14 ms·

I'd be willing to pay for news from organizations like the AP or Reuters. Trad newspapers like NYT/WSJ seem to just cater to their bases. Cable companies are mo

by Yhippa 4y ago

I'd be willing to pay for news from organizations like the AP or Reuters. Trad newspapers like NYT/WSJ seem to just cater to their bases. Cable companies are more entertainment and are beholden to their advertisers. I felt things like PBS are a public good. Growing up I got educational programming from there and that should be available to the public as a last resort.

RajT88 4y ago
PBS is the best thing I get from the antenna on my roof.
- aliqot 4y ago
  > I get from the antenna on my roof. These are just extra words :) I like PBS a lot
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
The AP is made up of CNN, USA Today, NBC, Washington Post, etc writers be them local or national branch. Reuters is slightly better but this isn’t a problem that can be solved with just throwing more money at someone. It’s a lack of integrity.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Integrity is what people complain about when they aren’t willing to pay up for aligned incentives. You need aligned incentives.
  - PixyMisa 4y ago
    No, just the facts.
    - kbenson 4y ago
      The current media gives you facts. They just present them in specific ways or downplay or omit other facts. Getting all the facts is as bad as getting no facts, because we aren't capable of paraing then all. Curation of facts is what these companies do, and how they curate them is how they express their bias. News companies aren't lying (even if some pundits do). They just present facts in ways to support the narrative they want. It is impossible to relay facts without doing so, but how objective they are and how much vias is injected is variable.
      - systemvoltage 4y ago
        Omission of critical aspects seems more insidious than straight up lies. At least with the latter, you can dispute it. The former, hides behind the facade of integrity while doing more covert damage.
        SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
        Ah, yes. I too listen to NPR occasionally.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      > No, just the facts. Facts are meaningless without proper context. You can take the same facts and present them under a different light and get completely different stories. Check "selective editing" if you are not aware of the term.
  - gruez 4y ago
    How is "aligned incentives" supposed to help integrity? We've seen with partisan news media that not having integrity (ie. being biased and catering to one side) is a viable business strategy.
    - throwawaysleep 4y ago
      The people professing the need for it need to be willing to as aggressively fund journalists as much as the ardent supporters of a cause.
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      If the incentives are aligned it doesn’t matter whether people have integrity. They do what they need to do to win and winning is the the thing we want them to do. That’s the whole point. I don’t think hedge funds are bastions of integrity but their incentives are fully lined up. If you make a lot of money for your clients you get a lot of money.
tootie 4y ago
Disclosure: I work in public media. It's a pretty broad ecosystem of NPR and PBS affiliates and independent news sources like Pro Publica, The Guardian or niche sources like The Markup or Grist. If you follow a few big ones and few local ones, you'll get almost everything you'd need. That being said, I think it's impossible to live without the top tier papers of records like Axios, NY Times and WaPo. They definitely push profitability, but they also unmatched resources to dig up hard news and get it to a huge audience. I even love CNN (cnn.com, not the TV network) just because their coverage is so broad and exhaustive even if so much of it is fluff. There's stuff that sucks about all of them, but we'd be much worse off if they didn't exist.
- PixyMisa 4y ago
  Every source you mention is left-wing. They all report the same stories in the same way. And worse, they all ignore or cover up the same stories in the same way.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    Nice Polite Republicans is hardly left wing. At best they’re right of center. It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who suggests any major news media operation in the US is “left-wing”. This country doesn’t have a big or strong enough “left” to matter.
    - onionisafruit 4y ago
      opensecrets.org indicates the opposite.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    Actual leftist here. There is nothing even vaguely left-leaning about any of the organizations mentioned. There is, however, the minor issue of political expedience driving a wedge between right-wing politicians and observable reality. Demand better from your people.
    - 4y ago
the_lonely_road 4y ago
Isn’t the AP the organization that insists Black be capitalized while insisting that White not be capitalized? They are just as biased and steeped in the culture war as anyone else. For the record I don’t care if both are capitalized or both are not but taking the divisive approach of choosing one and disallowing the other causes me to lose all trust in them.
- res0nat0r 4y ago
  This is likely why: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Yep; the AP cited similar motivations (https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462 https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...). I think CJR's is a better explanation; that many Black folks in the US have no idea which country their ancestors came from, and thus don't have the Irish / Chinese / German / etc. identifiers of origin many Americans honor and celebrate.
    - gfdsgfsgf 4y ago
