4 ms·

In my opinion, this is a graph of the downfall of journalism rather than some larger indicator of the attitudes of Americans. Journalism now is primarily rageba

In my opinion, this is a graph of the downfall of journalism rather than some larger indicator of the attitudes of Americans. Journalism now is primarily ragebait and self-gratifying garbage.

novagameco 3y ago
Hasn't journalism always been that way? Was there ever truly a "golden age" of journalism? What I remember from history class is that William Randolph Hearst published lies to sell more newspapers which resulted in the Spanish American war. Early British and American newspapers were just partisan pamphlets meant to rile up support for a particular politician. Whenever we hear about good journalism in the past, I think it's usually the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps there was a period around the 1970s where journalists were willing to go to war zones and risk prosecution to report on the Viet Nam war or the Watergate scandal, but I'm not sure if that's indicative of the entire body of work of the era.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  And even the Watergate scandal was really a coup by the deep state, which was vehemently opposed to the changes Nixon had in mind [0]. Even if you don't buy the whole story, it should give you pause that the Watergate burglars were connected to the CIA. Or, put differently: "49 state landslide, 520 electoral votes, and a year later half the country genuinely believed he had to break into an office building to win" [1]. [0] https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-theory-of-watergate/ https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-th... [1] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508 https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508
  - hedora 3y ago
    How does the coup theory explain the audio tapes of Nixon implicating himself? I'd explain his resignation differently: Back then, there was more of an expectation that politicians would obey the law, or at least get punished if caught.
    - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
      > Nixon implicating himself Got a link?
      - hedora 3y ago
        It's [7] in the top hit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes Whoops. That's a link to a news story about this page: https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    man the deep state propaganda shills are out hard for 2024 welcome to the world of chatGPT
- toss1 3y ago
  True, but there are many also many scaling factors. First among these is the 24-hour news cycle, requiring filling 1440 minutes of every day regardless of quality. Another is the profitability of rage-farming and engagement. It's one thing for a person to buy a newspaper and get his chain yanked every morning, then go about their day, typically either ignoring the stories or discussing them with other live people in person. It's another to have the rage-farming TV source continually pumping moving video and sound into every space they enter (home, lobbies, bus/train/airport stations, etc.), and programs deliberately designed and tuned to coerce viewers' attention, and they can keep interacting with the story every day with only the announcers. The same thing at different scale is different.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    One obvious way to fight this on a personal level is to have no TV. Yes, do have a big screen to watch movies if you like them, but never turn on the TV reception. Stay away from the on-the-air rage machine, the same way you can stay away from the social media rage machine. Also saves you a lot of time not watching any commercials. I did not have a TV for last like 25 years, and never missed it. All the news you think you care about are often not; you can get your news fix by looking at the news online a couple of times a day, for a few minutes. You can dig any topic deeper if you're really interested, again online. I see only one sane use for (cable) TV, and this is sports and other unique live events. Fortunately I'm not into sports, and most live events I care about are also broadcast on YouTube.
    - toss1 3y ago
      Exactly!! I've not had any cable or OTA TV since before 2006. The only thing I miss is Formula 1 racing (which DVR'd and watched over the following week), and it's now finally online if I need it. Been more than fine with streaming content. When I encounter it in waiting lobbies, it is really jarring just how much cable TV is relentlessly stupid.
- hedora 3y ago
  I'd say the golden age of journalism ended in the mid-1990s in the US. That was when radio and print new consolidation really started accelerating, and when cable news stations started becoming popular. The US used to have laws that would have made the current situation illegal. They didn't make much sense for internet news, but they did for radio, television and newspapers. They were repealed, and each time a law was repealed there was a direct financial tie between the politicians that repealed the laws and the networks that stood to gain. Post consolidation, the networks started running propaganda for the party that enabled the merger. I don't have a great solution for the current firehose of foreign propaganda, but restoring market ownership rules (no TV, radio or local newspaper owner can have more than, say 25% of the viewership/readership of a given city with over N million people) would definitely help. They could apply this to the internet by restricting editorial control to the editors of each publication. This would immediately force Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple to change how they aggregate news content. Concretely, Apple News could be made OK with minor changes: Apple would need to eliminate algorithmic ranking of articles, and replace it with algorithmic ranking of periodicals. Facebook could recommend you follow newspapers and magazines, but would not be allowed to intermingle the feeds. I'm sure the platforms would argue that this is unworkable, but we already have an existence proof. Podcasts work this way, and most people (here) would argue that they're a much healthier ecosystem than written internet news. For one thing, there's no such thing as clickbait with podcasts. For another, you can cut off an editor with one click if you notice ragebait or sloppy journalism. None of the internet news aggregators allow you to do either of those things. As for HN (assuming its readership is above some threshold), it would end up turning into a collection of blogs and syndicated tech columnists. I'd have mixed feelings about that, but I suspect having a collaboratively edited RSS feed with independently curated (by Dang and friends) comment sections on each article would be fantastic.
  - snakeyjake 3y ago
    >I'd say the golden age of journalism ended in the mid-1990s in the US. The mid-1990s saw US journalists hounding Richard Jewell, faking car crashes, and amplifying the Satanic Panic. I like to use satire as a lens of truth for people with rose-colored glasses. Anyone who thinks airport security is a joke needs to watch Airplane and Airplane II and anyone who thinks journalism used to be good "back in the day" needs to watch Robocop and Network.
- TYPE_FASTER 3y ago
  Agree. Yellow journalism is a term that was "coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal." [0] My take is that modern communications mechanisms have changed journalism just like they changed music discovery and distribution: tons of content suddenly available at a low cost or free with ads. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
atticora 3y ago
Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers. It's hard to blame a business for failing to commit financial suicide on principle. You can, but that's like blaming water for falling from the sky.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
This feels like projection.

