3 ms·

Ask HN: What Is Wrong with the News?

• stop50 2y ago
  Only a small number of publishers completly lost my trust. fox news and the whole murdoch empire, axel Springer AG are the most prominent.
  • jaredwiener 2y ago
    why did they lose your trust?
    • stop50 2y ago
      Fox news because of the hate that is sipping through every pore and axel springer se because of their usage of what is called in Germany "Witwenschütteln"(widow shaking), an practice where the people do anything to get any information from victims or an suspect by any means. Wrong information is also ok for them, they stalked a lot of people who they thought were criminals and at least one person committed suicide after they published an wrong story.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• bediger4000 2y ago
  I've lost my trust because it appears that wealthy owners (and publishers) put a distinct pro-wealthy people slant. Beginning in 2005, when NYT was revealed to have spiked the story of NSA mass surveillance, to the squelching of presidential endorsements, we've seen a lot of it. It's also true that a lot of anti-oligarch news gets published, there's some bells you can't unring. If news orgs published only Baghdad Bob type lunacy, they'd loose all credibility. Framing and selective publishing can do the trick.
• RGamma 2y ago
  The vast majority of it is non-actionable (to me) information. It's exhausting to follow and impossible to remember, except perhaps as tidbits or "moving average". Professional journalism and its products have a place, but not in my head right now. There is however great value in its archives, e.g. for contemporary historians and journalists painting a bigger picture or consulting decision makers. Can't compute history from today. And of course there's possible problems with bias, agendas, etc. But that's history science 101.
  • jaredwiener 2y ago
    What would be actionable? Local news? CNBC?
    • RGamma 2y ago
      Local news tends to be much more actionable as member of that locality at least in my experience. Things like when the burglary season starts, local/regional investment opportunities (e.g. wind farms), gatherings, events, road blocks due to construction. Not American and dunno about CNBC, but national news seems more for economic decision makers, politicians. Not saying nobody else should have access to that sort of thing, but it's cognitively too hard to follow for me alongside everything else. It's a difficult delivery/targeting problem. Everything's happening all the time. Right (truthful and complete) information for the right person (role, intention, interest?) at the right time/occasion (entertainment, time-sensitive, deliberate research?). And to be clear: I do not necessarily mean algorithmic targetting or recommendation. E.g. the (hobbyist) historian certainly wouldn't want to be swayed this way. Incidentally sifting through news archives is something LLMs might be quite good at, e.g. for consolidation, comparison, lookup. However they mustn't kill their sources doing that. There's no replacement for primary sources (except AGI yadda yadda)
• Rochus 2y ago
  Journalists are interviewing each other, which is then presented as news and facts. Most journalists seem to have stopped presenting facts and fact based analyses anyway, and instead apparently want to involve themselves as a person and pass on their worldview (or that of their employer) instead. Or they simply pass on what is distributed by Reuters and co., without further research and analysis. I'm not interested in that and I'm not paying for it.
  • jaredwiener 2y ago
    Curious -- what is wrong with Reuters?
    • Rochus 2y ago
      I just used them as an example. The point is that if a newspaper article essentially corresponds to the Reuters (or any news agency's) news reports, why should I pay for the newspaper?
    • solardev 2y ago
      (Not the OP, just another opinion) Reuters is a wire service that many other outfits license and republish, usually verbatim or with some truncation for brevity. It's the journalistic equivalent of retweets without any further comments. They also try to maintain a high degree of non-partisanship (because they want to broadly resell their content across demographic/cultural boundaries), which is good in a "just the facts" kinda sense, bad in the sense that it makes for boring reading and usually doesn't carry a lot of detail/commentary/analysis – which for people not already informed on a topic usually means they're just glossing over it and not getting any of the subtext. It's kinda like trying to understand world affairs through RSS feeds instead of in-depth expertise. Nothing inherently "wrong" with that model, but it's not the same as true investigative journalism (which there is less and less of, both in terms of producers/journalists and audiences interested in that material) or even a good blogger explaining the important background of a topic. As our attention spans shorten to tweet length or below, perhaps our thoughts become similarly oversimplified. Nuance and depth don't really sell anymore, so our journalism is likewise shallow...
  • 2y ago
• solardev 2y ago
  Their monetization models rely heavily on advertising and sensationalism, and much of it is the journalistic equivalent of SEO spam. Boring, sober analyses don't sell clicks anymore, so it's all hyperpolarized doomsday headlines. That, and also seeing how disempowered the average American has become in terms of their ability to actually make any difference in the political or corporate world. It's just a dog-and-pony show in these waning days of democracy combined with ever-more-powerful corporate interests... the news really just serves as a way to reaffirm how helpless the overwhelming majority of us really are, no matter if it's the latest hot-button political topic, layoffs, return-to-office mandates, etc. The news helps the elites mirror each other's strategies and behaviors, while doing little more than instilling a sense of cyclic doom and gloom for the average Joe. They don't call it "doomscrolling" for nothing.
• LinuxBender 2y ago
  What do you consider "the news" Skimming the Infotainment dopamine sites for fun but not for news. There has never been a news site and probably won't ever be in my opinion. Not newspapers, radio, television, scrawling on cave walls. Everyone has multiple agendas, hidden agendas and some more obvious. Somewhat off topic from your question I enjoy when people make a mashup of all the "news" sites repeating the exact narratives they were given verbatim whilst playing circus music. Example [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo [video][2 mins][warning: does not contain circus music]