5 ms·

• Successful launch of a shuttle • Breakthrough in physics • Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history • Election results? I mean title is fairl

• Successful launch of a shuttle • Breakthrough in physics • Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history • Election results? I mean title is fairly click-baity

habibur 4y ago
Some of the originals used the word "journalism".
pjkundert 4y ago
- why a successful shuttle launch doesn’t mean it is a worthwhile expenditure - reasons why breakthroughs have become so rare vs. recent history - how discoveries invalidate accepted dogma written by victors - election results not matching validators/checks harvested from non-regime-controlled sources These are news. Reporting the obvious in a way agreeable to the regime isn’t.
- mrkstu 4y ago
  No, that is analysis and commentary of the news.
  - pjkundert 4y ago
    Providing evidence counter to the evidence presented by the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma. Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere.
    - danShumway 4y ago
      I feel like on some level this is a more round-about way of saying, "real news is politically useful." To me that seems like a fairly obvious reduction of the scope of news into a pure propaganda tool. It is true that a lot of even objective news is inherently political and has political implications, and it is true that which facts reporters choose to print and what context they choose to supply around those facts carries an editorial message regardless of whether the facts are true. What stories a reporter chooses to focus on is itself an editorial decision. But the quote itself is an oversimplification of that more nuanced truth. Some more specific objections: --- > Providing evidence counter to the evidence presently the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma. Commentary is a necessary foundation to empower citizens to form educated opinions and to combat dominant narratives. "Commentary" is not a dirty word, it is a legitimate thing that gets built on top of news reporting and on top of neutrally presented factual information. Separating reporting from commentary does not delegitimize commentary and it shouldn't be treated as an attempt to delegitimize commentary. Commentary is important, and forcing it to masquerade as news reduces the scope of how we can use it. And of course there isn't a binary distinction between commentary and reporting (see my first paragraph), but that doesn't mean there's no distinction at all or that different pieces don't stray more towards commentary than others. --- > Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere. The US is a country that is fairly evenly divided between (at least) two very different viewpoints about how the world works, and each side is convinced that the other is stewing in "a one-sided, vacuous environment." I find this argument pretty unconvincing because it's difficult for me to think of many news stories nowadays that don't fit into this category. It doesn't really eliminate much; pretty much all reporting is something that somebody doesn't want printed, and most reporting can be characterized as "establishment propaganda" from people who want to dismiss it. The hard part of reporting nowadays isn't writing headlines that will make people angry, it's writing headlines that won't be immediately interpreted as a direct political attack. And in pretty much all of those cases, you'll be able to find somebody that doesn't want that headline printed. And as a quality metric in general, it doesn't seem very useful or strongly correlated with quality. I can print some pretty nonsense, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Conservative establishments angry that it was published. I can also print some pretty nonsensical, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Liberals angry. That's trivial to do, on both sides of the isle. It's trivial to do outside of politics as well --- heck, I can come up with headlines that will make native developers and web developers respectively angry. But doing that doesn't mean that what I'm printing is more likely to be legitimate or newsworthy. What's worse is that the reduction of "news" to be things that make my out-group angry encourages me to lean into that kind of editorializing; and it encourages me to phrase pretty straightforward announcements/discoveries/research-projects as if they are combative towards my out-groups, even it I have to do worse reporting to make that happen. I would argue that "news has to make people angry" is a big part of how we get incredibly angry, polarized societies in the first place.
      - pjkundert 4y ago
        Perhaps my expectations are too high; but when I read any significant news article, it is extremely tiring — because my work is just beginning. My default belief is: “it doesn’t appear they they are not telling the truth”. And my next task is “now, what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?” It is exceedingly rare that I (eventually) say: “wow; I couldn’t find any evidence of high-probability events that significantly alter the probability of their stated facts”. Usually, after a few hours of digging around the seedy edges of … whatever they’re claiming to be describing — I find that, indeed, most of what they’re writing is either BS, or much more tenuously supported than they imply. After a few rounds of this, any trust in the veracity of the media organ evaporates. This shouldn’t be my job. Didn’t “journalism” used to include this heavy lifting?
        danShumway 4y ago
