The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such.
Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Instead we talk about the direction of the country and indeed, humanity itself, with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team, or voting people off the island on Survivor.
> But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
This is how the news was for me as a 90s kid who only had over the air channels for TV. 6:00-6:30PM was local news, 6:30-7:00PM was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Outside of that folks weren't particularly concerned with what was happening beyond their immediate bubble.
Even in the early 90s news started shifting towards our modern incarnation. CNN was considered hard news in the 80s, but that changed around the time of the Persian Gulf war and Wolf Blitzer becoming the Scud-Stud, and all the other shows like Cross-Fire becoming news-er-tainment (or whatever the proper industry term is), etc...
And realistically, as a fellow 80s and 90s kid . . . what benefit is there to this always-on 24 hour news extravaganza?
There are not enough relevant things going on in the world to merit a 24-hour news cycle, so the media has to make things up to fill the gaps. But once they make things up, they're pathologically incapable of distinguishing their own made-up crap from actual relevant news items.
So we spend the day glued to our phones flooded in crap.
This is still true today, though. I am generally sick of the news too but sometimes it is nice to watch local news (WDIV channel 4 here in Detroit) from 6 to 6:30 to hear about stuff going on around town, and then NBC nightly news from 6:30 to 7 to get some more national info.
Yep. For a decent chunk of my early adulthood, barring really major events, my news consumption was ABC World News Tonight and maybe This Week with David Brinkley on Sunday if I was around--and Time Magazine delivered weekly to my mailbox.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this.
Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it?
We've had salacious media for a long time:
> Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the editor of one of the earliest scandal sheets, The Morning Post, which specialized in printing malicious society gossip, selling positive mentions in its pages, and collecting suppression fees to keep stories unpublished.[5]: 11–14 Other Georgian era scandal sheets were Theodore Hook's John Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's The Age, and Barnard Gregory's The Satirist.[5]: 53 William d'Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, explained his purpose:
Definitely a demand issue. Sure, there are secondary supply-side effects, but the simple truth is what we see today is what captures available demand. There is no other domain where you find that Americans are willing, en masse, to eat their vegetables before dessert. So the pro-wrestling flavor of televised news is going to crush anything more thoughtful slash less entertaining with relentless invariance.
To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)
Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.
It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.
Both, really. As technology has created new and broader reaching mediums, the people operating those mediums have changed their target audience to support their existence.
There is more and better quality news available now than ever in history and people flock to the crappiest options because they can't get enough. It's demand.
Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine would be the one switch to flip to undo a lot of this very destructive mess. Of course all of the media giants would throw all the lawyers at it. Now that they know how incredibly lucrative news-as-entertainment is. But it's what must be done to turn this problem around and get a handle on it.
Would it? Remember TV competes with online news. Fox biggest competitor isn't NBC, it is Breitbart, The Dodge Report or Real truth network.
And you are never going to get the fairness doctrine to apply to those that are online.
You could have Facebook set rules for posts on their network, but then Facebook competes with Twitter and Tiktok and whatever, so if the posts on Facebook are less engaging than those on Twitter, people may go there.
What is it you think this would even accomplish? There’s no shortage of contrasting and opposing viewpoints, but people watch and read what they want to, and most often on non-broadcast mediums.
Literally illegal for certain with anything non-broadcast about with about 90% certainty for broadcast. It’s such a blatant violation of the first amendment it’s never going to happen.
I have to agree, and some have even said the quiet parts out loud... and that there wasn't broad-spread outcry is somewhat terrifying to me. I don't care what side you're on, I disagree with many on most things. This is frankly a terrifying, and somewhat delusional, precedent.
Cable News may have boiled it down to its essence, but the problem transcends tv. The same problem exists in writing, its just more spread out.
If you synthesize all that happens in Washington in a day, it is a giant soap opera. IT keeps its power by keeping people paying attention to it. Even a "just the facts, maam" view of the news is largely rabblerousing.
I wonder how much of what I see on https://www.memeorandum.com/river today will matter in 10 years. How much of it belongs in a history book. How much of it is needed to make an informed decision in an election. How much of it is needed to understand the world around me.
I think the amount of news we expose ourselves to should correlate more with the closeness of the events (or inversely with their distance from us). We can actually have an impact on events in our local community. And in a lot of ways what is immediately around us when we walk out the front door has a more impact than anything else on how we experience the world.
News from far away is just second hand sadness.
Cable TV and Internet are tools. They are technologies. They are not people.
News companies, specifically news company executives looking to sell as much ad revenue as possible, and are willing to produce any content that gets viewership, are to blame.
Where I was the US, 7pm - 9pm was prime entertainment time, and the news would start at 9pm or 10pm depending on the channel (which I think was partially so TV would become boring to kids right around when they should go to bed). Don't remember how long it ran, though my guess would be an hour before the late-night shows would begin.
My grandparents managed to maintain this way of watching news. The TV was off the entire day. They would turn it on at 8pm after dinner for the local/national news report, and turn it off when it finished. It's possible to do but it takes discipline and intention.
Neil Postman articulates this point in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and cites Marshal McLuhan’s adage, “the medium is the message”: TV is entertaining and context-free. News over TV will adopt the shape of the medium.
Postman is the sort of public intellectual no longer exist. Classically educated and proud of it, conservative in spirit, tolerant in action. He also made digestible a lot of the work from 60s70s academia on these topics.
Mcluhan, his French counterparts, Deborah, ELlul, all understood something 60 years ago. Mass manufacturing and mass media are the key determinants of our society. The first has commoditized the physical things we surround ourselves with. The second commoditizes our dispositions. Political or economical arrangements matter so much less.
Taking that view, and the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology as we think it is. Just another means for media saturazition, washing out individual thought.
A salient effect, when everything is essentially the same, the only mechanism to differentiate is branding. Hence, everything is captured by marketing. Products are differentiated by their commercials, people differentiate themselves by the identity they assume, everything/everybody is thrown in a marketplace where comparison is based on image, not substance. Really nothing can be evaluated intrinsically anymore, our evaluation of everything gets mediated by a story, a narrative, an image. The matrix is real, not the living in the computer part, but the unease that everything is fake, everything is a projection.
If true, and it also explains why the classic California easy-going personality is now the dominant one. It is not even cool anymore to be 90s abrasive or cynical, that just elicits eye rolls (the rebellion in fight club looks quaint now, almost adorable). Better to just bland in.
The logical end point of this evolution is that we all become widgets. Essentially the same, responding to inputs, participants in algorithm, the only difference maybe the skinning, the look&feel. All undifferentiated tough.
May be true, may be not. But it certainly explains a lot of the last 150 years, and it makes our current era less special. which is comforting, we're not messing up in ways grandpa wasn't already doing so.
Viewers are to blame. Cable and the internet are just better than ever monetizing the garbage people gravitate towards. There's more high quality journalism on offer than ever and it's audience just keep dwindling in favor of social media and purely fraudulent news like FOX.
People talk about media or corporations or government like they're from some alternate dimension or alien species. They're run by the exact same human beings that exist in your daily life. Most people act out of self-interest and are subject to bias. Media didn't invent it, it's an extension of human nature.
And when entertainment isn't recharging our souls, giving us time off, isn't wholesome (which all apply to current news) we don't get what our souls need, and we become worse people individually and collectively.
Watching the 24 hour news cycle as entertainment is just like any kind of constant trauma, constant onslaught, constant conflict and it fundamentally is rewiring our brains individually and collectively
The problem is speed of information eroding our sense-making coupled with the dominant linguistic framework of economics which reduces communication to zero-sum competition.
To pine for any kind of quaint return is missing the point entirely. The only way through is forward and out.
> But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Essentially this is arguing for limited distribution & gatekeepers for the news. That would almost certainly be better for society, but there's the problem with disenfranchisement & how you select/entrust gatekeepers. I don't think the "old" solutions to those problems were particularly good.
> The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment.
That's a very bold claim but I can't say it's wild. The news is supposed to be a critical source of information but I think the effect is a net negative. By a large margin. It's a pretty perverse situation.
I don't think the government should ban news or anything. That's obviously bad. But society would probably be better off without it (as-is), as extreme as that would be.
