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The Bullshit

walterkirn.substack.com

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Re: The Bullshit

#131

Post by coldtea »

a_puppy wrote: post #113

This essay has a grain of truth, but then he stretches it way too far. The grain of truth is that mainstream news doesn't live up to the standards they like to claim they do. The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs. Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biase…

>This essay has a grain of truth, but then he stretches it way too far.

Does it? If anything it's quite tame. The truth is worse, and has been for a long time.

>Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants

The post never makes that claim.

>The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right

You'd be surprised, and seldom when it matters most.

At best they'll offer some retraction of their errors afterthey're caught with their pants down, and when it's too little, too late (as with the WMDs or the Contra affair).

Nowadays, that they don't even have to do that (e.g. Steele dossier), since their errors are lost in the barrage of new BS news anyway, and the public, bombarded by all that, has developed the memory and attention span of a proverbial goldfish.

Re: The Bullshit

#132

Post by smellsinore »

jollybean wrote: post #128
smellsinore wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because the reference to Q Their biggest line was "nothing can stop what is comming" and sure enough the biggest thing to ever happen happened, Covid.

Am I to read your comment correctly as if to indicate that you are seriously validating the legitimacy of QAnon given their ostensible 'prediction' of COVID?

Too soon to say for sure. Its still in progress.

Re: The Bullshit

#133

Post by coldtea »

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…

>news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse!

Were they? News co-ops has historically been quite good.

Re: The Bullshit

#134

Post by whatev84584 »

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?

[dead]

Re: The Bullshit

#135

Post by coldtea »

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?

Well, first of all, that they are 1/1000000 of the news produced by mainstream sources.

Re: The Bullshit

#136

Post by jollybean »

smellsinore wrote: post #132
jollybean wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I to read your comment correctly as if to indicate that you are seriously validating the legitimacy of QAnon given their ostensible 'prediction' of COVID?

Too soon to say for sure. Its still in progress.

Heyzeus, you're not kidding? Well thanks for proving my point that fake news is probably as big or bigger a problem than 'bs' in regular journalism.

Re: The Bullshit

#137

Post by timkam »

cpu_qwerty wrote: post #123
a_puppy wrote: post #113

This essay has a grain of truth, but then he stretches it way too far. The grain of truth is that mainstream news doesn't live up to the standards they like to claim they do. The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs. Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biase…

> The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. > The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right, so if one's worldview contradicts the literal basic facts, then that person is wrong. Without clarity as to what constitutes literal basic facts vs facts that are distorted, this is just more plain bull…

I disagree. We can't argue with formal precision here (unfortunately) but we should be permitted to try analyzing, anyway. Roughly speaking, the "objective" observations made in traditional mainstream news outlets tend to be correct, but the more an article strays from those objective observations (and becomes opinion, value judgement), the more contestable the inferences that the writers draw from these objective observations becomes (and the more divisive the article tends to become, in particular in the US).

Re: The Bullshit

#138

Post by mjburgess »

narrator wrote: post #119

I think one of my favorite cases of bullshit was the 2 years spent investigating Trump for Russian collusion, and nothing happened despite "Anonymous sources say..." stories every week in the New York Times. The hilarious thing about watching this is is the seemingly coordinated narrative everywhere with everyone using the same phrase like they all are just repeating "the truth" from some central source where they wr…

A friend showed me one of these telegram videos, it was from Ukraine in 2014.

Re: The Bullshit

#139

Post by mns »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #10

These recent substack articles which have been posted to HN are interesting. Not because the people who write the articles are intelligent and serious thinkers, because if they are, they definitely aren't showing it via their prose. They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap t…

I think it's more interesting how he's been already labeled as an amateur who's trying to make a name for himself, alt-right nut-job, covid conspiracy theorist, racist and so on, all in various comments on this page. Having grown up in a communist country, it's so disturbing, especially now, to see how whenever someone has a diverging opinion (someone could agree with you on 99 issues and have a different thought on the last one) he's done and needs to be labeled and treated like a pariah.

Re: The Bullshit

#140

Post by MisterBastahrd »

sellyme wrote: post #64
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'll put my 13 years of working around newsrooms and with journalists against your fantasy of what they're like any day.

I don't see why you think "I worked around a newsroom for 13 years" is a good rebuttal to the fairly trivial claim that most professionals chose said profession because they wanted to do it.

Well, maybe it's because he replied to ME and I made specific claims that he decided to doubt. Now maybe in this brave new world, some people don't consider actual lived experience to be worth a whole lot, but that's not my problem.

The associate editor at the paper I did work for was making $13.50 an hour as of two years ago when I left. I know this because she overheard a conversation regarding the salary of my subordinate who was guaranteed to be paid a certain hourly rate (that was about 3x hers) upon his initial 6 months with the company, and she vented to me about it one night when I was in the office to perform some server maintenance and she had just arrived back from a football game she covered for the sports editor, who was out of town on vacation. She routinely wrote between 16-20 stories a week, did layouts for 5 sections of the paper including real estate, legal, and classifieds, covered all official local events, and covered girls' sporting events.

Does that seem to you like something you could do in 40 hours?

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