        > My default belief is: “it doesn’t appear they they are not telling the truth”. And my next task is “now, what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?” This is part of the point of commentary. It's to provide additional context and to talk about the implications of the news article, and to talk about angles that the news article might be not be getting into or that might contradict the article's premise. The downside of commentary is that it's more tightly tied to ideology, and having someone help interpret a news story provides more opportunity for them to phrase that story in a way that's politically advantageous to them. But that doesn't mean that commentary isn't important, it just means that it's something we need to be careful consuming, and that we need to be careful about getting multiple sides/angles to the story when we approach it. > This shouldn’t be my job. Didn’t “journalism” used to include this heavy lifting? This is part of the problem of phrasing journalism as purely a way to speak truth to power, upset the ruling class, disrupt the system, etc... You're describing a situation where you have a hard time trusting the news because you don't know up-front what its angle is or what facts/context it's omitting to further that angle. I would argue that's a direct consequence of a culture that delegitimizes boring/factual reporting that doesn't lean as far as possible into a political angle or ideological goal. A couple comments down I saw a comment arguing that "a rocket launched" isn't news, and "is the rocket budget too high" is. But when every single story is starting from the perspective of "how is this information useful to the political end I want to achieve", then yeah, you need to spend more time filtering out the news and looking behind the scenes and figuring out what the angle is. It's not actually great for public discourse/education for every single news story about launching a rocket to be an argument for/against space funding. That's part of why I think "news is what people don't want printed" isn't that great of a philosophy; because it encourages more articles to write from an angle and forces you to constantly ask "what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?" or "do the facts actually imply what they say those facts imply?" What you want in the situation you describe is basic reporting as a baseline that attempts to be as neutral, factual, and unemotional as possible (while acknowledging that all reporting is at least somewhat political in nature and that we can't completely remove that aspect of any story); and then you want extensive commentary from a diverse set of experts/reporters you can trust to help you interpret that news. But instead, this comment section has a number of people arguing that the more boring side of factual reporting that doesn't directly challenge a status quo is illegitimate. Well, when you get rid of that part of reporting, the only thing you have left then is the commentary, and it becomes incredibly difficult and time-consuming to find out what the facts behind the commentary are and whether the commentary is trustworthy. The boring non-political reporting that doesn't immediately make anyone mad, or question the establishment, or snap readers out of their comfortable existence -- is all actually really important for building a shared set of facts about the world that we all agree on and can use to build healthy political commentary that does explicitly challenge norms and establishment narratives.
FatActor 4y ago
Granted this isn't even a well-thought-out essay, it is someone trying to research a quote. I don't see that as click-bait. To counter your point: do you refer to "Popular Science" as news? or "Scientific American"? Scientific reporting isn't "news" in the context of the OPs query. The implications or context would be though (like how much it cost from a budget and if it was worth it). I'm sure you understand the point of the article because being on HN you are smarter than the average person, or are you mayyyybeee just trying to be click-baity yourself?
version_five 4y ago
I'd argue all those (except elections) are at least potentially advertising. It's not just from public interest that these things would get promoted. A space launch is a great example, look at the history of the space program, it's largely an advertising campaign. Re elections, the real results are something that in many places lots of people will not want shared, and this is an important function of the press. Yes, news publications have lots of facts like your examples they think people will want to read, but the core of news (as opposed to books or magazines) and the idea that the press gets a special place on society is definitely aligned with the quote I'd actually further suspect that the quote rubs many people the wrong way now because of the whole "misinformation" thing where they actually want their "news" source to be a propaganda organ of their political alignment, rather than an actual unbiased reporter of facts
- danShumway 4y ago
  > I'd actually further suspect that the quote rubs many people the wrong way now because of the whole "misinformation" thing where they actually want their "news" source to be a propaganda organ of their political alignment, rather than an actual unbiased reporter of facts I don't think I agree. In a divided society, it is very easy to find establishment players who will object to a propaganda headline being printed. News framed to suite either a Conservative or Liberal perspective will make the other side angry, regardless of its truth value. "I made someone angry that I printed this" doesn't really imply, "it's good that I printed it." Making people angry is incredibly easy to do, especially in a polarized society, and optimizing for outrage and the thinking that outrage makes news more "legitimate" is arguably one of the reasons we're in a polarized society. ---- Aside: other commenters have already mentioned, but just quick reminder again that this article is not about whether the quote is true, it's trying to investigate its origins.
boomboomsubban 4y ago
The article is investigating the history of the quote, something that is clear both while visiting their website or by looking at the source URL. All their articles are titled with the quote they are investigating.
- derefr 4y ago
  Proper editorial technique would be to put the headline itself in quotation marks, then.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    In this instance, we can replace "Proper" with "My preferred" and as a result have improved fidelity as there is sufficient information in the article and the URL to adjudicate.
    - derefr 4y ago
