Most journalism nowadays is like pop music: it does not really provide anything new.
You can take a newspaper or a radio show from any day, replay it any other day, and it will probably pass unnoticed.
The main problem, as I see it, is that there's just too much of it. There's no need for daily news and journalists produce formulaic content because it's the only way to produce so much content.
TV and free news, yes. Paid journalism, per the article, no; it’s for elites.
The Financial Times and Politico’s reporting tend to be concise, timely and actionable. It’s just that the whip for a Schumer-Sinema-Johnson-other guy grind around the finer points of a budget negotiation, or jobs numbers vis-à-vis rates forecasts, aren’t relevant for most people. (Or the, for that matter.)
- This is the most important election of our times. The other candidate wants to send you and your children to the gulag.
- Person X had sex with person Y and laundered PAC money.
- Government shutdown unless item X gets funded and item Y doesn’t. X supporters say Y supporters are holding the country hostage. Y supporters say they just want America to get back to work.
- ...
It would be journalistic malpractice not to report those things when there is evidence to support the allegations.
The news only started sounding like that very recently.
You can check this for yourself, go look at some archived newspapers from the early 1990s.
I haven't listened to 7 O'Clock News/Silent Night in years, but I always felt the news in it were timeless. Maybe I'll give it a try tonight to see if 1966 news still sound fresh in 2024.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_O%27Clock_News/Silent_Nigh...
We need a basic event log. Hard cold events, timestamped.
Every vote a politician makes on every issue. Every murder. Every time a mass shooting happens. Every time oil spills. Every time Boeing loses a chunk of its hull. Every time Boeing then lobbies for some self-serving favor. Every time a rocket is fired. Every time an incursion is detected.
Make it filterable. Searchable. Etc.
Journalists are biased though, like any human, but I don't see how it can be fixed. Even an AI digesting the events will have some bias, though it might be aware of much more things than a simple humain brain.
A raw event log is definitely useful tool in the toolbox, allow people who interested to perform deep level analysis.
To engage with different generations, we need different tools that engage with them and yet provide verifiable information.
1. The event log -- in many places, this still doesn't exist in digital, structured, usable format. It's gotten better, but there's still a ways to go
2. Referencing the underlying event log -- there needs to be interpretation, summarization, and commentary, for the average viewer/reader. However, all of that should come with a reference to the underlying event log
We've gotten to the place we've gotten because (1) is impenetrable to the average person (or non-existent) and (2) doesn't happen.
Consequently, a bag of words has become more and more confused with facts.
We've had hyperlink technology for a while, journalism needs to fucking use it. :/
Hey Google, how much worse is everything this year?
According to Eventscore.com, national despair increased by 34.2%, a slight uptick compared to last year. School shootings have proceeded as expected, political corruption is within norms, and economic marginalization has followed modeled trends. Climate change and wars continue, planes are falling apart again, the courts made bad decisions, protestors are angry. But a new VR headset is coming out soon and a sportsball team somewhere won a game. Happy new year! Your next update is in 2025.
Sometimes things need to be explained. Now, long-winded magazine articles that exist for the writer to show off the virtuosity of their prose? That's niche for people who enjoy those things.
But otherwise raw brute-force data encourages raw brute-force policy.
For example, data point of prevailing home prices indicates a problem - that housing has gotten very expensive. Dumb brute-force policy = price caps. Analysis explains that houses are expensive because of supply and demand and the supply has plummeted while demand is rising, and that price caps would make that worse. Where does that connection live in your event-log?
There is not even an attempt to be fair anymore to all sides of any given issue, and the editorial contempt for the average viewer/reader leaks through much more often than it used to. The natural response from many people is simply to stop watching, and to get their news elsewhere. Thus far, mainstream news networks have not seemed to care or do any introspection at all as to why they are losing so much viewership and credibility.
