The world would be a much better place if everybody only checked what's happening around them instead of the other side of the country / world. 99% of the "news" have 0 impact on you and you have 0 power (direct and indirect) on 99% of what's happening, why even bother ?
Just now that they started to look at what is happening elsewhere that they are starting to understand what they are lacking.
Here is the thing, and it works for everything in life: Knowing a thing is almost always better than not knowing it, even if it is not clear what use to make of it.
This said knowing what is happening near you is also very important.
An individuals knowledge is like a garden. It needs to be kept in order and it takes time to maintain. There is simply too much information being produced and a limited bandwidth to ingest this information. To select the right information is of the essence. Form a strategy of knowledge gathering. For example, one can decide to pick a topic that is not well known, in order to be a valuable amateur expert on that topic. But, just ingesting information without any rhyme or reason is a recipe for disaster.
Isn't that the problem though, knowing what is true? It is an incredibly hard thing to do, even when everyone is acting in good faith and trying their hardest, which certainly isn't the state of affairs today. I'd say much less than 10% of people would get a passing grade on both of those requirements, and I'm not even sure I'd give myself a passing grade.
"It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So."
And you provided a perfect example: Americans think they have the best education/healthcare in the World.
There are new/updated laws every single day, in my country I can read them online, 99.99% of them aren't presented in mainstream news.
Don't read mainstream newspapers or watch CNN/Fox news to be an informed citizen, that's not how it works.
Fixed it for you.
Same as holocaust, I am sure Hitler was going to prefer that other countries don't report on what was happening so that he can continue to eliminate all German Jews. When he was done, he was going to move to neighbouring countries and continue until he reaches your backyard. By then, it will be too late.
What Donald Trump tweets, does affect me directly because Google Play on my Huawei phone can stop working with one announcement from him. I need to be up to date with the politics of the US. Recession in USresults in recessions all ov er the world. We are part of one global community and what happens on one corner of the world is everyone's problem.
We can take a current event, hong kong, besides posting memes on reddit and #thoughtsAndPrayers on twitter what are people outside of the region doing ? Nothing. You can be aware and upset about something, if you don't do shit about it you're better off taking care of your local community. I also doubt we can compare the vast majority of the click bait news spewed by mainstream media and the holocaust. There is a very big difference between a war next door and whatever happens in the other side of the world.
Let's reverse your argument, what about Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan ? the US managed to (initially) get public support for those through the medias, are they a net good for the average citizen ?
Not just British, it was a global effort and a global boycott. The British government of the time wasn't a supporter of Mandela.
> I am sure Hitler was going to prefer that other countries don't report on what was happening so that he can continue to eliminate all German Jews.
The Holocaust was barely reported at the time. Much of the details were only discovered by horrified Allied troops that overran the camps. Internment and the other racial discriminatory laws were reported; and the wave of Jewish refugees was, along with the high levels of opposition to taking in refugees.
Some of those have very striking parallels today.
I don't want to be ignorant towards what is happening around me, but I feel like I have no choice, I don't want to become bitter and "pick a side", I prefer to remain ignorant.
Even when friends say "Oh, but try this source, they are soooo much better", it doesn't take long to realise there is ALWAYS an agenda behind it, a political leaning... It's exhausting.
Until something goes wrong. It's not that there won't be elections, they'll just be won by the same party for years on end. You personally will be fine, but there's an uptick in the number of journalists and activists killed in car bombs or more mysterious circumstances. The quality of the roads deteriorates and the number of homeless you have to step over increases.
Still, best not to have an agenda.
How does this follow at all?
You're doing exactly what the news spammers want. You're believing that they are the gatekeepers to knowledge and being informed. You're buying into the story that you need them to understand the world. This is a load of hogshit.
Candidates post their platforms and their ideas and encourage you to read them before you vote. How does watching the news make me more informed of their platform? They have values and they apply those values to the issues at hand. They say things like, "I believe in universal healthcare," or "I am tough against gun rights." How does being super up to date on the news help me understand how they will react to hypothetical situations, which is what I'm voting on?
Why do I need to know that there's massive protests going on in Hong Kong, the middle east and South America? Those are irrelevant to the domestic issues we face at home. The same domestic issues we face every election cycle (in the US): jobs, health care, food, guns, infrastructure. How does being well informed of the news help me make decisions based on my values and on the alignment of values with a candidate?
giving up on consuming news because everything might be biased is simply lazy
Not at all; it's a valid strategy. The events and the state of the world can be deduced from observing the (near) past just as well as from reading the news, perhaps even better. A person can stay reasonably well informed by skipping on the news, and instead observing actual events, actual outcomes, that is the (near) history. Both in person and through social circles, in particular friends and family. You could call it "the slow way" of getting the news.
