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> "My role was to identify the voices that were not in the mainstream and to give those voices a stage," Rheem says. [...] > He says the media was hungry for t

• truculent 4y ago
  In the UK, you need a substantial amount of meta-knowledge about the media outlets and political landscape in order to use news reporting to become more, not less or dis-, informed. It’s a shame that the idea of learning media studies and related subjects at school or university were so maligned in the 00s, but probably not a coincidence either.
  • flooow 4y ago
    > In the UK, you need a substantial amount of meta-knowledge about the media outlets and political landscape in order to use news reporting to become more, not less or dis-, informed. This is most-certainly true, and an interesting corrollary is that journalists themselves very likely underestimate the impact their work can have. Being on the inside, they of course know (because 'everybody knows') that this Daily Mail article about Jeremy Corbyn being a soviet spy (yes, it is real [1]) is utter dreck, basically just popcorn nonsense for bored retirees to flick past on the way to the sports pages. Journalists might have a hard time believing/understanding that people actually trust and respect them, and may even take what they say at face value, with actual consequences. Of course, their proprieters understand this full-well, which is why e.g. Murdoch is willing to plough endless cash into loss-making endeavours like The Times. Not that I intend to absolve journalists whatsoever. Their actions have literally destroyed everything (we just haven't realised it yet). [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5401097/Jeremy-Corbyn-paid-Czech-secret-police-spy-claims.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5401097/Jeremy-Corb...
  • mhh__ 4y ago
    Informed about what? The vast majority of news articles are factual, it's more subtle than you suggest.
    • truculent 4y ago
      Well, quite
• Comevius 4y ago
  Just because a perspective is different it doesn't mean that it's the truth, or should be treated equally importantly for the sake of some kind of balance. Climate change denial is a good example, because it's not the truth, and it's not important. It doesn't have it's own scientific literature, nobody ever tries to prove it, it's contrarianism at best, propaganda at worst. And yet the media tends to give it an equal amount of screen time, which makes the public believe in it's legitimacy. This might be shocking to the HN audience, but contrarianism by itself is not enough to discover the truth.
  • consp 4y ago
    There is a nice visual example of this made by John Oliver on his show to illustrate this to a more understandable level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg
  • flooow 4y ago
    Thank you for semi-articulately saying my argument back to me.
    • Comevius 4y ago
      No offense, but in my experience semi-articulate wins the day. I bet you a beer nobody knows what "media omertà" means. Even Google can't define it, but it references a book called A Climate Vocabulary of the Future that defines it as the media silence on climate change.
  • origin_path 4y ago
    It sounds like you never actually spent any time reading anything by people who dispute popular narratives on climate change. If you did you'd know that nothing you just said is true. They frequently prove the points they're making, often via reference to climatologist's own papers, and it's not mere contrarianism but rather is pointing out places in which their science either isn't reliable or is being misrepresented. Look at it this way. In the past few days HN has had a bunch of submissions on the news that a major paper in Alzheimer's research appears to be entirely fraudulent. It was noticed by outside "deniers", not any scientists within the field itself, and the science based on it went 16 years and received hundreds of millions of dollars in NIH funding. All based on some dodgy Photoshops, or so it appears. When people argue with climatology and (often) absurd media claims that aren't even well connected to published science to begin with, they're usually arguing about actual, concrete problems with what scientists are doing. To believe that it's all mere contrarianism and propaganda is the sort of naive "Believe The Science!"-ism that has trashed trust in public health in the past two years, and worse, created a culture in which researchers think that they can get away with anything.
• Angostura 4y ago
  I was a journalist. The intent here, is reasonable. Whenever you wrote an article with person A claiming a thing, the editor would ask you to 'stand it up'. That involved checking the claim's validity by finding supportive and contrary sources and talking to them. The intent was to then produce a balanced, authorative synthesis. Unfortunately, with things like climate change, the result tends to be 'false balance'. The BBC recognised this several years ago - but too late.
  • Tycho 4y ago
    If it’s good enough for courts of law, it’s good enough for news reporting.