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Mainstream Failure

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Re: Mainstream Failure

#21

Post by jarek »

fogus wrote: post #6

I suppose this is why more and more people that I know (in the US) are turning to Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera for their news.

I've been less than impressed with AJE's coverage of this. The general pattern has been 2/3rd of article devoted to the one nuclear site, 1/3rd to the rest of the country, with a town or two namechecked with a couple of data points per article. The last Japan-related headline in their main AJE feed which didn't mention the plant was early morning of the 21st. Oh and the lead always mentions the plant.

Re: Mainstream Failure

#22

Post by danohuiginn »

pinaceae wrote: post #8
fogus wrote: post #6

I suppose this is why more and more people that I know (in the US) are turning to Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera for their news.

der spiegel lost a LOT of credibility due to its blatant anti-nuclear messaging right from the beginning of the fukushima reports. instead of explaining what the hell was happening, they started chernobyl discussions and simply forgot about the actual disaster. the media in german speaking countries went full retard of fukushima.

lost credibility with whom?

In Germany, it's been no more anti-nuclear than the rest of the German media, politics and public opinion. It's not losing credibility here.

Outside Germany? One of the main reasons to read news from different places is to get a sense of the range of arguments being made. If Der Spiegel just parroted the view in the USA, it would be far less valuable.

Re: Mainstream Failure

#23

Post by brown9-2 »

andrewheins wrote: post #15

I actually disagree with the author's point about the "main story". The main story for me, and I'd wager for some of the other people on this board too, is the story of the engineers who are still working to keep Fukushima under some semblance of control. I really want to hear their story. The critical piece of info I wanted to know that was missing from the XKCD chart is where do the engineers working on Fukushima f…

I think he may be referring to "main story" as in what the big story will be when we look at this event years from now: 1) the deaths of ~10,000 people and widespread destruction, or 2) a nuclear reactor incident in which the reaction was bungled at first but ultimately was not a catastrophe for the larger nation or world.

Re: Mainstream Failure

#24

Post by brown9-2 »

I think the main cause of what Tim describes here is not so much just general media mediocrity (although that is relevant also), but the fact that most people simply do not understand what radiation is, how it works, or even the distinction between "safe" levels, "slightly higher than normal" levels, and "dangerous" levels.

Fear of nuclear accidents and atom bombs has conditioned most people to react negatively to any mention of the word "radioactive" - as if it is an all or none situation. The general population has zero idea that you are exposed to radiation when eating a banana or flying internationally.

This isn't an excuse - the mainstream media could do a lot of educating here - but I have a feeling that those that work in the mainstream media don't even begin to have any clue about the science behind this either.

Re: Mainstream Failure

#25

Post by heyitsnick »

mryall wrote: post #4

Tim has it exactly right. Searching some of the mainstream media sites in my area of the world -- Fairfax (smh.com.au) and Fox (news.com.au) -- shows up no results for 'tsunami' in their front page and world news section aside from badly informed reports about the nuclear reactors. That's a really sad indictment of the state of our media organisations and where their focus lies.

Really it's a sad indictment of what sells.

Re: Mainstream Failure

#26

Post by parasubvert »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #18

I get so tired of comments blasting mainstream media. It's easy to do, and just counterproductive. The good stories about the tsunami are out there, you just have to stop watching 24 hour news channels. Read the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic. Please stop complaining that good stories don't fall in your lap for free. Go find them, or build a better way to put important, un-sensationalized stories in f…

The New York Times front page story has been a poor source of information since this crisis began, basically being a disjointed summery of "who said what" with a sensationalist headline. When radiation levels were falling (according to other sources), the Times headline stood as "nuclear meltdown near imminent" or something to that effect.

IMO,!f you came looking for realistic analysis or summarization of the facts as known, you had to scour both mainstream and non-mainstream sources and piece it together above the melodrama.

