4 ms·

[flagged]

• titzer 1y ago
  When the media stops holding people in power accountable, they are no different than idiots with megaphones. The press has special rights because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job.
  • wwweston 1y ago
    Might be worth asking: Why would “the media” do this? Over thousands of outlets?
    • mulmen 1y ago
      Because it’s a moral obligation. The fourth estate is critical to the sustainable operation of our system of government and society. The electorate need to make informed decisions at the polls. In the same way lobbyists inform representatives the media inform the electorate.
    • kulahan 1y ago
      I think you could reduce the profession of journalism to “forced transparency”, which can be a form of accountability unto itself. In short: because it’s simply who they are by definition
    • ethbr1 1y ago
      Interpreting as "why would the media stop holding people in power accountable"... Because it's cheaper and lets it survive. The unspoken undercurrent is that Google and Facebook ate the ad spending that used to fund journalism, without replacing its function. Google and Facebook don't fund journalism at scale -- that's why their profit margins stay at 23% & 40%. Without revenue, reporters don't get paid, high quality reporting doesn't get done, and newsrooms grovel for any source of margin. Which currently seems to be {minimal cost "journalism"} + {catering to power in exchange for access}.
  • srean 1y ago
    Do they have special rights ? Perhaps an expectation or a duty. From the number of press people jailed or killed it does not seem they enjoy any special rights of they speak truth to power.
    • jacobgkau 1y ago
      As an example, courts ordered the Associated Press allowed back into the White House press pool after the Trump administration attempted to remove them. You or I would not be allowed to just show up at the president's events to watch/listen in person. That is a special right.
      • ejstronge 1y ago
        > As an example, courts ordered the Associated Press allowed back into the White House press pool after the Trump administration attempted to remove them. You or I would not be allowed to just show up at the president's events to watch/listen in person. That is a special right. This was overturned. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/business/media/appeals-court-associated-press-restrictions-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/business/media/appeals-co...
        • jacobgkau 1y ago
          You got me on language at least, but it's not that simple. It was overturned for specific "private" spaces-- e.g. the Oval Office-- but the most recent Court of Appeals panel from June 6th did find that the East Room is not private like that and kept in place the prior ruling that the AP's allowed in the East Room. (The NYT article you linked doesn't mention this, but it's really only talking about a July 22nd denial of the AP's emergency petition challenging the partial overturning, not any change to the situation on the ground.) Regarding the East Room, according to the White House Correspondents' Association website (https://whca.press/covering-the-white-house/ https://whca.press/covering-the-white-house/), reporters either need to have a hard pass or a temporary pass from the White House Press Office to enter. The Press Office generally only gives press passes to the press. That's why even if we restrict the conversation to the East Room, it's still a "special right" (or special privilege). Regarding the Oval Office et al. (which admittedly is what the term "press pool" actually refers to), the Trump administration's entire argument was that press access to those spaces is a "privilege, not a right." So keeping in mind the courts affirmed an actual right to the East Room, the White House itself still grants other journalists a special privilege (because they're journalists). You can make an argument if you'd like that the guy earlier in the thread should've said, "The press has special privileges because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job." (This ignores that it's still a "right" in other cases, like the East Room.) Squabbling over that word choice doesn't do a lot for the topic of this thread, which was journalists no longer serving the interest that justified giving them those privileges/rights.
• fragmede 1y ago
  It's almost like defunding the entire stack was a bad idea!
• bryanlharris 1y ago
  News never reported well. Murray Gell Mann noticed long ago.
  • jacobgkau 1y ago
    It can be true that news has always struggled to get certain/technical subjects entirely accurate while also being true that there's been a serious decline from an earlier point to now.
    • bryanlharris 1y ago
      Gell-Mann amnesia isn't about being "not entirely accurate." The news has commonly gotten things completely backwards and completely wrong, from physics to babysitting. "Wet streets cause rain."