      I’m not speaking of preferences, but of what you’re taught to do in professsional journalism/editing programs. Headlines are read before article bodies / before other meta-information like URLs. Often — especially when a headline is a link embedded elsewhere, but also when a headline is one among many on a multi-article layout — only the headline is read (because the reader decides they’re not interested and moves on.) In the inverted-pyramid style of news-article structure — which is so commonplace that people intuitionally expect even non-news writing to also conform to it — a reader is supposed to be able to stop at any point in reading and have received all the important info; and an editor is supposed to be able to cut any article from the bottom up for space reasons without damaging the article’s meaning. Thus, readers expect a headline to be a most-condensed summary for an article; something they can read without reading anything else, and still come away informed. This leads to guidance for writers of headlines, even in non-news traditions: write the headline such that a reader can read a headline, decide they now know enough, and stop reading/move onto something else, without doing so having resulted in the reader being misled. An article whose headline is a quotation, but which does not quote the quotation, is misleading to those readers who read nothing else. This is, from the headline-writer’s perspective, bad praxis.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Successful launch of a shuttle the country launching it is advertising their result, their adversaries definitely would like to cancel it, making it newsworthy. example: Russian propaganda around Sputnik, seen from the US side. > Breakthrough in physics > Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history the way the media treats these arguments resemble much more clickbait than news. see: nuclear fusion or the coverage on Musk's bs about anything remotely science related, but there are times when this can actually be news, even though it can be more often closely affiliated to advertising to attract tourists. For example the real archeological breakthrough discovery presented in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" barely made the news. In this particular case, many archeologists would prefer it never happened. But mostly is reporting the progress of something that's been slowly going on for decades. > Election results there are definitely many people who would like to not see them published, every time an election is held. edit: anyway, that's not what the linked article is about, the poster simply tried to track the origin of the quote.
corndoge 4y ago
You should read the article, it's pretty interesting!
javajosh 4y ago
All of your examples are news by the quotes definition. Plenty of people don't want any of that printed. Much of it comes down to fights over zero-sum pies. Successful launch of a shuttle? We're wasting money on space and the media is shilling for the industrial/military complex, as usual. Breakthrough in physics? That discovery is just careerist researchers making shit up to get more grants. Election results? The result is a complete fraud that steals my victory away from me and printing this only proves media's bias in favor of my opponent.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  To be fair most of that stuff is propaganda gold. Why state media loves tech it's advertising for government.
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  I think we've reduced the headline to something that is not useful. For instance, I don't want advertising to be printed. So, I guess advertising is news?
  - javajosh 4y ago
    First, I just discovered Androids keyboards weird symbols mode. ¥°¢{×`÷|π|√∆}£][™®. Nice. Second, I feel like you're making the mistake of saying if you object to anything then the thing you object to is news. The original statement is pretty short, but I take it to mean that you object to the content of the item and not the genesis of the item or the motive of the author itself. Of course, this distinction leads to all kinds of uncomfortable situations. For example, you might be against propaganda itself, but you might be very much for the position espoused by certain propaganda. I think the narrower content oriented aspect of being against something is what we're talking about. Because otherwise it gets a bit silly. You could argue that the westboro Church thinks that gay people are news, for example.
    - actionablefiber 4y ago
      The point of my comment is to object to your characterization of things like a breakthrough in physics as "news" because there are people somewhere who find it objectionable for some reason. It is a semantically valid interpretation of the post title but incongruent with its spirit.
oldgradstudent 4y ago
Science journalism is where this quote is most important for practitioners to internalize. > Successful launch of a shuttle Investigative journalism on NASA ignoring problems prior to the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have prevented both disasters. > Breakthrough in physics Investigative reporting around, for example, BICEP2 instead of just spell checking the press releases would have easily exposed the fiasco. > Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history So many artifacts were later turned out to be frauds, and even the ones that aren't outright fraud are often way over-interpreted.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Oh, the irresponsibility of journalists with respect to the Shuttle runs far deeper than that. They largely acted as cheerleaders for a program that made very little sense. They largely didn't ask the hard questions about whether the Shuttle was worth doing at all (spoiler: it wasn't.)
  - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
    > spoiler: it wasn't. Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.
    - oldgradstudent 4y ago
      > Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position. It could, and it was. http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.html http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...
      - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
        Huh. Touche.
        4y ago
notatoad 4y ago
i first heard this as "journalism is what somebody doesn't want you to print, the rest is PR" which rings a bit truer. somebody's success that they desperately want you to report on (like a shuttle launch or election win) can be news, but it's not actually journalism until you start reading beyond the press release and finding additional context.
- jfengel 4y ago
  It's truer because it's tautological. Either somebody wants you to print it or someone does not. I suppose the middle case is "nobody cares one way or the other", and it's true that if nobody cares then it's not news. That is at least a definition rather than a tautology.
duxup 4y ago
Pretty much any local news. Construction proposed. Local events ongoing/ upcoming…

