There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.
[1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.
Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there.
We have to acknowledge what has changed in our world and why things are the way that they are. Perhaps daily news is simply not profitable enough to provide us with quality information, and our economic incentives (namely advertising dollars from websites, YouTube, TikTok and the like) are having an adverse effect on quality.
I think the GP's statement was that there are almost no decent newspapers anymore, which I think nobody would disagree with.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about economics than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
But in fact Crichton's quote was:
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. [0]
Why they felt the need to edit Palestine out of the quote is unclear.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michae...
Editing the quote without using "..." or similar indications was, of course, unacceptable.
Changing "Palestine" to "economics" was done by an anonymous editor five days ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gell-Mann_amnesia...
Also, if any news orgs are listening: when you are regurgitating a press release about, say, a report or scientific paper, please make it your house style to hyperlink to the report or paper. That way I can see your sources and judge the claims for myself.
Also, people who write reports or papers and then make press releases: please upload them to your own damn websites, and make them easily findable by the public. Don't just email the press release to your pals in the media, and not put your words anywhere else.
The issue here is that for every journalist there are 6 to 7 PR people. (There approx. 45,000 journalists but 297,000 PR people in the USA. PR agencies employ 114,000 ppl.)
But there are some good investigative journalists out there.
Arguably, all the smart and careful journalists have moved to the weekly or monthly format. Economist, The Atlantic, and the like.
But there are good newspapers just like they are good <any category of thing>.
Although good newspapers still have bias, but as a reader, you can correct for bias. You can’t correct for sloppy fact checking.
Like in archery, if you always land in the same spot, you can “reverse bias” the result back to bullseye. If you land all over the place, there’s nothing you can do.
The only problem is that good newspapers cost some money.
Is it as easy as NYT? Or Economist? Or is that still slop and ProPublica is the standard? But even then, something like ProPublica is great for investigative journalism but less useful as a general source of information.
I'm happy to pay for a good source of news. But finding something that doesn't just look good, but is in fact actually good, that's my problem.
As others have mentioned I would consider ProPublica probably the gold standard right now
I was mildly obsessive about fact checking. And oh wow, it is bad.
My takeaway was that people who casually read the news (e.g. newspaper, scanning headlines on their favorite news site, etc) are the most misinformed.[1] The one who doesn't follow the news knows he is ignorant and doesn't know the inaccurate information. The one who follows it heavily, and with an eye towards gaining knowledge (and not following a tribe) will develop the skill to sift through the crap.
[1] Well, OK - those who obsessively follow only the news in their bubble are probably worse.
Still. In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.
Yes!
And two of the most common indicators of that are if you read something that either makes you thrilled or furious.
I would go so far as to say that the median human with a 100IQ doesn’t even understand the concept of what constitutes a “fact” or how you would dicriminate fact from opinion or has even heard the word “epistemology”
Expecting anything close to that in the context of celebrity gossip… well at that point the author needs to manage his own expectations of humanity
For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.
Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.
Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
I agree though, that the general population can't reasonably be expected to do a better job of it than the professionals, so I can't imagine that exhortation having much effect.
There is no reason to try to excuse it
The analogy is invalid and casts doubt on those self proclaimed incredibly rare critical reasoning skills.
OK, if you're reading an (alleged) interview with an actress where she, a nonagenarian talks about her 40s, but it turns out she was in her 30s, gasp.
However, if someone in the news section, keeps calling several US cities a warzone, over and over again, with no evidence, ehh, the hardest part about fact checking this is overcoming any personal biases or prejudices you might have.
What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?
If the newspaper is printing it, they own it. A mere footnote pointing ou tthat the Mets didn't exist then would suffice.
We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content.
High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce.
The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content.
With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap.
That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off.
The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer.
We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.
Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced.
It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to go "oopsie daisies".
Couple things:
1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least.
2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that".
Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.
References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes.
It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently.
Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet
I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc.
I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers.
It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked.
I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.
I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.
Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.
While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.
So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.
yes, but also to manufacture consent for the priorities of the rich and powerful
So the quest is for eyeballs, but not for cash. They're totally willing to throw away the pennies* that they could get from that if the alternative is not to get the ideas they want to push into circulation, which often boosts their other business interests.
It's not even possible to make money from journalism. Every outlet is a money sink for someone, you should just wonder if that person has a moral reason for throwing away the cash or another goal.
[*] is there any news outlet that beats alpha other than the NYT? Maybe the WSJ?