I don't think you can really say anything is to blame for this: people follow incentives and the incentives are to yell higher and higher to be heard over all the noise of everybody else and to create the most insane headlines to be hear over all the other insane headlines.
The solution to this tradegi of the commons is to ignore it all and read up on the various candidates a few weeks before the election.
I totally agree with this. Except when it comes to new platforms and media of the likes of tech we are collectively much more willing to examine and be critical of our own industry even on HN. However IMHO the thing that makes the news industry so scummy is that these are the people that still control most of the narratives people read about and they seem to almost never be self critical at all and if they were then Jon Stewart wouldn’t still have a show getting laughs off of this truth.
"with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team"
While true, I can't help but think everyone who says that is talking about "other people" (mostly people on the other side but maybe a few from my side) or "other news sources" (mostly ones from the other side that I don't watch and maybe a few isolated examples on my side).
I think most of us realise that "our side" is just as likely as the other side... We all recognize the problem, it's just that we differ on what we believe are ideal solutions. In the end, the breakdown of actual compromise on most issues is the result and it's bad for anyone without the pocketbook to overcome the issue, politically speaking.
Some of us are mostly adjacent. I'm a right-leaning libertarian. I actually dislike when people refer to modern progressives as "liberal" as it's pretty insulting to classic liberals who also aren't into where progressives have gone. I never voted for Trump, don't really like him. I have to admit, I did/do enjoy how worked up those with TDS get about him though. But it's completely hyperbolic on both ends, and there's more dishonesty about the man than from the man.
Many people want the establishment out... the problem is, as above, that there are several camps of what people believe should prevail in terms of direction... so no traction gains and the establishment wins. I'm thinking more people on either side should start voting for more anti-establishment candidates all around. They may be a bit cooky, but in the end, if they're willing to negotiate we could see better outcomes overall that at least try to serve the people and not the establishment insiders.
True that the US seems to have its own "quality" of news, but most western countries don't fare better. On the contrary, the less sensationell style often makes you believe the news to be more reliable, but in essence it never truly is.
How about reinstating the fairness doctrine that changed (along with so much else) in the 1980s as a start? And creating some rules to prevent news sources from being used as propaganda machines by billionaires?
I started following Jay Rosen on Twitter and that's something he often talks about. Coverage is like a horse race, that talks about the odds, not the consequences of someone getting elected.
Isn't it remarkable how healthy and wise our society was before 24-hour news. Nowadays we have newfangled problems like "populism", "anger", "Nazis" - say, where does that name even come from?
No, we have a problem with the news selling those fictional things as real. Turn off CNN or OAN wherever you get your firehose of algorithmically generated nonsense from and they magically go away.
> The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
No, it's television in general. People were famously making that exact same point in the 1980s, before the widespread adoption of cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death. tl;dr: the medium is the message, and the message of television is entertainment, even when the news was only a half-hour a day.
"... the human race is divided into two distinct and irreconcilable groups:
those that walk into rooms and automatically turn television sets on,
and those that walk into rooms and automatically turn them off.
The trouble is that they end up marrying each other."
Social media and its manipulation have amplified the problem vastly, and what makes it even worse is the consolidation of ownership. Nothing like turning on an ABC (owned by Disney) news program and getting ten minutes of self-referential Disney news.
I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world"
And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening news would give you the stories of the day, and then you would buy the next morning's newspaper if you wanted to read about it more in depth. Sometimes multiple newspapers if it's a topic you really wanted to sink your teeth into. There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
As more people turn away from the news, it seems that they rely on their own smaller, informal communities to filter and signal boost the topics they really should pay attention to. Articles that get shared in a Discord catch my attention more than anything on Drudge or even Hacker News.
> There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't have a real conversation about this." That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
> That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.
"That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long."
That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
I wonder if they meant that you need a deeper understanding to have a meaningful conversation. Talking about what "the news" presents to you only scratches the surface and only covers what "the news" wants you to pay attention to. In that sense, only consuming "the news" could be considered a waste of time.
Uh, early 2000s? There was very much 24/7 news media back then. Mature internet news, immature social media, multiple 24/7 national news channels for most major countries and languages...
I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war.
Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was minted in this era of hyper-pervasive media.
Note that the actual non-news media of the early 2000s, and the period pieces that remake it, mostly ignore this reality and are culturally set a decade or more earlier. This is a sort of 'the Simpsons' effect where creators in their 30s and 40s who don't realize how much the world has changed produce media about their childhood set in the present.
I recognize there was 24/7 news media then, but it was still better than now. And before there was 24/7 news media was even better than the early 2000s
> it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world
I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing.
However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed.
The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight.
And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.
That assumes you even read the newspaper... when I was a kid, I had a paper route for a couple years. Only about 1/3 of houses got the paper, and not everyone even read it every day. Often only a couple cover articles, and maybe the 5pm or 10/11pm news. It was a relatively narrow window into only the most pressing issues of a given day.
Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia of what a celebrity said/wore, or every single military engagement in Ukraine. The gulf war in Iraq was probably the first 24/7 news cycle engagement in human history for any significant number of people.
I also agree on quality degradation. There is both more editorialization and lower quality writing all around. In addition to personal narratives all around.
This is the reason I receive every morning a notification with a link to the pdf version of a newspaper: to get an abridged recap of news like in the old times.
Sometimes to keep your sanity you need help from others.
The issue is that political aspects of the news are simply too entrenched at this point. My mechanism for changing it used to be my single vote (that's useless), but the other was expressing views with people I knew to change how they think on things. But nobody listens, or it's drowned out, or I don't even get to talk to people with other views, or nobody is undecided anymore.
I'll try to avoid being political here with Trump. Trump was a deconstruction of old guard media and the illusions they put up with the political process. He reduced political campaigning to almost pure media events and games, with almost no substance for the right or the left (except outrage or adulation).
As part of that, old media like CNN that tries to keep the trappings of authoritative news delivery have been thoroughly "pantsed". Everyone knows you are stupid if you accept what newspeople tell you at face value (unless they are telling you things you already agree with emotionally).
I'd like to note, I view myself primarily as a environmentalist, and the corollary to that is I feel I have no political party. The right is outright hostile to it, the left is duplicitous and non-supportive of it.
Social media has corralled everyone into echo chambers, and then added a massive amount of cacophony to drown out any real conversation.
But practically everyone is dealing with this for whatever they care about. Social media has highlighted how little we can do, yet amped up the education about a lot of shadow stuff that used to be completely hidden.
Anyway, now I watch sports "news" and let the social stuff bleed in.
The real question is if the internet has made people smarter as a whole. I believe the internet of the last 30 years has made almost everyone smarter. What will the next 30 years look like?
But it took 30 years for non-internet corporations and governments/politicians to "figure out" the internet on a fundamental level. IMO the Trump election was the first example of that. Control and corralling of information with echo chambers has changed things.
Yes, my elderly mother can’t stop complaining about how much crime there is “these days”. Despite the fact crime per-capita has decreased, the news reports the absolute value. This in turn tricks people into believing something that is quite literally opposite from
what is really happening.
For specifically the 90s, its crime rate is genuinely better than the absolute horrible time of 70s and 80s. To this day when we say "crime is decreasing", in a fraud way we always compare it to those peak bad times even though compared to 90s it creeps back up (all of this is US specific). With collapse of Soviet Union and absolute victory of Gulf War, western world and especially USA is in euphoria until 9/11.
"I was recently listening to a podcast recapping a television show set in the early 2000s, where a current college aged student basically said "I wish I had the experience of being a teenager in that time period - it seemed much simpler as you weren't aware of every bad thing that was happening around the world"
I'm sad that kids these days did not get to experience things like the Sopranos, otherwise known as the best TV series ever.
I not only avoid it, I've added news sites that I used to read to my hosts list, redirecting to localhost so I can't compulsively check them in the middle of the day anymore.
Personally, I think Aaron Swartz was right [1]: I feel better off, emotionally and mentally, reading a monthly magazine or an annual book than trying to absorb every tidbit of clickbait dished out by the view-driven media. Monthly content is generally more nuanced and often more actionable, and whatever social media furor accompanied each small part of it, as it developed, is omitted for being the tempest in a teapot that it was.
