9 ms·

The Fandomization of News

53 points by xingyzt 3y ago

drewcoo 3y ago
As opposed to Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity? Sounds like sour grapes because it's too hard to buy enough of gen Z's influencers.
- ouid 3y ago
  [dead]
ta8645 3y ago
Pick your poison. For all its flaws, I'll still take citizen journalism over corporate interests. The MSM abdicated its journalistic responsibility in favor of activism and manipulation; they caused this as much as social media did.
- marban 3y ago
  CJ suffers from the same cases of activism and even more extreme tribalism – I'd rather read 3 different newspapers than follow a guy on Twitter who starts all his tweets with #BREAKING.
  - mypastself 3y ago
    Amusingly, that’s exactly what CNN was doing the last time I turned it on.
- bregma 3y ago
  "citizen journalism" is what we used to call rumour, gossip, and hearsay. It still is.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Take that as a signal. The messaging in journalism has been so thoroughly hijacked that people trust gossip more. I can appreciate that people might pick “unreliable“ over “actively manipulating.”
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > messaging in journalism has been so thoroughly hijacked that people trust gossip more If your information diet is television, sure. If not, there are obvious and almost daily advantages from being properly informed relative to the large number of Americans, including some wealthy ones, who think they can roll their own open-source intelligence through gossip-like media.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      > The messaging in journalism has been so thoroughly hijacked that people trust gossip more no it hasn't, and no they don't this is an example of a common occurrence: a loud minority incorrectly thinking that their opinions represent those of "[the] people" some other examples are American conservatives with their incorrect ideas of what "[the] people" want, and anti-science advocates with their incorrect views that "people" don't trust science just say "I" instead.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        > no it hasn't, and no they don't wow, that's sure persuasive. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. That isn't "a loud minority."
        ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        almost as unpersuasive as the original claim that it has, and they do - a loud minority opinion if I ever heard one, and one that deserves no more effort refuting than you spent proving it in the first place (none) open to hearing evidence of that claim of yours, because the article disagrees with you
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    And that is still (marginally) better than what the commercial and political propaganda machine we call "journalism" has become today.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tqi 3y ago
> Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have grown beyond making connections and delivering entertainment into places people trust to keep themselves informed And the NYT, MSNBC, Foxnews, Verge et al have grown beyond places people trust to keep themselves informed into delivering entertainment, going back to the early 2000s with 24 hour cable news and talking heads shows.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Oh I think it goes further back than that. Read a turn-of-the-20th century newspaper for some sensational headlines and muckracking. Perhaps it's always been this way. "Informing the public" via news is inseparable from gossip and campfire tales.
  - extragood 3y ago
    The lawsuit against Fox by Dominion made it clear to me that they exist to sell ads to their viewership by telling them what they want to hear, regardless of facts. I have no doubt that there's a long-standing legacy of that amongst many news groups, or maybe even most of them, but I'm not aware of a bigger manipulation of the American public
  - brightlancer 3y ago
    Absolutely. Ben Franklin regularly passed fictional stories off as fact in his newspapers. It has always been thus.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
10g1k 3y ago
News has always been fake. The earliest centralised news was local kings, lords, whatever, instructing the town crier or scribe what to tell the people. You'd be nuts to think it had anything to do with facts. As civilisation developed, and we had things like the Roman Empire, it was the same deal, except different senators or others would pay criers to spread stories in different sectors, usually their own or a competitors, to sway things one way or another. Remarkably similar to today. And yes, it was fake news. Such as telling citizens that the Carthaginians were baby-eating deamon worshippers, to get people to support a war to wipe out an economic rival. Then we had governments in WW1 portraying Germans as monsters in those silly posters, inventing horrific crimes against humanity. Then we had all the media telling tall tales about Saddam Hussein and his secret invisible nuclear chemical weapons in cartoon trains in the desert where they didn't even have railway lines, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead innocent people who never harmed the USA, and the destabilisation of the Middle East for decades. It has always been nonsense. So when you're evalutating the credibility or utility of random internerds and their "news", just be mindful of what you're comparing them against.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  So true. Sorry you're downvoted. Even investigative reporting and historical scholarship suffer. Anyone investigating or studying anything needs to pick and choose which sources they're going to rely on, and therefore introducing intrinsic biases and only as reliable as the sources they rely on.
jpizagno 3y ago
Does anybody have a source (CJ or traditional) that is unbiased? It seems that everything from mass media to small tiktokers are so biased, I can't believe anything they say.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  All news is biased and has been. Even if not deliberately, the journalists are not experts on what they report on so don't alwys spot errors or biases in their sources. You have always had to read or listen to several sources. Some sources are less biased than others. E>g. in the UK the print media is biased and readers do know which way e.g. Daily Telegraph is right wing and Guardian is left wing. The broadcast media is less biased as there is legislation to form some form of control. Most of the broadcast media get complaints from both left and right wing - although GB News seems to be firmly right wing.