Re: Mainstream Failure

#27

Post by heyitsnick »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #18

I get so tired of comments blasting mainstream media. It's easy to do, and just counterproductive. The good stories about the tsunami are out there, you just have to stop watching 24 hour news channels. Read the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic. Please stop complaining that good stories don't fall in your lap for free. Go find them, or build a better way to put important, un-sensationalized stories in f…

Agree entirely. It's never been for the news consumer; my mind boggles when I read opinions like this, things like criticism of techcrunch. With today's high competition, countless aggregation services and worldwide audience, _you no longer are stuck with reading mainstream media from your country!_

I get my daily news from Al Jazeera, BBC, Guardian, and a host of US daily and weekly news sites. Tech news is aggragated for me by HN and techmeme. Niche topics are read in my google reader. I can send all these sources to my ebook reader for later comsumption. Read something of which I question the veracity? I'm a google search away from differing opinions, original sources, intelligent discussion and critique. We have sites like wikileaks, governmental websites, Guardian's 'Data Is Free' and others putting out free datasets to enable anyone to dig deeper and find the stories.

How awesome is all this! And the vast majority is free!

Re: Mainstream Failure

#28

Post by roc »

pieter wrote: post #7

One of the things that annoys me slightly is that while our news is loaded with the nuclear accidents, I haven't heard any mainstream media talk about this refinery fire caused by earthquake which had been raging for 10 days, putting who knows how much pollution in the air. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/21/japan-refinery-idU... http://www.flickr.com/photos/enciclopediapt/5523005370/

Nuclear accidents are scary because people don't understand reactors, they don't understand the actual dangers and there, frankly, haven't been a whole lot of them, so FUD can snowball.

On the other hand, mine collapses, refinery fires, oil spills, explosions -- the causes of the day to day death toll of the fossil fuel supply chain (to say nothing of its use) is familiar, understandable and all too common.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/25-oth... (25 fossil fuel energy disasters from 2010, claiming 668 lives)

Re: Mainstream Failure

#29

Post by gjm11 »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #18

I get so tired of comments blasting mainstream media. It's easy to do, and just counterproductive. The good stories about the tsunami are out there, you just have to stop watching 24 hour news channels. Read the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic. Please stop complaining that good stories don't fall in your lap for free. Go find them, or build a better way to put important, un-sensationalized stories in f…

There are two quite different possible complaints.

1. "I want good journalism but can't find it."

2. "The general public is being fed a diet of bad journalism."

To someone who's making complaint 1, it's very reasonable to reply "It's out there, you're just looking in the wrong places" (assuming that's true, which seems plausible).

To someone who's making complaint 2 -- which is how I read Tim Bray here -- that doesn't seem like such a helpful response. Telling Tim to look for better news won't do anything to raise the overall level of journalism.

(Of course a good response to complaint 2 may be "This is an insoluble problem; people will watch and read what they want to watch and read, and it turns out they don't want what you consider good journalism".)

Re: Mainstream Failure

#30

Post by ecuzzillo »

gjm11 wrote: post #29
jrwoodruff wrote: post #18

I get so tired of comments blasting mainstream media. It's easy to do, and just counterproductive. The good stories about the tsunami are out there, you just have to stop watching 24 hour news channels. Read the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic. Please stop complaining that good stories don't fall in your lap for free. Go find them, or build a better way to put important, un-sensationalized stories in f…

There are two quite different possible complaints. 1. "I want good journalism but can't find it." 2. "The general public is being fed a diet of bad journalism." To someone who's making complaint 1, it's very reasonable to reply "It's out there, you're just looking in the wrong places" (assuming that's true, which seems plausible). To someone who's making complaint 2 -- which is how I read Tim Bray here -- that doesn'…

The second complaint seems to be complaining about Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap); historically, Sturgeon's law has been nearly as inviolable as conservation of angular momentum.

If anything, I suspect that mainstream journalism has never been orders of magnitude better than it is now. It's just that back in the day, we didn't have bloggers with photo essays showing us what we could be reading instead, so our standards were different.

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