>Not only that, I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources.

This is true every time there is a news story on about anything that somebody around me is an expert on. It's always "what the hell are they talking about!?"

I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a few times, and EVERY TIME what they end up broadcasting, and what I was explaining to them are different things.

What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.

Frightening. Really truly actually frightening to me.

What you're describing is Gell-Mann Amnesia:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

-Michael Crichton

My favourite example of this is the Economist news magazine. The Economist reports on a much larger range of country and topics than the typical magazine or newspaper. Many of its readers like it for that exact reason: it gives them information on stories they won't normally find in their local or national news sources and they want to be informed about, say, hydroelectric developments in the Congo.

The problem is that writing about 25 different countries in a single issue doesn't mean they actually have experts on most of those places or people on the ground to do original reporting. Often, it devolves into British or American writers regurgitating inaccurate information from the Internet. But if it's the only thing you read about, say, forest exports from Myanmar, you have no reason to question it.

The easiest way to see this is to be a non-US/UK/EU person and read an article in the Economist about your own country. Then you realize that all the other articles are just as simplistic and uninformed.

My experience is the opposite. And I'm definitely not blind to the Gell-Mann Amnesia, I notice it on Wikipedia all the time.

I've noticed that in The Economist the articles about my field of technology, work, and my small home country, have been accurate to the point that I suspect they have had experts in the field involved in creating them. That gives me confidence in the articles about issues I'm not intimately familiar with.

That is why The Economist is one of the few news sources I read after cutting out following daily news completely. As a result I'm much better informed about the facts and issues than I was when reading huge amounts of daily news. It boils down to a difference between consuming mostly noise and consuming mostly signal.

Interesting. My own area of knowledge is renewable energy, a topic which appears with moderate frequency in TE. I would say 8/10 articles are merely repackaging reports published by major global consultancies like McKinsey, Navigant, etc. that I had seen two or three months earlier through my employer (a large multinational energy company). I would not say the information is not correct, but it hardly insightful and often presents an incomplete picture which looks at the industry primarily from the perspective of financiers.

Well that's why it's not called The Technologist I guess :) It's hard to expect non-specialist publication to write anything non-trite to an expert in the field, but just not botching up the basic facts is often refreshing.

Repackaging reports and press releases (without attribution!) is major problem in news everywhere.

perhaps not insightful to you, someone with knowledge of the area. but how about others? how about me? where should I gain my insights into all of the various industries that I don't have direct knowledge of today?

I'd like to echo this sentiment. In fact, this is the exact reason that I happily pay for The Economist. Even when reporting on topics with which I'm quite familiar, The Economist nails it in terms of accuracy.

For instance, recently there was a writeup on quantum computing in which they made a somewhat hyperbolic claim regarding D-Wave. This gave me pause; however, the point was clarified in subsequent paragraphs, thus restoring my confidence in their analysis.

Much like the parent poster, I too have dropped many of my daily news sources, but not The Economist. I've yet to find a publication which matches it in terms of coverage and accuracy--not to mention their exceptionally high-quality audio recordings of each edition (perfect for commuting!).

yes and no.

Ive noticed the economist has a habit of playing policy games.

In that case they publish nonsense to further certain policy aims.

But often its well researched unbiased material.

not that easy to tell the difference.

but infinately better than the junk put out by the likes of the bbc fox cnn times etc.

Totally agreed.

But the nice thing about the newspaper (The Economist refers to itself as a newspaper, not a magazine) is that they provide pure opinion journalism and as a reader you know exactly where they are coming from.

While I agree a lot with the publication (for example: they argued to liberalize drugs, or advocated gay marriage literally decades before it was chic). I encounter my share of (what I lovingly refer to as) full-of-shit opinions, with which I wholeheartedly disagree.

Overall, though, it's one of the last remaining publications, on which I put a certain amount of trust because they usually know what they're writing about and even on the subjects on which I (partially vehemently) disagree it's always an interesting read.