      • jacobgkau 1y ago
        Ok, but are you arguing that it's always gotten as many things completely backwards and as completely wrong as often as it does today? If you're not arguing that, then it seems like a little bit of whatabout-ism to say "well they've gotten things wrong before." If you are arguing that, then that's fine, I can see your point and there's a historical case to be made there.
      • gilbetron 1y ago
        Almost like an LLM hallucination
• SilverElfin 1y ago
  The link doesn’t work for me, but based off your comment: I can accept that mainstream journalism is generally in decline in various ways. But it is curious they chose to single out WSJ, which is considered more balanced and less biased than NYT or whoever else (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart). Or is it just to point out that even WSJ is subject to this issue?
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • davidw 1y ago
    The NYT has some pretty serious problems of its own, although they're subtler in nature. This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening: https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-inconsistent-narrative-selection-and-framing-that-tends-to-favor-republicans/ https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in... The press has a lot of problems right now: * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance. * Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The paper in the city I live in keeps getting cut and cut and cut. There's little left. * Social media suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the same time that fewer people read real news sources. IDK how we fix those things... but they're all deleterious for our society.
    • ch4s3 1y ago
      > * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs This has more or less always been the case.
      • yepitwas 1y ago
        The total count of e.g. newspaper owners, and especially radio and TV owners (because there used to be laws against that being too concentrated, for one thing), has plummeted, though. Lots and lots of consolidation, lots of small outlets surviving only as barely-staffed zombies under big owners. Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.
• ks2048 1y ago
  > The WSJ piece is a perfect case study in how everything gets flattened into culture war narratives and influencer drama instead of actual substance. But the article is literally about the culture war, so of course it is framed in a culture war narrative. I guess you can claim the WSJ shouldn't have written this piece at all, but I didn't see anything glaringly wrong about it.
• naasking 1y ago
  > The collapse isn’t in the fields themselves, it’s in the layer of journalism that used to connect experts to the public. Sure, but what do you do if the subject matter is the question of whether the experts are being myopic and the system in which they're operating is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose? Where's the expert for that? If you just ask those same experts, well, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
• breakingrules3 1y ago
  [dead]
• cm2187 1y ago
  From the WSJ article: > The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory. I don't agree with the second part of the sentence, i.e. about the reason, not that I disagree, just that I have no idea why that is. But the first part, about discovering little of importance, is true though. Just look back at what theoretical physist has yielded in term of practical implications historically. XVIII century physics gave us gravitation, thermo-dynamics, and basically enabled the industrial revolution. XIX century physics gave us electricity, electro-magnetism, computers, etc. First half of the XX century gave us nuclear energy, lasers, etc. But is there any major technology that post 1960s theoretical physics has given us? I can't think of any example.
  • taeric 1y ago
    It isn't hard to argue that most of the advances that people recognize as scientific advances are more from material sciences than they have ever been theoretical physics, though? Even claiming that theoretical physics enabled the industrial revolution feels off to me. What supports that claim?
    • cm2187 1y ago
      Well it is hard to talk about theoretical physics at the XVIII century since physics in general was nascent and there was little separation between the disciplines. But I believe the industrial revolution was largely driven by the development of the steam engine, so Watt, Carnot, later Kalvin, etc. Of course that's not the only factor. Like computers rely on XIX century physics but it took almost a century before the technology became industrially significant.
  • sriram_malhar 1y ago
    Not sure the eras comparable. One _could_ argue that the earlier discoveries were lower hanging fruit, where it was possible for a single brilliant soul to come up with a new concept. Now it seems to require more and more collaboration. That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...
• heresie-dabord 1y ago
  From TFA: "There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone." Now extend this to the state of all public discourse in the US degraded by propaganda.
• PhearTheCeal 1y ago
  Are you sure this isn't just an example of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect? > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
• wdr1 1y ago
  > The frustrating part is that Woit is right: mainstream media has completely lost the ability to report intelligently on technical subjects. Did it ever have it? Things such as this remind me of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, when you notice the media is wrong about something you know, but still trust it on everything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect