What I see in journalism today is a classic shift from leadership to management. From substance to imitation. There are a lot of things that were meaningful once upon a time that now are mostly ridiculous imitations. For example, wearing an expensive suit, or a fancy watch, or having a big desk. Those used to be symbols of strength and power - now most people my age see that as nothing but douchebage-ness. The same goes for a lot of what's happening in news. All the holograms and "exclusive" and that other nonsense that is so terribly fake you can't help but cringe when watching cable news.
There was a time when flashing "BREAKING" in big bold letters and exclusive interviews indicated the most important things happening in the news. Now it means nothing. CNN was flashing "BREAKING" on the screens two weeks after the Malaysian airliner went down, preceding a discussion about whether or not it could have been a black hole that consumed it (that literally happened). Conversations between two parties are so canned that correspondents are even using the exact same wording as passed down by the party lines. Cable news is nothing but theater now, and to people who haven't grown up watching the news it seems very weird an disengenuous.
Focusing on externalities such as why someone became famous (a bathtub full of cereal?) lets the old guard not care about up-and-coming forms of journalism, dismissing its legitimacy. The legitimacy doesn't come from the content, but in how serious and domineering one can look when delivering the news. It's BS professionalism.
It is interesting to see the "established news media" try to tear down the youtube media by using their stupid stunts against them. The Daily Show has been doing that same thing against the news media for years, and like Hank Green said they've lost all legitimacy to anyone under 40.
It's pretty obvious to me that most of the people in the news business will say whatever their paid to say, or in some cases what they think will sell more books.
Do you remember the effort put into explaining to people that when the Large Hadron Collider was turned on, it wasn't going create a black hole that would swallow the entire planet?
This is the audience CNN has to entertain. You know... morons.
I'm hoping that always on video news falls apart with the cable bundles. CBS is hoping it won't (they've launched a 24 hour internet news channel), but I wonder if that is a good sign.
Computing parallel: 24-hour news is like busy-waiting, but what people really want is a signal when something actually happens. The biggest reason the news has lost its legitimacy is that 24-hour news means that a lot of news must be invented, overemphasized, or endlessly re-hashed in order to fill time. This makes it harder to convince people that what you're talking about really is news.
I've ended up getting most of my political news from the Charlie Rose show on public television. The vast majority of episodes are about non-newsy things, like culture, business, and philanthropy. Every once in awhile, something important is actually happening, and there are a couple episodes about it before moving on. It has only made the whole idea of always-on news seem even more ludicrous to me.
I agree with you about the news, but disagree about the suits.
Most people still think a nice suit looks nice, and are automatically think the guy who looks like he cares about how he looks is more capable or responsible than the hippy in a hoodie.
Where this may be an exception is in tech but even then it's hardly universal. Edgar the Line Programmer and his buddies might dress like slobs because it signals they are not constrained by fuddy duddy old school managers like Mr. Rheinhard in the Matrix who was born before asynchronous IO was invented, but if you look at the people who really hold the power and money in tech, they are all wearing suits or at least looking very sharp if not actually donning a full three piece suit. There are reasons for this.
Think of it in light of yesterday's HN discussion of minimalism in possessions. If you were only going to leave yourself with a few feet of closet space, what would you keep. The suit and your dress shirts, of course, and then maybe a sports coat and your sport shirts and then maybe a khaki. Now you can go anywhere. You can't say the same thing about a wardrobe consisting of t-shirts and shorts.
"Millenials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with each other or talking about issues that matter to them from perspectives they can identify with."
I'm really tired of reading stuff like this, the idea that the president doesn't use snapchat to communicate with voters and that is why millennials don't care. Communication is not the problem. I have no problem picking up the white house message, be it through the NYT, CNN, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, RedditAMA, Funny Or Die, The Daily Show, or anywhere else he has shown up the past couple years. The issue is that it increasingly feels like there is nothing that can be done to influence the situation. That's not just from a personal perspective - it feels like the president has a really hard time getting things done as well.
Absolutely true. Ok, everybody has decided to care; now what?
I do think a big part of the problem is that the answer to "what should we do" has been pushed way too far up the chain. "Caring" is measured by voting patterns in presidential and congressional elections. But that's way too far up the chain, it's already too late to have an impact at that level. Impact comes from affecting the processes that control who becomes politically influential, which controls who is nominated in those elections. This is where local and state governments and other politically active institutions (including businesses) come into play, but it's not at all clear and very hard to predict in exactly which ways. Voting in elections and arguing with your parents is not even close to enough, but going further isn't an obvious path, and nobody ever talks about how to do it. From a personal standpoint, I'm interested in this stuff, and I vote, but I also recognize that I have no influence and no idea what to do about it, which isn't exactly motivating!
