Most news is entertainment, in that people watch it to be distracted and entertained and not to be informed. That's why in local TV there'll be a bit about someone doing something horrendous or funny, but the boring and painstaking legislative fight over things that really matter get zero coverage.
Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#32It would be stranger if TV news or newspapers led with sports coverage. But they almost never do. What is stranger by far, and more alarming, is the creep of soft news -- celebrity news and other "lifestyle" news -- from the end of the newspaper to the front page. Here is an example: "Trump Attacks Warriors’ Curry. LeBron James’s Retort: ‘U Bum’" [1]. In 2017, that article was front–page news in the New York Times [2…
Come to Southern Europe countries, where football is occasionally the only news you get to watch.
Not only the games, but what the players, their wives, kids, families, fan clubs, and whatever else are up to.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#33The job of the news is to inform people (or more cynically, keep them watching to show ads). Sports are a major topic that a huge number of people want to be informed about. Why wouldn't they be in the news? There are lots of things in the news that some people don't care about - they report on traffic (or at least they used to) even though many people don't commute. They report on the stock market even though many p…
I disagree that the job of news is to inform people. I think that it’s just a possible side effect that they champion in order to keep you engaged.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#34Honestly not at all. What is actually more novel about the news today is the fact that it is no longer geographically local.
News is about finding things that concern/interest you. Hacker news, happens to be a place where I find lots of things of interest and some things of concern. I expect to see if my team won that day's match that night on the news.
Primetime news is no different. We want to know if our team won the game, so it is reported.
It's everything else on primetime news that doesn't make sense, or points to a serious issue.
It isn't that we _have_ sports on the news, the problem is what we _don't have_ on the news. That cheezy little bit about the old ladies down at the community center doing a bake sale for the school. We don't have the local farmer on talking about how the highway road closure is affecting him. Nothing about the local religious group doing homeless ministry, or the individual homeless on your specific streets.
What we have on the news: a bunch of things that our online lives have taught us are important, that drastically inform our online selves, how to speak, think, what is worrisome. And yet none of those things that our online lives tell us is so important, hardly affects our material lives, lived in our local geographic material area, at all.
We desire to be informed about the things that concern us. Our problem is we have made things that were never a concern to previous generations, our greatest concern, and the greatest concerns to previous generations, the least concern. At the very least previous generations and ours have enjoyed our local team's sports for whatever weird reason.
No one (should) give a crap if their neighbor is a Trump supporter or Biden supporter: Your neighbor needed a cup of some sugar to bake some cookies for the bake sale and you gave them some.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#35Sports is content. Sports provide relatively low-cost, widely available and reliably engaging content. Fill the timeslots, sell more ads.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#36Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, said that he always turned to the sports pages of the newspapers first: the sports pages were about humanity's victories, the front page mostly about its failures.
Sportsing a ball across a patch of grass into a special area isn't really much of a victory.
All but the most historic games are forgotten almost instantly, and even the most historic games have a very limited cultural life.
How many people care what happened in baseball in 1971 - never mind 1921?
Meanwhile those people are still reliant on applications of quantum theory, which was first described in 1900, even if they're not aware why it matters to them.
The bigger problem with sports is they encourage superficial tribalism and even racism.
This was very obvious in the UK during and after the Brexit debate. Vocal Brexiters seemed to think "winning" and "losing" were a team event, and most - especially those with football team flags on their Facebook profiles - literally didn't seem able to understand that there would be hard consequences for the country as a whole which went far beyond the immediate result.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#37Not really. Sports are a fundamental part of every day life for arguably the majority of the population. I do think there is a hang over from the past though as arguably gaming or social media could be considered as such too.
What does grind my gears, however, is how the British media (including BBC News) think that the results of TV shows or the things that happen on soap operas are news. The fact that a person dressed up as a sausage won a TV talent contest or that a character died on Eastenders is not national news, IMHO.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#38Complaining about sports coverage is kind of like complains about “non-tech” articles on Hacker News. It’s there because people find it interesting.
People like sports, and there are new sports events all the time. They want to know what happened. Using “the news” to relay this information seems like a reasonable, entertaining and profitable way to do this.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#39Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, said that he always turned to the sports pages of the newspapers first: the sports pages were about humanity's victories, the front page mostly about its failures.
Sportsing a ball across a patch of grass into a special area isn't really much of a victory. All but the most historic games are forgotten almost instantly, and even the most historic games have a very limited cultural life. How many people care what happened in baseball in 1971 - never mind 1921? Meanwhile those people are still reliant on applications of quantum theory, which was first described in 1900, even if th…
How much relevance would ANYTHING on local tv (or even national) have in 100 years? That’s a weird bar to hit.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?
#40Not really. Sports are a fundamental part of every day life for arguably the majority of the population. I do think there is a hang over from the past though as arguably gaming or social media could be considered as such too. What does grind my gears, however, is how the British media (including BBC News) think that the results of TV shows or the things that happen on soap operas are news. The fact that a person dres…
That seems to be an extrapolation from sports news... It's all in the category of "reporting on entertainment."