- basch 3y ago
  Unbiased is the wrong premise. Bias will always exist, so identifying it and consuming the spectrum is the way to see it. Seeing bias is better than avoiding it, as it helps you understand others perspectives (as they consume biased news.) allsides.com is good. Modo News is good.
  - incompatible 3y ago
    Looking for different perspectives doesn't seem very helpful in this case. "Tay is dead"; "Tay is alive".
    - sorokod 3y ago
      If you don't trust either statement,you will need to accept the ambiguity and move on.
      - incompatible 3y ago
        Good advice, she can take her place beside Schrödinger's cat.
antigonemerlin 3y ago
There was a Vox video called "Who made these circles in the Sahara?" that really showcased the investigative powers of journalists once they have the budget to bring in the big guns. Budget cuts and the gutting of profitable newspapers by Alden Global Capital really destroyed a lot of journalism and turned it into "internet journalism", at which point, they are scarcely better than the average reader. https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og
smfugit 3y ago
When I was 16 there were better things to do than pay attention to the news. I mean if the "adults" were struggling to solve complex issues, why give me anxiety over it. The over riding goal today has become attention capture/Like/View/Click collection. But this is a temporary blip. The story is breaking down with the platforms seeing growth stall, reduction in free content (pushed behind paywalls/login screens), banks collapsing, period of low interest rates ending, advertising budgets shrinking, subscription charges rising, new regulations that are upending how things used to work etc etc. The Attention Economy is under assault and things are going to change. Content creators (be it news orgs or influencers) are functioning under the belief that if they create the "right" content they will get the views. But the platforms (just like HN) dont inform them as more and more content creators enter the chat, and more and more content is Produced, the amount of content being Consumed doesn't increase cause total collective Attention is a constant. It has become easy to produce content, copy it, broadcast it. So supply goes on rising. But demand cant match it. And then spending time analyzing what "works" for the content creators is delusion.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
KKKKkkkk1 3y ago
Technology has brought increasing competition to the news business, starting with AM radio, then cable news, then the likes of Drudge Report on the internet, and finally social media. As a result, the media are pursuing consumers much more aggressively, and in particular they are targeting specific demographics. Hence polarization, "juicy collection of great narratives," [0] and the death of objectivity [1]. The age of Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow is not coming back. [0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461796763162054663 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461796763162054663 [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms-news-reporting-objectivity-diversity/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms...
incompatible 3y ago
If you want to find out whether Lil Tay is dead or alive, it's a bit of a conundrum. Apparently, you can't trust any sites or accounts that she might have, since they could have been hacked. It's unlikely that you could get any government verification like a death certificate right away, and there won't be one if she is still alive, and who trusts the government anyway. The verification that she is alive comes from "a statement provided to TMZ from Tay's family", but is there any reason to trust that? I've never heard of TMZ so have no idea how credible they are, and in any case perhaps somebody spoofed being Tay's family and they didn't check very hard, and Tay is actually dead. What are you going to believe, a video statement from Tay herself perhaps, which may be a deep fake? Edit: Of course, I have no idea if Tay was a real person in the first place, or just a personality created by deep fakers. Edit: Wikipedia (dubious of course) says that TMZ is a tabloid owned by Fox Corporation. Yeah, like I trust Fox. let alone some tabloid they own.
- enlyth 3y ago
  TMZ are pretty much the de facto celebrity deaths reporters. They wouldn't risk their reputation by making up stuff like that.
  - incompatible 3y ago
    But according to the article, “When there’s no face to it, it seems like it’s a corporation, and corporations to a lot of Gen Z equal bad or untrustworthy”. Do they make an exception for TMZ?
    - mcny 3y ago
      I think you're moving goal posts here. Do I trust TMZ if it tells me to do all my life savings into dogecoin? No. Do I believe if it tells me Michael Jackson has passed away? Absolutely. There is nothing actionable for me with a celebrity's death but I'll take TMZ's word for it until proven otherwise and even then I'd expect tmz to publish a swift retraction. Whether gen z trust faceless corporations I don't know but as a millennial, I know that it isn't a dichotomy. It isn't like faceless equals untrustworthy and a face equals trustworthy. I'm sure we have all listened to our CEOs and senior leaderships lie / "bend the truth" even when they know we know the truth. The only thing I'd like to urge and caution against is we don't continue the vilifying of future generations like the boomers did to us.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
theonlybutlet 3y ago
I'm a bit flabbergasted as an outsider. Reading these comments, there's such a lack of trust it seems in very basic tenets of society and it's institutions in America. (Dismissing certain factors to a degree I'd understand.) If this were an actual sample (which I hope it's not) the country may just descend into anomie.
- eastbound 3y ago
  Inversely, I’m flabbergasted that some people still have trust in institutions like journalism. I can’t count the times I knew about a subject, then read it in the newspapers and it was true. The scientific article that is not quoted in the article may say “…therefore we can’t conclude that XYZ” and all your colleagues are persuaded of XYZ because the AP or Reuteurs or AFP dépèche said “Scientists conclude on XYZ.” Anything, from police arrestation reasons to diplomatic stories, is rehashed into something unrecognizable from the truth. Did you know that “Man sues $1m from McDonalds for a coffee served too hot” was false?
