In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.
Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.
I also just don’t see interviews being a big audience draw (at least for text-based news). It seems there are so many other, bigger problems than the issue of access: lack of revenues, lack of interest in quality journalism, …
Unfortunately it’s documentarians such as David Attenborough that carefully curate a picture of nature as some playful, curious thing. It would behoove schools that prepare students for post-secondary education to put on actual video recordings of how animals go at it and how the strong kill the weak (and their offspring) in the most savage and cruel of ways with complete disregard. And then ask them if they would rather not know this is how the world really is. Because that’s what taking a side means here, is being wilfully ignorant.
I suggest you see some raw video footage, without music, additional sounds, careful DOF camera work and color correction, of one animal killing another. Watch the whole thing if you can sit through it - it takes quite awhile for an animal to die while it’s screaming in pain unable to move.
But what I don’t understand is that you quote the OP article re climate change and racism, but then go off on a tangent re Attenborough? Sounds like you have an axe to grind.
What I am getting to is that by taking a side on these matters we implicitly think one is wrong, one is right, and by shunning/ignoring that magically the wrongs can be righted. I bring in nature to question this line of thinking: the moment they “fix” nature, they’ll fix racism and other things they seem to think are wrongs to be righted. Because if they knew how deep this rabbit hole goes, and once they see what kind of planet they have to contend with, it may make them realize how their $current_issue is a tempest in a teapot.
In other words: you can take a side all you want, and then what.
Epstein should have been a wake up call that rules and laws made by man are fictitious.
The 55+ are just lying, or have a very different scale where neutral falls somewhere else.
No other demographic is more religiously willing to believe anything a fat TV news retard tells them than old people in America.
The "authenticity" thing of podcasters is only meaningful if the podcaster was there. Sometimes that happens, and those are the good ones. There are good protest videos. Not many war videos. Secondary sources are just pundits, of which we have too many. It's easy to be an influencer who covers entertainment - entertainment wants to be watched. It's hard to be an influencer who covers, say, unemployment. It's possible, but you have to go and talk live to people who just got laid off. That's reporting.
It's not the delivery system. It's whether the source goes out and pulls in news. Most don't.
“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." - City Editor of a Chicago newspaper, 1918. Look at a news story and ask "did this begin with a press release or a speech?". If so, it's publicity. HN had an article from a few days ago about "CEO says" journalism. It's worse on the political front.
Democracy requires that a sizable fraction of voters know what's really happening. This is a big problem.
Influencers can be controlled. Dubai has cracked down on war reporting by the large number of influencers there.[1] Right now, Iran claims a missile hit on an Oracle data center in Dubai. The UAE denies this. Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-...
It's a sickness.
I genuinely now believe that a real barrier to (the terrible idea of) reinstating the draft is that it would actually be difficult to find and inform the public about it, in a believable way.
I feel like I vaguely remember hearing about it a while back, with little fanfare, and then not again until just yesterday.
In that time I’ve learned of all kinds of crazy developments in politics and AI companies here on HN
Personal accountability can still be something we all strive to honor. Blaming a news aggregator website for your own ignorance is a hell of a thing.
rootusrootus•1h ago
Or if you must watch the news, local only.
tigerlily•58m ago
littlexsparkee•50m ago
lotsofpulp•42m ago
Other than news about mortgage rates dropping and trends in payrates for various careers, I see almost nothing actionable in the news for 99% of people.
littlexsparkee•30m ago
kevin_thibedeau•54m ago
littlexsparkee•54m ago
modeless•46m ago
littlexsparkee•36m ago
slg•24m ago
Animats•20m ago
For example, war maps are hard to find. Al Jazeera publishes maps of what's been hit in the Middle East, which makes sense because their readers are on the receiving end. understandingwar.com contributes to an interactive war map.[1] (The site says to view it with Firefox; Chrome has bugs on mobile.)
ops.group, which is for people operating aircraft internationally, has a frequently updated map of where to avoid and what the problems are.[2] They have a GPS spoofing map. A sizable chunk of Eurasia is currently unsafe for aviation. "For flights between Europe and Asia, the normal Gulf corridor is effectively unavailable. Overflying traffic is rerouting either north via the Caucasus-Afghanistan, or south via Egypt-Saudi-Oman." Nobody wants to overfly Afghanistan. Almost no ATC, no radar, and an emergency diversion to Kabul means dealing with the Taliban. "For most operators, landing at an Afghan airport would be akin to ditching in oceanic airspace."
You have to dig that hard to find out what's going on. Neither the mainstream media nor the podcasters and influencers go that far.
[1] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/089bc1a2fe684405a67d67f...
[2] https://ops.group/blog/middle-east-airspace-current-operatio...
thesumofall•16m ago