Think about all the "Sources say" articles you've read at 'respected publications' over the past few years. How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?
The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true.
So, what now?
The faux equivalency "they're all the same" (usually pointing to a tiny, minuscule fraction of stories where something was errant) is exactly how we ended up with the rise of overtly fake news. In the same way we have normalized politicians who lie overtly and repeatedly by casting them all the same: some politician took exaggerated credit or said something that in some contexts might be misleading, ergo he's the same as the one who lies maliciously at every turn. "They're all the same"
I wonder if there's a snappy name for this fallacy that professionals are somehow responsible for the failings of amateurs. It's pretty common.
- Blogger writes poorly researched post -> "mainstream journalists are much worse"
- Crypto project is fraud -> "banks are the real scams"
Applying this logic to the tech industry, we get:
- Random Wordpress plugin is poorly designed -> "the real incompetents are software engineers at FAANGs"
I mean, it might be true, but there's really no relationship between the two and it doesn't absolve the amateur.
If your business model generates revenue through advertising, you are incentivized to attract attention, as we all know very well. News is no different; news publications are incentivized to write outrage-generating content to get you to look for ad revenue, whether it's CNN or Breitbart or ONN or Fox or NYT, it doesn't matter.
CNN isn't the same as Fox on this level, for sure, so it's not completely equivalent, but that's mostly because the ideology is different. But outrage on the left sells, outrage on the right sells. Those publications are different because the outrage they sell is targeted at different audiences.
You are making a false equivalence. Fox publishes outright nonsense like "Texas has 0 deaths from Covid now, showing mask mandates are unnecessary" (asterisk: for one fluke day in the metrics, so we're not technically lying, even though we know members of Congress will cite while paraphrasing into huge lies).
That's not a very convincing statement. Do you have anything to back that up?
So, in conclusion, human beings excel at pattern matching, even when the patterns aren't there, and sometimes use their pattern matching ability to validate the point of view which aligns most closely to their identity and psychological needs.
I used to follow this friend of friend journalist just to see the unnamed sources. It was funny because the articles frequently presented them as authoritative like “knowledgeable sources familiar with Mr Jackson say…” Funny because I knew the mom and she just read the same material anyone else could read.
I'm sure most hacker news folks can find the right-leaning fake news easily so here's some left-leaning fake news to balance things out. Most of these include citations as well.
Are they? For instance, Ars Technica used to be a source of high quality tech journalism for nerds, where the journalists seemed to really “get it”. There’s still some of that left, but in the recent years, I observed more and more bland nothingburger articles coated in clickbait titles popping up in my feed; to add insult to injury, the comment section was sinking deeper and deeper into tribal outrage, consistent with the rest of the (Anglo, at least) Internet. I finally unsubscribed last year. Now I know zero source of consistent high quality tech journalism.
relatedly, my neighbor was just telling me yesterday how anxious and frazzled she's been for the past number of months. she's constantly following current events on npr, nytimes, facebook, instagram, and youtube. she's having a hard time concentrating and getting things done. she's yet to make the connection between these things herself, even with gentle (and even overt) nudging.
Ars Technical in particular has been around for a long time and always as funded.
There’s something different now that is maybe compounded by only being ads.
I think the friction is between cost structures from a different revenue time and just constantly using short term tactics to hold onto declining revenue.
So the issue isn’t as revenue per se, but the bad business models associated with ads.