  - mcny 3y ago
    I have heard about the case and how McDonald's was clearly liable but I didn't realize how mass media acted as a mouthpiece of the chamber of commerce. > ABC News called the case "the poster child of excessive lawsuits" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... I won't assume malice rightaway given the PG essay submarine but it is not journalism either. I can see how people wouldn't trust the news.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
assimpleaspossi 3y ago
The biggest problem I see is that, from a quick scan, all of that so-called news has nothing in it that affects anyone's personal life in any way. Mostly for entertainment but no value otherwise and probably forgotten within seconds of reading it. I also question any organization that has vulgarity in their name or title. What is the need for such a thing over civility?
hliyan 3y ago
One day, I hope we look at this period in history and marvel at the fact that our knowledge of current affairs was largely left to chance (or worse yet, algorithms that are designed not to inform but to sell) -- whatever happens to catch our eye as we scroll through our various timelines. With all the data, technology and query capabilities we have at hand, I'm surprised I can't set up preferences like this: drop sports drop celebrity news unless death or court case drop crime unless within state prioritise presidential election prioritise rocket launches prioritise aviation accidents
- tunesmith 3y ago
  I've had this half-baked thought for a while that the state of our world is based off of facts, values, and the various arguments/conclusions that emanate from them... and therefore the most newsworthy events are the events that have the "loudest" impact by propagating furthest through those argument graphs...
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > People bought personalized filter programs to skim a few droplets from that sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became the selected entertainments and special-interest zines passed through by those tailored shells. > To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. “Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.” > “And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?” Jen felt in a good mood. “Let’s go with twenty percent.” That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters. -- Earth by David Brin
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    I REALLY want customizable recommendation algorithms. I believe a lot of people would like this and it would keep them on platforms more because it makes the experience more enjoyable.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
878654Tom 3y ago
Made the same comment yesterday on another submission but it still fits this discussion. I suggest people who read a lot of news to read up on Rolf Dobelli's book named Stop Reading the news. I found it an eye-opener and have since blocked all news websites on every device. Currently 3 weeks without a newspaper and I don't feel I am missing a thing. The best chapters were the ones were he explained with great examples how irrelevant the news was, how news would make you less creative and feel much smaller than you really are. Now, he also clearly tries to distinguish news and longreads. If your paper is a daily paper that tries to be very generic... you can skip it. If your paper is a medical journal and your profession is a doctor. Keep reading that medical journal.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  And so voters become less informed and so don't know what politician to vote for. How does this help society?
  - 878654Tom 3y ago
    He actually talks about this in his book, democracy already existed before newspapers became big (or even existed). People got informed through books, pamphlets, essays, debates and public gatherings. Now, some articles do inform the people more, one of the big examples is Watergate. But the difference in quality and research between the Watergate articles and the daily news is immense. Most political news-articles are nothing more than copy-pastes from what a politician sends to the writer and newspapers aren't the only medium where investigative journalism can exist. In my home-country a one-man journalist published some big scandals on his blog which showcased some unsavory corruption in one of our cities, all the big newspapers could only report what he already said, they had zero investigation themselves. The other part is, do daily newspapers really inform you? Do they follow up the promises of candidates? Do they analyze effects of laws? Do they give you a neutral view of the situation? Democracy can work fine without newspapers, maybe even better. Politicians in my country focus mostly to solve small fires without addressing the problems underneath it as those get them in the news but the big problems with complex solutions don't give them the same return of visibility in the papers versus the work required to fix it.
jacooper 3y ago
> The Los Angeles Times took note of V’s success and tapped them to help launch its own personality-based TikTok account. They’re one of many publications attempting to recreate the success of individual creators on TikTok within their newsroom. But what's the point? TikTok doesn't share AD revenue, so why do all of that for nothing? Is it in hope that these followers become readers? I personally don't trust any single creator news source, a single person is much much easier to influence than a whole news agency. I used to follow johnny Harris regularly, then he dropped an economic video about a supposed new economic model that's supported by many companies. The issue is almost all the talking points in that video were taken from the WEF, the same "you will own nothing and be happy" guys.[1] I still think news creators have a place in the news cycle, maybe for more fun stuff, like science questions maybe economics, Tom Scott style videos, or digital investigations like coffeezilla, but for real news, news agencies are still king, especially ones that are publicly funded. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dum0bqWfiGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dum0bqWfiGw