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        That is... not my experience. Tracing my family tree was a school assignment; I know folks who wear kilts because they've got a Scottish ancestor, or talk about their Italian grandmother's cooking, there's Greek and Korean and Italian and Puerto Rican and whatnot festivals annually in my city... https://archive.ph/1zKZF https://archive.ph/1zKZF > A basic tenet of genealogical research is that white Americans can more easily trace their European ancestors, while black Americans often face a “ brick wall” — a dearth of records before emancipation. Because enslaved people were considered property until after the Civil War, many enslaved people’s full names and identifying information are not included in documents that white Americans can use to track ancestors, such as annual census counts. But Ancestry.com’s attempt to provide context often does not take into account that white and black histories are fundamentally different.
lettergram 4y ago
I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong. PBS generally has been some of the best news / reporting I’ve seen. That said, it’s still driven by ideology — “good” being defined by someone. You can see it in the titles of their documentaries and programming. If you go through their programming objectively and put yourselves in the mindset the opposing side it becomes rather clear. This includes things like portraying nationalism as bad or Christianity as evil (see some of their frontline documentaries) While the bias is there. PBS is generally one of the least bias in the space, I think that’s what makes it so frustrating. A slight improvement in breadth and depth would make it amazing. I also have to give credit to pbs for often releasing full-length interviews. I’ve really appreciated watching hours long interviews with various people about a specific topic. See “Putin files” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk9igTqTx9s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk9igTqTx9s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88 or Steve bannons interview on frontline. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0
- thakoppno 4y ago
  I really enjoy PBS and generally agree with you but we’re at a place so far removed from objectivity in news gathering when the best still stand by this rationale. > We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions Terence Samuels, NPR's Managing Editor for News on the NY Post Hunter Biden story https://mobile.twitter.com/nprpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096 https://mobile.twitter.com/nprpubliceditor/status/1319281101...
hairofadog 4y ago
I sorta wish I could buy a subscription to one publication that was the news sections of both NYT and WSJ but neither of their opinion sections.
- interotrong123 4y ago
  That is almost what Apple News is.
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  Yea me too. I got combustive when I read what i thought were outrageous op-eds in those two and just canceled them. One from left and one from right wing opinions. Even when I read unbiased information/data driven articles there’s still a bias - someone chose this information for me to digest. Did they choose it to influence how i feel? Maybe just because they think the most people will click on it so it’s published? Anyways, I’m not entitled to “truth” so I guess I have to keep reading/doom scrolling.
systemvoltage 4y ago
PBS/NPR has skewed left in last 5 years. It used to be amazing and not partisan.
- Auracle 4y ago
  PBS doesn't seem too bad from my limited exposure but NPR has more than "skewed."
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Yeah, I urge people to just listen to 20+ year old American media, doesn't matter, left/right, it was so much more civil, courteous and intellectual. Read NewYorker magazine from 1980's. Spectacular writing, and genuine insight that people from all political spectrums can be engaged with. It makes me sad. Sometimes, I listen to old archives from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/npr-all-things-considered https://archive.org/details/npr-all-things-considered and stuff like Car Talk on NPR. It was a beautiful world. I have no trust left for NYT, WaPo or whatever right wing media is around blasting stuff on TV today. It is toxic.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Haha skewed, NPR has been a staple liberal stereotype since my grandpa listened to them. If you’ve noticed anything it’s that the gap between liberals and conservatives widened massively starting in the late 2000s when the Republican party started slipping so they manufactured a wedge issue out of gay marriage and when that died down trans healthcare with some opportunistic blm thrown in. And look, it worked. It paid off huge for them but at the cost of literally bifurcating the country and hollowing out moderates and independents. So now it’s much much easier to see the side they’ve always been on since the contrast has been turned up to 11. As much as I personally think the Republican party is absolutely fucking evil for the specific issues they capitalized on — because good god lower taxes, eliminating government agencies, and less powerful unions doesn’t pour gasoline on festering racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia creating a tire fire of hate and violence that will outlive me — I’m not mad at the game in abstract, Democrats play it too.
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
A bit tangential but HUGE shout-out to PBS for their science shows on YouTube. I follow PBS Eons and PBS Space Time, both are fantastic and highly educational.
ekianjo 4y ago
> news from organizations like the AP AP is just as biased as the rest. Even if you remove ads the people with agenda are still everywhere. > PBS are a left public good. Fixed that for you, because it's so obvious how it has changed.
gpm 4y ago
> I'd be willing to pay for news from organizations like the AP or Reuters. reuters.com is free as an invdividual, you just need to make an (entirely free) account or you get limited to X articles per month. I don't think apnews.com even asks you to make an account.
throwaway6734 4y ago
Iirc Reuters sells a subscription

by Yhippa 4y ago

RajT88 4y ago

PBS is the best thing I get from the antenna on my roof.

