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Anatomy of a Moral Panic

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Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#121

Post by Iv »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #115
Iv wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because barring the entrance of one of these as-yet-unimagined alternatives, it seems we'll need to lean on regulation...but then we get into messiness of regulating free speech. OK. I'm on break, I'll make it a big longer to translate and sum up what I think has been the most underrated video of the 2016 french presidential election discussing how to «fix» political press. (reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

I love this. Not because I understand it fully - I suspect someone is going to shoot plenty of holes through this proposal - but because it's the first one I saw that actually treats the problem seriously, and seems to preserve the reason we need press while eliminating the bad incentive structures.

For the context, this proposal was made by this journal director to JL Mélenchon, the far-left candidate in the election (who got 19% of votes, i.e. not a marginal) hoping it would be included in his political program.

It is a well-thought proposal by someone who knows the press industry well. It of course has leftist bias but I suspect that while there can be political criticism, it is probably pretty solid.

I don't know how applicable it is in the US though.

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#122

Post by [deleted] »

dogruck wrote: post #102
wolf550e wrote: post #81

Wasn't the "baseball test" an accepted norm in journalism? "A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball."[1] Shouldn't media outlets be embarrassed into retracting stories written by people who know nothing about the subject? Shouldn't the reputation of the media outlet suffer? 1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/per…

It's an ilformed test. Can a writer truly understand baseball as well as a baseball player? But, isn't a baseball player bound to be heavily biased toward the consensus baseball view? Or, take finance. If a financial journalist truly understood finance, wouldn't they be running a hedge fund instead of scraping by pumping out articles?

[deleted]

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#123

Post by Iv »

morgante wrote: post #120
Iv wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because barring the entrance of one of these as-yet-unimagined alternatives, it seems we'll need to lean on regulation...but then we get into messiness of regulating free speech. OK. I'm on break, I'll make it a big longer to translate and sum up what I think has been the most underrated video of the 2016 french presidential election discussing how to «fix» political press. (reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

It's not clear to me what good this does. Say a narrow set of "information" sources follow this model and produce quality journalism. Meanwhile the vast majority of traffic continues to go to "entertainment" journalism and shoddy reports spread widely.

It is not a proposal to kill entertainment media, it is a proposal to make it easier to make informative journalism. The theory being that a plurality of information sources leads to a better informed population and that if newspapers have less to worry about satisfying shareholders or advertisers, they will do a better job.

I think that the most important point for the US situation is the non-concentration condition, preventing one person or company from owning several information media posing as different entities, masking the lack of plurality. It would prevent this kind of things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

Arguably this is more a solution to the situation we have in France. In the US it looks like you have people like the Koch brothers who would not mind running newspapers at a cost to promote propaganda. It would still make it more expensive as it would have to compete against people who would have little costs and privileged access to primary sources.

It does not solve all the problems of society and information though. IMO, the fact that so many Americans confuse information and entertainment is an education problem, not a media one.

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#124

Post by tpeo »

wolf550e wrote: post #81

Wasn't the "baseball test" an accepted norm in journalism? "A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball."[1] Shouldn't media outlets be embarrassed into retracting stories written by people who know nothing about the subject? Shouldn't the reputation of the media outlet suffer? 1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/per…

I'm starting to believe that there isn't such a thing as reputation when it comes to news. Or rather, that low quality news has such little impact on readership due the strategic nature of news reading (e.g. even if you might not like a certain news organization, you might still want to read it, if only to know what other people are reading) that a news organization can coast indefinitely on a readership built on it's prior reputation.

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#125

Post by fenomas »

dogruck wrote: post #102
wolf550e wrote: post #81

Wasn't the "baseball test" an accepted norm in journalism? "A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball."[1] Shouldn't media outlets be embarrassed into retracting stories written by people who know nothing about the subject? Shouldn't the reputation of the media outlet suffer? 1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/per…

It's an ilformed test. Can a writer truly understand baseball as well as a baseball player? But, isn't a baseball player bound to be heavily biased toward the consensus baseball view? Or, take finance. If a financial journalist truly understood finance, wouldn't they be running a hedge fund instead of scraping by pumping out articles?

Most baseball writers aren't former players or coaches, and nobody expects them to be. That's the whole point of the analogy.

They're just expected to understand the rules of the game, know what the various acronyms mean, and generally be able to converse intelligently about the game. That's the standard being suggested for reporters covering other topics.