Syriza (Greek election today) is an example of what can happen next but things have to be so very far gone before such a party can bubble to the surface. I think you're one more crisis away from it in America - and there's a very real risk that your leaders will divert attention towards blaming all of the problems on a minority group.
Find a pivot with a really long lever and jump on the end of it. The War on Terror is in full swing but we can defeat the war on drugs. You could get people to read this - or at least absorb the salient points, http://chasingthescream.com/.
> it feels like the president has a really hard time getting things done as well.
Yes and no.
He's the commander in chief and the top manager of the administration. Executive orders and simple orders. He could stop the drones. Basically any military unit. (As far as I know. Though probably while honoring the chain of command, so not directly. But disobeying a direct order is grounds for court martial, etc.)
But other than those, he could have done a lot more, on paper.
The question is do we know why he picked the people he did during his terms? Why he waited with the equal pay order? Why is he not pushing more on transparency?
And why is his team so incompetent that they botched the fucking healthcare.gov site? ACA was the big thing he pushed through Congress. And no one was keeping an eye on it?
This article shows the extent to which the President and his team are playing chess to these Youtubers' tic-tac-toe. By granting interview time to a group so clearly hungry to establish their legitimacy as "real" journalists, Obama ensured that they'd be in doe-eyed admiration of the President and the fact that they are interviewing him, and forget the principal reason that political journalism exists: to hold decisionmakers accountable to the public.
A journalist who treats the President like any other interview subject and asks tough questions, even if the President gives evasive answers, is serving the public more than a group who thinks to themselves "Holy shit, I just interviewed the President."
> the principal reason that political journalism exists: to hold decisionmakers accountable to the public
Green's point in this article is that traditional political journalism has made a mockery of this responsibility, and I for one agree with him.
We can't have Walter Cronkite anymore because political media has completely debauched itself. I'd rather have earnest if naive amateurs than however you want to describe what happens on Fox News and MSNBC. Maybe not exclusively, but at least as a counterbalance.
I don’t agree that the YouTube personalities, despite being given access, didn’t ask the President tough questions. During the interview with Obama, Hank Green (the author) asked the President about several things:
- the feasibility of the ideas he put forth in the SOTU
- the revolving door between industry and government
- his use and alleged overuse of drone strikes
- the long-term foreign policy strategy on North Korea
- the confusing marijuana policy in the US
I think these are all legitimate questions that the President should have to answer for. I think that there could have been follow-up questions asked, but the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth. Obama also took a long time in answering each question, which may have been because the complexity of the issues discussed demanded long answers, or just because he wanted to run the clock.
> the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth
Precisely the problem with giving valuable interviewing time to people like this.
They're so happy to show up that they "don't remember a lot of the interview," let alone press for it to be a real one. (Hank Green's words on MSNBC after the interview.)
The President has stock answers for every single one of those questions, btw.
I wonder how long until the cycle comes full circle, and Youtubers are co-opted as subtle spinmakers for political ends. I wonder if it's already happening or already happened.
I feel like that's actually a more terrifying prospect than the fact that the younger generation doesn't watch TV news. You can mock, bash, and discredit TV news with facts and "honesty", and that's exactly what happened. But if your trusted source of news and political ideas is visceral comedy and memetic entertainment trends, that's almost immune to rational debate, since anything and everything can be dismissed as a joke.
I can imagine a future where politicians are elected on the basis of a lulzy hashtag, and that scares me way more than what we have now.
#HopeandChange (By which I mean, social media and enthusiasm have already played a strong role in a presidential election)
I think it's easy to co-opt these single channel people, you just pick the ones you want to talk to.
Traditional media does this by trading softball treatment for access, if you are granting access on an individual basis you can make sure you get the treatment you want.
>I wonder how long until the cycle comes full circle, and Youtubers are co-opted as subtle spinmakers for political ends. I can imagine a future where politicians are elected on the basis of a lulzy hashtag, and that scares me way more than what we have now.
This is how Barack Obama got elected in 2008 and 2012 #hopeandchange
I really don't get your point. If the TV media is biased (which it is), why would I watch that over someone like Hank Green who has so far given me no reason to distrust him?