Beyond not watching news shows and not having a TV, this is how I filter. What action can I take? It has drawn me closer to local issues where I can do something.
Maybe I can clean up the beaches in Australia, but I'm not there. Becoming enraged about politics 1,000 miles away shows a lack of humility and lack of understanding my sphere of influence.
The moment you realize that news is just another form of entertainment, not a source of knowledge you're obligated to follow, you free to stop wasting your time on it.
Someone created an AI model to consume daily, thousands of news sources, scores the articles and lists what it's highest scored for the day.
---
Ironically, APNews use to work this way. They provide a "relevance score" for every news article they published/reported so that other outlets could use that score as a signal on what they should report on.
Problem is, all other news outlet are disparate for eyeballs, so everything becomes "breaking news" regardless of the news relevance score.
The links are all to biased, bad, sources and the headlines already have the bias baked in as well. I don't really see how this solves the problem. If this went a step further and summarized the articles while stripping out the bias, then I think it would be a lot more useful. Very interesting concept though.
You might also consider the human curated alternative, the Wikipedia "Current events" portal [0]. It does not include very many topics, but it hits all of the big stories that are likely to be significant after the dust has settled.
Even on Wikipedia, notice how all the news is dominated by disasters, crime, etc (And sports, which is the only type of news allowed to be positive).
We live on a planet with 6 Billion people. We’re living in the most peaceful time in history. And there isn’t anything positive to cover? I don’t know if it’s necessarily a conspiracy, but there is definitely some kind of mind virus going on in modern society.
Thanks for sharing newsminimalist. I've unknowingly built nearly the same thing but more visual with additions like maps and images. Similar to Yahoo News Digest from years back.
I like the "relevance score", it would be interesting to implement something similar to that.
This "news" site is absolutely useless as the top "news" is just a bunch of whinging about climate change and covid19. Even the genres don't get rid of it, as selecting "world" brings up climate change. "general" brings up covid19, etc.
That's a shame. How could most of the popular news be such nothingness?
I wish I had local news. For example if there's a crazy mom trying to get on the school board. Or my local towing company is owned by a person undergoing felony indictment. New businesses opening that could really use my dollars. My local shop had a 4 for 5$ sale for kombucha and I nearly missed out on it due to a lack of local news.
I really don't want to know what is happening to youth in a country that is very far from me as often.
I avoid the news because it’s often wrong (and I don’t necessarily blame them, because they are reporting with incomplete information as it appears).
I find that it’s much more productive to just ask “what happened 2 weeks ago?”. All the unverified trash gets filtered out at that point. All the outrage bait has simmered down.
Readit News
Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Instead we talk about the direction of the country and indeed, humanity itself, with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team, or voting people off the island on Survivor.
This is how the news was for me as a 90s kid who only had over the air channels for TV. 6:00-6:30PM was local news, 6:30-7:00PM was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Outside of that folks weren't particularly concerned with what was happening beyond their immediate bubble.
There are not enough relevant things going on in the world to merit a 24-hour news cycle, so the media has to make things up to fill the gaps. But once they make things up, they're pathologically incapable of distinguishing their own made-up crap from actual relevant news items.
So we spend the day glued to our phones flooded in crap.
And that was pretty much it.
Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it?
We've had salacious media for a long time:
> Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the editor of one of the earliest scandal sheets, The Morning Post, which specialized in printing malicious society gossip, selling positive mentions in its pages, and collecting suppression fees to keep stories unpublished.[5]: 11–14 Other Georgian era scandal sheets were Theodore Hook's John Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's The Age, and Barnard Gregory's The Satirist.[5]: 53 William d'Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, explained his purpose:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_magazine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_reporting
To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)
Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.
It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.
It's very similar to how professional wrestling isn't real wrestling, but actually 'wrestling entertainment'.
I call this the 'WWE-ification' of the news and politics.
https://voussoir.net/writing/slamming_and_blasting
And you are never going to get the fairness doctrine to apply to those that are online.
You could have Facebook set rules for posts on their network, but then Facebook competes with Twitter and Tiktok and whatever, so if the posts on Facebook are less engaging than those on Twitter, people may go there.
Its all broken incentives all the way down.