As noted in OP and elsewhere in discussion, the news are rife with misinformation. It follows news listeners, subject to the misinformation, end up with various misconceptions and strong emotions, thus prone to doing things no well informed person would do. Having a sizable segment of population not subject to the news, and instead informed via others means is a natural counter-balance, a safety mechanism against single mindedness imparted by the centralized news.
Journalism is always biased; even supposedly "objective" news outlets, by just picking which stories to emphasize or even report at all, are engaging in bias -- even when you think that the stories they do choose are "fair". This is not a bad thing, it's just a reality of life (it could be argued that objective reporting is impossible, philosophically speaking). You just have to be aware of the bias and take it into consideration.
Every time I want to dig in a subject it always comes down to this:
1. If the topic has scientific coverage, try to find meta-analysis. If there isn't any the field has a high chance of lacking ground truth. Sadly you need at least statistics knowledge to know where are you getting into, and some times this isn't enough because domain knowledge is a must. Some words may be used in a different meaning than you're used to.
2. If there isn't any scientific coverage, try to find specialized sources. Most of them are not open access though.
3. If your only resource is main stream media or internet outlets, then try to balance out different approaches. This is a very hard task because the amount of noise is staggering. It's not only agendas but journalist really doing a poor/cheap/lazy work or a combination of them all.
If you happen to know a domain, then try to avoid anything other than specialized media upwards, because you'll get angry or at least you won't believe how weird some realities are depicted to the general public.
It's also a good exercise to read info that doesn't reinforce your beliefs, try to break the famous "eco chamber", it's probably the only way to not become an idiot, even if you know the truth from first hand, because it's useful to know what people are being told to think and how some other people can reach other conclusions.
I feel like twitter is actually the best place to that process, and to "defragment" the complexity of information flow. You can follow "mainstream" opinion makers and "rebels", "experts/specialists" for narrow but deep insights, and so on
"real" journalism doesn't make any money because it's expensive to make and doesn't generate any more ad revenue than bad journalism.
Most newspapers lose money, and that's getting worse not better. So billionaires own (and subsidise) newspapers, and get to influence content.
So either we start paying for our news, or we continue with the current situation. Though it's going to get worse because we're de-training an entire generation of journalists, and the advertising revenue is shrinking.
The BBC gets its revenues from public funding, but it's got a strong political bias.
Also, if there was ever a time to be concerned about the owners of media organizations controlling the narrative this is not it. The media, and the ruling class more generally, being pissed off that the peasants are daring to speak back and have their own non approved opinions is behind the never ending stream of invective directed at the big tech companies[1].
Martin Gurri’s book on this loss of control, The Revolt of the Public, is amazing by the way[2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/19/the-co...
[2] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-...
https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/02/book-review-revo...
You really can't see the difference between the two? If Mark Cuban has a problem with a player and cuts him from a game, then only the Maverick's suffer. If he (owned a paper and) has a problem with a politician and demands hit pieces, the whole country suffers.
Noam Chomsky explains to a BBC journalist how it can be accomplished much more cleverly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nBx-37c3c8
Reporter: How can you know that I'm self-censoring, how can you know that a journalist is self-censoring?
Chomsky: I'm not saying you're self-censoring, I'm sure you believe everything you say. But what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.
What changed in the 2016 election is the torrent of foreign governments who were spreading outright lies in the interest of harming the country, and Americans who gleefully cooperated with them.
What has changed is the mainstream media used to care a lot more about being honest. Now they often couldn't give a toss.
I don't mind media being partisan, it's always been so, and often it's revealing to see the reporting from both sides of an issue, and add the FT's take for the financial slant. I do mind that we're rapidly running out of sources that care about being honest. Murdoch ruined the Times, the Barclay Brothers ruined the Telegraph. Both now far more opinion than news. That's a loss, whatever your politics.
the mainstream media used to care a lot more about being honest
Never in the history of the world have individuals had such ease of access to original sources, such as eyewitness accounts, texts of legislation, etc. Yet people generally stay within their bubbles.
There is the argument that if people were equipped with the skills to identify bias in reporting themselves then these news sources would not be able to operate as effectively and with as much influence as they do today.
For example, in Swedish schools children are actively taught to identify and evaluate biases in news sources as a way to filter false reporting [1].
It we start giving children the toolbox required to live in our (real) world of imperfect reporting then the impact of biased news sources might be neutralized in a generation.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/dan-gainor-fake-news-abc-fal...
The reporting could be a lot more balanced, presenting both sides, not using provocating headlines, etc.
It would probably be a bit more boring (which is why even previously serious publications like the Financial Times gave up).