• Successful launch of a shuttle • Breakthrough in physics • Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history • Election results? I mean title is fairly click-baity

habibur 4y ago

Some of the originals used the word "journalism".

pjkundert 4y ago

- why a successful shuttle launch doesn’t mean it is a worthwhile expenditure - reasons why breakthroughs have become so rare vs. recent history - how discoveries invalidate accepted dogma written by victors - election results not matching validators/checks harvested from non-regime-controlled sources These are news. Reporting the obvious in a way agreeable to the regime isn’t.

mrkstu 4y ago
No, that is analysis and commentary of the news.
- pjkundert 4y ago
  Providing evidence counter to the evidence presented by the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma. Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    I feel like on some level this is a more round-about way of saying, "real news is politically useful." To me that seems like a fairly obvious reduction of the scope of news into a pure propaganda tool. It is true that a lot of even objective news is inherently political and has political implications, and it is true that which facts reporters choose to print and what context they choose to supply around those facts carries an editorial message regardless of whether the facts are true. What stories a reporter chooses to focus on is itself an editorial decision. But the quote itself is an oversimplification of that more nuanced truth. Some more specific objections: --- > Providing evidence counter to the evidence presently the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma. Commentary is a necessary foundation to empower citizens to form educated opinions and to combat dominant narratives. "Commentary" is not a dirty word, it is a legitimate thing that gets built on top of news reporting and on top of neutrally presented factual information. Separating reporting from commentary does not delegitimize commentary and it shouldn't be treated as an attempt to delegitimize commentary. Commentary is important, and forcing it to masquerade as news reduces the scope of how we can use it. And of course there isn't a binary distinction between commentary and reporting (see my first paragraph), but that doesn't mean there's no distinction at all or that different pieces don't stray more towards commentary than others. --- > Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere. The US is a country that is fairly evenly divided between (at least) two very different viewpoints about how the world works, and each side is convinced that the other is stewing in "a one-sided, vacuous environment." I find this argument pretty unconvincing because it's difficult for me to think of many news stories nowadays that don't fit into this category. It doesn't really eliminate much; pretty much all reporting is something that somebody doesn't want printed, and most reporting can be characterized as "establishment propaganda" from people who want to dismiss it. The hard part of reporting nowadays isn't writing headlines that will make people angry, it's writing headlines that won't be immediately interpreted as a direct political attack. And in pretty much all of those cases, you'll be able to find somebody that doesn't want that headline printed. And as a quality metric in general, it doesn't seem very useful or strongly correlated with quality. I can print some pretty nonsense, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Conservative establishments angry that it was published. I can also print some pretty nonsensical, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Liberals angry. That's trivial to do, on both sides of the isle. It's trivial to do outside of politics as well --- heck, I can come up with headlines that will make native developers and web developers respectively angry. But doing that doesn't mean that what I'm printing is more likely to be legitimate or newsworthy. What's worse is that the reduction of "news" to be things that make my out-group angry encourages me to lean into that kind of editorializing; and it encourages me to phrase pretty straightforward announcements/discoveries/research-projects as if they are combative towards my out-groups, even it I have to do worse reporting to make that happen. I would argue that "news has to make people angry" is a big part of how we get incredibly angry, polarized societies in the first place.