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
If you synthesize all that happens in Washington in a day, it is a giant soap opera. IT keeps its power by keeping people paying attention to it. Even a "just the facts, maam" view of the news is largely rabblerousing. I wonder how much of what I see on https://www.memeorandum.com/river today will matter in 10 years. How much of it belongs in a history book. How much of it is needed to make an informed decision in an election. How much of it is needed to understand the world around me.
News companies, specifically news company executives looking to sell as much ad revenue as possible, and are willing to produce any content that gets viewership, are to blame.
Back in my day and in Germany, "news" was from 20:00 to 20:15 with the last 5 or so minutes of that were dedicated to the Bundesliga :)
I did a little write-up after reading AOtD for a TL;DR of the book: https://lambdaland.org/posts/personal/2020-06-07-amusing-our...
(Though you really should read the book and not my dumb little write-up.)
Mcluhan, his French counterparts, Deborah, ELlul, all understood something 60 years ago. Mass manufacturing and mass media are the key determinants of our society. The first has commoditized the physical things we surround ourselves with. The second commoditizes our dispositions. Political or economical arrangements matter so much less.
Taking that view, and the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology as we think it is. Just another means for media saturazition, washing out individual thought.
A salient effect, when everything is essentially the same, the only mechanism to differentiate is branding. Hence, everything is captured by marketing. Products are differentiated by their commercials, people differentiate themselves by the identity they assume, everything/everybody is thrown in a marketplace where comparison is based on image, not substance. Really nothing can be evaluated intrinsically anymore, our evaluation of everything gets mediated by a story, a narrative, an image. The matrix is real, not the living in the computer part, but the unease that everything is fake, everything is a projection.
If true, and it also explains why the classic California easy-going personality is now the dominant one. It is not even cool anymore to be 90s abrasive or cynical, that just elicits eye rolls (the rebellion in fight club looks quaint now, almost adorable). Better to just bland in.
The logical end point of this evolution is that we all become widgets. Essentially the same, responding to inputs, participants in algorithm, the only difference maybe the skinning, the look&feel. All undifferentiated tough.
May be true, may be not. But it certainly explains a lot of the last 150 years, and it makes our current era less special. which is comforting, we're not messing up in ways grandpa wasn't already doing so.
Viewers are to blame. Cable and the internet are just better than ever monetizing the garbage people gravitate towards. There's more high quality journalism on offer than ever and it's audience just keep dwindling in favor of social media and purely fraudulent news like FOX.
People talk about media or corporations or government like they're from some alternate dimension or alien species. They're run by the exact same human beings that exist in your daily life. Most people act out of self-interest and are subject to bias. Media didn't invent it, it's an extension of human nature.
And when entertainment isn't recharging our souls, giving us time off, isn't wholesome (which all apply to current news) we don't get what our souls need, and we become worse people individually and collectively.
Watching the 24 hour news cycle as entertainment is just like any kind of constant trauma, constant onslaught, constant conflict and it fundamentally is rewiring our brains individually and collectively
To pine for any kind of quaint return is missing the point entirely. The only way through is forward and out.
Essentially this is arguing for limited distribution & gatekeepers for the news. That would almost certainly be better for society, but there's the problem with disenfranchisement & how you select/entrust gatekeepers. I don't think the "old" solutions to those problems were particularly good.
That's a very bold claim but I can't say it's wild. The news is supposed to be a critical source of information but I think the effect is a net negative. By a large margin. It's a pretty perverse situation.
I don't think the government should ban news or anything. That's obviously bad. But society would probably be better off without it (as-is), as extreme as that would be.
The solution to this tradegi of the commons is to ignore it all and read up on the various candidates a few weeks before the election.
While true, I can't help but think everyone who says that is talking about "other people" (mostly people on the other side but maybe a few from my side) or "other news sources" (mostly ones from the other side that I don't watch and maybe a few isolated examples on my side).
Some of us are mostly adjacent. I'm a right-leaning libertarian. I actually dislike when people refer to modern progressives as "liberal" as it's pretty insulting to classic liberals who also aren't into where progressives have gone. I never voted for Trump, don't really like him. I have to admit, I did/do enjoy how worked up those with TDS get about him though. But it's completely hyperbolic on both ends, and there's more dishonesty about the man than from the man.
