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Re: No More Stories

#51

Post by shannifin »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #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…

> the media and what it publishes is downstream of what individuals in society want to see and hear.

I think it's more likely a feedback loop and they're both downstream from each other. And, in that sense, there's "blame" on both sides, and certain patterns continually reinforce themselves through such loops.

Re: No More Stories

#52

Post by pcmaffey »

pjscott wrote: post #48
pcmaffey wrote: post #26

There are no facts in journalism, only observations. The media is not a courtroom, it’s not science, it’s just humans observing each other.

A couple of days ago there were very strong winds in my area that caused a lot of falling tree limbs and property damage. The next day the newspaper reported, correctly, the fact that the weather had indeed been like that. I'm not sure how this fits with your claim unless you're using the words "fact" and "observation" in an epistemically radical way.

All facts begin as observations. Not all observations are facts.

All I'm saying is that the media operates on the level of "observations." That doesn't mean that some of those observations are not facts, just that the verification process that makes an observation a fact is outside the domain of media.

Re: No More Stories

#53

Post by tptacek »

With respect to COVID-19, this makes sense.

More broadly, though, for journalism in general, not so much. For instance: Carryrou's Theranos work much more strongly fits the "story" notion of journalism than it does "data journalism".

Re: No More Stories

#54

Post by tsimionescu »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #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…

> 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.

This seems very naive. Media companies are not working for the public, which pays pennies to the dollar compared to advertising. Not to mention, everyone in power knows how much the public is influenced by media, and takes care to cultivate their relationship with media through all means possible - donations, access journalism (you publish something bad about me? See if anyone in your whole paper gets one more "leak" from us), friendships with the editors and managers and so on.

Not to mention, you're making an assumption that the media has a responsibility of extracting the maximum possible engagement, which is definitely not a given. Even if Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson get the maximum possible engagement, that doesn't make it ethical to put such partisan and deceptive voices front and center. This is essentially a way of manipulating emotion, just like advertising, it's not a democratic style of "listening to your consumer".

Finally, there is a difference between the style that media chooses to employ, which the public has some influence on; and the content they actually publish, which is much more controlled by management and special interests groups. Just look at stories that don't get published - for example, when Ruth Badger Ginsburg was interviewed, she noted that she didn't agree with athletes kneeling; but, the interviewers decided that this will hurt her image among the left, so they just cut out this part of her interview.

Re: No More Stories

#55

Post by Veen »

Even if the media adopted a "just the facts" approach, there's still the question of which facts. Most misleading news stories aren't outright lies, but a careful selection of truths and ommissions that creates a narrative the journalist (and their reader) finds desirable. I don't think it's possible to overcome that and still create a product most people will watch or read: I strongly doubt the average reader will wade through "collections of consensus" in place of partial news stories. People read the New York Times or the Daily Mail because they like them, not because they lack an alternative that tells them the real truth.

Another problem, one tech people tend to ignore, is that journalism is as much about values as facts. And so long as we disagree on values, collections of consensus will quickly turn into competing consensuses, each motivated by values that aren't recognized by the others, which is exactly what we have now.

Re: No More Stories

#56

Post by craftinator »

tsimionescu wrote: post #54
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #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…

> 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. This seems very naive. Media companies are not working for the public, which pays pennies to the dollar compared to advertising. Not to mention, everyone in power knows how much the public is influenced by media, and takes care to cultivate the…

> This seems very naive. Media companies are not working for the public, which pays pennies to the dollar compared to advertising.

I agree that the advertising is where the money comes from for most media... But that supports the parent comment, in that it incentivises the media companies to tell their audiences exactly what they want to hear (or, more correctly, exactly what will keep them coming back and watching more advertisements).

Re: No More Stories

#57

Post by masswerk »

Actually, no. The article misses one important step, namely experts or interpretation of data. Meaning, there's data, data reporting, aggregation and selection, and finally, interpretation. Journalism is then another step, namely a transmission system from the realm of data and specific domain to common understanding. The form of this is the story, which integrates the findings with public matters (by this constructing meaning) and allows the public to form an opinion. Accepted opinion eventually becomes the narration that leads our accorded actions. – What "data journalism" means here, is omitting expert opinion and directly applying common understanding to unstructured data, by this neglecting any need for expert domain or domain experts, in other words, skipping informed opinion, since the expertise is already "in the stack" – and even more so, requiring the members of the public to come up with the story on their own (and fight it out). I'm not convinced.

Re: No More Stories

#58

Post by femiagbabiaka »

tsimionescu wrote: post #54
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #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…

> 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. This seems very naive. Media companies are not working for the public, which pays pennies to the dollar compared to advertising. Not to mention, everyone in power knows how much the public is influenced by media, and takes care to cultivate the…

I think what you've said here, while well reasoned, is pretty much the kind of magical thinking about the power of the media and its influences that I think is a part of the paralysis around the subject.

Media, in your words, is simultaneously purely driven by capital and Machiavellian self-interest, "not working for the public" and _also_ is an entity that should be concerned about the ethics of putting "such partisan and deceptive voices front and center". In this world, there exists a cabal of people, all moving in concert to suppress the truth (which truths? don't know) and release propaganda, all of which, of course, everyone in society cleanly falls for.

The problem, of course, is that you're taking the actions of a loosely defined group of hundreds or thousands (or more) of publications, and importantly, _individuals_ working at those publications in the U.S. and around the world and pushing them together into a grand narrative.

I don't really think I'm being naive. We've all gotten to see the rise of independent media and the new gigantic wave of disinformation networks that came along with it. The democratization of content creation was a shift of power from "elites" to the common people. And yet, independent media tends to reproduce the same kinds of narratives of traditional media (and often even more nefarious ones), just with a different face. It's precisely because of the relationship between people and the media that there are no easy answers.

Re: No More Stories

#59

Post by bostik »

pjscott wrote: post #49
nsxwolf wrote: 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.

I've been appreciating some people's practice of giving subjective probability estimates for various things depending on the strength of the evidence; see e.g. the "Probability Updates" section of this article: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/omicron-post-7/#prob... Probably a well-functioning prediction market would do it better, though I'm not sure our prediction markets today are there yet.

Prediction markets, or at least the decent and regulated ones, won't touch the plague. It's gambling, and taking bets on human misery is generally frowned upon as a business practice.

You need insurance provider's license for that.

Re: No More Stories

#60

Post by femiagbabiaka »

darawk wrote: post #38
nerdponx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come to believe that people don't want it as much as they are just generally susceptible to it. The "news" has figured out how to become a supernormal stimulus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

I think this point is sort of the fundamental contradiction of modernity, and it underlies many of our disagreements and problems. Succinctly, it's the non-unitary nature of preference. I want to eat the cookie and I want to be thin. The fact that I eat the cookie does not actually mean that I want the cookie "more" than I want to be thin. It just means that preference functions are not consistent over time. My prefe…

You should take this, expand on it if you want, and publish it as a blog.
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