61–67 of 67 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Around the time of the first Obama term, journalism got redefined as activism rather than reporting. It's been a slow but inevitable collapse ever since.
Right. Because Fox was fair and balanced before Obama came along...
Part of the problem is deciding what journalism is . I don't mean that in terms of the craft -- I was a journalist for many years in the legacy media. We knew what we were doing, and were proud of our work. The issue is that like any other art/craft/trade, being good at it isn't enough. Is this a charity? A public good? A business? A hobby? Good journalism is very expensive. It requires people doing real work who nee…
We don't value right or wrong outside of the financial markets so much because there's not much profit to be made there. A politician doesn't need to know if their ally is ethical, only need to act according to the narratives. A piece about a company easily swayed by sponsorships and donations, or needless alarmism that keeps public mind away from real problems.
The current system we live in doesn't value the accuracy of the information and I think that's a tell on how badly the world is running.
Meta: It would be really interesting to see comment sentiment vs time of day to get a read on perspective when different parts of the world wake up. For example, "independent journalism is the future" and "independent journalism is dangerous", which are the two extremes in in these discussions. Has anyone made something like this for HN?
This might be enough to get you started if you wanted to roll your own (h/t @simonw):
> Summarizing Hacker News discussion themes with Claude and LLM
https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/claude-hacker-news-themes
For something similar at the story level, but without any kind of sentiment analysis, there’s this:
Edit:
Some (AI?) comment analysis summary per story on this site, but I don’t know how the site works or how often it might re-analyze the comment thread, if at all:
Journalism today is a joke. More like 'what journalism? that heavy manipulative gossip masquerading as journalism?' Until society as a whole recognizes the value of managing disagreement and the discussion of controversy without emotion, journalism is a losing proposition because it will always be more profitable to cater to the larger emotional reasoning population. Until the rational percentage of society is large…
There is still good journalism going on but it is seldom read as it can't afford to promote itself like the propaganda empowered by capital. In LA, we have LA TACO for example. But they don't have much staff, so they don't even publish at a rate of a single article a day, it can be a few days between articles, and they are only able to cover a limited set of topics. People also of course aren't reading in general, th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Because Fox was fair and balanced before Obama came along...
Fox was already unbalanced, yes, and seemed to never claim otherwise.
Is it meant to be facetious?
For the uninformed. "Fair and Balanced" was their literal slogan for 20 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/15/fox-news-drops...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know there are 4th estate implications, but there's probably an argument made that news media should be a municipal endeavor supported through taxation. Yes there is public corruption all the time but usually it isn't a grand conspiracy sort of corruption, but on an isolated individual level, frequently exposed by staff themselves. In LA these days, the city controller is actually one of the best muckrakers right n…
Unfortunately, if it's a municipal endeavor, you will have coloring of the coverage. I don't trust the current political establishment in the US to not turn newsrooms into pure propaganda machines if public funding is requested. Besides, I don't know if there is much of a point. The current President, at the very least , bungled the release of millions of documents related to his former personal friend who was under…
The thing is with them being private is they are now targets for the bezos's and soon-shiongs of the world to buy out and then color however they like.