Because they argue their position intelligently and competently. It won't make me a believer, but it's useful and interesting to get the counterpoint from a reputable and trustworthy publication and sometimes get your dogmas slightly shaken in the process.

Additionally, I feel they present opposing opinions with proper weight and fairness (before arguing against these points), so you never quite feel totally in the dark about the full controversy.

How is an opinion "full-of-shit? Do you not think that is their actual opinion?

I'll give you an example. The Economist has a few core principles that they hold very dear. Two of these are social liberalism and trade liberalism. They are strong believers in the free market. Applying these principles to issues in the recent past, the Economist took positions in favour of both legalisation of drugs and enacting the Trans Pacific Partnership. Most people (but not all) disagree with one of these stances but not the other. A Reagan Republican would favour trade and "just say no" whereas an Obama Democrat would demonise the TPP and demand the end of a failed, pointless war. It's easy to see how such people would find some stances taken by the Economist as "full-of-shit".

I'm a long time subscriber to the Economist, ever since I was in high school. I appreciate their breadth of reporting and their commitment to provide opinionated takes on news while also giving a balanced take on news. Very few times have I felt the "Murray Gell-Mann effect" while reading it. I can recall just one instance they have been wrong about a topic I'm knowledgeable about. That's a better record than any other publication I read.

I thought we liked BBC?

Reading the above quote from Micheal Chrichton, I immediately thought about The Economist and how they are usually well informed. I remember a short article on some legal case in rap music. I used to be very into rap, and while I didn't learn a lot from the article it did confirm that the writers take it very seriously whatever topic they are reporting on.

I stopped reading TE because I was put off by their too steadfast belief in monetarism as the be it end all. To their credit, they are pretty upfront about that though.

Actually, the Economist has about 400 reporters for a 50 page weekly magazine, about 8 per page, so they do have enough people to include experts for all those fields.

The times I read an Economist article about my country or my line of work the coverage was actually very good, but your milage may vary.

I am from a non-US, non-EU, non-UK country and the Economist coverage about my country isn't perfect but it's pretty decent.

Non-UK after non-EU already? the brexit hasn't happened yet :)

To be fair, I live in the such a country. Only, in my case, it is Norway, so it is kind of different altogether.

Very true, but TE is usually way less wrong than the alternatives. The journalists there at least seem to know how to use Wikipedia. I mean, what am I supposed to read instead?

The Economist also has a fairly evident political agenda.

I don't follow it that closely, but aren't they also pretty up-front about their own bias?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance

Indeed, and that is why I very rarely read it - for me, it would be too echo-chambery. I read the NYT quite deliberately and every day, enumerate why Krugman and Blow are wrong about whatever they are pontificating about...

Has The Economist shifted? I started reading it in about 2000, and at the time I really liked it because it seemed so intelligent and neutral. It seemed like such a pleasure to read something that went deep into interesting topics without an obvious axe to grind.

In the past ten years it seems to have drifted gradually leftward. Sometimes I can't reconsile The Economist of 2000 with the one of 2016. Did The Economist move gradually to the left or did I move to the right?

I think you've moved to the right, or this is another case of "reality having a leftwing bias". Or perhaps issues not reducing clearly to left/right.

The Economist were always Mill/Smith liberals, in favour of free trade, light but effective regulation, against the War on Drugs, pro-migration etc. They have a strong tendency to recommend economic liberalism regardless of what the problem is. These days the "right" have moved to "illiberal" positions - restricting free trade and migration. That may be what you're seeing.

If $xyz seems neutral to you, then it might mean you are politically and tonally aligned with $xyz ?

They have shifted over the past years, from small-business, fair/relatively-free market stance towards elitism/globalism.

My subscription is up in January, and -for the first time in 25 years- will NOT be renewed.

Left? The Economist has a blatant liberal slant.

I think it depends on your viewpoint.

I think The Economist is pretty open about their liberal slant (Adam Smith liberal, not US politics liberal).

I would think that a publication called 'The Economist' would be Adam Smith free market liberals.

