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Things You Notice When You Quit the News

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Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#491

Post by sooheon »

kibwen wrote: post #221
sooheon wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does HN have a hard-on for Greenwald? I really cannot understand the down votes here. I took 7 minutes to skim the article in question, and Eichenwald's point is very simple: his own word were misattributed to someone else, and Trump regurgitated this misinformation, knowingly or not. So many people are arguing from ignorance here...

HN largely views Snowden as a martyr, and thereby canonizes his confidants.

Snowden can be a martyr, and greenwald can still be wrong.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#492

Post by aorth »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #292
andrewflnr wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a good "upstream" for geopolitics?

Very hard to find, because it's not a hard factual area like medicine. Take a page from anthropologists and look for a variety of primary sources, or sources that do good analysis albeit with known (or explicit) bias. Personally, for anything international and important I like to mix BBC (known bias), Al Jazeera International (different known bias), and Economist (explicit bias, in-depth analysis). Your tastes may di…

I'm an American living outside the US and literally the only TV station I watch is Al Jazeera English. It agrees with my tastes more, yes, but they also have documentaries about all kinds of things throughout the day.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#493

Post by soft_dev_person »

justinlaster wrote: post #156
cloakandswagger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at recent events if you need further evidence of this. The term "fake news" has exploded in just under a month in the mainstream media. If my memory serves me, tabloids like The Enquirer have been sitting on news stands for as long as I can remember. So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly? Mainstream outlets move in lockstep with each other and these are the final, desperate de…

>So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly? Do you honestly not see the difference between creating fake stories about celebrities and then creating fake stories about people in the government, stories that end up having far reaching real world effects? >of an outdated and superfluous institution. Oh brother. If anything this last year has proven exactly why the publication and editing…

> And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship.

No, but automatic removal of fake news is censorship, since all of us in here should know that determining truth by algorithms is really an unsolvable problem in _very many important cases_.

It could/would probably be reduced to a source credibility score, but credibility is subjective.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#494

Post by justinlaster »

soft_dev_person wrote: post #493
justinlaster wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So how did this fervor over "fake news" coalesce so quickly and uniformly? Do you honestly not see the difference between creating fake stories about celebrities and then creating fake stories about people in the government, stories that end up having far reaching real world effects? >of an outdated and superfluous institution. Oh brother. If anything this last year has proven exactly why the publication and editing…

> And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. No, but automatic removal of fake news is censorship, since all of us in here should know that determining truth by algorithms is really an unsolvable problem in _very many important cases_. It could/would probably be reduced to a source credibility score, but credibility is subjective.

Using facebook as an example, Facebook had editors and then got slammed with the completely useless "bias" label because they sought stories from actual, reasonably credible sources. Their algorithm was not responsible for removing content, their editors were. Until they got rid of those editors because of "bias" and "censorship." Then fake stories/yellow journalism flourished on Facebook's trending news feed for quite some time during the election.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#495

Post by specialist »

recursive wrote: post #415
specialist wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michael Crichton? The xenophobe and anthropocentric climate change denier? Pot, meet kettle. He should have stuck to fantasy land, err, show business.

The quote can stand on its own merit. Discrediting the source doesn't change the words.

I've changed my mind. Thank you.

Who better to explain profiteering from misogyny, lying, hysteria, anti-intellectionalism, war-mongering, amnesia, obfuscation than Micheal Crichton?

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#496

Post by eonwe »

ideonexus wrote: post #363
elsonrodriguez wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is Gell-Mann Amnesia: "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 cau…

There's a bit of irony in this quote coming from Michael Crichton. When I started hanging out with the Science Online community in the early 00s, I learned that Crichton was widely regarded as spreading bad science by regularly citing discredited studies or fringe research in his books. He was also known for getting even basic science wrong, like in "Jurassic Park," where the scientists fill-in missing dinosaur DNA b…

Jurassic Park was published 1990. I don't think that birds being the closest relatives of dinosaurs was established beyond doubt at that time as the theory of dinosaurs being ancestors of birds was revived only in the 1970s.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#497

Post by soft_dev_person »

justinlaster wrote: post #494
soft_dev_person wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And _apparently_ for some people any action taken to correct yellow journalism is decried as censorship. No, but automatic removal of fake news is censorship, since all of us in here should know that determining truth by algorithms is really an unsolvable problem in _very many important cases_. It could/would probably be reduced to a source credibility score, but credibility is subjective.

Using facebook as an example, Facebook had editors and then got slammed with the completely useless "bias" label because they sought stories from actual, reasonably credible sources. Their algorithm was not responsible for removing content, their editors were. Until they got rid of those editors because of "bias" and "censorship." Then fake stories/yellow journalism flourished on Facebook's trending news feed for qui…

True, but by using "external fact checkers" they are more or less reverting to the old system. Similar, anyway.

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#498

Post by jospoortvliet »

talmand wrote: post #433
krrrh wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It referred to a real and serious phenomena, but now the phrase has been muddied by political rhetoric. It's still a problem, and it's different enough from the old clickbait sensationalism and conspiracy theory chain emails that it deserves its own name. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-the-new-yellow-j... https://medium.com/@ev/i-found-it-interesting-that-when-i-we...

Nah, for the most part what some are calling "fake news" is still the old-fashioned clickbait. I can remember several scandals over the years from the big news agencies that would be considered "fake news" by today's standards. They range from just being wrong to outright fraud. This is nothing new, this crap existed before there were websites. It's just that people simply choose not to remember to continue their des…

I suppose fake news has been totally normal in the showbizz coverage world - and popular. Now it goes mainstream and people complain...

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#499

Post by jospoortvliet »

losteric wrote: post #436
cyberferret wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an extension to what I wrote above, I used to follow my local newspaper on Facebook a couple of years ago, just in order to keep in touch with local events seeing as I don't have a TV. I noticed their feed back then starting to change from a simple and useful dissemination of their newspaper articles, into a conduit for posting tabloid style or inflammatory/unverified web links and popular memes. I questioned them…

My theory is that profit destroys many news channels from the inside out. The channel start with the best intentions of conveying legitimate unbiased news to inquisitive educated audiences... but eventually the supply of news seekers gets depleted, while investors and advertisers demand more. The channel is "forced" to keep expanding so they start catering to people that don't seek out news... steadily devolving into…

I'm sure this is what is happening. Income from readership of physical paper goes down, pressure mounts and even reputable news papers feel thsy have little choice... ask any journalist. It is brutal, earning a decent living is hard, earning it from actual quality reporting is impossible because the vast majority of customers can't separate anote article written in 10 minutes without any research or fact checking from the results of a 1 year research has undercover project...

So yeah, no surprise they deliver more of the 10 minute pieces and quality goes down. If we don't pay we get what we pay for - nothing. Hot air..

Re: Things You Notice When You Quit the News

#500

Post by randomsearch »

cyberferret wrote: post #70

I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all. The biggest problem to me, seems to be the 24 hour news cycle for things like wars, elections and the like. I was visiting friends during a couple of major air accidents in the past couple of years (The MH370 and MH17 incidents in particular), and was astounded at the propensity for news stations on ALL channels to fill every minute of…

I don't watch TV either (don't have a subscription or connection).

But your criticism of television does not support the idea of disengaging from news altogether.

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