aliqot 4y ago
> I get from the antenna on my roof. These are just extra words :) I like PBS a lot

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

The AP is made up of CNN, USA Today, NBC, Washington Post, etc writers be them local or national branch. Reuters is slightly better but this isn’t a problem that can be solved with just throwing more money at someone. It’s a lack of integrity.

throwawaysleep 4y ago
Integrity is what people complain about when they aren’t willing to pay up for aligned incentives. You need aligned incentives.
- PixyMisa 4y ago
  No, just the facts.
  - kbenson 4y ago
    The current media gives you facts. They just present them in specific ways or downplay or omit other facts. Getting all the facts is as bad as getting no facts, because we aren't capable of paraing then all. Curation of facts is what these companies do, and how they curate them is how they express their bias. News companies aren't lying (even if some pundits do). They just present facts in ways to support the narrative they want. It is impossible to relay facts without doing so, but how objective they are and how much vias is injected is variable.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      Omission of critical aspects seems more insidious than straight up lies. At least with the latter, you can dispute it. The former, hides behind the facade of integrity while doing more covert damage.
      - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
        Ah, yes. I too listen to NPR occasionally.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > No, just the facts. Facts are meaningless without proper context. You can take the same facts and present them under a different light and get completely different stories. Check "selective editing" if you are not aware of the term.
- gruez 4y ago
  How is "aligned incentives" supposed to help integrity? We've seen with partisan news media that not having integrity (ie. being biased and catering to one side) is a viable business strategy.
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    The people professing the need for it need to be willing to as aggressively fund journalists as much as the ardent supporters of a cause.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    If the incentives are aligned it doesn’t matter whether people have integrity. They do what they need to do to win and winning is the the thing we want them to do. That’s the whole point. I don’t think hedge funds are bastions of integrity but their incentives are fully lined up. If you make a lot of money for your clients you get a lot of money.

tootie 4y ago

Disclosure: I work in public media. It's a pretty broad ecosystem of NPR and PBS affiliates and independent news sources like Pro Publica, The Guardian or niche sources like The Markup or Grist. If you follow a few big ones and few local ones, you'll get almost everything you'd need. That being said, I think it's impossible to live without the top tier papers of records like Axios, NY Times and WaPo. They definitely push profitability, but they also unmatched resources to dig up hard news and get it to a huge audience. I even love CNN (cnn.com, not the TV network) just because their coverage is so broad and exhaustive even if so much of it is fluff. There's stuff that sucks about all of them, but we'd be much worse off if they didn't exist.

PixyMisa 4y ago
Every source you mention is left-wing. They all report the same stories in the same way. And worse, they all ignore or cover up the same stories in the same way.
- sidlls 4y ago
  Nice Polite Republicans is hardly left wing. At best they’re right of center. It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who suggests any major news media operation in the US is “left-wing”. This country doesn’t have a big or strong enough “left” to matter.
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    opensecrets.org indicates the opposite.
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  Actual leftist here. There is nothing even vaguely left-leaning about any of the organizations mentioned. There is, however, the minor issue of political expedience driving a wedge between right-wing politicians and observable reality. Demand better from your people.
  - 4y ago

the_lonely_road 4y ago

Isn’t the AP the organization that insists Black be capitalized while insisting that White not be capitalized? They are just as biased and steeped in the culture war as anyone else. For the record I don’t care if both are capitalized or both are not but taking the divisive approach of choosing one and disallowing the other causes me to lose all trust in them.

res0nat0r 4y ago
This is likely why: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Yep; the AP cited similar motivations (https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-9105661462 https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...). I think CJR's is a better explanation; that many Black folks in the US have no idea which country their ancestors came from, and thus don't have the Irish / Chinese / German / etc. identifiers of origin many Americans honor and celebrate.
  - gfdsgfsgf 4y ago
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      That is... not my experience. Tracing my family tree was a school assignment; I know folks who wear kilts because they've got a Scottish ancestor, or talk about their Italian grandmother's cooking, there's Greek and Korean and Italian and Puerto Rican and whatnot festivals annually in my city... https://archive.ph/1zKZF https://archive.ph/1zKZF > A basic tenet of genealogical research is that white Americans can more easily trace their European ancestors, while black Americans often face a “ brick wall” — a dearth of records before emancipation. Because enslaved people were considered property until after the Civil War, many enslaved people’s full names and identifying information are not included in documents that white Americans can use to track ancestors, such as annual census counts. But Ancestry.com’s attempt to provide context often does not take into account that white and black histories are fundamentally different.

