picture of the original writing: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
111–120 of 359 posts
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#112I would pay quite a bit for a newspaper in Jefferson's proposed format. To be quite certain that something is true for current events, the reports on those events would likely have to be delayed days or weeks after they broke. I would be fine with that and is the complete opposite of today's instant, viral seeking, click-bait, emotionally charged media landscape.
Edit:It would be even better if this paper was connected to a prediction market where people could bet real money on if the "Truths" and "Probabilities" events will be shown to be false at certain time steps in the future.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#113Whenever I think of media, I keep going back to Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter. It seems a very appropriate metaphor that there is no personal ill-will on the part of the reporter but still the quill just keeps writing in a scandalous way.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#114When I was 15, there was a bus bombing near my school. A kid in my class was the grandson of a well known politician. A newspaper ran with a completely made up story about how it was his bus line, and how the grandfather had panicked. A few days later a fact checker called his mom. Not sure if they ran a retraction. It seemed incredibly disrespectful to those who were on the bus. Two died. About a year after that, so…
This is largely due to the wholesale destruction of the news industry by embarrassed capitalists and politicians over the last 30-40 years. Another reasons is that the same people have removed any ensemble of education which teach children to think even halfway critical about any topic. We have journalists entering the workforce who have a good chance of having never consumed or witnessed any real journalism in their…
Journalism has almost always been payed to a vast extent by advertisers, not subscribers. I don't think the decline in journalism is directly attributable to the pattern of free news.
More likely, it is due to the progressing obsession with profit, metrics-driven businesses. Papers are for-profit companies, so any change they can do that help their bottom line will always win out. We can make more money if we run aggressive titles? Done. We can save money by getting rid of seasoned professionals and people won't stop reading and looking at our ads? Awesome!
Not to mention, the extent to which journalism has declined is probably exaggerated. The style is obviously changing, and it may be more popular and crass. But journalism has always been extremely biased for the status quo, with many events that ruin the common narrative being systematically ignored. A lot of the problems caused by the US military and companies in South America was long ignored in mainstream journalism in the US in the 70s and 80s, just as one example. Watergate was huge news for years, COINTELPRO was quickly forgotten.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I didn't describe was the non-trivial cost, workload and time it took to deal with a very simple libel case. When you have publications, major TV networks, where almost literally every single piece they publish is filled with lies and manipulation it becomes an impossible task. A couple of years back I decided to highlight such lies to a group of people I was in regular online conversations with. Friends and peo…
>Sometimes I think the simple addition of the word "truthful" to the first amendment could be enough. IANAL, so I don't know how that could be detrimental. As a lay person it makes complete sense: >"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the truthful press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,…
No, of course not. Look at the recent events: the governments asked the press to organize their own "Truth Consortium" that would decide what's "fake news" or not and label it accordingly. Why make it a part of government that could, in principle, be made somewhat accountable to the public? Better leave it in the hands of the few owners of the news consortiums. They'll self-regulate all right, with the public interest in their minds first and foremost.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#116I love this part: “I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.“ When I read the headlines or scan articles here on HN I’m under the impression that I know things and unde…
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Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#117The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating.
I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it.
By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material into maximally entertaining spectacle. The factual raw material can even be done away with sometimes as evidenced by how much of the news is just media reporting on itself (often centering on Twitter!).
There is not a technical solution to any of this. "Decentralization" into forums and social media and whatnot is not a solution. At best it's a good way for some of us to discuss the problem among ourselves as it unfolds. Decentralization is better termed "de-professionalization." The institutions which used to, at the very least, dedicate serious resources to going out into the world and gathering facts no longer function properly or just don't exist.
I remember seeing an interview with Christopher Hitchens where somebody asked him how he informed himself about the world, what news he liked to read. He said, not much. Mostly he relied on people he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. Must be nice!
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of the opening text of Fargo. > The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred. So solemn, so respectful and complete bs :D
Is there a word for that sort of cinematic (or in some cases literary) device? Opening with "disclaimer" style text to make the movie feel more real. It seems mockumentary adjacent - fiction presented as fact. Pseudo non-fiction? I've seen it used in other films, too but the only example I can really think of is maybe the Blair Witch Project.
The use of disclaimers to suggest real events is discussed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_disclai...
Also
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vice has that reputation. This is the problem. There's plenty of newsrooms doing solid work. You can't do this any more than you can talk about restaurants while describing fast food burgers and a fancy tapas bar in the same sentence. There's more interesting problems here. Outlets with actual scientists on staff do better science coverage, local institutions can cover a crisis with a better grasp on the context than…
Definitely. I've certainly found my own sources for the kinds of news that I'm interested in. A lot of it is independent journalists/*loggers. Often enough I can check their sources and check multiple points of view on the same topic. The problem is that's a lot of work. Other people I might want to educate about the facts haven't put in that work -- they've just watched CNN/MSNBC/FOX or read the NYT/etc. And most of…
Sure, and I won't defend cable news at all. The 24/7 realtime nature of what they do is set up to be superficial and error-prone.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fake News is far more common than people think (not just the Gell-Mann effect, but that helps...) I quit trusting anything I saw in the media in 1998, when my wife and I saw NBC totally faking a hurricane report in Corpus Christi. The reporter was in a rain slicker, and there was a lackey standing off-camera with a hose spraying water. Corpus was on the dry side of a hurricane deep in the Gulf that wound up hitting n…
Actual news these days comes from message boards such as this. TV / Radio news is little better than entertainment. The trouble the news industry is having is that you can get an equal amount of information from social media without all the holier-than-thou garbage coming from news anchors.
I don't feel that way. Social media circulates a lot of weird takes. For the many, many hot topics of 2020, I hear a lot of opinions that are something like, I'm bored of this so it's not important and it's all fake news anyway so I can make up my own story. That's a take that sounds like it should be quiet but it's instead really noisy.
Not really a replacement for quality journalism.