    - pjkundert 4y ago
      Perhaps my expectations are too high; but when I read any significant news article, it is extremely tiring — because my work is just beginning. My default belief is: “it doesn’t appear they they are not telling the truth”. And my next task is “now, what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?” It is exceedingly rare that I (eventually) say: “wow; I couldn’t find any evidence of high-probability events that significantly alter the probability of their stated facts”. Usually, after a few hours of digging around the seedy edges of … whatever they’re claiming to be describing — I find that, indeed, most of what they’re writing is either BS, or much more tenuously supported than they imply. After a few rounds of this, any trust in the veracity of the media organ evaporates. This shouldn’t be my job. Didn’t “journalism” used to include this heavy lifting?
      - danShumway 4y ago
        > My default belief is: “it doesn’t appear they they are not telling the truth”. And my next task is “now, what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?” This is part of the point of commentary. It's to provide additional context and to talk about the implications of the news article, and to talk about angles that the news article might be not be getting into or that might contradict the article's premise. The downside of commentary is that it's more tightly tied to ideology, and having someone help interpret a news story provides more opportunity for them to phrase that story in a way that's politically advantageous to them. But that doesn't mean that commentary isn't important, it just means that it's something we need to be careful consuming, and that we need to be careful about getting multiple sides/angles to the story when we approach it. > This shouldn’t be my job. Didn’t “journalism” used to include this heavy lifting? This is part of the problem of phrasing journalism as purely a way to speak truth to power, upset the ruling class, disrupt the system, etc... You're describing a situation where you have a hard time trusting the news because you don't know up-front what its angle is or what facts/context it's omitting to further that angle. I would argue that's a direct consequence of a culture that delegitimizes boring/factual reporting that doesn't lean as far as possible into a political angle or ideological goal. A couple comments down I saw a comment arguing that "a rocket launched" isn't news, and "is the rocket budget too high" is. But when every single story is starting from the perspective of "how is this information useful to the political end I want to achieve", then yeah, you need to spend more time filtering out the news and looking behind the scenes and figuring out what the angle is. It's not actually great for public discourse/education for every single news story about launching a rocket to be an argument for/against space funding. That's part of why I think "news is what people don't want printed" isn't that great of a philosophy; because it encourages more articles to write from an angle and forces you to constantly ask "what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?" or "do the facts actually imply what they say those facts imply?" What you want in the situation you describe is basic reporting as a baseline that attempts to be as neutral, factual, and unemotional as possible (while acknowledging that all reporting is at least somewhat political in nature and that we can't completely remove that aspect of any story); and then you want extensive commentary from a diverse set of experts/reporters you can trust to help you interpret that news. But instead, this comment section has a number of people arguing that the more boring side of factual reporting that doesn't directly challenge a status quo is illegitimate. Well, when you get rid of that part of reporting, the only thing you have left then is the commentary, and it becomes incredibly difficult and time-consuming to find out what the facts behind the commentary are and whether the commentary is trustworthy. The boring non-political reporting that doesn't immediately make anyone mad, or question the establishment, or snap readers out of their comfortable existence -- is all actually really important for building a shared set of facts about the world that we all agree on and can use to build healthy political commentary that does explicitly challenge norms and establishment narratives.

