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The Bullshit

walterkirn.substack.com

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Re: The Bullshit

#101

Post by Proven »

teflodollar wrote: post #87
roenxi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse! And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companie…

I always thought PBS and NPR were pretty good. What am I missing?

They are state owned - shouldn't exist.

Re: The Bullshit

#102

Post by unbroken »

MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #71
mistermann wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was totally real I missed that part, any chance you could quote the text where he says this?

> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths. Pretty standard alt-right nutjob. Substack is swarming with them…

You think there are "vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation"?

> alt-right Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.

Re: The Bullshit

#103

Post by workinghard »

p_j_w wrote: post #95
teflodollar wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought PBS and NPR were pretty good. What am I missing?

Yeah, not sure what that guy's on about. PBS, NPR, and other not for profit news orgs like BBC aren't perfect, but then what is? If I had to choose a single news source to try to stay informed, I'd take any one of those three over any of their for-profit competition.

I never trust any media org which is funded by gov. BBC is worst but you have to live to learn though

Re: The Bullshit

#105

Post by curation »

roenxi wrote: post #54
tomnipotent wrote: post #6

> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. I have a better idea. The news has always been shit. There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market. It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs…

In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse! And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companie…

Maybe the category "the news" is the problem? What precisely is it?

Re: The Bullshit

#106

Post by sellyme »

unbroken wrote: post #102
MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths. Pretty standard alt-right nutjob. Substack is swarming with them…

You think there are "vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation"? > alt-right Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.

I don't think anyone is under the delusion that domestic terrorists in the US are being secretive any more. That ship somewhat sails after an attempted insurrection.

Re: The Bullshit

#107

Post by curation »

rcurry wrote: post #8
lordnacho wrote: post #3

I feel a bit privileged, and in a dangerous way, because feeling like you're special can be an illusion that is easily shattered. Here's what I mean. If I was born earlier, like say a baby boomer, I'd have less education in critical thinking, but I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland…

Writing off an entire generation of people as lacking critical thinking skills seems a bit short-sighted.

Agreed. I don't think my parents generation lack critical thinking skills. They are dedicated to being individuated bootstrap pullers and live in this dissonance - because of course we live fully interdependant from birth. They see that everyone else has an ideology, except them, and so they generate their own truth inside and see any attempt at discussion of things they've never thought of as threat. They are the 'end of history' (Fukiyama) - the best music, the best culture, the best geopolitics, the best economy - and tho history has changed and we symbolically register that as ridiculous as well as the idea of a western sovereign subject - they cannot because their entire identity is at stake. At least these are the lies I tell myself so I stay gentle with them as they fade out.

Re: The Bullshit

#108

Post by Karrot_Kream »

User23 wrote: post #29
tomnipotent wrote: post #6

> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. I have a better idea. The news has always been shit. There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market. It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs…

In the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why he got into the printing business. It's been common knowledge for a very long time that the primary purpose of political reporting is to persuade and not to inform. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...

American journalism in the aftermath of WW2 had a brief moment where it became both a unifying idea (largely sharing and building shared cultural values) and was largely seen as high-integrity. This perception began collapsing around the start of the internet news age, and now has pretty much totally collapsed. But it's important to remember that the WW2 consensus around the press was just an artifact of its times and that Franklin is talking about the press from a very different lens. To him the "press" was more like the Federalist Papers or Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". If you want to see what journalism _used_ to be like in the US, read about Yellow Journalism [1], or just read some news from the 1800s industrial era in the US.

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

Re: The Bullshit

#109

Post by jollybean »

inreverse wrote: post #48
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists. Local journalism pays rates that make teachers look like kings, and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work a week. It's a job that requires passion, because there are far more of them who are making under minimum wage at an hourly rate than there are who are making six figures.

Do you have any (including speculative) ideas that could explain why our news is so bad, given that most journalists are passionate about their work?

Because digging up facts is very expensive, and not necessarily engaging to the public.

Ontario Public Broadcasting has this show 'The Agenda' with 'Steve Paikin' where he brings in mid-level and behind-the-scenes people from the bureaucracy people and they talk about granular issues of civic reform in great detail.

If you want to inform yourself on the nitty-gritty details of the new 'Subway Expansion' and why it's over budget, it's all right there.

But it's incredibly boring , and there's very little viewership.

Donald Trump put it really well when he said he would be 'great for news ratings'. It was rubbish, and a lot of people tuned in, it brought in a lot of money.

Add in the economics brought on by the Internet and we have a real problem.

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