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glyph.twistedmatrix.com

21–30 of 72 posts

Re: No More Stories

#21
Problems that people have with journalism are always misplaced IMO. It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of what individuals in society want to see and hear. Quite to the contrary, most journalists I've met and talked to (largely in print media) have journalistic standards and generally want to do the right thing by their readers. But in a sense, media companies are held captive by their readers.

It seems like many people believe that if somehow big corporate media (let's say Fox, CNN, NBC), swapped into a mode of "more facts, less editorialization" then it would have positive downstream effects on society. (Let's set aside that facts and data are completely meaningless without context, and context is political.) I'm not sure that's actually the case. I think it would have largely no effect. People in our society want the Rachel Maddow's and the Tucker Carlson's, the Joe Rogan's and the Russell Brand's. Until society shifts out of that mode, our media will continue to look this way.

Re: No More Stories

#22

Nothing new here. I spent a few years working in war zones. I made friends with journalists. They were all (even the "good" ones that I became friends with) full of crap. Even if they wanted to tell the truth they couldn't, because they didn't understand the subject matter well enough. Edit to refine my point due to presumed misunderstanding: At the end of the day it's about dollars. News is there to sell, not to exp…

Nothing new here. I spent a few years working in enterprise. I made friends with software developers. They were all (even the "good" ones that I became friends with) full of crap. Even if they wanted to create good software they couldn't, because they didn't understand the problems to be solved well enough. (This is how unhelpful and condescending it sounds when one paints everyone in a profession with the same broad…

What you say reinforces the GP's point. In my experience, most devs don't understand the problems well enough. They think they do, they may even earnestly try to understand, but because they lack first hand experience they do not.

How many devs actually spend a year or more working in the role of the person who will be using their software? Then they might have an understanding.

Re: No More Stories

#23

> One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept of a “story” in the news media is a relic that needs to be completely re-thought. It is not suited to the challenges of media communication today. > Specifically, there are challenging and complex public-policy questions which require robust engagement from an informed electorate. The problem is that the media is not intended to inform the electorate, n…

The ad-based business model is probably the single largest contributor to bad outcomes in our time.

Re: No More Stories

#25

I would really appreciate a "news" site that just cited verifiable facts and maybe showed data trends but didn't try to make any conclusions for me

I went looking for that, and I found that Wall Street Journal does that better than any other US source I found, though of course nothing is perfect. Their regular quoted subscription rate is big, but with some effort you can find much better deals.

[deleted]

Re: No More Stories

#28
post #8

At this point literally everything has been wrong. Facts are confidently stated and they turn out to be opposite, then reverse again. Followed by more totally confident assertions. Maybe there is a story here, and it is our hubris. This is beyond us.

We need automatic compilation, to fight that trend.

When all you get from the news is the current political spin of the latest scandal to make your party look good, you need to record who is saying what to start to see trends in what may be the truth, piecing together the bits of verifiable information they offer.

Now this is too much to do manually. A fact-counterfact format on "public discourse" sites like Kialo[1] is useful to collect the evolution of known facts over news, but it's too slow to do by hand. A news aggregator that collected partisan claims from both sides in breaking news would allow journalists to analyse the big picture, being able to report the story based on published facts and not just hearsay.

An additional advantage is that it would allow readers to contrast the bias of individual journalists, seeing which facts they emphasise and which they ignore. It would also serve as an ever-growing database of public discourse like we used to have in the days of printing press and newspaper libraries, when what was published remained unchanged and could be checked out.

[1] https://www.kialo.com/

Re: No More Stories

#29

Nothing new here. I spent a few years working in war zones. I made friends with journalists. They were all (even the "good" ones that I became friends with) full of crap. Even if they wanted to tell the truth they couldn't, because they didn't understand the subject matter well enough. Edit to refine my point due to presumed misunderstanding: At the end of the day it's about dollars. News is there to sell, not to exp…

Nothing new here. I spent a few years working in enterprise. I made friends with software developers. They were all (even the "good" ones that I became friends with) full of crap. Even if they wanted to create good software they couldn't, because they didn't understand the problems to be solved well enough. (This is how unhelpful and condescending it sounds when one paints everyone in a profession with the same broad…

I think you've unintentionally made an argument in favour of GP.

Re: No More Stories

#30
post #9

> One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept of a “story” in the news media is a relic that needs to be completely re-thought. It is not suited to the challenges of media communication today. > Specifically, there are challenging and complex public-policy questions which require robust engagement from an informed electorate. The problem is that the media is not intended to inform the electorate, n…

Is an informed electorate by definition a group of people who sat through a series of free college level lecture taught by an expert virologist? Even then, I found an error or two because I did exhaustive surface level fact checking. Or is it about the public being informed of accurate surface level facts and big picture views?

This also ignores that there are multiple perspectives to being 'informed'.

For example, as someone who's studied online communication and social computing at the graduate level, my main disagreement with a lot of policy decisions isn't due to my disagreement with scientists, but rather because I think that the policy decisions made are pouring gasoline on our infosphere problems. So am I not informed because I don't have a biology related degree, or are THEY not informed because none of them seem to have a clue how people or the Internet work?

Somebody that only understands virology doesn't understand the PANDEMIC, as a social construct/an impact on human societies. (And vice versa.) And that's without getting into history and geopolitics: Since variants are a global concern, the optimal choices are also impacted by what other countries are doing. And understanding those in context means different legal systems, different ideas of human rights, different patent and pharma laws, blah blah blah.

I sincerely doubt if an informed electorate is possible on some issues (such as COVID) because I think the time investment to be informed is too much to put on the average citizen.

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