FatActor 4y ago

Granted this isn't even a well-thought-out essay, it is someone trying to research a quote. I don't see that as click-bait. To counter your point: do you refer to "Popular Science" as news? or "Scientific American"? Scientific reporting isn't "news" in the context of the OPs query. The implications or context would be though (like how much it cost from a budget and if it was worth it). I'm sure you understand the point of the article because being on HN you are smarter than the average person, or are you mayyyybeee just trying to be click-baity yourself?

version_five 4y ago

I'd argue all those (except elections) are at least potentially advertising. It's not just from public interest that these things would get promoted. A space launch is a great example, look at the history of the space program, it's largely an advertising campaign. Re elections, the real results are something that in many places lots of people will not want shared, and this is an important function of the press. Yes, news publications have lots of facts like your examples they think people will want to read, but the core of news (as opposed to books or magazines) and the idea that the press gets a special place on society is definitely aligned with the quote I'd actually further suspect that the quote rubs many people the wrong way now because of the whole "misinformation" thing where they actually want their "news" source to be a propaganda organ of their political alignment, rather than an actual unbiased reporter of facts

danShumway 4y ago
> I'd actually further suspect that the quote rubs many people the wrong way now because of the whole "misinformation" thing where they actually want their "news" source to be a propaganda organ of their political alignment, rather than an actual unbiased reporter of facts I don't think I agree. In a divided society, it is very easy to find establishment players who will object to a propaganda headline being printed. News framed to suite either a Conservative or Liberal perspective will make the other side angry, regardless of its truth value. "I made someone angry that I printed this" doesn't really imply, "it's good that I printed it." Making people angry is incredibly easy to do, especially in a polarized society, and optimizing for outrage and the thinking that outrage makes news more "legitimate" is arguably one of the reasons we're in a polarized society. ---- Aside: other commenters have already mentioned, but just quick reminder again that this article is not about whether the quote is true, it's trying to investigate its origins.

boomboomsubban 4y ago

The article is investigating the history of the quote, something that is clear both while visiting their website or by looking at the source URL. All their articles are titled with the quote they are investigating.

derefr 4y ago
Proper editorial technique would be to put the headline itself in quotation marks, then.
- tomrod 4y ago
  In this instance, we can replace "Proper" with "My preferred" and as a result have improved fidelity as there is sufficient information in the article and the URL to adjudicate.
  - derefr 4y ago
    I’m not speaking of preferences, but of what you’re taught to do in professsional journalism/editing programs. Headlines are read before article bodies / before other meta-information like URLs. Often — especially when a headline is a link embedded elsewhere, but also when a headline is one among many on a multi-article layout — only the headline is read (because the reader decides they’re not interested and moves on.) In the inverted-pyramid style of news-article structure — which is so commonplace that people intuitionally expect even non-news writing to also conform to it — a reader is supposed to be able to stop at any point in reading and have received all the important info; and an editor is supposed to be able to cut any article from the bottom up for space reasons without damaging the article’s meaning. Thus, readers expect a headline to be a most-condensed summary for an article; something they can read without reading anything else, and still come away informed. This leads to guidance for writers of headlines, even in non-news traditions: write the headline such that a reader can read a headline, decide they now know enough, and stop reading/move onto something else, without doing so having resulted in the reader being misled. An article whose headline is a quotation, but which does not quote the quotation, is misleading to those readers who read nothing else. This is, from the headline-writer’s perspective, bad praxis.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> Successful launch of a shuttle the country launching it is advertising their result, their adversaries definitely would like to cancel it, making it newsworthy. example: Russian propaganda around Sputnik, seen from the US side. > Breakthrough in physics > Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history the way the media treats these arguments resemble much more clickbait than news. see: nuclear fusion or the coverage on Musk's bs about anything remotely science related, but there are times when this can actually be news, even though it can be more often closely affiliated to advertising to attract tourists. For example the real archeological breakthrough discovery presented in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" barely made the news. In this particular case, many archeologists would prefer it never happened. But mostly is reporting the progress of something that's been slowly going on for decades. > Election results there are definitely many people who would like to not see them published, every time an election is held. edit: anyway, that's not what the linked article is about, the poster simply tried to track the origin of the quote.

