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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 beli

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.

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.