In my opinion, this is a graph of the downfall of journalism rather than some larger indicator of the attitudes of Americans. Journalism now is primarily ragebait and self-gratifying garbage.

novagameco 3y ago

Hasn't journalism always been that way? Was there ever truly a "golden age" of journalism? What I remember from history class is that William Randolph Hearst published lies to sell more newspapers which resulted in the Spanish American war. Early British and American newspapers were just partisan pamphlets meant to rile up support for a particular politician. Whenever we hear about good journalism in the past, I think it's usually the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps there was a period around the 1970s where journalists were willing to go to war zones and risk prosecution to report on the Viet Nam war or the Watergate scandal, but I'm not sure if that's indicative of the entire body of work of the era.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
And even the Watergate scandal was really a coup by the deep state, which was vehemently opposed to the changes Nixon had in mind [0]. Even if you don't buy the whole story, it should give you pause that the Watergate burglars were connected to the CIA. Or, put differently: "49 state landslide, 520 electoral votes, and a year later half the country genuinely believed he had to break into an office building to win" [1]. [0] https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-theory-of-watergate/ https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-th... [1] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508 https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508
- hedora 3y ago
  How does the coup theory explain the audio tapes of Nixon implicating himself? I'd explain his resignation differently: Back then, there was more of an expectation that politicians would obey the law, or at least get punished if caught.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    > Nixon implicating himself Got a link?
    - hedora 3y ago
      It's [7] in the top hit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes Whoops. That's a link to a news story about this page: https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  man the deep state propaganda shills are out hard for 2024 welcome to the world of chatGPT
toss1 3y ago
True, but there are many also many scaling factors. First among these is the 24-hour news cycle, requiring filling 1440 minutes of every day regardless of quality. Another is the profitability of rage-farming and engagement. It's one thing for a person to buy a newspaper and get his chain yanked every morning, then go about their day, typically either ignoring the stories or discussing them with other live people in person. It's another to have the rage-farming TV source continually pumping moving video and sound into every space they enter (home, lobbies, bus/train/airport stations, etc.), and programs deliberately designed and tuned to coerce viewers' attention, and they can keep interacting with the story every day with only the announcers. The same thing at different scale is different.
- nine_k 3y ago
  One obvious way to fight this on a personal level is to have no TV. Yes, do have a big screen to watch movies if you like them, but never turn on the TV reception. Stay away from the on-the-air rage machine, the same way you can stay away from the social media rage machine. Also saves you a lot of time not watching any commercials. I did not have a TV for last like 25 years, and never missed it. All the news you think you care about are often not; you can get your news fix by looking at the news online a couple of times a day, for a few minutes. You can dig any topic deeper if you're really interested, again online. I see only one sane use for (cable) TV, and this is sports and other unique live events. Fortunately I'm not into sports, and most live events I care about are also broadcast on YouTube.
  - toss1 3y ago
    Exactly!! I've not had any cable or OTA TV since before 2006. The only thing I miss is Formula 1 racing (which DVR'd and watched over the following week), and it's now finally online if I need it. Been more than fine with streaming content. When I encounter it in waiting lobbies, it is really jarring just how much cable TV is relentlessly stupid.
hedora 3y ago
I'd say the golden age of journalism ended in the mid-1990s in the US. That was when radio and print new consolidation really started accelerating, and when cable news stations started becoming popular. The US used to have laws that would have made the current situation illegal. They didn't make much sense for internet news, but they did for radio, television and newspapers. They were repealed, and each time a law was repealed there was a direct financial tie between the politicians that repealed the laws and the networks that stood to gain. Post consolidation, the networks started running propaganda for the party that enabled the merger. I don't have a great solution for the current firehose of foreign propaganda, but restoring market ownership rules (no TV, radio or local newspaper owner can have more than, say 25% of the viewership/readership of a given city with over N million people) would definitely help. They could apply this to the internet by restricting editorial control to the editors of each publication. This would immediately force Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple to change how they aggregate news content. Concretely, Apple News could be made OK with minor changes: Apple would need to eliminate algorithmic ranking of articles, and replace it with algorithmic ranking of periodicals. Facebook could recommend you follow newspapers and magazines, but would not be allowed to intermingle the feeds. I'm sure the platforms would argue that this is unworkable, but we already have an existence proof. Podcasts work this way, and most people (here) would argue that they're a much healthier ecosystem than written internet news. For one thing, there's no such thing as clickbait with podcasts. For another, you can cut off an editor with one click if you notice ragebait or sloppy journalism. None of the internet news aggregators allow you to do either of those things. As for HN (assuming its readership is above some threshold), it would end up turning into a collection of blogs and syndicated tech columnists. I'd have mixed feelings about that, but I suspect having a collaboratively edited RSS feed with independently curated (by Dang and friends) comment sections on each article would be fantastic.
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  >I'd say the golden age of journalism ended in the mid-1990s in the US. The mid-1990s saw US journalists hounding Richard Jewell, faking car crashes, and amplifying the Satanic Panic. I like to use satire as a lens of truth for people with rose-colored glasses. Anyone who thinks airport security is a joke needs to watch Airplane and Airplane II and anyone who thinks journalism used to be good "back in the day" needs to watch Robocop and Network.
TYPE_FASTER 3y ago
Agree. Yellow journalism is a term that was "coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal." [0] My take is that modern communications mechanisms have changed journalism just like they changed music discovery and distribution: tons of content suddenly available at a low cost or free with ads. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

atticora 3y ago

Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers. It's hard to blame a business for failing to commit financial suicide on principle. You can, but that's like blaming water for falling from the sky.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

This feels like projection.