Well, it's clear now that traditional journalism is dead and not coming back. TV and newspapers are biased as hell and the idiots on YouTube are, well, idiots.
But was it ever alive in the first place? Print journalism pretty much always included the Buzzfeed-style linkbait garbage: just look at any cover of any woman's magazine in the past 20 years. As for Rupert Murdoch, even though he's never won a Pulitzer Prize, he's a perfect fit for the legacy of Joseph Pulitzer and the politically-biased, sensationalist yellow journalism he made his fame and fortune from.
One of the most terrifying facts about 20th century America is the idea that three men--and the companies they were the face of--used to give all Americans all of their information about the greater world around them. They could try as hard as they could to be unbiased, but they would still have blind spots. And that's putting it charitably.
The reality we have to deal with today is that there is a cacophony of morons, partisan hacks, shills, and other unreliable narrators. But we have the benefit that, unlike the Walter Kronkites of old, they actually look as unreliable as they really are. Those of us who are interested in the truth can triangulate between them (and revel in the wealth of raw source material--smartphone videos turn every abusive police encounter into a potential Rodney King incident) and find the fact of the matter somewhere within, and those of us who are only interested in confirming their own biases can always find a way to do that anyway.
Fantastic. One of the most opaque administrations in history [1] can buy authenticity off-the-shelf, like a jar dime-store pomade, all because they've co-opted some YouTube stars into their fiction. He's right, the traditional media blew it when they, too, allowed themselves to be co-opted. But what we need is an adversarial press, not people starstruck by their own access. It's just as bad, if not worse.
Did you watch the interview? There were multiple hardball questions, including one with a critical premise regarding drone strikes and another about regulatory capture (which the president didn't give a real answer to, but oh well). No Snowden though. I also found the rest pretty interesting/informative due to the breadth of topics covered, although of course he's said it all a million times before.
I appreciate that some hardball questions were ultimately asked, but did you notice the part in this blog post where he mentioned that his own first instinct was to ask softer questions and it was actually the people from Google who pushed him to ask harder ones? A good journalist would need no such prodding.
As a Brit, I feel that the BBC is considered pretty legitimate as a respected news source, despite being old and decidedly non-hip. They normally seem to report impartial facts, which works for me (but seemingly not the likes of Fox/MSNBC).
We also have shows similar to the Daily Show (e.g. Have I got news for you) which come along and take the mickey out of the news as well, just to be on the safe side.
Within the subject matter they decide to report they are not terrible, but there are huge gaps in what they decide is worth reporting on.
As far as I'm concerned, their role is not simply to repeat endless interviews with the major political parties. They have a role to play in showing the public that other options exist. Lately they've given UKIP a ton of airtime with endless nonsense scandals like 'X says Y down the pub' and almost ignored the rise of the Greens.
Their wall to wall coverage during the 'phone hacking scandal' compared to ongoing total-surveillance by the NSA getting a token mention every now and then.
Today, they chose to describe Syriza as a 'radical left-wing party'. I don't think that choosing 'radical' in this context is an accident.
I could go on; some of my bugbears are more trivial than others; but I think they're definitely a 'mouthpiece of the establishment'.
Better than FOX? Sure; but that's not a high bar to meet.
Our electoral system is bad enough without major media outlets focusing almost all of their time on Red vs Blue.
BBC is publicly funded. It's as if PBS hadn't faced decades of Republican attacks and budget cuts. Republicans believe that the only form of television we should watch should be for the benefit of shareholders. Even so, PBS still manages to do some great journalism with shows like Frontline. But they don't have anywhere near the budget to create content as good as the BBC.
Agreed completely. The BBC certainly aren't without their faults, but at the end of the day they're the most impartial news service I've come across. I'm glad we have them!
I was pretty impressed by the article and just watched the youtube interview and came out less impressed than before I read the article. The questions were too soft - even CNN and other big news outlets ask tougher questions than these guys did. I understand they have to be themselves but if this is supposed to be the next outlet for news, it doesn't make me very hopeful.
I thought the authors questions were pretty good, slightly less impressed with the next two (although I would also identify with the first guy more, so maybe there's something to this whole thing).
The thought I came away with was that it was probably actually a pretty easy interview for him, not because they threw him softballs, but because there's a genuine lack of political sophistication and knowledge from the interviewers, and by extension their audiences.
I think Obama realised it too by the end, and did a reasonable job of not coming off too patronising - except for the movie bit. He could have emphasised that all of their viewers have a voice, but it only counts if they use it.
