WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything
Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
31–40 of 145 posts
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#32[flagged]
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#33[flagged]
The link doesn’t work for me, but based off your comment: I can accept that mainstream journalism is generally in decline in various ways. But it is curious they chose to single out WSJ, which is considered more balanced and less biased than NYT or whoever else ( https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart ). Or is it just to point out that even WSJ is subject to this issue?
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Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#34[flagged]
> The WSJ piece is a perfect case study in how everything gets flattened into culture war narratives and influencer drama instead of actual substance.
But the article is literally about the culture war, so of course it is framed in a culture war narrative.
I guess you can claim the WSJ shouldn't have written this piece at all, but I didn't see anything glaringly wrong about it.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#35[flagged]
> The collapse isn’t in the fields themselves, it’s in the layer of journalism that used to connect experts to the public.
Sure, but what do you do if the subject matter is the question of whether the experts are being myopic and the system in which they're operating is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose? Where's the expert for that?
If you just ask those same experts, well, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#36I'm not sure why the author is making digs at Joe Rogan so much... I mean, his podcast isn't really a deep dive into anything, its more conversations with generally interesting people from a number of different backgrounds. Sometimes MMA, sometimes conspiracy nuts... It's not a scientific podcast and I'm not sure that anyone is claiming it is.
Of course, this is quite a bit different than bought and paid for corporate media shills that currently represent "journalism" at large. In that space they do pretend to have the prestige of being about news, truth and information. For television in particular is pretty bad... MSNBC, CNN, Fox, etc. all are just not great between selection/coverage bias, misinformation, out of context contortions and opinions masked as news. I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though. I used to find BBC coverage decent, but they've slipped a lot in the past few years. Similar for Al Jazeera, at least for content outside middle east concerns.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#37That is a lot of words to communicate a very simple truth: WSJ is trash. (so is NYT btw)
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#38[flagged]
The link doesn’t work for me, but based off your comment: I can accept that mainstream journalism is generally in decline in various ways. But it is curious they chose to single out WSJ, which is considered more balanced and less biased than NYT or whoever else ( https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart ). Or is it just to point out that even WSJ is subject to this issue?
The NYT has some pretty serious problems of its own, although they're subtler in nature.
This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening:
https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
The press has a lot of problems right now:
* Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance.
* Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The paper in the city I live in keeps getting cut and cut and cut. There's little left.
* Social media suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the same time that fewer people read real news sources.
IDK how we fix those things... but they're all deleterious for our society.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#39It's not just technical subjects, either. In the midst of the chaos of Charlie Kirk's assassination, they ran an article [0] yesterday titled (it has since been edited) "Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology".
It's just incredibly irresponsible reporting. One can only assume it is a symptom of a wider problem within WSJ and media itself.
0: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/ammu...