No More Stories • Hacker News Board

Re: No More Stories

#61

Post by allemagne » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #22

CharlesW wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These criticisms probably ring true for any field, profession, or institution. At the end of the day all of these are inevitably made up of flawed human beings with a vested interest in appearing more high-minded and impressive than they really are.

Re: No More Stories

#62

Post by stevenicr » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

cgh wrote: post #4

alexfromapex wrote: post #2

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

Here’s a good media bias chart: https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/?utm_source=HomePage_St... Try choosing sources near the top middle, eg the Associated Press, Reuters, etc.

this chart is helpful and glad it's been made to keep the conversation going in a better direction.

Sadly due to what I consider terrible editorial controls, I feel we need to move to a chart that shows more details, and even goes to actual reporter/writer level and editor level.

Also in the age of Trump and Bernie - we likely need to chart 'those for / those against' these two specifically - as there are plenty on the 'right' and 'left' side of the news that are against them.

I'd like a browser extension that can highlight a crowd sourced plusses and minusses of each individual writer.

In some ways I have found the trust placed in the middle, like chart shows abc/cbs/bbc/npr near middle.. this is when the most damage is done..

like when I watched a nora odonel about 2 years ago - a fair and balanced reporting for about 55 minutes - lots of facts, not much fluff.. then the last 5 minutes one fact and a hard slant to be anti-trump story.. what makes this so bad is that she/they really try to say they are proper reporting, so it makes the propaganda pieces they add in 100x worse imho..

at least if you watch enough of the reidOut or newsmax (going by the chart) - you get a sense that they are totally skewering the stories with no balance at all attempted - and I think it becomes obvious that are working more like the enquirer - it's more tribal circle jerking entertainment than real facts..

When a place stands as an arbiter of truth and fairness and balance and they sprinkle just little bits of slant it's worse I believe.

Re: No More Stories

#63

Post by allemagne » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

cgh wrote: post #4

alexfromapex wrote: post #2

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

Here’s a good media bias chart: https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/?utm_source=HomePage_St... Try choosing sources near the top middle, eg the Associated Press, Reuters, etc.

Honestly that chart looks great to me, but there's just no way to tell or to prove to others whether that's because we're both objective truth-seekers or because our awful obvious heinous biases happen to match up.

Re: No More Stories

#64

Post by dillondoyle » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

I disagree that journalism that uses stories, quotes, human interest is bad or causing our misinformation problems. There is a LOT of great, factual, reporting that use real stories.

A great example is this recent Wayfair child trafficking article from WaPo (worth a read if you haven't). [1]

Adding in the real life experience of the supposed victims, those who spread the information, and then the final story of a believer. How this was the start of her radicalization, directly leads to QAnon, and finally she went to Jan 6 and died. Powerful story from start to finish which is 100% based in fact. This brings what a lot of us view as fringe & quirky online craziness into the real world with real consequences.

IMHO the big problem is opinion masked as news.

I constantly report on Apple News examples of this. Fox News does it all the time. They put out pieces on there that are opinion and not reporting that are not labeled. They put headlines and push notifications that are opinion but not labeled. A lot of people only see these and don't actually read. They are not reporting facts, or the piece uses just a few facts to support their opinion.

When WaPo, NyTimes, even more 'conservative' outlets like WSJ publish they put 'opinion: ' in the headline or minimally the byline and a graph at the bottom about the writer.

I'm picking on Fox but they aren't the only bad actors this happens on the left too lots of online outlets like Vox, Mother Jones. But Fox is the modern pioneer of opinion 'news' and probably have the widest audience of a mainstream outlet and IMHO take it farther than what are more like obviously political blogs.

Their top shows are all opinion but parade as news. A lot of these personalities have segments that are not based in reality and especially not factual (Tucker Carlson's jan 6 show is probably the most egregious recent example).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2021/way...

Re: No More Stories

#65

Post by allemagne » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

The ideal situation our brains want is a close friend with high social status who entertains us with compelling and digestible narratives about what's really going on. A news outlet that only deals in cold hard facts, consensus, and objective numbers will simply never be able to out-compete a retweetable headline from a famous journalist with a sensationalized and entertaining version of the facts.