Many people want the establishment out... the problem is, as above, that there are several camps of what people believe should prevail in terms of direction... so no traction gains and the establishment wins. I'm thinking more people on either side should start voting for more anti-establishment candidates all around. They may be a bit cooky, but in the end, if they're willing to negotiate we could see better outcomes overall that at least try to serve the people and not the establishment insiders.
How about reinstating the fairness doctrine that changed (along with so much else) in the 1980s as a start? And creating some rules to prevent news sources from being used as propaganda machines by billionaires?
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
No, it's television in general. People were famously making that exact same point in the 1980s, before the widespread adoption of cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death. tl;dr: the medium is the message, and the message of television is entertainment, even when the news was only a half-hour a day.
And that's really the way it used to be. It was even better before 24 hour news networks, as your evening news would give you the stories of the day, and then you would buy the next morning's newspaper if you wanted to read about it more in depth. Sometimes multiple newspapers if it's a topic you really wanted to sink your teeth into. There was no need to follow the result of every individual rocket volley in the Ukraine or each individual comment from a politician.
As more people turn away from the news, it seems that they rely on their own smaller, informal communities to filter and signal boost the topics they really should pay attention to. Articles that get shared in a Discord catch my attention more than anything on Drudge or even Hacker News.
This is really it. Who has the time or the emotional bandwidth to spare for following all of this? I was talking to somebody about the overturning of affirmative action, and their response to me was basically "if you haven't read the Supreme Court opinions on this matter, we can't have a real conversation about this." That opinions pdf on supremecourt.gov is 237 pages long. I need to read multiple news articles and then a novel just to have an opinion on something now? That's cool, I just won't then.
It's incredibly hard to have a conversation on a complex legal document if you do not read the legal document.
Yes. Why do you want to have opinions on things you don't understand?
That's not comparable to a book. The organization of an opinion is quite good and you can get a quick sense of what the arguments are even if you skip a bunch of stuff. When you find a claim that you don't agree with, dig into that a bit more and see why they say that.
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I daresay most teens in the early 2000s were aware of such minor news events as Sept. 11 and the subsequent decade of global war.
Your stereotypical Millennial news junkie that the Wapo is crying about moving on with their lives was minted in this era of hyper-pervasive media.
Note that the actual non-news media of the early 2000s, and the period pieces that remake it, mostly ignore this reality and are culturally set a decade or more earlier. This is a sort of 'the Simpsons' effect where creators in their 30s and 40s who don't realize how much the world has changed produce media about their childhood set in the present.
Now if you ignore the news you’re assumed to be some form of social pariah.
I strongly disagree with that. I wasn't exactly a teenager back then (past 30 already), but in the 80s and 90s, news papers over here informed you about happenings in the entire world, and social developments in my own country, and neighboring countries (what you exactly got depended on the news paper, as they ranged from populist-conservative to communist; news could be rather biased). I sometimes read the NY Times in that period as well, and it had a huge coverage of world events. Their Saturday edition was no joke, so it wasn't just a European thing.
However, what you didn't read was: American boy assaults someone, twitter is outraged. American celebrity did/said something stupid 10 years ago, twitter explodes! American police officer hurts poor person, twitter has a stroke!! And that 10 times per day. All that online clickbait was missing, and rightly so. I don't care what some idiot does 6000km far from my home. If they start forming a threatening political movement, then I'd like to be informed.
The quality of journalism has degraded considerably since then. There is too much attention to personal stories, either sobbing or ecstatic, never in between, and almost always with an implicit political agenda. Some of that is good, because it makes the abstract policies and distant wars relatable, but it has overtaken the hard news. Even national politics has largely disappeared from the news paper. Only when some politician is accused of intimidating behavior it gets back in the limelight.
And that's why I am ignoring the news more and more. Not because it informs you too much about the bad in the world, but because it informs you about trivia, and lacks the things that really matter. Journalism has made itself irrelevant.