I'm sympathetic to your description of mainstream news (which is a bit of a nebulous term, I must admit; "legacy" might be a better description), but, in my experience, the news you get from "elsewhere" is often unabashedly biased. So, is the fall in popularity of mainstream news a result of the lack of neutrality, or because it's not partisan enough? After all, wildly biased news is wildly popular online and mainstream news has to compete. There's a network effect to that. Social media has made the ability to curate one's newsfeed to a degree of ideological specificity that is pretty incredible. Bias sells.
Personally, I don't think it's "neutrality" or even "bias" that is the issue with most news these days. A lot of news orgs have simply abdicated themselves from the vital role of journalism in a functioning liberal democracy: accountability. Most people follow the news incessantly but actually know next to nothing about what is actually happening in government or politics. All they get in the news is a slice of a soap-opera instead of insight into governance or politicking, backstage where the sausage is actually made and where crime, graft, negligence, corruption, stupidity, and brazen cruelty in the pursuit of power, is endemic by both parties.
Journalism has also become a "status" job that is often only attainable and maintainable as a career by people from elite education or with connections to the industry. You end up with a particular class of people as journalists interacting with politicians or executives or other people from the same class. This leads an effect whenever they try to cover lower class people that is similar to that famous image of Hilary Clinton walking into that small apartment.
I don’t think those two explanations are at odds with each other. People may prefer listening to a news source that tries to be neutral. But if the reporters can’t hide their personal leanings, they would rather go with a news source where the reporters’ personal leanings agree with their own.
Part of this is driven by the increasing polarization of journalists. In 1971, democrats somewhat outnumbered republicans among journalists. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tiny-percentage-american-jo.... By 2022, that ratio is now 10:1 https://ustimesmirror.com/a-tiny-shrinking-percentage-of-ame....
People aren’t stupid. They can tell the difference between someone who is trying to overcome their personal leaning and be neutral, and someone who is so affected by their personal leaning that they can’t even conceal it. People can trust the former person even if they disagree. People can’t trust the latter person.
Fox News still tops the basic cable charts. It saw less viewers in 2023 but so did all of cable together. It's unclear to me at all that they are "losing so much viewership" vs. people just leaving cable and getting their news/entertainment elsewhere.
I'm sure Fox News's marketing department sees what their cable numbers, streaming numbers and online reader numbers all look like together and I really doubt their style of reporting that got them to where they are today suddenly became irrelevant when everyone else in the industry seems to have followed suit, rather than find success with another strategy.
The idea that they've lost viewership and credibility is, imo, wishful thinking on your part.
Example: I see "[Administration] transporting migrants from the border to cities around the country, in secretive nighttime flights" receiving heavy coverage on a certain news channel (you can probably fill in the gaps here, but I'll leave the specifics out because that's not important for the illustration). Like, it's most of what they're talking about, for the entire hour or so I happen to be in a room with them on the TV, and not during an opinion segment.
Quick google:
1) Not secret,
2) Some are at night, but that's just because of, like... flight scheduling, same way some commercial flights are after sundown and others aren't, plenty are during the day, and it's not as if nighttime flights are somehow significantly harder to track than daytime ones or like it's weird for passenger planes to fly at night, so that whole bit was silly to begin with, worst evil plan ever if that was a deliberate part of it (as was implied), and
3) It's part of longstanding, ordinary operation of immigration control, isn't a new thing, and is happening for non-crazy (and certainly not secret) reasons—though one could disagree with them and say something else should be done instead, sure, but that's not how it's being covered, it's being covered as (implicitly) a new program (not new) being carried out for mysterious reasons (not mysterious) in secret (not secret).
Is this "story" receiving similar heavy coverage with a different slant on perceived-as-opposing channels? No, the info on it's mostly to be found on simple factual sites that published info on these activities from before it was "a story", and sites dedicated to debunking "fwd: fwd: fwd:" crap, because it's, emphatically, not even news, so how would an ordinary news program cover it? It's simply absent.