53 points by xingyzt 3y ago

As opposed to Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity? Sounds like sour grapes because it's too hard to buy enough of gen Z's influencers.

ouid 3y ago
[dead]

ta8645 3y ago

Pick your poison. For all its flaws, I'll still take citizen journalism over corporate interests. The MSM abdicated its journalistic responsibility in favor of activism and manipulation; they caused this as much as social media did.

marban 3y ago
CJ suffers from the same cases of activism and even more extreme tribalism – I'd rather read 3 different newspapers than follow a guy on Twitter who starts all his tweets with #BREAKING.
- mypastself 3y ago
  Amusingly, that’s exactly what CNN was doing the last time I turned it on.
bregma 3y ago
"citizen journalism" is what we used to call rumour, gossip, and hearsay. It still is.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Take that as a signal. The messaging in journalism has been so thoroughly hijacked that people trust gossip more. I can appreciate that people might pick “unreliable“ over “actively manipulating.”
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > messaging in journalism has been so thoroughly hijacked that people trust gossip more If your information diet is television, sure. If not, there are obvious and almost daily advantages from being properly informed relative to the large number of Americans, including some wealthy ones, who think they can roll their own open-source intelligence through gossip-like media.
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    > The messaging in journalism has been so thoroughly hijacked that people trust gossip more no it hasn't, and no they don't this is an example of a common occurrence: a loud minority incorrectly thinking that their opinions represent those of "[the] people" some other examples are American conservatives with their incorrect ideas of what "[the] people" want, and anti-science advocates with their incorrect views that "people" don't trust science just say "I" instead.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      > no it hasn't, and no they don't wow, that's sure persuasive. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. That isn't "a loud minority."
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        almost as unpersuasive as the original claim that it has, and they do - a loud minority opinion if I ever heard one, and one that deserves no more effort refuting than you spent proving it in the first place (none) open to hearing evidence of that claim of yours, because the article disagrees with you
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  And that is still (marginally) better than what the commercial and political propaganda machine we call "journalism" has become today.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tqi 3y ago

> Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have grown beyond making connections and delivering entertainment into places people trust to keep themselves informed And the NYT, MSNBC, Foxnews, Verge et al have grown beyond places people trust to keep themselves informed into delivering entertainment, going back to the early 2000s with 24 hour cable news and talking heads shows.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Oh I think it goes further back than that. Read a turn-of-the-20th century newspaper for some sensational headlines and muckracking. Perhaps it's always been this way. "Informing the public" via news is inseparable from gossip and campfire tales.
- extragood 3y ago
  The lawsuit against Fox by Dominion made it clear to me that they exist to sell ads to their viewership by telling them what they want to hear, regardless of facts. I have no doubt that there's a long-standing legacy of that amongst many news groups, or maybe even most of them, but I'm not aware of a bigger manipulation of the American public
- brightlancer 3y ago
  Absolutely. Ben Franklin regularly passed fictional stories off as fact in his newspapers. It has always been thus.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

10g1k 3y ago

News has always been fake. The earliest centralised news was local kings, lords, whatever, instructing the town crier or scribe what to tell the people. You'd be nuts to think it had anything to do with facts. As civilisation developed, and we had things like the Roman Empire, it was the same deal, except different senators or others would pay criers to spread stories in different sectors, usually their own or a competitors, to sway things one way or another. Remarkably similar to today. And yes, it was fake news. Such as telling citizens that the Carthaginians were baby-eating deamon worshippers, to get people to support a war to wipe out an economic rival. Then we had governments in WW1 portraying Germans as monsters in those silly posters, inventing horrific crimes against humanity. Then we had all the media telling tall tales about Saddam Hussein and his secret invisible nuclear chemical weapons in cartoon trains in the desert where they didn't even have railway lines, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead innocent people who never harmed the USA, and the destabilisation of the Middle East for decades. It has always been nonsense. So when you're evalutating the credibility or utility of random internerds and their "news", just be mindful of what you're comparing them against.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
So true. Sorry you're downvoted. Even investigative reporting and historical scholarship suffer. Anyone investigating or studying anything needs to pick and choose which sources they're going to rely on, and therefore introducing intrinsic biases and only as reliable as the sources they rely on.

jpizagno 3y ago

Does anybody have a source (CJ or traditional) that is unbiased? It seems that everything from mass media to small tiktokers are so biased, I can't believe anything they say.

pasc1878 3y ago
All news is biased and has been. Even if not deliberately, the journalists are not experts on what they report on so don't alwys spot errors or biases in their sources. You have always had to read or listen to several sources. Some sources are less biased than others. E>g. in the UK the print media is biased and readers do know which way e.g. Daily Telegraph is right wing and Guardian is left wing. The broadcast media is less biased as there is legislation to form some form of control. Most of the broadcast media get complaints from both left and right wing - although GB News seems to be firmly right wing.
basch 3y ago
Unbiased is the wrong premise. Bias will always exist, so identifying it and consuming the spectrum is the way to see it. Seeing bias is better than avoiding it, as it helps you understand others perspectives (as they consume biased news.) allsides.com is good. Modo News is good.
- incompatible 3y ago
  Looking for different perspectives doesn't seem very helpful in this case. "Tay is dead"; "Tay is alive".
  - sorokod 3y ago
    If you don't trust either statement,you will need to accept the ambiguity and move on.
    - incompatible 3y ago
      Good advice, she can take her place beside Schrödinger's cat.

antigonemerlin 3y ago

There was a Vox video called "Who made these circles in the Sahara?" that really showcased the investigative powers of journalists once they have the budget to bring in the big guns. Budget cuts and the gutting of profitable newspapers by Alden Global Capital really destroyed a lot of journalism and turned it into "internet journalism", at which point, they are scarcely better than the average reader. https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og

smfugit 3y ago

When I was 16 there were better things to do than pay attention to the news. I mean if the "adults" were struggling to solve complex issues, why give me anxiety over it. The over riding goal today has become attention capture/Like/View/Click collection. But this is a temporary blip. The story is breaking down with the platforms seeing growth stall, reduction in free content (pushed behind paywalls/login screens), banks collapsing, period of low interest rates ending, advertising budgets shrinking, subscription charges rising, new regulations that are upending how things used to work etc etc. The Attention Economy is under assault and things are going to change. Content creators (be it news orgs or influencers) are functioning under the belief that if they create the "right" content they will get the views. But the platforms (just like HN) dont inform them as more and more content creators enter the chat, and more and more content is Produced, the amount of content being Consumed doesn't increase cause total collective Attention is a constant. It has become easy to produce content, copy it, broadcast it. So supply goes on rising. But demand cant match it. And then spending time analyzing what "works" for the content creators is delusion.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