I can't remember where exactly I've read that and what the exact wordings were though.
Google Translate:
>French media: who owns what?
>Property relations between the French media and their main shareholders
>The data is organized in two tables:
>1. 'medias_francais.tsv' contains all shareholders (natural or legal persons) and media represented on the map
>2. 'relations_medias_francais.tsv' details the capital links between these shareholders and the groups or media they own
>Last updated November, 2019
>Technical indication: for those who wish to participate in updating the database by making a pull request, make sure that the file is encoded in UTF-8 with unix line breaks so that we can merge it all without conflict.
Edit: I wish this was all added to Wikidata so we can chart this for every country but also map the transnational stake-holding.
However I agree that the media is biased and it is worse now than ever. I think even more than being biased, it’s what they choose to report on or not report on that matters. Look at the coverage of Andrew Yang on MSNBC. There are over a dozen instances of ignoring him on charts and graphs and putting lower-polling candidates on display other than him. A few times is one thing but it’s literally over 15 times, including ignoring him for the first 30 mins of the November debates and giving him the least amount of talking time of all the candidates for the 4th debate in a row. Things like this show that media is biased to a degree that is undermining our democracy.
I would say this is beyond biased and well into the "literally evil" category.
Strangely, this is reassuring to my sanity because looking at the opposite points of view of the media leads the logical person to conclude they can't be talking about the same thing, that they both cannot be true. With news deconstruction like they do on No Agenda it becomes obvious that "mainstream news" in the United States is pretty much a world of make-believe these days.
Despite the social shame associated with it, I no longer even believe main stream history around things like the kennedy assassination. I don't know what happened, but I'm skeptical that what they say happened actually happened.
We live in an epistemological radical age, with mass psychological operations being carried out by multiple state and non-state actors.
The good news is that the only sane response is to step back and focus on the ones we love around us, which is what we should be doing anyway.
You can't just say "I'll focus on the ones I love around me" and ignore the rest.
Irish Democracy[1] is more effective and more moral than any sort of political activism.
[1] "Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous….One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy”—the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people—than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs." James Scott - Two Cheers for Anarchism
That's the only solution that's offered, and a bad one at that. Letting "the people decide", e.g. democratizing the news, is a bad idea. How would we know what to choose? How would we know that there's an important issue out there that needs to be reported on, beforehand? Normal people aren't investigative reporters.
I don't have a solution either, but I know what it is we need. We need good journalists to do good journalism and be able to choose freely what they research and report on. The current for-profit corporate structure of the news media is incompatible with that.
That's why you get more truth nowadays from independent journalists, researchers and content creators than from the corporate media, which will almost exclusively lie to you to further an agenda. It's very hard to separate the weed from the chaff though, and it requires a lot of critical thinking and observation of the reader.
Well sure, but how can such a thing really be accomplished, considering all the difficult pre-requisites, one of the main ones being likely no workable business model under the current state of affairs in the world?
This fake news thing is a huge problem, but who do we expect to find a solution, under the current constraints nature forces upon us? Politicians? Media? Altruistic billionaires? Democracy ("the people")?
In the bizarre matrix of information flow that takes place on Planet Earth circa 2019, HN happens to be a unique and substantial junction, frequented by an unusually high concentration of intelligent and logical people. I propose that if something is ever going to change, if any entity is capable of bringing the mental horsepower to the table to perform a comprehensive, unbiased analysis of the problem, and come up with workable solutions that can overcome the unfortunate constraints, it is going to take the collective intelligence of something like the HN community. I further propose that not only do we have this capability, but also that we have a responsibility. The world is what we make of it, and as it is it seems like we're all using our substantial intellectual abilities to analyze the problem, but then just complain to each other about it and point out how others (the people mentioned above) "should" fix it. News flash: they're not going to fix it, for the very reasons that people are pointing out in this thread.
So, what are we going to do about this problem dang?
Or the same idea from a different perspective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKzVmVDCtFg
I've become quite fascinated lately how artists seem able to better communicate complex, multi-dimensional ideas, where plain language and logic fails. But then, this has always been the case if you stop and think about it.
I'll throw one idea in the ring: a government-sponsored, unbiased and transparent, crowd-sourced version of Snopes, that doesn't just fact-check cherry picked fake news stories, but rather does a continuous review of the daily news stream. The goal isn't to perform a full, "truthful" telling of each story, but rather to serve as a "spot the lie" service, pointing out bias, assumptions, memes, opinions, mind reading, future predicting, history rewriting, logical fallacies, different perspectives, overlooked complications, and so forth and so on. The goal is not to tell people what's really going on, but rather to make it crystal clear that in actuality, we don't really know WHAT is going on! And that's ok, because at least we'd now know that, which is quite an improvement from our current state.