The less-brazen version of this is to not cover or downplay something that is news but that you'd rather bury but this stuff is... on another level. The "other side" can't provide a different slant, or uncover a story you're hiding, because it's not even a story. (the evolved version of this tactic, of course, is that your opinion-focused programs accuse the "other side" of burying the story and use it as Yet More Evidence that they can't be trusted, which story they can't even responsibly cover because it's made-up, unless their story is to report that you're inventing news) Bonus points that this gives you stuff to talk about if you're the ones trying to avoid a real story that's inconvenient. It's brilliant, really.
Dry facts.
Balanced commentary.
They're doing it wrong if it's not boring, because it shouldn't be playing your emotions.
If the for-profit sector wants to continue to air partisan-pro-wrestling-masquerading-as-news... fine. But the average viewer/reader needs to have an easily accessible and comprehensive alternative.
Most countries have some form of this, but it needs to be recognized as a critical democratic institution in a post-gen-AI world, and funded as such.
If you want non-profit, government funded news then NPR and VOA exist. The quality is generally pretty good, although they're not free of bias either.
This perception of a dichotomy in news is a brain worm that needs to be excised from everyone's mind.
What's the "balanced" commentary for something like the JFK assassination, for example?
LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because LHO was a communist. LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because LHO was crazy. LHO was the lone gunman who shot the president because the CIA paid him to (and then killed him). LHO was a patsie and the president was shot by a second gunman from the grassy knoll because the CIA wanted to invade Cuba.
Off the top of my head those are the stories that would need "balanced commentary".
News organization don't need to be unbiased and they don't need to be balanced. What they need is a to stop catering to rabid political fanbases who've got involved in the team sport of politics not out of some sense of civic duty to their fellow man but out of loneliness and a need to belong[1]. News organizations are the mirror reflecting us, not the other way around.
[1] https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2020/03/20/the_lone...
It’s mind blowing to go back and watch CNN from the 1980s: https://youtu.be/T3S6cDpr3j4?si=7Fp-wfR9403_6jw_. It was just news, without all these talking heads offering opinion.
Is this a parody? I thought it was serious until here.
TLDR journalism is expensive. Accurate journalism even more so, investigative 10 x that. if its only for rich people, then only rich people problems will get exposed.
Longer:
As you know journalism costs, "journalism" is cheaper, and often more popular. What do I mean?
Big paid for news systems have the budget to let people investigate stuff, peer in, check sources and generally have specialists in different areas (transport, health, science, trade, business, environment, law , etc). This means that its harder to sneak bullshit past them, and use that platform as a free advertiser.
What does this mean in practice? Well, lets look at tech coverage. the free sites are basically a thin veneer over tech company's PR. Certain sites will be given exclusive access if they are nice and well behaved. Tech companies are almost never tackled on their bullshit. Thats down to financial news sites or the like.
Theranos was obviously pulling some bullshit, but it wasn't until the WSJ put some effort in before consequences actually happened. but how could that be? because up until the finance news papers got involved, Theranos was operating in a pull model, sending invites to tech journalists who know that if they say bad things, they won't be called back. Apple and Tesla do this as well, along with others. This means that if you want eyeballs, you need to be nice to the tech companies and print bullshit.
So what does that mean?
It means that rich people's news sources are doing the majority of investigative journalism, which means there are scandals that affect the average person, going unpunished.
For the UK that means things like the collapse of the NHS, Adult and social care, the halfing of all local council budgets, along with education for kids with any kind of extra need. Most of that is known, but its never a front of centre by the news sources. Which means the government can ignore it. (see the post office scandal, it was known about, but never front page. it took a fucking drama to shame the state into action.)
Even if all only people who are affluent, highly educated, privileged (aren't all affluent people privileged?), and middle-aged or older read the news, that's still way more people than care about art. Plenty of people I know who fit these criteria don't care at all about art, but definitely read the news.