For one thing, I am not convinced we have cracked a way in general of translating cold hard data and situations with scant evidence into a decent lay understanding. So in some ways news-as-entertainment media may even succeed in communicating actual reality better than a list of facts ever could, even if everyone's understanding is pretty shit on average. By using clickbait and sensation to turn a profit they can even do it more sustainably while Objective News Corp goes out of business (or more likely starts to slowly become more like everyone else).

Maybe we'll find effective scientific ways to measure how news outlets and specific authors tend to do at predicting future developments through implication or otherwise, but I think the more realistic boring reality is that the broad ecosystem will just trudge ahead on a bumpy road and converge on a few marginally better ways of reporting and interpreting news.

Re: No More Stories

#66

Post by enderm » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

Objective truth does not exist, in my opinion, so I see this article as misguided.

Consider reading Manufacturing Consent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Re: No More Stories

#67

Post by enderm » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #34

> What we need from journalism for the 21st century is a curated set of ongoing collections of consensus. This is a horrifying idea. Tension between various facets on a topic is good. Consensus breeds complacency, avoids change, and the meek-but-correct get crushed. Let's teach our children how to identify opinion and compare opinions for reasonableness.

I agree - this article is a bit scary.

Re: No More Stories

#68

Post by marcusverus » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

I've been having very similar thoughts recently, but I've come to a very different conclusion.

I agree with the author that the news article is an archaic way of transmitting history in real time. The solution, in my mind, is a new medium--something between a news article and a history book. This requires two changes.

1) We need a free, user-friendly platform for organizing and navigating news stories. Basically, we need a Google News that is actually interested in the original mission statement--“to organize the world's information [in this case, data about current events] and make it universally accessible and useful.” Looking at the Google News of today, you'd think their mission statement was to be the Drudge Report. It should be trivially easy to put together specific sets of news articles, but it's not. Say you want to see a list of every NYT, WaPo, and WSJ article that mentioned Trump in 2016. Should be trivial, right? Or maybe you want to see a list of every article referencing Jeff Sessions in the lead-up to his decision to recuse himself from the Russia collusion probe? Good luck! I've been searching for a neatly organized, searchable and free news database for awhile, and I've had zero luck. But there are only a few thousand articles coming out of reputable publications every day. It strikes me as utterly bizarre that past news articles are really not all that much easier to parse through than there were in the era of microfilm. I think there are millions of would-be fact-checkers and meta-journalists out there who would love to organize the daily deluge of news data and battle fake news in forums across the internet. They just don't have the tools.

2) We need to end the tyranny of the news article. Let's say you want to learn about Watergate. Would you pick up the NYT archives and start reading every Watergate article you could find? Of course not. It wouldn't make any sense to re-live the slow, confused trickle of facts in real time. You wouldn't know which articles were biased, confused, or outright misleading. You would be piecing together your own narrative while using shoddy data. Instead, you go straight for a book. Leave it to someone else to collect the relevant facts and tamp down the spin and the confusion! They'll even sprinkle in a healthy dose of background data for context, and weave it all into a neat narrative. It might even be entertaining! When it comes to the news, we need something that's closer to books than a news article. We need folks who follow events in real time (facilitated by tools like I mentioned in point 1), collating facts, and maintaining clear, coherent narratives, instead of dumping facts into the real-time, disposable media that is news articles. Of course, reading a history book while it's being written sounds awful. But I'm confident that there is a happy medium.

Re: No More Stories

#69

Post by mleonhard » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

debacle wrote: post #39

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…

I advocate on grassroots political issues locally. There is a special interest group that has much more sway than the general public is aware over local policy decisions (to the extent that they head two local, theoretically competing political parties). In the last 12 months, I have brought this up at least a dozen times in media interviews, letters to the editor, etc. It has gotten nearly no media attention. Eventu…

Chomsky explained this very thoroughly in the book Manufacturing Consent.

Re: No More Stories

#70

Post by mleonhard » Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 6:42 AM UTC

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…

> I'm hopeful that technology and media will start to move in this direction, because I think it'd be a really significant improvement.

I see technology moving in the opposite direction. Companies consistently choose profit over user quality-of-life. Some people are talking about the problem. When I read their posts talking about the problem, I have hope that things may improve someday.