The fundamental problem with news reporting is that so much of it has political implications, and political opinion among the public is bimodal. You can look at the two left-right humps on a spectrum of political beliefs and see two different worldviews. If you try to report the facts on any story that has a political angle, you're probably going to alienate one of those worldview modes. And god forbid the facts fall right in the middle and you alienate both.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
141–150 of 359 posts
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#142When 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…
Interesting (and well written).
It had an opposite effect on me. Maybe because it wasn't a specialized are. It was just regular news.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
This version of their site has less visual clutter and flashy graphics: http://lite.cnn.com/en Spoilers, it's still shit. The biggest problem with CNN is the shitty writing. CNN articles seem to be written for an audience of borderline illiterate idiots. Do yourself a favor and read the NYTimes instead. The biases there are basically the same, you're getting the mainstream American centrist take on things, with the d…
I call BS: The NY Times is in no way a "mainstream American centrist take on things", and they now freely admit their Socialist biases. I will agree the writing there is better than most other sources, but that's a low bar these days.
Agreed. It's hard to consider a newspaper "centrist" that basically forces Bari Weiss out of a job.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#144I'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.
I tend to think this proves the point.
Healthcare and childcare and education are in fact (largely though not comprehensively) nonessential goods that are already in very many ways far better than they were 50 years ago. Childcare wasn't even a thing except for the incredibly wealthy until pretty recently. It would be very difficult to argue that the overall options for post-secondary education (and the number of people taking advantage of them) are not better than 30 years ago, even though their costs are known to be rising much faster than their quality. Most of the kinds of healthcare that are clearly price-gouging were not even categories of healthcare 50 years ago, and most of the ones that were are so qualitatively better now that we're comparing apples and oranges. Etc.
Climate change is the one where by almost any objective measure we're headed for potentially irrecoverable catastrophe, and yet this one doesn't actually receive media coverage commensurate with the weight of the potential risk and its probability.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#145A primary concern with "the news" is that it has no incentive to be correct, especially when it is reporting on predictions. Consider a situation where a respected economist releases a report that predicts a high likelihood of economic recession. "The news" will circulate something like "HIGH PROBABILITY OF RECESSION, SAYS FAMED ECONOMIST". The impending recession will be the talk of the people for the next several w…
A related aspect is that a nice, solid, impartial fact-based news organization will often report on what various public figures have said. Since they are impartial, objective, and just reporting the facts, they will of course refrain from commenting on the truth of said declarations - that would be the reporter's biases showing! "X says Y" is objective news. "Y is actually not true" is journalists showing their biase…
You're right. It gets really gnarly, really quickly. "X says Y" is objective news, but it is extremely difficult to evaluate Y without deep knowledge of both the background of Y and the reliability of X.
"Y is actually not true" is partial, biased journalism, but can also serve as critical information about the truth of Y, or the reliability of X!
The safest bet is to be aware of what the news is claiming, but remember at all times that the news is a signal repeater, not a signal generator. Whenever possible, one must find primary documents or videos.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#146"The lies of the day" is a great phrase. Stealin' it. Thanks, TJ.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#147When 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 don't quite follow how the narrative makes it more important than the facts. I guess we have define what ideas we expect the news to deliver.
Many people die every day. This isn't news, nor is it meaningful to us on more than an ambient level.
The narratives that these deaths fit into make them meaningful. The stories of people dying of covid. People dying of political violence.
If drug deaths or suicide rates are increasing, and it's been making news then associated deaths are a part of this narrative.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#148The 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.
I've found that even "liberal" media is heavily biased to favor corporate sponsors.
Sometimes journalists can sneak small (actually) progressive articles through but are often followed up by large front-page hit pieces on those same ideas.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." You open the newspaper to an article on some subject that you know well, because your salary depends on it. In Tourre's case, finance. In mine, tech. You read the article and see that the journalist isn't a subject matter ex…
> Is there a name for the opposite effect? If not, I propose the "Sinclair Effect" after "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I think this is a fantastic comment, especially given the cavalcade of robotic quotations of that "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" passage that happen whenever the press comes up. One should definitely read the newspaper with a…
> I think it's useful to just see the news for what it is: a timely first rough draft of history.
Only, it's not what "the news" are. One can reconstruct the history using "the news" as source material, but it's a grave error to think that "the news" are "a first draft of history."
Try to find how the media covered the claimed "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq in 2003, and how they wrote many years later about the same events. What you believe to be a "first draft" was historically completely false. But it was at the time used as an excuse to start the war, which are both now verified historical facts -- both the fake "news" in the major media and the start of the war.
If you are interested in the topic you can even read how the local pressure on journalists makes them "following the editorial policy" even when they know that what they write about is false.
In short, there's no substitute for treating the news as only "pieces of information" which have to be verified, behind which could be different interests and which surely don't have to be true at all.
Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I tend to think this proves the point. Healthcare and childcare and education are in fact (largely though not comprehensively) nonessential goods that are already in very many ways far better than they were 50 years ago. Childcare wasn't even a thing except for the incredibly wealthy until pretty recently. It would be very difficult to argue that the overall options for post-secondary education (and the number of peo…
Saying things like, "look, it really is better!" when wages haven't gone up in 50 years as college has gotten twice as expensive in the last 20 I think is really missing the point and being overly dismissive of people's life experiences.
Price gouging because kinds of healthcare most people weren't really getting a few years ago? My best friend was billed 1100 dollars for an ambulance ride and 4000 dollars for a recent hospitalization that lasted 12 hours. Get out of here with this dismissive nonsense.