We were taught that the first paragraph of a story should summarize the entire story because most people won't read past that.
Also, people tend to think they are informed about a story even when they just read the headline alone, despite that being obviously nonsensical.
Also because it's better writing. For that purpose, anyway.
One can find readable images of e.g. late 19th and early 20th century papers that followed this style like it was the word of God, and they are so nice and effortless to read.
Well, when the headline is "Lost hiker found using Apple Watch" or "Airline grounds fleet due to loose bolts" or "potential presidential candidate says something that sounds stupid" or "AMD says their new chips are faster than last year's chips", then I don't really need to read anything further to know the gist of the story, do I?
to delay sharing the essential information in a story, and beginning with
secondary details instead.
Not because the job of a good journalist would be easy to replace, but because there are no longer good journalists around.
They have already been replaced by people who just regurgitate content. That kind of "journalism" is easy to replace with AI.
Therefore, the content will be even cheaper to produce. Therefore I don't see it disappearing, because the consumers of the "news" provide value to those who have an agenda to push.
Some newspapers already have no local staff, and just publish content generated at some distant office by the owner, like Gannet. Give Gannet access to sufficient LLM resources and they'll churn out crappier crap. Even Sports Illustrated was caught using generated, complete with fake author biographies.[1].
1. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/28/sports-illustr...
Sports Illustrated was what I had in mind when I said that it has already partly happened.
It is going to be interesting if people will eventually realize that there is very little substance in the content, especially if the content continues to detoriate. At least Sports Illustrated was ashamed they got caught, and removed the articles.
There are some good investigative journalists in my country, but that is about it. I have seen very close (family member) how even the excellent investigative journalists have difficulties, because they are making power structures uncomfortable, and media ownership is too close to the power structures.
In my country, there is even a platform for deep and slow journalism, but the content is crap, because even when journalists get the resources to do quality journalism, they are no longer able to do it. It appears to me that they are so used to pushing agendas, that the only kind of journalism they can do is agenda journalism.
But I do consider myself in the elite of my country, considering wealth and education. I am not a millionaire, but my monthly income put me in the top 5%. I only have a bachelor degree, but that also puts me in the top 20%. Is that the elite they meant?
In the UK it means anyone a speaker doesn't like. For example:
o Someone who lives in london
o Someone who went to university (50% of 18 years olds in 2017 went to uni)
o Someone who has expressed an opinion on brexit (either way)
o Someone who _doesn't_ vote
o Anyone with a house
the list goes on
This usually means the top 0.01%.
For example, I’m not in the 0.01%, but as a corporate attorney I make multiples of what I would make in Europe. Is that because American lawyers are smarter? No. It’s because the sheer profitability of American companies means they have a ton of money to fight legal battles with each other. The same is true for everyone from accountants to software engineers. Why are Silicon Valley salaries so high? Because Google and Facebook have profit margins comparable to Standard Oil back in the day.
And whether they think about it or not, all of these people have a strong incentive to maintain the system that enables them to capture an outsized share of the economy. Thus, properly defined, the elites include the ordinary wealthy whose livelihoods are intertwined with those of the super wealthy. In Scandinavian countries, the top tax bracket starts around 1.5x the median income. I think that’s a pretty fair definition of “elite”—these are people who would be worse off under a more equitable system.
The term also properly includes the educational elites who staff various bureaucracies and organizations that have high degrees of social influence. If you look at the folks who exercise decision making authority over the lives of ordinary people (everyone from judges to regulators), they overwhelmingly come from a handful of elite schools. DOJ attorneys might not be rich, but they went to school with and are friends with the CEOs and hedge fund guys. The same is true for journalists at national-level outfits like the New York Times.
It’s used variously. In terms of elite overproduction, it’s anyone with an education. In terms of social policy, it’s anyone with philanthropic wealth; top 1% is easily in this category. Top 5%, depending on one’s community.