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#126

Post by hueving »

matt4077 wrote: post #110
brianjoseff wrote: post #13

Who is making strides in fixing the underlying business model problems that are driving the increasing virulence and frequency of these moral panics, and undermining the integrity and function of journalism? Or at least providing alternatives that are equally profitable yet less pernicious. Because barring the entrance of one of these as-yet-unimagined alternatives, it seems we'll need to lean on regulation...but the…

If you stick to quality journalism (NYT/WSJ/The New Yorker/The Economist/Bloomberg), the world of journalism is really not worse than it was in whatever golden age of the press people seem to imagine. The idea that all media gravitate towards low-brow outrage clickbait because it sells better is quite obviously wrong. Just as there is fast food as well as organic granola, or porn as well as independent conceptual art…

>If you stick to quality journalism (NYT/WSJ/The New Yorker/The Economist/Bloomberg), the world of journalism is really not worse than it was in whatever golden age of the press people seem to imagine.

Only if you agree with the political stances those sources are biased towards. Perhaps it has always been that way, but something like the NYT is hardly unbiased and it bleeds through on everything from article selection to point of view, etc if you're not an American Liberal.

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#127

Post by vonnik »

Ironically, the premise of this critique of journalism is as false as the Amazon story it cites. Algorithms and the Internet didn't ruin journalism, and this is not the end of the world. Journalism was corrupted by sensationalism as soon as it moved from subscriptions to ads, which in the US was in the 19th century. Remember when we discovered a colony of aliens on the moon? Yeah, that was the New York Sun way before we had electricity... Remember when Hearst started the Spanish-American war? No Internet then. Bad signals via the media is a very old problem. We should think about it, but we shouldn't think it's the Internet's fault.

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#128

Post by tpeo »

dogruck wrote: post #102
wolf550e wrote: post #81

Wasn't the "baseball test" an accepted norm in journalism? "A reporter should not be assigned to cover subject X unless he has as good an understanding of X as a baseball writer is expected to have of baseball."[1] Shouldn't media outlets be embarrassed into retracting stories written by people who know nothing about the subject? Shouldn't the reputation of the media outlet suffer? 1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/per…

It's an ilformed test. Can a writer truly understand baseball as well as a baseball player? But, isn't a baseball player bound to be heavily biased toward the consensus baseball view? Or, take finance. If a financial journalist truly understood finance, wouldn't they be running a hedge fund instead of scraping by pumping out articles?

To answer the second question, a financial journalist might not take up a hedge fund management position on the basis of the risks involved, career stability, hedonic factors, etc. besides the purely monetary gains involved. Understanding something doesn't imply that's also the optimal course of action.

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#129

Post by TeMPOraL »

Iv wrote: post #123
morgante wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me what good this does. Say a narrow set of "information" sources follow this model and produce quality journalism. Meanwhile the vast majority of traffic continues to go to "entertainment" journalism and shoddy reports spread widely.

It is not a proposal to kill entertainment media, it is a proposal to make it easier to make informative journalism. The theory being that a plurality of information sources leads to a better informed population and that if newspapers have less to worry about satisfying shareholders or advertisers, they will do a better job. I think that the most important point for the US situation is the non-concentration condition…

> IMO, the fact that so many Americans confuse information and entertainment is an education problem, not a media one.

Then there's the Tesla vs. Top Gear case. Top Gear spewed bullshit about Tesla's car, got sued, and won, with the court saying that Top Gear is an entertainment show and has no obligation to be factually accurate. And yet, it's widely known that people treat this show as an information source, not a comedy.

And then there's British Tabloids vs. EU case. A British tabloid will write some utter and complete bullshit about some EU regulation, and then it gets picked up by countries on the continent and reprinted in the quality news sources as facts. So what's understood as entertainment by the Brits gets presented as facts elsewhere.

I think this is not an American problem, and not people problem. It's a media problem too.

Re: Anatomy of a Moral Panic

#130

Post by groby_b »

Iv wrote: post #121
TeMPOraL wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this. Not because I understand it fully - I suspect someone is going to shoot plenty of holes through this proposal - but because it's the first one I saw that actually treats the problem seriously, and seems to preserve the reason we need press while eliminating the bad incentive structures.

For the context, this proposal was made by this journal director to JL Mélenchon, the far-left candidate in the election (who got 19% of votes, i.e. not a marginal) hoping it would be included in his political program. It is a well-thought proposal by someone who knows the press industry well. It of course has leftist bias but I suspect that while there can be political criticism, it is probably pretty solid. I don't…

For context on "far-left" - it's nothing like the far left in the US. France has an extremely well-developed set of leftists. It's the only country I ever visited where people had deep discussions about the difference between Trotskyism and Leninism when debating actual political events.

The US far left would maybe, possibly, pass as moderate left in France. Obama would be considered... center right? OK, centrist.

These ideas will not easily translate into a US political context :)

For those curious, his movement, FI, proposes also a rewriting of the constitution, Frexit, withdrawal from TTIP, sustainability as law. It's... interesting. It's a very uniquely French party.

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