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> ...even if that something is just the status quo of daily life. That is it, and maybe an attempt to keep the news from being a selective display of only bad

> ...even if that something is just the status quo of daily life. That is it, and maybe an attempt to keep the news from being a selective display of only bad things, creating the misleading impression that the world is a grimdark shitshow where nothing good ever happens. > And that is also why when it's feel-good stories about the police, it feels particularly insidious; As though the stories are trying to distract from all the horrible things police do. As the meme goes, no one ever wrote a song called 'Fuck the Firefighters' And that's distorted thinking. Dislike of the police is causing people to believe and peddle false conspiracy theories to express that dislike. It's pretty clear that what's really is when ducklings get saved by anyone, some fraction of the time a local journalist with column inches to fill writes a fun story according to an established template.

genocidicbunny 4y ago
> It's pretty clear that what's really is when ducklings get saved by anyone, some fraction of the time a local journalist with column inches to fill writes a fun story according to an established template. Which is not mutually exclusive with these things being puff pieces. For example, the same journalist could probably find something consequential to report happening down at city hall, or the last council meeting. They could dig a little into the local homelessness or drug problem or something else. If all you need is a few column inches to fill, you don't need to do in-depth investigative reporting of those things either. But they don't do these things because as you pointed out earlier: > maybe an attempt to keep the news from being a selective display of only bad things, creating the misleading impression that the world is a grimdark shitshow where nothing good ever happens. That's what it is. Modulating the dopamine drip. Get you worked up, bring you back down, rinse, lather and repeat. If your local newspaper was all depressing or boring stories all the time, no matter how truthful, you'd eventually get tired of it and move on. So you sprinkle a little bit of feel-good writing throughout to keep the ride going. This is why I never specifically referred to this as a conspiracy, because I don't think it is on the scale that the linked article is trying to imply. That would imply coordinated collusion between thousands of actors, which I find a bit hard to believe. I think it's more that the system is set up this way and we're seeing the natural results of actors behaving within the rules of the system. Take my example above of the newspaper that only prints bad news. Eventually people stop reading it, and the newspaper goes out of business. Newspapers that didn't only print bad news survive and take over the readership of the now-defunct one. (Incidentally this also offers a pretty simple explanation for why there might be more puff pieces about the police published after the police do something horrible. If you think of a media outlet as trying to maintain a homeostasis between outrage and feel-good, then you need more feel-good stories to offset the newly generated outrage until things are back in balance.)
- tablespoon 4y ago
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genocidicbunny 4y ago

> It's pretty clear that what's really is when ducklings get saved by anyone, some fraction of the time a local journalist with column inches to fill writes a fun story according to an established template. Which is not mutually exclusive with these things being puff pieces. For example, the same journalist could probably find something consequential to report happening down at city hall, or the last council meeting. They could dig a little into the local homelessness or drug problem or something else. If all you need is a few column inches to fill, you don't need to do in-depth investigative reporting of those things either. But they don't do these things because as you pointed out earlier: > maybe an attempt to keep the news from being a selective display of only bad things, creating the misleading impression that the world is a grimdark shitshow where nothing good ever happens. That's what it is. Modulating the dopamine drip. Get you worked up, bring you back down, rinse, lather and repeat. If your local newspaper was all depressing or boring stories all the time, no matter how truthful, you'd eventually get tired of it and move on. So you sprinkle a little bit of feel-good writing throughout to keep the ride going. This is why I never specifically referred to this as a conspiracy, because I don't think it is on the scale that the linked article is trying to imply. That would imply coordinated collusion between thousands of actors, which I find a bit hard to believe. I think it's more that the system is set up this way and we're seeing the natural results of actors behaving within the rules of the system. Take my example above of the newspaper that only prints bad news. Eventually people stop reading it, and the newspaper goes out of business. Newspapers that didn't only print bad news survive and take over the readership of the now-defunct one. (Incidentally this also offers a pretty simple explanation for why there might be more puff pieces about the police published after the police do something horrible. If you think of a media outlet as trying to maintain a homeostasis between outrage and feel-good, then you need more feel-good stories to offset the newly generated outrage until things are back in balance.)

tablespoon 4y ago
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