Many issues that a majority of the population has an agreed position get no time and discussion in the news or by our elected representatives.
Other reporting brings to mind the expression that’s something like: the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
Why should they? In the news, I mean. (With electeds is a separate question.)
I think your second sentence is bullshit because why would any "they" care what "we" feel like. The news industry is built around making money from peoples attention. Like many other things in this world that seem planned it's just the product of business satisfying a human desire.
To expand on the second sentence, centuries ago news was little more than propaganda to appease the peasant classes - "we've invaded the next village and won, we're great" - all delivered by a town crier or equivalent. I don't believe we ever really went beyond that too much. Here in the UK, there's no such thing as a non-partizan newspaper - every newspaper is pushing an agenda, people buy the newspaper that the rest of their tribe reads, they all get enraged about the same things and those are the things that someone, somewhere, wants them to get enraged about because it serves some need that the proles don't need to worry their silly little heads about.
All of this is not to say that some individual people within the news machines are not incredible, hard working, honest people doing extremely important work. There are many. But when that hard work conflicts with the wishes of the puppeteer, it's bumped to page 28 and quickly dropped.
The Horizon / Post Office scandal is a perfect, and timely, example of this. Some journalists were banging that drum for years, yet it never hit the front pages despite being the biggest miscarriage of justice the UK has ever seen. Only when a terrestrial TV channel turned it into a drama, coincidentally in an election year, is it suddenly on the front pages with our politicians blaming the other side and our newspapers happily printing the talking points fed to them. Now the few elites want us to know about it, specifically so that they can score some points and use it for electioneering.
I think there are three levels for looking after prod
- monitoring - modelling - machining
This applies here I think
Firstly it’s reporting - a kind of event logging for society. It’s our timelines, it’s who bombed whom. And by far and away it’s the most common and frankly the most useless, because it needs to be interpreted through a model
What does it mean that your disk is 80% full? What does it mean that Huthi attacks on Red Sea mean shipping is diverted? Whose model You use determines what kind of alerting you get - does your model mean you add a new server when the disk is full? Or just ignore it?
Machining is the final part - what action to take. What to build or chnage - and this depends on the model you have. A lot of politics these days seems to be arguing over the alerting levels - when does this light go red?
Today in the UK we finally have Post Office post masters being pardoned for having been jailed - because the Post Office corporate body covered up Bugs in a central accounting system. Jailed because of bugs.
This has been “news” for 15+ years. But it only became “mainstream” this week.
News as Edward R Murrow knew it was all three parts at once. He scanned the horizon, found the story and told people that this person was not a communist (monitoring / reporting) and in the same time told them why this was wrong (liberty, freedom) and what action to take (remove senator)
But Murrows news has been disaggregated.
The OP is thinking news is this Murrow like idea where the elite choose a model, and find facts around that model. It’s not great (but done with integrity it works generally well)
The thing is now we have choices of models and reporting and actions and most people have not got a good model of the world and even if they did the flood of information barely allows them to adjust the model
We will always need Ed Murrow and others like them to curate the timeline and challenge the models.
We could make them explicit and testable (but that’s science) and we could build and validate our own but that’s hard work
Or we could seek out people of integrity to curate the models on our behalf and presenst their view for us to consume - with their doubts and uncertainties ans their opinions
What we need are great journalists.
Laying bare this world trade, will have an impact on similar way laying bare the politicking of parliaments did.
Would look cool too
For News orgs the focus is on New Infotmation.
So even though news orgs have professional trained info collectors, and have good access to networks that produce Info they don't think of them selves as a Wiki or Factbook. Why?
Cause legacy + they are taught media theory not information theory + tech platforms are not taught either and control distribution of info.
But things change as people learn the system is a waste and noise generating. Learning takes time.
