Of course intellectually stimulating media still exists, but if it's the minority of what people consume then it doesn't make sense to say the culture is A-OK. Also, what does a scientific journal have to tell us about current events and politics?

My sister remarked at how inane the news was and I suggested she try looking somewhere else for her news. Oddly it was more of a revelation for her than I expected. The prototypical "news" show is "crime in your area", "weather in your area", followed by "your area's sports teams performance". Which is more about "what has happened" than "what is going on".

Purely for personal gain... can you explain your post?

Are you saying she was surprised by the news' idiocy?

She hadn't thought about the question, "What is news?"

There were shows which identified themselves as providing "news" and she wanted to hear the "news" but it had never occurred to her that she and the media would disagree on what that word meant. The thing that took her away from single tracking mainstream media was Michael Jackson's death. It was tragic but she just wasn't that interested in it and so many other things were happening at the same time that were getting no coverage that she could see. I suggested she seek out other sources of information and she did. A trip to the library for copies of various magazines and other newspapers and she was amazed at how much stuff she was not getting in the channels that she had voluntarily limited herself too.

Her big epiphany was that there is no "this is the information we're not sharing with you" summary. And without that summary, you don't know what you don't know unless you go looking for it.

"but if it's the minority of what people consume then it doesn't make sense to say the culture is A-OK."

Then culture has never in the entire history of man been "A-OK".

Which is perhaps true. But since it would basically be true by definition, it's not very useful, either practically or academically.

I'm not going to venture into whether things were better now or before but our media is toothless and more interested in acting as a stenographer for powerful people and institutions than challenging them.

I've always wondered whether that's an issue with the media now (specifically) or whether it's actually been an issue for its entire history, with the difference being that with the internet, we can finally look up claims made by 'authorities' much more easily.

That wasn't really the case in the olden days, where gatekeepers controlled access to the media and a large audience. If your local/national newspaper was lying, you'd only know if you were deeply involved in the subject or went to serious lengths to research it. At which point, so what? You'd have no way to easily publish your findings and get a large portion of society hearing them and realising the current media were lying to people or pushing a distorted narrative.

The internet has merely made it easier to fact check people's claims and expose the mistakes made (and lies told) by the 'establishment'.

Note: Of course, the media could indeed be worse for various reasons (like say, the internet making decent journalism too expensive to be viable and culling the herd down to 'those best at attracting attention to themselves'), but you have to question whether things really were ever 'good' here, or whether the barriers to entry just made them appear to be 'good'.

OK, even though I just said I'd avoid getting into this, I think the Vietnam War really created a sort of golden age where reporters were more willing to challenge the narrative and institutional power than any time before or since. Vietnam (and to a lesser extent Korea) really disillusioned a lot of young journalists who did amazing work -- the Neil Sheehans and Seymour Hershes of the world, basically. It's telling how many scoops still come from reporters who cut their teeth in those years like, say, Hersh, or Bob Woodward.

I think before Vietnam journalists largely imagined themselves on the same side. I think after Vietnam, government propaganda got a lot more sophisticated. Besides that, the business model collapsed, making newspapers into supplicants and leading to cutback in resources devoted to investigative journalism. The latest trend of advertorial has newsrooms basically renting themselves out to businesses to write ad copy; how can you really cast yourself as an objective investigator after doing that?

Of course, journalists who imagine themselves as part of the circle of power are a problem but were around in the past too.

Would society be better if the majority read scientific journals? I don't know...

Probably not. Not everyone needs to be an expert in every conceivable topic. I think society would be better if people had at least a basic understanding of current events so it weren't so easy to mislead the general public.

Science never misleads... /s

I guess my primary complaint is that the author assumes the ignorant masses can learn nothing useful from "Friends". Plenty of academians have had epiphanies during a break from studying/working.

Anyone who claims to know the single event that brought down Rome is a fool.

I mean, I don't care if people watch a show I don't like for fun. My issue is mostly people being grossly misinformed about things they could easily learn (questions like: Does foreign aid constitute half of US spending? Is there a consensus about global warming? Did Saddam Hussein actually turn out to have weapons of mass destruction, and was he involved in 9/11? It's stunning how many people, when polled, give the wrong answers to these questions).