That's not to say that they don't run their fair share of gossip/clickbait... but show me an online medium that does not.
It is worth paying attention to the significant rise in prominence of non-profit newsrooms, particularly in the USA.
Some notable examples:
The Baltimore Banner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baltimore_Banner Founded: 2022
ProPublica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica Founded: 2007
The Texas Tribune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Tribune Founded: 2009
The Marshall Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marshall_Project Founded: 2014
I'm particularly excited about the Baltimore Banner, who are only a few years old but are earning sizable subscription revenue now (it's healthy for them not to be too dependent on donors).
I would also be interested to hear about how older small and alternate news sources compare to these newer ones. To use an example I'm familiar with, Willamette Week in Portland has a reputation of being halfway decent. Though to be fair, it also has advertising, and does not even have subscriptions since 1984.
I believe they did it because they wanted the power that owning a media outlet can provide in order to help protect their actually profitable businesses.
It certainly helps that they have their own revenue streams so that they're not just money down the drain. If the Post loses $100M per year, but Amazon keeps making Bezos $50B per year, that's fine, probably costs him less than the depreciation on his yachts or jets.
People always ask how we will deal with AI generated fake images and news etc. My answer is the way we have always done it: by creating institutions to deliver accurate information
1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals.
2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.
First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.
In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.
Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.
The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract.
But looking into it, that company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships?
Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments
are there any facts claimed on this page that are incorrect
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45583336
TLDR: HN commenter saying that "Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story." which spawned a whole discussion.
The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.
My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack.
But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there.
Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe.
Of course, that's how it used to work!
The problem is that micropayments are expensive. 2.9% and 30 cents is 32.9% on a dollar transaction (and basically all of it if you charge 50 cents to read an article). I've seen some cryptocurrency attempts at a solution, but I think a more viable solution would be a single account you periodically top up, and some aggregator that distributes payments to outlets in bulk to minimize fees.
I've looked at others' attempts in this space [1][2][3]*, but none of them seem to have taken off and I'm not sure why. It seems like a win for publishers, unless those micropayment news readers end up cannibalizing their subscriber base.
[3] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
* I think Brave's approach of replacing ads with their own and paying in their own crypto is atrocious FWIW
I think that this is a fundamentally wrong headed idea. I might go farther and say that you're not going to create a new model for news, you're going to discover a new model, or you're going to accept the model that you know works, and figure out how to make it conform to your values without breaking it.
The facts: people who produce a lot of what we call news want it to be read. They write it because they have made a value judgement that it has importance, and that it should be reacted to by people. They should be backed by people who share those values - and those people should be paying for the news to be made and circulated to anyone who they can convince, beg, or trick into spending their time to understand what the producers of the news (both financiers and journalists) think is important.
This is the current actual model of the news, even though it still masquerades as a strange public service model adapted from network television news where OTA channels were required to do something in return for their use of the public airwaves. This was never the print model, which is that you have a boss, and you do what he says.
The other model of the news was never in danger. People will pay for sports and celebrity news and photographs because it is entertainment. People will even pay for crime news (of the titillating type, like violent street crime, rape and murder) because it also usually is entertainment masquerading as public service. None of that is in danger. It's important to be specific about what you're talking about.
I think that the way to save the endangered part of the news is the same way we need to save everything - more collaboration tools for individuals to form into groups. I think we see this forming with things like Substack, Patreon and Locals, etc., and what we need is to make this more decentralized, and not routed through a few gatekeepers all additionally gated by banks and credit card companies. 500 people should be able to start a newsroom of 10 people with their spare pennies, and get what they believe and what they think is important to the widest audience possible. The Substacks, Patreons, etc. have shown that it is not hard to get that many people together to pay a few bucks for something they believe in, or simply like.
If there's a tl;dr: you shouldn't be paying to read journalism; if anything, people should pay you to read their journalism. I wish I could take money from 80% of the garbage I wasted my time reading. We need microdebits, not micropayments.
In some cases it is relatively easy, but in many cases it requires some subject area expertise.
I do wish it was easier to punish media organizations for slop; however any feedback mechanism would also be (ab)-used for political purposes and reputation laundering.
Modern media is a combat arena.
*laughs in Taylor Lorenz*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R...?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S......?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B...
rafterydj•1h ago
Not only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.
rpodraza•1h ago
peterldowns•1h ago
ecshafer•58m ago
b2ccb2•34m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610450
The last one hits hard:
I am distraught at how AI is conditioning us with its sycophancy.