To me the questions the interviewers planned up front seem reasonably solid - what's missing is anything after Obama's responses. The interviewers don't ask follow-up questions, ask about things the answer omitted, or challenge anything that was in the answer - they just move on to the next question.
Of course it would be a mistake for us to fetishize combative interviews or to say the interviewer must always disagree with the politician regardless of what they say. But if this type of interview is the future of journalism, the interviewers need to get better at asking probing questions on the fly, not just scripted questions they've had months to come up with.
Readit News
There was a time when flashing "BREAKING" in big bold letters and exclusive interviews indicated the most important things happening in the news. Now it means nothing. CNN was flashing "BREAKING" on the screens two weeks after the Malaysian airliner went down, preceding a discussion about whether or not it could have been a black hole that consumed it (that literally happened). Conversations between two parties are so canned that correspondents are even using the exact same wording as passed down by the party lines. Cable news is nothing but theater now, and to people who haven't grown up watching the news it seems very weird an disengenuous.
Focusing on externalities such as why someone became famous (a bathtub full of cereal?) lets the old guard not care about up-and-coming forms of journalism, dismissing its legitimacy. The legitimacy doesn't come from the content, but in how serious and domineering one can look when delivering the news. It's BS professionalism.
It's pretty obvious to me that most of the people in the news business will say whatever their paid to say, or in some cases what they think will sell more books.
Lolwut?! They seriously discussed the possibility of a black hole opening up and swallowing the plane?
AFAIK CNN International did not have any such discussion though they did keep going on and on about the plane.
This is the audience CNN has to entertain. You know... morons.
I've ended up getting most of my political news from the Charlie Rose show on public television. The vast majority of episodes are about non-newsy things, like culture, business, and philanthropy. Every once in awhile, something important is actually happening, and there are a couple episodes about it before moving on. It has only made the whole idea of always-on news seem even more ludicrous to me.
Most people still think a nice suit looks nice, and are automatically think the guy who looks like he cares about how he looks is more capable or responsible than the hippy in a hoodie.
Where this may be an exception is in tech but even then it's hardly universal. Edgar the Line Programmer and his buddies might dress like slobs because it signals they are not constrained by fuddy duddy old school managers like Mr. Rheinhard in the Matrix who was born before asynchronous IO was invented, but if you look at the people who really hold the power and money in tech, they are all wearing suits or at least looking very sharp if not actually donning a full three piece suit. There are reasons for this.
I'm really tired of reading stuff like this, the idea that the president doesn't use snapchat to communicate with voters and that is why millennials don't care. Communication is not the problem. I have no problem picking up the white house message, be it through the NYT, CNN, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, RedditAMA, Funny Or Die, The Daily Show, or anywhere else he has shown up the past couple years. The issue is that it increasingly feels like there is nothing that can be done to influence the situation. That's not just from a personal perspective - it feels like the president has a really hard time getting things done as well.
I do think a big part of the problem is that the answer to "what should we do" has been pushed way too far up the chain. "Caring" is measured by voting patterns in presidential and congressional elections. But that's way too far up the chain, it's already too late to have an impact at that level. Impact comes from affecting the processes that control who becomes politically influential, which controls who is nominated in those elections. This is where local and state governments and other politically active institutions (including businesses) come into play, but it's not at all clear and very hard to predict in exactly which ways. Voting in elections and arguing with your parents is not even close to enough, but going further isn't an obvious path, and nobody ever talks about how to do it. From a personal standpoint, I'm interested in this stuff, and I vote, but I also recognize that I have no influence and no idea what to do about it, which isn't exactly motivating!
Find a pivot with a really long lever and jump on the end of it. The War on Terror is in full swing but we can defeat the war on drugs. You could get people to read this - or at least absorb the salient points, http://chasingthescream.com/.
Yes and no.
He's the commander in chief and the top manager of the administration. Executive orders and simple orders. He could stop the drones. Basically any military unit. (As far as I know. Though probably while honoring the chain of command, so not directly. But disobeying a direct order is grounds for court martial, etc.)
But other than those, he could have done a lot more, on paper.
The question is do we know why he picked the people he did during his terms? Why he waited with the equal pay order? Why is he not pushing more on transparency?
And why is his team so incompetent that they botched the fucking healthcare.gov site? ACA was the big thing he pushed through Congress. And no one was keeping an eye on it?
A journalist who treats the President like any other interview subject and asks tough questions, even if the President gives evasive answers, is serving the public more than a group who thinks to themselves "Holy shit, I just interviewed the President."