Of course, this is kind of what reddit is in a sense, and it typically degrades into a shitshow of people yelling at each other and voting on their subconscious biases. Identifying that behavior as a problem, and finding a solution, is something I suspect the minds of HN could solve. Well, if we could stop fighting amongst each other that is.
The larger problem seems to be global.
The ability to be expressive comes with it certain biological traits and dispositions. These traits may determine your viewpoints on matters.
So, if I hire journalists purely based on their writing ability, I may find most of them have very similar political views. If I create an industry of the best actors/musicians, again I may find them to have similar traits and views.
So, you can have a situation where some view has 50% support in the larger population, but almost no support in the press, academia, entertainment industry etc.
In a society based on free speech and no violence, the views supported by expressive people have an overwhelming advantage. The problem is just because you are very good at communication, doesnt mean your viewpoint is always correct. That is the reason some brilliant professors dont make it in the private sector, while someone who cant string a sentence together becomes a billionaire.
But when people see, supposedly neutral organizations have an overwhelming slant to one side of a viewpoint, the organization loses credibility. They are in a bubble.
When you no longer have institutions of fairness everyone can agree upon, you create the problem of fake news.
This is an extremely hand-wavy assumption that you're basing your arguments on. Any evidence to back that up? It would seem to me that the ability to express one's views would be orthogonal to one's viewpoints on various matters.
Since when? I know quite a number of brilliant engineers in different fields. Most of them should never be put in front of a camera or a general audience for public speaking. Having strong and even well understood viewpoints does not mean you have the ability to translate them outside of your domain well. That is a rather rare trait.
[0]: https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/who-owns... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TitleMax
It's actually easier to tell today whether something is fake because there are more outlets to determine an intersection within.
Here's how you do it:
Read both CNN and Fox. If something is reported on both, it's real. For stories that exist on both, notice the slant of each story. Pay attention to emotive conjugation [1] and ask yourself these three questions:
1. Why did the editors pick this story?
2. What is their opinion of it and the actors in it?
3. What stories are not being reported because the editors are not interested in them.
I'd be up for prominent disclosure of ultimate ownership, though.
If the belief is that the press (news) should be free and unencumbered to report the truth, and accepting all solutions are imperfect, then I think its a case of removing the worst influences in alignment with that goal.
Media conglomerates and billionaires usually have competing interests due to their diverse interests and influence. So my suggestion is not to remove them or exclude them from news but to limit the number of levers they can pull within news.
I accept that my thoughts are imperfect and flawed also, so offer them for discussion and nothing else.
One could just as easily argue that the state of the media is due to a failure to adapt to the internet in which blogs, Twitter, and social media become peoples primary source of information. So the "power of the people" could have in fact caused this issue. This also being a conjecture.
The only point in this article that is well substantiated is that trust in media is low and I feel this article is perfectly on trend.
I don't see a problem with two wildly different takes on the same incident, particularly when it is political. In fact, I would say this is a sign of a healthy democracy. Compare it to the alternative: a single, typically state-sponsored viewpoint in a totalitarian state.
This isn't to say there aren't problems with fake news, the corporatisation of media, sensationalism, etc. But competing narratives imposes at least some checks and balances.
It wouldn’t be perfect but could be better than what we have where there is no responsibility or accountability for misrepresenting news events.
Let's say you disbar some John Doe so he cannot be hired by a news media organisation any more.
There is still nothing stopping him from blogging, tweeting, instagramming, and tiktoking. I suspect that the people who really know how to spin stories and get a following don't really need to work for a newspaper at all.
What I'm saying is that the news corporations may not be as influencial as some people believe. Let me take, for example, the Hong Kong protests/riots (whatever you would like to call them). There were plenty of fake news and rumors circling around Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc; and those had real influence on how people viewed the protests/riots; none of those fake news or rumors had to come from a "proper" news tv station or newspaper.
The issue it tries to address is the one where people are looking to find journalistic news based on confirmed evidence rather than hearsay, speculation, playing loose with statistics, posing opinionmakers as experts and driving narrative, etc.
Second, make an effort to understand the context of any actions or quotes. This may require some more research and understanding. You can rarely extract this from a news article and requires some careful language parsing to determine what the facts are vs some reporters opinion or agenda.
I wonder if we'll start seeing 1) better tools for historians, and 2) tools historians currently used accelerated/improved to do more real-time news.
I think the only defense is to get news from a variety of diverse sources.
Came here to say that I hate that stupid ticker at the top. Utterly unnecessary, gratuitous, overboard animation, even when the price of an item didn't actually change!
Immediately switched to Reader View in Firefox because the ticker was too annoying.