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The Bullshit

walterkirn.substack.com

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Re: The Bullshit

#21

Post by tlarkworthy »

brundolf wrote: post #11
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…

As with any field in a capitalist society, good things can only really come from those who care more about what they're working on than about any associated profit-motive. I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks…

My theory is its data driven decision making. It's messed up the corporation to be purely metrics driven. Everyone hunts the metrics and misses the qualitative reasons for anything. We distrust internal models now, and try to be purely empirical, which is a mistake. We are overly technology now, but the technology lacks nuance and long term reasoning.

Re: The Bullshit

#22

Post by MisterBastahrd »

pessimizer wrote: post #19
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists. Local journalism pays rates that make teachers look like kings, and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work a week. It's a job that requires passion, because there are far more of them who are making under minimum wage at an hourly rate than there are who are making six figures.

Yes, but there are barely any of this type of journalist anymore, and barely any outlets for them to be published in. What there are are a lot of connected people who went from elite schools to exclusive unpaid internships, jobs in prestige nonprofit PR departments, and consulting firms, then to national outlets at very high salaries. Their coworkers are ex-politicians and campaign flacks, and people who worked at ma…

Oh, you mean other than about 90% of journalists in America.

I worked around multiple newsrooms. It's clear that you have not.

There is a very big world outside of the corner of the internet that you live in. And it still exists despite the internet trying to kill it off. Most "hometown" papers still exist. Go find some of them. Read them. What you'll see is that most of them are staffed by about 5-6 people, a few freelancers, and then a bunch of bylines that are simply the name of the paper, because they don't want you to realize how short-staffed they are (these are also written by those same journalists and editors).

That's the reality of the modern newsroom for the VAST majority of news outlets in the US.

Re: The Bullshit

#23

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit

#24

Post by pessimizer »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #18
bobmaxup wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Essayist is a more concise way to describe someone who engages in long-form verbal diarrhea. It takes neither moral courage nor intellectual valor to declare oneself above the fray without describing your method for being so.

> He has also reviewed books for New York Magazine and has written for The New York Times Book Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Time, where he has received popularity for his entertaining and sometimes humorous first-person essays among other articles of interest. He also served as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC.

> In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago. He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1983 after completing a 22-page-long senior thesis entitled "Entangling Breaths (Poems)." Following that, he obtained a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar.

You don't think this guy can get a job as an editor?

Re: The Bullshit

#25

Post by MisterBastahrd »

pessimizer wrote: post #24
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essayist is a more concise way to describe someone who engages in long-form verbal diarrhea. It takes neither moral courage nor intellectual valor to declare oneself above the fray without describing your method for being so.

> He has also reviewed books for New York Magazine and has written for The New York Times Book Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Time, where he has received popularity for his entertaining and sometimes humorous first-person essays among other articles of interest. He also served as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC. > In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at…

I think that guy seriously NEEDS an editor. All writers do.

Re: The Bullshit

#27

Post by TeMPOraL »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #21
brundolf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with any field in a capitalist society, good things can only really come from those who care more about what they're working on than about any associated profit-motive. I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks…

My theory is its data driven decision making. It's messed up the corporation to be purely metrics driven. Everyone hunts the metrics and misses the qualitative reasons for anything. We distrust internal models now, and try to be purely empirical, which is a mistake. We are overly technology now, but the technology lacks nuance and long term reasoning.

What irks me about data-driven decision making are two things:

1. Correctly reasoning from data is a very difficult task, needing advanced skills, requiring deep understanding of statistics. Most companies have nobody with such skill set on board.

2. It provides a fake air of legitimacy to otherwise arbitrary decisions. Whether by mistake (confirming your own biases with data) or on purpose, you can use data to justify whatever decision you already want to make, few people know enough statistics to call you on your bullshit.

Re: The Bullshit

#28

Post by krona »

It's no longer a credible business model to simply report what you see to a wider audience. We have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every person on the planet with a smartphone for that. (See the fall of Kabul for the latest example.)

When people read the news they expect a lens upon the world that they agree with, that connects to everything else in a coherent narrative that confirms what it was they thought they knew. This fakeness (or 'bullshit') is a form of hypernormalization for the consumerist society.

Re: The Bullshit

#29

Post by User23 »

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 the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why he got into the printing business. It's been common knowledge for a very long time that the primary purpose of political reporting is to persuade and not to inform.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...

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