Green's point in this article is that traditional political journalism has made a mockery of this responsibility, and I for one agree with him.
We can't have Walter Cronkite anymore because political media has completely debauched itself. I'd rather have earnest if naive amateurs than however you want to describe what happens on Fox News and MSNBC. Maybe not exclusively, but at least as a counterbalance.
[Edit] First post, formatted bullets.
Deleted Comment
Precisely the problem with giving valuable interviewing time to people like this.
They're so happy to show up that they "don't remember a lot of the interview," let alone press for it to be a real one. (Hank Green's words on MSNBC after the interview.)
The President has stock answers for every single one of those questions, btw.
And indeed there were a few tough questions by the first guy. It wasn't exactly a bloodbath of hostility, but is that really necessary..?
I feel like that's actually a more terrifying prospect than the fact that the younger generation doesn't watch TV news. You can mock, bash, and discredit TV news with facts and "honesty", and that's exactly what happened. But if your trusted source of news and political ideas is visceral comedy and memetic entertainment trends, that's almost immune to rational debate, since anything and everything can be dismissed as a joke.
I can imagine a future where politicians are elected on the basis of a lulzy hashtag, and that scares me way more than what we have now.
I think it's easy to co-opt these single channel people, you just pick the ones you want to talk to.
Traditional media does this by trading softball treatment for access, if you are granting access on an individual basis you can make sure you get the treatment you want.
This is how Barack Obama got elected in 2008 and 2012 #hopeandchange
But was it ever alive in the first place? Print journalism pretty much always included the Buzzfeed-style linkbait garbage: just look at any cover of any woman's magazine in the past 20 years. As for Rupert Murdoch, even though he's never won a Pulitzer Prize, he's a perfect fit for the legacy of Joseph Pulitzer and the politically-biased, sensationalist yellow journalism he made his fame and fortune from.
One of the most terrifying facts about 20th century America is the idea that three men--and the companies they were the face of--used to give all Americans all of their information about the greater world around them. They could try as hard as they could to be unbiased, but they would still have blind spots. And that's putting it charitably.
The reality we have to deal with today is that there is a cacophony of morons, partisan hacks, shills, and other unreliable narrators. But we have the benefit that, unlike the Walter Kronkites of old, they actually look as unreliable as they really are. Those of us who are interested in the truth can triangulate between them (and revel in the wealth of raw source material--smartphone videos turn every abusive police encounter into a potential Rodney King incident) and find the fact of the matter somewhere within, and those of us who are only interested in confirming their own biases can always find a way to do that anyway.
[1] http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/3/27/barack_obama_the_...
We also have shows similar to the Daily Show (e.g. Have I got news for you) which come along and take the mickey out of the news as well, just to be on the safe side.
As far as I'm concerned, their role is not simply to repeat endless interviews with the major political parties. They have a role to play in showing the public that other options exist. Lately they've given UKIP a ton of airtime with endless nonsense scandals like 'X says Y down the pub' and almost ignored the rise of the Greens.
Their wall to wall coverage during the 'phone hacking scandal' compared to ongoing total-surveillance by the NSA getting a token mention every now and then.
Today, they chose to describe Syriza as a 'radical left-wing party'. I don't think that choosing 'radical' in this context is an accident.
I could go on; some of my bugbears are more trivial than others; but I think they're definitely a 'mouthpiece of the establishment'.
Better than FOX? Sure; but that's not a high bar to meet.
Our electoral system is bad enough without major media outlets focusing almost all of their time on Red vs Blue.
The thought I came away with was that it was probably actually a pretty easy interview for him, not because they threw him softballs, but because there's a genuine lack of political sophistication and knowledge from the interviewers, and by extension their audiences.
I think Obama realised it too by the end, and did a reasonable job of not coming off too patronising - except for the movie bit. He could have emphasised that all of their viewers have a voice, but it only counts if they use it.
To me the questions the interviewers planned up front seem reasonably solid - what's missing is anything after Obama's responses. The interviewers don't ask follow-up questions, ask about things the answer omitted, or challenge anything that was in the answer - they just move on to the next question.
Of course it would be a mistake for us to fetishize combative interviews or to say the interviewer must always disagree with the politician regardless of what they say. But if this type of interview is the future of journalism, the interviewers need to get better at asking probing questions on the fly, not just scripted questions they've had months to come up with.
... or the interviews need to last for years.