Reminds me of Ecclesiastes. "There is nothing new under the sun".
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
131–140 of 359 posts
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#132It's just so sad. The biggest one lately for me has been watching the riots which are happening all over the US. The really crazy thing is that all of these things are livestreamed usually by 10s of people in every city, who are standing a few feet from the people burning buildings and attacking people. You can virtually attend all of these things from your office. To watch buildings burning, people chanting that the…
Don't think that just because you're your own editor you can't be deceived by editing. You're feeding yourself with the material that you're seeking out. edit: just spend a day only looking up the millions peacefully marching, rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams. (Also, give me some information about the people you've seen attacking and burning private residences, because I don't know of a single example of…
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Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#133I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately. It seems to me that the nefarious ways in which modern media operates are responsible for a large portion of the problems we see in the world today.
That's because the world in general is doing better than ever in almost any measurable parameter, yet the general notion is that everything is going to shit. This has real world consequences such as violent riots, couples deciding not to bring a child into "this terrible world", depression etc.
The mere choice of what is news worthy and how much coverage any one item gets already warps the mind's heuristics about how often this type of event occurs and thus how important it is. Add to that the "artistic licence" that reporters take (maliciously or otherwise) and the situation becomes really dire.
The reason for this problem is that society has decided that news should be a form of entertainment, and news outlets are for-profit companies. Considering these incentives the current state seems inevitable.
This has also led me to think of hypothetical solutions. I would argue that "The News" should be a non-profit, state funded entity (or entities). However, these must very much not be state controlled but rather allowed to operate independently. A similar institution is the Judicial System, which doesn't need to worry about clickbaiting titles for its rulings in order to fund itself, yet it has, ideally, full autonomy to procecute people in power if the need arises and we (society) take any attempt of collusion between state and court to be unacceptable.
Similarly, an independent yet tax funded news agency can deliver boring, unentertaining news and facts to help save us from ourselves.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#134The 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…
Customers of newspaper pay for the political aligned viewpoint, most people like their viewpoint confirmed. Look out for people needing information to make money. Money does not care about political bias. E.g. I think the "financial times" quite unbiased (of course there is no perfection).
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#135The 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…
Handy tip: to get the politics of a nation, read the news on it by some paper outside the nation.
So reading the BBC for US news gives you something fairly readable.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#136The 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…
I think the best approach is to read a story from a left, right and centrist source. The intersection of "facts" is probably all true and the things that point far one direction or the other are probably in the middle somewhere.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#137I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately. It seems to me that the nefarious ways in which modern media operates are responsible for a large portion of the problems we see in the world today. That's because the world in general is doing better than ever in almost any measurable parameter, yet the general notion is that everything is going to shit. This has real world consequences such as violent riots, couples…
I think there are plenty of things going wrong in the world as it exists today, at least as an American, that would dissuade me from having children. The exploding costs of childcare, healthcare, and education, let alone the impending crisis of climate change and ecological collapse, are all pretty scary. None of those things need to be exaggerated by the media.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#138When 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…
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... “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 bac…
It's interesting to me that Jefferson, in this text, offers an observation that's formulated very similar to (one-half of) the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, when he says:
"The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowlege with the lies of the day."
For hundreds of years, anyone with personal knowledge of a topic-reported-on knows much if not most of the reporting is wrong.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#139When 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…
I was once interviewed by a local newspaper. It was not a full-length interview. I just said something quotable as a bystander and so they asked me for some demographic information. I gave them three facts, my name, my age, and the town I lived in. Including my quote, I gave the journalist four facts.
When I read the article, I was horrified that two of the four facts, including a misquote of what I said, were wrong.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#140When 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…
> IMO the problem is expectations. "Restraining it (a newspaper) to true facts & sound principles only" is not just boring... it's unimportant. It's the narrative that makes it salient. > Calling out intellectual dishonesty is a road to hypocrisy, usually. It's very common to have someone call it out and practice it simultaneously. You have a right to your opinion, of course, but frankly I find this revolting. There'…
I think you might be misunderstanding me.
">* dismissing the aspiration towards intellectual integrity*" is far from true. Intellectual integrity is crucial. I a deep sense, it's the main thing that matters.
I mean that a newspaper is a newspaper. A pamphlet is a pamphlet. An Encyclopedia is... etc. Moralizing about it doesn't help much. As TJ says in his speech.
Anyway, I mean this "for one's own sake." Our own Intellectual honesty is something most of us think we just have. In practice, it's a skill. Call outs like this aren't a good way of practicing it, IMO.