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Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

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Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#191

Post by oblio »

minimuffins wrote: post #117

The 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 that the best thing, which is really hard to do with the internet, is to let time pass. If you're 1-2 weeks, 1 month behind the news, you will probably get only the important news. Following daily news is madness and useless unless you're making money out of it.

As someone I know said when I mentioned a new revolutionary battery technology has been discovered: I'll believe it when the researchers get the Nobel prize for it, in 10 years.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#192

Post by minimuffins »

andi999 wrote: post #134
minimuffins wrote: post #117

The 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).

Political alignment isn't the problem. Every outlet will spin the same facts differently, sometimes intentionally sometimes not, because of this or that ideological commitment. They will choose which facts to foreground and which to background ("framing"), etc, etc, all that media studies stuff. Bias is fine. There is no such thing as an unbiased media outlet.

I'm talking about a different problem, which is that increasingly, the basic facts don't even enter into the discourse at all! That's the case because the institutions that used to carry out the basic functions of journalism are now facing tons of pressure to cut their costs, and all of that.

Disruptive "decentralization" pressure from the tech industry, often discussed as a "solution" to this mess, is actually a major cause. And it's of course not a solution at all because it has no answer to the basic material problem: once we've defunded traditional journalism, who is actually going to do the work? News is basically the production of information about the facts of unfolding world events. Now that we have no foreign correspondents etc, news ends up just being the production of information about the news itself (the only part left is the bias!). How long can we keep doing this, I wonder?

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#193

Post by techslave »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #164
minimuffins wrote: post #117

The 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…

Here is what goes on in a day: 1.) Bad things 2.) Good things 3.) Things that might be both bad and good Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things.

yeah well you’re not being persecuted. for many it may as well be the 12th century or whatever

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#194

Post by crispyporkbites »

tines wrote: post #180
godzillabrennus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what goes on in a day: 1.) Bad things 2.) Good things 3.) Things that might be both bad and good Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things.

> Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things. The obvious counter is "but you learned this from headlines" (assuming you're not like Hitchens with a bunch of intercontinental friends to be your eyes and ears.

No the headlines state the opposite. You learn this by reading history and looking at recent events through reasonable sources.

And yes this is the safest period in human history, and it continues to get safer by the day.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#195

Post by dependenttypes »

necrotic_comp wrote: post #184
staplers wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because "liberal" in the U.S. typically means "neo-liberal", so the focus on corporate sponsors shouldn't be a surprise.

Liberal globally refers to economic liberalism - that is, capitalism.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#196

Post by Baeocystin »

tines wrote: post #180
godzillabrennus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what goes on in a day: 1.) Bad things 2.) Good things 3.) Things that might be both bad and good Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things.

> Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things. The obvious counter is "but you learned this from headlines" (assuming you're not like Hitchens with a bunch of intercontinental friends to be your eyes and ears.

Not the person you were responding to, but I learned it from this TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm5xF-UYgdg

(Not joking in the least. It's a very good presentation. Title is: How not to be ignorant about the world | Hans and Ola Rosling)

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#197

Post by minimuffins »

TheDong wrote: post #190
snarf21 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This reads to me like saying "the best way to determine if god exists is to read the hebrew bible, the koran, and the book of mormon and take the average". It starts with the assumption left, right, and centrist sources all have biases, but those biases cancel out. That the "middle" of those things is meaningfully better. I see no evidence that that's the case. All popular news sources these days seem to be biased to…

Well said. The problem is not bias but just the absence of any real content.

What happened in the world today? CNN: Trump is rude and orange! etc.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#198

Post by blhack »

pessimizer wrote: post #125
blhack wrote: post #78

It'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…

I think your comment here perfectly illustrates exactly the problem I'm talking about.

>rather than the 10s of right-wing livestreams.

These aren't "right wing livestreams". It's people, at the protests, with cameras. Some of the bigger ones are people like Unicorn Riot, who has been active in Minneapolis for quite some time, and Regg Ikagnedo.

In some cases, the "press" end up being protestors themselves and end up fighting with the police. I really struggle to understand why you would cast any of this as right wing.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#199

Post by jariel »

marcosdumay wrote: post #161
jariel wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I see is that foreign news have no idea of what is happening in my country, they all just repeat some superficial and normally wrong pieces. At the same time, domestic media is all lying through their teeth. With some work one can disecate the news, separate what can't possibly be lies (because it would lead to problems), and reassembly something into an overall picture. (Who has the time for all this?) But one…

The BBC is not 'wrong' - it's maybe just superficial and doesn't have enough detail.

The anecdotes about 'lying press' on this thread are misleading. 'Respected' news entities do not just 'make stuff up'. Definitely no the BBC, they have standards.

The problem with the bigger agencies is narrative bias, and yes, if 'within America' the narrative is pushed to 'one side' hard by the local press, then the international press will be influenced by that, but it's not as bad.

Edit: got to CNN.com right now and give some examples of their 'blatant lying'. Because they're not. Editorial bias, of course, but 'making up stories' - this is wrong. The onus would be on you to provide evidence they are doing this consistently.

Re: Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)

#200

Post by mellowdream »

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson

"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists." Norman Mailer

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." George Bernard Shaw

"In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has." Mark Twain

"I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets." Napoleon

"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." Oscar Wilde

"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word journalist." Soren Kierkegaard

"Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends." - Wittgenstein

"The newspaper epitomises the goal of today’s educational system, just as the journalist, servant of the present moment, has taken the place of the genius, our salvation from the moment and leader for the ages." - Nietzsche

https://web.archive.org/web/20180327031901/http://www.aarons...

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