lettergram 4y ago

I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong. PBS generally has been some of the best news / reporting I’ve seen. That said, it’s still driven by ideology — “good” being defined by someone. You can see it in the titles of their documentaries and programming. If you go through their programming objectively and put yourselves in the mindset the opposing side it becomes rather clear. This includes things like portraying nationalism as bad or Christianity as evil (see some of their frontline documentaries) While the bias is there. PBS is generally one of the least bias in the space, I think that’s what makes it so frustrating. A slight improvement in breadth and depth would make it amazing. I also have to give credit to pbs for often releasing full-length interviews. I’ve really appreciated watching hours long interviews with various people about a specific topic. See “Putin files” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk9igTqTx9s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk9igTqTx9s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88 or Steve bannons interview on frontline. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0

thakoppno 4y ago
I really enjoy PBS and generally agree with you but we’re at a place so far removed from objectivity in news gathering when the best still stand by this rationale. > We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions Terence Samuels, NPR's Managing Editor for News on the NY Post Hunter Biden story https://mobile.twitter.com/nprpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096 https://mobile.twitter.com/nprpubliceditor/status/1319281101...

hairofadog 4y ago

I sorta wish I could buy a subscription to one publication that was the news sections of both NYT and WSJ but neither of their opinion sections.

interotrong123 4y ago
That is almost what Apple News is.
Pigalowda 4y ago
Yea me too. I got combustive when I read what i thought were outrageous op-eds in those two and just canceled them. One from left and one from right wing opinions. Even when I read unbiased information/data driven articles there’s still a bias - someone chose this information for me to digest. Did they choose it to influence how i feel? Maybe just because they think the most people will click on it so it’s published? Anyways, I’m not entitled to “truth” so I guess I have to keep reading/doom scrolling.

systemvoltage 4y ago

PBS/NPR has skewed left in last 5 years. It used to be amazing and not partisan.

Auracle 4y ago
PBS doesn't seem too bad from my limited exposure but NPR has more than "skewed."
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Yeah, I urge people to just listen to 20+ year old American media, doesn't matter, left/right, it was so much more civil, courteous and intellectual. Read NewYorker magazine from 1980's. Spectacular writing, and genuine insight that people from all political spectrums can be engaged with. It makes me sad. Sometimes, I listen to old archives from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/npr-all-things-considered https://archive.org/details/npr-all-things-considered and stuff like Car Talk on NPR. It was a beautiful world. I have no trust left for NYT, WaPo or whatever right wing media is around blasting stuff on TV today. It is toxic.
Spivak 4y ago
Haha skewed, NPR has been a staple liberal stereotype since my grandpa listened to them. If you’ve noticed anything it’s that the gap between liberals and conservatives widened massively starting in the late 2000s when the Republican party started slipping so they manufactured a wedge issue out of gay marriage and when that died down trans healthcare with some opportunistic blm thrown in. And look, it worked. It paid off huge for them but at the cost of literally bifurcating the country and hollowing out moderates and independents. So now it’s much much easier to see the side they’ve always been on since the contrast has been turned up to 11. As much as I personally think the Republican party is absolutely fucking evil for the specific issues they capitalized on — because good god lower taxes, eliminating government agencies, and less powerful unions doesn’t pour gasoline on festering racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia creating a tire fire of hate and violence that will outlive me — I’m not mad at the game in abstract, Democrats play it too.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

A bit tangential but HUGE shout-out to PBS for their science shows on YouTube. I follow PBS Eons and PBS Space Time, both are fantastic and highly educational.

ekianjo 4y ago

> news from organizations like the AP AP is just as biased as the rest. Even if you remove ads the people with agenda are still everywhere. > PBS are a left public good. Fixed that for you, because it's so obvious how it has changed.

gpm 4y ago

> I'd be willing to pay for news from organizations like the AP or Reuters. reuters.com is free as an invdividual, you just need to make an (entirely free) account or you get limited to X articles per month. I don't think apnews.com even asks you to make an account.

throwaway6734 4y ago

Iirc Reuters sells a subscription