KKKKkkkk1 3y ago

Technology has brought increasing competition to the news business, starting with AM radio, then cable news, then the likes of Drudge Report on the internet, and finally social media. As a result, the media are pursuing consumers much more aggressively, and in particular they are targeting specific demographics. Hence polarization, "juicy collection of great narratives," [0] and the death of objectivity [1]. The age of Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow is not coming back. [0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461796763162054663 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461796763162054663 [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms-news-reporting-objectivity-diversity/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/30/newsrooms...

incompatible 3y ago

If you want to find out whether Lil Tay is dead or alive, it's a bit of a conundrum. Apparently, you can't trust any sites or accounts that she might have, since they could have been hacked. It's unlikely that you could get any government verification like a death certificate right away, and there won't be one if she is still alive, and who trusts the government anyway. The verification that she is alive comes from "a statement provided to TMZ from Tay's family", but is there any reason to trust that? I've never heard of TMZ so have no idea how credible they are, and in any case perhaps somebody spoofed being Tay's family and they didn't check very hard, and Tay is actually dead. What are you going to believe, a video statement from Tay herself perhaps, which may be a deep fake? Edit: Of course, I have no idea if Tay was a real person in the first place, or just a personality created by deep fakers. Edit: Wikipedia (dubious of course) says that TMZ is a tabloid owned by Fox Corporation. Yeah, like I trust Fox. let alone some tabloid they own.

enlyth 3y ago
TMZ are pretty much the de facto celebrity deaths reporters. They wouldn't risk their reputation by making up stuff like that.
- incompatible 3y ago
  But according to the article, “When there’s no face to it, it seems like it’s a corporation, and corporations to a lot of Gen Z equal bad or untrustworthy”. Do they make an exception for TMZ?
  - mcny 3y ago
    I think you're moving goal posts here. Do I trust TMZ if it tells me to do all my life savings into dogecoin? No. Do I believe if it tells me Michael Jackson has passed away? Absolutely. There is nothing actionable for me with a celebrity's death but I'll take TMZ's word for it until proven otherwise and even then I'd expect tmz to publish a swift retraction. Whether gen z trust faceless corporations I don't know but as a millennial, I know that it isn't a dichotomy. It isn't like faceless equals untrustworthy and a face equals trustworthy. I'm sure we have all listened to our CEOs and senior leaderships lie / "bend the truth" even when they know we know the truth. The only thing I'd like to urge and caution against is we don't continue the vilifying of future generations like the boomers did to us.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

theonlybutlet 3y ago

I'm a bit flabbergasted as an outsider. Reading these comments, there's such a lack of trust it seems in very basic tenets of society and it's institutions in America. (Dismissing certain factors to a degree I'd understand.) If this were an actual sample (which I hope it's not) the country may just descend into anomie.

eastbound 3y ago
Inversely, I’m flabbergasted that some people still have trust in institutions like journalism. I can’t count the times I knew about a subject, then read it in the newspapers and it was true. The scientific article that is not quoted in the article may say “…therefore we can’t conclude that XYZ” and all your colleagues are persuaded of XYZ because the AP or Reuteurs or AFP dépèche said “Scientists conclude on XYZ.” Anything, from police arrestation reasons to diplomatic stories, is rehashed into something unrecognizable from the truth. Did you know that “Man sues $1m from McDonalds for a coffee served too hot” was false?
- mcny 3y ago
  I have heard about the case and how McDonald's was clearly liable but I didn't realize how mass media acted as a mouthpiece of the chamber of commerce. > ABC News called the case "the poster child of excessive lawsuits" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... I won't assume malice rightaway given the PG essay submarine but it is not journalism either. I can see how people wouldn't trust the news.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

assimpleaspossi 3y ago

The biggest problem I see is that, from a quick scan, all of that so-called news has nothing in it that affects anyone's personal life in any way. Mostly for entertainment but no value otherwise and probably forgotten within seconds of reading it. I also question any organization that has vulgarity in their name or title. What is the need for such a thing over civility?