Anyway, this got hit by the flamewar trigger and is off the front page now
The top headlines on my version of Google News are:
* an update on Trump's trial-- marginal utility, unless you are involved in the trial, with only its outcome being of use to the masses
* a story about France's new prime minister-- marginal utility, unless you live in France
* more trump trial
* more trump trial
* a piece on Age of Emprires
* whoever Nicole Eggert is has breast cancer
* an iPhone survived the drop from the Boeing 737 decompression event-- the story about the decompression has utility but the phone surviving is useless info
* news about the Peregrine moon lander-- useful to me because I'm an aerospace engineer and benefit from failure analysis of other projects, although its main utility is keeping it in my consciousness until actual in-depth analysis is available
* crime story out of Florida a state over 700 miles away-- useful to Floridians I guess
Minimally important.
The only news that is useful to people is that which can be used to inform their decisions: weather, stocks, local and national politics related to their jurisdiction, hyper-local (neighborhood level) crime, upcoming local events, and any safety or culture news related to destinations one is planning on visiting.
Everything else is just information/misery/voyeurism pornography.
It is frustrating to me because I want to know about what is going on in my area, not about some missing persons case in a state 1,400 miles away, and local news is either dead or worse than national news.
That being said, I like hacker news-- an aggregator that claims to be about anything that good hackers would find interesting whose main purpose actually seems to be providing an outlet for people to complain about Apple, Amazon, and copyright law.
I think people are under the odd impression that news used to be akin to national intelligence. But that was always far more detailed than news agencies were able to report. And, hopefully, more actionable. But most of the "actionable" comes from the greater agency of the government. Not from knowing the data.
The two shining example of this in my mind are: Claudine Gay and Jan 6. The right is very up in arms about the whole Claudine Gay situation but in reality she is just one president of one school and that piece of news really doesn't matter to anyone outside of that small bubble around Harvard and higher ed. Likewise on the left we have Jan 6 which they constantly push as a terrible thing to happen to our democracy. Again if you are in DC then it's an important issue but if you're the rest of the country, it was a terrible thing that happened one day and then the government continued to operate normally.
And this goes for the vast majority of issues the news covers these days and the shame in all of this is these stories that seem important but in the end aren't really that important take the spotlight away from stories of actual importance.
News outlets have crumbled under the profit incentive. Staff cuts, outlets shutdown or merged into larger organizations[1]. Some outlets have zero staff, and just publish stories sent out from the mothership, such as Gannett, and no local news at all.[2]
1. https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/...
2. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-27/as-the-s...
A functioning democracy requires a functioning media. The government has the power, and the media is supposed to keep them to account. but when the media gets their paycheque from the government and they stop reporting anything negative about the government anymore... that's not a functioning democracy.
In public, I've had many conversations with people, they very much care, but they don't care for the viewpoint pushed. Journalism 101 means you report on everything with as much neutrality as possible. Sometimes your team looks bad.
But it's problematic when that stops happening. The media who skews 1 way for a little too long will inevitably lose the audience or worse those people refuse to speak to the journalists. Those journalists suddenly never hear the viewpoint they have been losing and thus lose them even more.
>So the most fundamental problem facing journalism is that much of the public does not see the value of what the profession and the industry has to offer, and an election year bump will not dispel this existential challenge.
We definitely see the value of good journalism. We don't see the value in biased news. This is why the CBC will be defunded within the next 2 years pretty much guaranteed.
These are all TV/radio channels. Somehow newspaper brands work better on the web then TV brands.
Indeed, with the level of understanding and agency that most of us have, I'm struggling to see what an alternative would be.
That's it - I could care less about anything else. Sometimes I read The Hill.
When the metric becomes the target, nothing else matters.
The entire modern ad industry was built on false metrics and measures.
Attention is the currency of media. When sensationalism is not only acceptable, it's profitable, all boundaries are lost.
The entire news media has been perverted by the metrics and the measurements used in modern advertising and media. It's all about attention, measured to the individual and paid accordingly. No standards, no oversight, no limit.