Today, you look at twitter and see a massive range of news from populist minutia of what a celebrity said/wore, or every single military engagement in Ukraine. The gulf war in Iraq was probably the first 24/7 news cycle engagement in human history for any significant number of people.
I also agree on quality degradation. There is both more editorialization and lower quality writing all around. In addition to personal narratives all around.
Sometimes to keep your sanity you need help from others.
I'll try to avoid being political here with Trump. Trump was a deconstruction of old guard media and the illusions they put up with the political process. He reduced political campaigning to almost pure media events and games, with almost no substance for the right or the left (except outrage or adulation).
As part of that, old media like CNN that tries to keep the trappings of authoritative news delivery have been thoroughly "pantsed". Everyone knows you are stupid if you accept what newspeople tell you at face value (unless they are telling you things you already agree with emotionally).
I'd like to note, I view myself primarily as a environmentalist, and the corollary to that is I feel I have no political party. The right is outright hostile to it, the left is duplicitous and non-supportive of it.
Social media has corralled everyone into echo chambers, and then added a massive amount of cacophony to drown out any real conversation.
But practically everyone is dealing with this for whatever they care about. Social media has highlighted how little we can do, yet amped up the education about a lot of shadow stuff that used to be completely hidden.
Anyway, now I watch sports "news" and let the social stuff bleed in.
The real question is if the internet has made people smarter as a whole. I believe the internet of the last 30 years has made almost everyone smarter. What will the next 30 years look like?
But it took 30 years for non-internet corporations and governments/politicians to "figure out" the internet on a fundamental level. IMO the Trump election was the first example of that. Control and corralling of information with echo chambers has changed things.
Cue oddly specific example of “The Ukraine” and “rocket volley”.
Next, the highlight that informal communities that make their own echo chambers are more popular as distrust in established media is sown.
Finally, a personal anecdote that echo chambers curate more attention-getting articles.
Nothing in this post is especially truthy or falsey, yet it serves up mild “distrust the media” nihilism.
I'm sad that kids these days did not get to experience things like the Sopranos, otherwise known as the best TV series ever.
One hour. Once per week. No binge watching.
Personally, I think Aaron Swartz was right [1]: I feel better off, emotionally and mentally, reading a monthly magazine or an annual book than trying to absorb every tidbit of clickbait dished out by the view-driven media. Monthly content is generally more nuanced and often more actionable, and whatever social media furor accompanied each small part of it, as it developed, is omitted for being the tempest in a teapot that it was.
[1]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Beyond not watching news shows and not having a TV, this is how I filter. What action can I take? It has drawn me closer to local issues where I can do something.
Maybe I can clean up the beaches in Australia, but I'm not there. Becoming enraged about politics 1,000 miles away shows a lack of humility and lack of understanding my sphere of influence.
https://www.newsminimalist.com
I stumbled across it on HN sometime back.
Someone created an AI model to consume daily, thousands of news sources, scores the articles and lists what it's highest scored for the day.
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Ironically, APNews use to work this way. They provide a "relevance score" for every news article they published/reported so that other outlets could use that score as a signal on what they should report on.
Problem is, all other news outlet are disparate for eyeballs, so everything becomes "breaking news" regardless of the news relevance score.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
We live on a planet with 6 Billion people. We’re living in the most peaceful time in history. And there isn’t anything positive to cover? I don’t know if it’s necessarily a conspiracy, but there is definitely some kind of mind virus going on in modern society.
I like the "relevance score", it would be interesting to implement something similar to that.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-news-digest/id1669557131
That's a shame. How could most of the popular news be such nothingness?
I really don't want to know what is happening to youth in a country that is very far from me as often.
Is this article 'news'?
The article talks about 'traditional' sources of newspapers, NPR, MSNBC -- is there a certain type of 'news' that people are starting to avoid?
Dead Comment
I find that it’s much more productive to just ask “what happened 2 weeks ago?”. All the unverified trash gets filtered out at that point. All the outrage bait has simmered down.
Actually I do more like quarter in review or year in review. For example, I know Obama and Bill Gates do yearly reviews on big things that happened.
For events like Jan 6, I tend to stay away from the coverage and what for the official hearing where it's laid out structurally.
As long as the info comes before the next election, it's fast enough.