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It's becoming increasingly important to abandon the idea that a journalist's job is to sell you an accurate picture of what's happening in the world. A journali

It's becoming increasingly important to abandon the idea that a journalist's job is to sell you an accurate picture of what's happening in the world. A journalist's job is to farm attention and customer data and then sell it to advertisers.

porridgeraisin 2y ago
Yep. Someone in my family is the type who features quite frequently in the news. I don't mean tabloid-style stuff, or anything related to criminal activity. It was always about fairly serious topics however. As a result, I got to compare first hand information to what ends up in the news. And boy, there are no words. The worst part is that there is no hope. The root cause is that the incentives -- engagement, like you said -- are rotten. Gell-man amnesia etc complicates things further.
- reverendsteveii 2y ago
  The fix is to start paying for news again. This is capitalism. Everyone serves the one who pays them and sells everyone and everything else. If you want them to serve your interests, pay them. I'm honestly of a mind that while the internet's attitude of making everything available for free was fun and exciting, it's time for us to start paying for things again or not using them. More often the latter than the former. It's baked into our ideological framework that there always has to be an exchange of value. No one will give up something worth something unless they also get something worth something. For a while investors who recognized potential subsidized losses in companies like Facebook and Amazon, but that was with the (evidently correct) expectation that they'd get all of that money back and then some. But that's correcting itself. Everyone either sells you something or sells you to someone, just like it was before the internet. So if someone is letting you use their app for free, they're likely selling you to someone else behind the scenes. If you pay for what you use, you at least have a potential deal that fulfills the rule of exchange without making you the product and you can shop that deal around to see if there are any takers.

porridgeraisin 2y ago

Yep. Someone in my family is the type who features quite frequently in the news. I don't mean tabloid-style stuff, or anything related to criminal activity. It was always about fairly serious topics however. As a result, I got to compare first hand information to what ends up in the news. And boy, there are no words. The worst part is that there is no hope. The root cause is that the incentives -- engagement, like you said -- are rotten. Gell-man amnesia etc complicates things further.

reverendsteveii 2y ago
The fix is to start paying for news again. This is capitalism. Everyone serves the one who pays them and sells everyone and everything else. If you want them to serve your interests, pay them. I'm honestly of a mind that while the internet's attitude of making everything available for free was fun and exciting, it's time for us to start paying for things again or not using them. More often the latter than the former. It's baked into our ideological framework that there always has to be an exchange of value. No one will give up something worth something unless they also get something worth something. For a while investors who recognized potential subsidized losses in companies like Facebook and Amazon, but that was with the (evidently correct) expectation that they'd get all of that money back and then some. But that's correcting itself. Everyone either sells you something or sells you to someone, just like it was before the internet. So if someone is letting you use their app for free, they're likely selling you to someone else behind the scenes. If you pay for what you use, you at least have a potential deal that fulfills the rule of exchange without making you the product and you can shop that deal around to see if there are any takers.