was bemoaning the decline of functional local journalism. The rot hasn't really, truly hit big newspapers in big cities; the parent's citation of the continued existence of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting kinda doesn't change the realities of the local news, the decline of which is evident, well-studied, and heralds corruption of both democracy and mere finance.[0][1][2] I've linked blog-level readings, but feel free to scrutinize the links in the Global Anti-Corruption Blog article [0] for more academic analysis on the topic. Look to groups like Alden Capital [3], which buy up and destroy small-town American news sources. You'll find that those disappearing local papers used to pen most of the original reporting in the US. It's so fucking evident that mainstream institutions like PBS and NPR and even Netflix recognize it -- namely, "The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" [4] on exactly what I'm talking about. [0] https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-of-small-newspapers-means-higher-risk-of-local-corruption-in-the-u-s/ https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/01/25/the-decline-... [1] https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-less-democracy/ https://niemanreports.org/articles/less-local-news-means-les... [2] https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-measures-the-cost-of-corruption-when-the-local-newspaper-dies https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2018/06/06/a-new-study-... [3] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-of-when-a-hedge-fund-buys-newspapers https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046952430/the-consequences-o... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNirsV1rLA

dagw 5y ago

The press is lazy and incurious. "The Press" is also who exposed Theranos (and Holms) as a fraud.

royjacobs 5y ago
It was John Carreyrou at the WSJ who did so. The rest of the press printed all of Holmes' lies verbatim (and some retracted after the scandal came to light).
- foobarian 5y ago
  I feel like most technical people knew Theranos' claims were not real, similar to any fusion-type startup claims. Sure they may sound good but it takes extraordinary evidence to really prove. I can't figure out how most commercial partners and especially a major pharmacy chain fell for the fraud. Do they not have ongoing QA via statistics etc.? If they didn't monitor Theranos do they not monitor other providers either? Theranos' big claim was they could do tests on a much smaller amount of blood. Perhaps they didn't end up doing that for Walgreens since they used externally sourced hardware, in which case they were just another test provider and if they tested out OK in ongoing QA, I don't see a problem with that from partner POV, but just from the investor POV who expected a new technology to get an edge over the competition. IIRC they were using smaller than usual blood samples and feeding them into external testing hardware by watering down to required size. This sounds bad; but if it doesn't show up in QA - then maybe it's a legitimate advancement. If it makes testing less reliable and it doesn't show up in QA - then QA needs to be fixed. If it does show up in QA - Walgreens never should have agreed. If it does show up in QA but Walgreens never noticed - that is a problem to address. I guess the initial deal was done on salesmanship and promises, so maybe they would have found out sooner or later.
  - royjacobs 5y ago
    The podcasts "Bad Blood" (by Carreyrou) and "The Dropout" (about the currently ongoing trial against Holmes) cover these questions and more. I can highly recommend them.
  - 5y ago

Zenst 5y ago

> The press is lazy and incurious. They don't pursue stories, they reprint press releases. And the even sadder part is they believe the press releases and report accordingly. Mostly true, and sad part if enough do that, then the rest follow. Kinda also gets down to how many likes a press release gets upon social media and we all know how that is a rose-glassed slant of the full public opinion.

Workaccount2 5y ago

The press would improve drastically if they could just get their "journalists" off fucking twitter.

kesselvon 5y ago

Tech press is basically PR for venture-backed startups. Don't expect techcrunch and the like to actually do serious reporting.