The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

Re:The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy ... by clarkmoody on Monday October 05, 2015 @09:30PM (#10336247)

Context is dangerous to news & politics. Numbers are even more dangerous. So the likelihood of your wish coming true is almost nothing, at least in the mainstream news outlets. You'll get tons of context in long-format blogs and podcasts, where the purpose of the content is to educate. The primary purpose of media news is to make money, hence the bent toward entertainment more than anything.

Data from the FBI[1] lists information about murders, including weapon types, circumstances of the murder, relationship to the victim, etc. (2013 numbers)

Going through those numbers is enlightening and will augment your CDC data, which gives great context to overall death rates.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

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Re:The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy ... by nfoz on Monday October 05, 2015 @11:08PM (#10336533)

> The primary purpose of media news is to make money

My main news sources are: - CBC (Canadian crown corporation), - BBC (UK Royal Charter), - TVOntario (Ontario crown corporation), - Democracy Now! (independent non-profit), - PBS (independent non-profit), - crowd-sourced for-profit sites (HN, reddit)

I live in NYC, and it's always really strange to see how prevalent for-profit media is here when there are so many better options.

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Re:The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy ... by Litost on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @10:57AM (#10339282)

I'd have to agree with the other commentator on this, the BBC is hardly unbiased, it's under huge pressure to tow the conservative party line via threats to its funding and it's coverage is often populist (a lot of stuff about the royal family) and shallow, I gave up watching it years ago.

Channel 4 news is better, but still i despair at some of the trolling for soundbites that goes on, it's still about the best of the mainstream UK news channels.

Recently The UK Guardian, which i used to have a very high opinion of, got into quite a bit of trouble (with the readers) about it's biased coverage against Jeremy Corbyn's labour leadership campaign.

I imagine the US media is way worse, but in todays horribly co-opted world, sometimes the best you can hope for it to take a cross-sample of biased sources and somehow average it out in your head :(.

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Re:The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy ... by refurb on Tuesday October 06, 2015 @08:51AM (#10338469)

You think that the CBC isn't trying to make money? What are all the advertisements for then?

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Re:The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy ... by InclinedPlane on Monday October 05, 2015 @10:11PM (#10336372)

There are generational changes happening that are pretty profound. Younger generations don't trust the traditional media the same way older generations did, and are increasingly skeptical of the narratives being peddled by the media.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being profit driven (although it's not without its problems), the bigger problem is, I think, being advertising driven. Which sets up an incentive of maximizing viewership with the least costly content, irrespective of quality.

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