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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)

#231

Post by phobosanomaly »

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…

Maybe take a weekend and go to a protest yourself?

I think you would be pleasantly surprised.

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

#232

Post by dragonsky »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #216
icelancer wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. Is it? Why? Does it meaningfully change your life to know what's going on everywhere from the mundane to the impactful? Our lives are lived in the present, locally. You interact with people in your community thousands of times more than people you read about thousands of miles away. Be where your feet are.

I personally view it as a duty. Part of being a citizen in a (kind of) functioning democracy is understanding the nuances of the stuff that is screwed up around you to the best of your ability so that when the time comes to vote or have a meaningful discussion with others around you, you can be a voice of reason. Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. I…

I do understand your feelings of a responsibility to be up to date on news, especially when it is regarding political events. It's easy to get the facts from a report on the weather, a tornado devastated a town, you know this is true because you can see the photos (selected for drama) taken of the damage.

It's more difficult when reporting is on things that are a little more fluffy. Claims a politician did something are almost impossible to verify and reporting on this ends up being an exercise in spin. One of the best things about politicians taking to twitter to directly communicate is that you have an unfiltered direct message. If something is in a tweet from a politician then you can be pretty sure that is the message they want to get out. If they same something stupid or ill considered at least you can judge them on that, not so much the actual facts of the content.

So media of all types allow you to judge the messenger, less so the message.

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

#233

Post by phobosanomaly »

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…

The thing with those books is, they are 100% based on faith. There are no underlying facts that they're based on. They're independently constructed origin myths and allegorical morality tales.

With an article in the NYT, it's a narrative representation of objective facts as filtered through the lens of a reporter. If you think it's B.S. check Reuters, check WaPo, check NPR, hell check Fox reporting on the same core set of facts.

If the story is important, it's going to be out on the wire feeds, and other major outlets. The narratives average out, the facts (mostly) stay the same.

That's the whole point of college. So we can learn to think about complicated things and draw on multiple sources to paint a cohesive picture.

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

#234

Post by chongli »

snarf21 wrote: post #136
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 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 is the argument to moderation [1] also known as the golden mean fallacy. If one person says the sky is blue and another person says the sky is yellow, by taking the middle position you would conclude that the sky is green. This is clearly not correct.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

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

#235

Post by NoSorryCannot »

tdfx wrote: post #156
stevula wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not match my experience at all with the many peaceful protests in SF lately. Your sources may be cherry-picking to push a certain political narrative.

I'm genuinely happy that SF is seeing peaceful protests, but I spent 2 weeks driving through National Guard checkpoints in my city due to violent unrest, and I'm aware of at least 5 other cities who were similarly affected. Minimizing the presence of violence on either side is wrong. The "few bad apples" narrative doesn't work for cops or protesters, or we wouldn't be seeing what we're seeing.

The police and the general population have very different flavors of bad apple.

The "good" protestors have no ability nor obligation to remove or control the "bad" ones. It's shameful that some see fit to dismiss the message of them all for the actions of a few. And anyway, the goodness or badness of violent or riotous protests through the lens of history is more than a little bit complicated.

The police do have such an ability and obligation. They are organized and they are in a position of power. It is shameful that some see fit to excuse the entire enterprise because not all cops are bad.

Neither is as simple as that.

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

#236

Post by tdeck »

Most of the comments here are missing a big part of the context: newspapers in the early 1800s didn't do journalism as we know it today. Most relied entirely on rumors and letters that crossed their desk, combined with cribbing old stories from the foreign press. Newspaper staff was often just one or two people doing the writing, marketing, and distribution (and often the typesetting too). There wasn't this idea that a journalist should be conducting interviews or investigating stories or even arriving at the scene of anything. Most papers were funded largely by political patronage as well.

For a great book on the history of American journalism I recommend "Infamous Scribblers" by Eric Burns.

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

#237

Post by icelancer »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #216
icelancer wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating. Is it? Why? Does it meaningfully change your life to know what's going on everywhere from the mundane to the impactful? Our lives are lived in the present, locally. You interact with people in your community thousands of times more than people you read about thousands of miles away. Be where your feet are.

I personally view it as a duty. Part of being a citizen in a (kind of) functioning democracy is understanding the nuances of the stuff that is screwed up around you to the best of your ability so that when the time comes to vote or have a meaningful discussion with others around you, you can be a voice of reason. Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. I…

>> Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11.

Consider that maybe them ingesting news from the President and other "news sources" are the reason they think this. Not because they are ignoring the world. If they ignored the world around them, they wouldn't have an opinion at all.

So in that case, how good is the consumption of information?

This is a lot like people saying that the people from thousands of years ago thought the world was flat. Then there is a rebuttal saying "no, Eratosthenes proved it was round forever ago, people knew that." The reality is people didn't think about if the world was round or not and it had zero impact on their life and vice versa.

People consume so much news information thinking it makes them a good citizen or something. But our power to change what happens 7000 miles away is basically nil; the power to change the lives of people within 7 miles of you is massive. And if we all did that... the people 7000 miles away would probably get a lot better results than us whining and wringing our hands about it while hoping politicians did something.

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

#238

Post by njarboe »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #187
Shoreleave wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest thing might be the bloomberg terminal. It costs 2k a month, but you can get a news feed of the topics you care about and it will be accurate and factual. And then people instantly make bets based on that news.

> it will be accurate and factual We're still waiting for the Supermicro retraction.

That was a "hard to believe this is true, but it is in Bloomburg" moment for me.

A nice summary of the situation a year after the article came out in 2018 can be found here[1]. I wonder what their rational for not retracting the story. Just one little line somewhere that few would notice would have put the controversy to rest, but if they did it now. so late after the fact, it would just add to the intrigue instead of diffuse it.

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

#239

Post by njarboe »

Shoreleave wrote: post #152
njarboe wrote: post #112

I 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 connect…

The closest thing might be the bloomberg terminal. It costs 2k a month, but you can get a news feed of the topics you care about and it will be accurate and factual. And then people instantly make bets based on that news.

2k a month is not in my current (one can dream) budget for news sources, but I would like to check one out sometime. I don't need the real time option, which is much of what people pay the 2k for, so maybe a 15 minute delay option, like there used to be with free stock quotes, could be a lot cheaper.

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

#240

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> 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.

But now the people they were gathering the facts from are connected to the internet.

Local newspapers often had a police blotter publishing the police reports in the locality. Now you can get that directly from the police department, because they have a website.

Once upon a time if you wanted to get stories from Turkey and Israel and Brazil then you had to send reporters to those places to collect the stories of the people there. Now the people there are on the internet and can post their stories themselves.

You're getting closer to the sources instead of having a "professional" as an intermediary. But you're also getting access to more sources, with more differing opinions, and it's driving people nuts because they don't know who to believe. But there weren't any fewer sources before, you just weren't hearing from so many of them because the traditional gatekeepers decided for you what you got to hear. If you assume they were doing a good job of that then we've lost something, but what evidence is there of that?

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