corndoge 4y ago

You should read the article, it's pretty interesting!

javajosh 4y ago

All of your examples are news by the quotes definition. Plenty of people don't want any of that printed. Much of it comes down to fights over zero-sum pies. Successful launch of a shuttle? We're wasting money on space and the media is shilling for the industrial/military complex, as usual. Breakthrough in physics? That discovery is just careerist researchers making shit up to get more grants. Election results? The result is a complete fraud that steals my victory away from me and printing this only proves media's bias in favor of my opponent.

psychphysic 4y ago
To be fair most of that stuff is propaganda gold. Why state media loves tech it's advertising for government.
actionablefiber 4y ago
I think we've reduced the headline to something that is not useful. For instance, I don't want advertising to be printed. So, I guess advertising is news?
- javajosh 4y ago
  First, I just discovered Androids keyboards weird symbols mode. ¥°¢{×`÷|π|√∆}£][™®. Nice. Second, I feel like you're making the mistake of saying if you object to anything then the thing you object to is news. The original statement is pretty short, but I take it to mean that you object to the content of the item and not the genesis of the item or the motive of the author itself. Of course, this distinction leads to all kinds of uncomfortable situations. For example, you might be against propaganda itself, but you might be very much for the position espoused by certain propaganda. I think the narrower content oriented aspect of being against something is what we're talking about. Because otherwise it gets a bit silly. You could argue that the westboro Church thinks that gay people are news, for example.
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
    The point of my comment is to object to your characterization of things like a breakthrough in physics as "news" because there are people somewhere who find it objectionable for some reason. It is a semantically valid interpretation of the post title but incongruent with its spirit.

oldgradstudent 4y ago

Science journalism is where this quote is most important for practitioners to internalize. > Successful launch of a shuttle Investigative journalism on NASA ignoring problems prior to the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have prevented both disasters. > Breakthrough in physics Investigative reporting around, for example, BICEP2 instead of just spell checking the press releases would have easily exposed the fiasco. > Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history So many artifacts were later turned out to be frauds, and even the ones that aren't outright fraud are often way over-interpreted.

pfdietz 4y ago
Oh, the irresponsibility of journalists with respect to the Shuttle runs far deeper than that. They largely acted as cheerleaders for a program that made very little sense. They largely didn't ask the hard questions about whether the Shuttle was worth doing at all (spoiler: it wasn't.)
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  > spoiler: it wasn't. Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.
  - oldgradstudent 4y ago
    > Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position. It could, and it was. http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.html http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.htm...
    - _a_a_a_ 4y ago
      Huh. Touche.
      - 4y ago

notatoad 4y ago

i first heard this as "journalism is what somebody doesn't want you to print, the rest is PR" which rings a bit truer. somebody's success that they desperately want you to report on (like a shuttle launch or election win) can be news, but it's not actually journalism until you start reading beyond the press release and finding additional context.

jfengel 4y ago
It's truer because it's tautological. Either somebody wants you to print it or someone does not. I suppose the middle case is "nobody cares one way or the other", and it's true that if nobody cares then it's not news. That is at least a definition rather than a tautology.

duxup 4y ago

Pretty much any local news. Construction proposed. Local events ongoing/ upcoming…