hliyan 3y ago

One day, I hope we look at this period in history and marvel at the fact that our knowledge of current affairs was largely left to chance (or worse yet, algorithms that are designed not to inform but to sell) -- whatever happens to catch our eye as we scroll through our various timelines. With all the data, technology and query capabilities we have at hand, I'm surprised I can't set up preferences like this: drop sports drop celebrity news unless death or court case drop crime unless within state prioritise presidential election prioritise rocket launches prioritise aviation accidents

tunesmith 3y ago
I've had this half-baked thought for a while that the state of our world is based off of facts, values, and the various arguments/conclusions that emanate from them... and therefore the most newsworthy events are the events that have the "loudest" impact by propagating furthest through those argument graphs...
Terr_ 3y ago
> People bought personalized filter programs to skim a few droplets from that sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became the selected entertainments and special-interest zines passed through by those tailored shells. > To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. “Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.” > “And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?” Jen felt in a good mood. “Let’s go with twenty percent.” That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters. -- Earth by David Brin
- solarkraft 3y ago
  I REALLY want customizable recommendation algorithms. I believe a lot of people would like this and it would keep them on platforms more because it makes the experience more enjoyable.
  - Terr_ 3y ago

878654Tom 3y ago

Made the same comment yesterday on another submission but it still fits this discussion. I suggest people who read a lot of news to read up on Rolf Dobelli's book named Stop Reading the news. I found it an eye-opener and have since blocked all news websites on every device. Currently 3 weeks without a newspaper and I don't feel I am missing a thing. The best chapters were the ones were he explained with great examples how irrelevant the news was, how news would make you less creative and feel much smaller than you really are. Now, he also clearly tries to distinguish news and longreads. If your paper is a daily paper that tries to be very generic... you can skip it. If your paper is a medical journal and your profession is a doctor. Keep reading that medical journal.

pasc1878 3y ago
And so voters become less informed and so don't know what politician to vote for. How does this help society?
- 878654Tom 3y ago
  He actually talks about this in his book, democracy already existed before newspapers became big (or even existed). People got informed through books, pamphlets, essays, debates and public gatherings. Now, some articles do inform the people more, one of the big examples is Watergate. But the difference in quality and research between the Watergate articles and the daily news is immense. Most political news-articles are nothing more than copy-pastes from what a politician sends to the writer and newspapers aren't the only medium where investigative journalism can exist. In my home-country a one-man journalist published some big scandals on his blog which showcased some unsavory corruption in one of our cities, all the big newspapers could only report what he already said, they had zero investigation themselves. The other part is, do daily newspapers really inform you? Do they follow up the promises of candidates? Do they analyze effects of laws? Do they give you a neutral view of the situation? Democracy can work fine without newspapers, maybe even better. Politicians in my country focus mostly to solve small fires without addressing the problems underneath it as those get them in the news but the big problems with complex solutions don't give them the same return of visibility in the papers versus the work required to fix it.

jacooper 3y ago

> The Los Angeles Times took note of V’s success and tapped them to help launch its own personality-based TikTok account. They’re one of many publications attempting to recreate the success of individual creators on TikTok within their newsroom. But what's the point? TikTok doesn't share AD revenue, so why do all of that for nothing? Is it in hope that these followers become readers? I personally don't trust any single creator news source, a single person is much much easier to influence than a whole news agency. I used to follow johnny Harris regularly, then he dropped an economic video about a supposed new economic model that's supported by many companies. The issue is almost all the talking points in that video were taken from the WEF, the same "you will own nothing and be happy" guys.[1] I still think news creators have a place in the news cycle, maybe for more fun stuff, like science questions maybe economics, Tom Scott style videos, or digital investigations like coffeezilla, but for real news, news agencies are still king, especially ones that are publicly funded. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dum0bqWfiGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dum0bqWfiGw