No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

While I agree, it would've been much more illuminating, persuasive, engaging and educational to do a deep dive into the substance of the claims and show why they're likely incorrect. This is really the best way to assuage belief in related conspiracy theories too. We would learn both why the allegations are false and learn about how these false beliefs start and spread. Combine academic rigor (without its stifling formality) with the distribution of journalism. Be less verbose and more numerate and logical. Many bloggers do this but it's missing from the majority of mainstream journalistic outlets.

I somehow think the business model will preclude this though. They're providing outrage entertainment for the masses. Not everyone is a balanced individual with 130 IQ seeking detail and illumination.

There’s a certain amount of information the world creates, and some fraction of that gets written up in the news.

The first would seem to be vastly larger today, just because the human population has grown significantly and the reduction of poverty has brought far more people to a level where they work on “information-producing” endeavors.

What fraction of that will be covered in the news media, in some form or another? The top segment, such as “who is the new prime minister of France” gets covered today as it did in the past. Similar news from smaller places probably gets covered more, because networks of correspondents have increased, communication has become easier, and the wire service model has had huge effects for efficiency. The same is likely true for the “long end” of domestic news.

We should probably look at not just production, but also distribution: how much information is transmitted. While subscriptions have dropped off a cliff, distribution has vastly increased. I’m in Europe, but regularly read the NYT and dozens of other US outlets. That just wasn’t possible even in the recent past.

They are defining information as “surprise”, but mixing the technological meaning with its common meaning at will. Am I surprised by the name of the next US Secretary of State? Sure, in the way that I had never heard the name before. I’d be more surprised by Whoopi Goldberg, but that doesn’t make the latter more “information-dense”. Newspapers today include all the scores of twelve different sports leagues from all over the world, which alone would likely dominate any actual measure of information. Then again, they dropped their listings of stock prices, which probably reduced that measure by 9x%. To recover, they should print some random number generators output, which is nothing but information according to the theory the article is (ab)using. Which just shows that “information” is ill-defined and probably useless to measure news quality.

This blog post is really just the old complaint about a “liberal bias”, cargo-culting with sciency phrases. No surprise there.

For one, frequency bias is real, and people aren't able to dig deep into every single issue they read about online. There's just too much of it. They read snippets and headlines, and cobble together responses from peers or sources they trust to build up their view. As time goes on, one might look into a given topic more and become more well informed. Ideology forms around the responses and ideology informs the responses. Just look at how the disinformation campaigns in 2016 went. The absolute volume of headlines and memes meant that you couldn't refute them one by one. But if you consumed all of them at face value, they created a coherent narrative in many peoples' heads.

And the other point that others have brought up in this thread is bad faith discussions. There's really no point engaging with these other than to rudely and flippantly shut them down. If they get you to respond seriously, you've already lost. They're not playing the same game as you.

Combining these points, I'm not as convinced nowadays that variation in viewpoints in what is needed. Transparency and accurate reporting, certainly, but not a wide variety of takes through some worldview or lens. The reporting from the BLM protests this summer is a good example. Video evidence of police brutalizing protesters and news reporters cut through a lot of the noise and made things clear. It's one thing to go back and forth arguing about numbers and policy, and another to view something, see that it is not what you want our society to look like, and work on actions to take starting with that as a basis.