Essentially it is, with caveats. The Economist was originally a publication set up to protest the Corn Laws and their distortion of the marketplace. The stance has shifted over the years but the tone is often inline with the founding idea that people and businesses should be left up to their own devices unless there is an excellent reason to intervene.

...compared to those outlets where is not that evident ?

Because I cannot think of any publication that I would call completely impartial (it also would make for pretty dry reading).

The Economist is not perfect but is the best news source I know, by far.

This quote has always bugged me a little bit. It does seem reasonable to expect that reporters and editors know more about the major world events that are the paper's bread and butter and less about other things.

The structure of a typical science section doesn't help. There are typically only a few reporters--often only one-- and they tend to cover whatever's timely (e.g., has recently been announced/opened/published), which doesn't let them build up much expertise. I think this also explains why pop-science articles tend to conflate background (here's what was known before this paper was published) and whatever actual result was: it's all new to the reporter.

That said, I was recently interviewed by CBC about my research and I thought they did a very good job. Everyone seemed prepared, asked reasonable questions, and the final product matched what I said!

I have also been interviewed by CBC (about floppy disks, oh well) and they were great. They put me in the best possible light, made me sound coherent, and got the facts correct.

It's funny to me the quote mentions Palestine. I once spent six months in Israel on study-abroad (I was a near eastern studies major). While there I saw certain things firsthand. When I came back I noticed that all the US newspapers I could find in the University library all reported falsehoods regarding the events. I actually found that the BBCs coverage was the most honest and accurate. This experience has always left me wondering, "If an event that I have personal knowledge of was not reported accurately in the newspapers, how do I know that other events that I do not have personal knowledge of are reported accurately?" It doesn't seem to be enough to use multiple sources since all of the US sources I could find were inaccurate and how would I know if the BBC was always accurate?

The main way I've found is to just read something from multiple countries. For a given article I care about or feel dubious about I always try to get at 3 or more country's take of it. While it doesn't help you find the 'truth' writers tend to misinterpret the same things different ways while things that are actually reported figures will lean more consistent.

Also for lots of things there is generally the direct source available if it is economic/legal/statistically relevant and a quick skim of that is a good get you up to speed thing. The writer made mention of something as 'interesting' so that's just a key to me to go looking for information in that direction where otherwise I would not.

One thing I should point out is that my story took place more than 2 decades ago in the pre-WWW days. It was a lot harder back then to check sources in multiple countries.

There's a bit of irony in this quote coming from Michael Crichton. When I started hanging out with the Science Online community in the early 00s, I learned that Crichton was widely regarded as spreading bad science by regularly citing discredited studies or fringe research in his books.

He was also known for getting even basic science wrong, like in "Jurassic Park," where the scientists fill-in missing dinosaur DNA by splicing it with reptile and amphibian DNA. Anyone who has studied dinosaurs knows that their closest living relatives are birds. How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact?

Then there was that embarrassingly awful book attacking the idea of climate change... but I think Crichton is a great example of this Gell-Mann phenomena. I know many people, even academics, who have read his books and will bring them up as having a degree of science fact.

>> How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact?

Because following that scientific fact would have ruined one of the major plot points of the story? Fiction authors do take some liberties to suit their fictional stories.

Jurassic Park was published 1990. I don't think that birds being the closest relatives of dinosaurs was established beyond doubt at that time as the theory of dinosaurs being ancestors of birds was revived only in the 1970s.

Funny. After reading this, I decided to comment that in my mind The Economist is a somewhat good counter example. Then I noticed that pretty much all other comments were already discussing TE. I guess I can keep on paying my subscription.

It seems rather ironic to me that this theory, which uses as it's basis that some journalists mix up cause and effect, then turns around and in essence posits that because some articles have errors it means that all articles have the same category of error.

It's not at all evident to me that every article in a more reputable news source will make errors in every thing they report on.

I have a couple of areas of interest where my knowledge is quite deep and I notice this whenever there's anything about those subjects written in the local or national press.

I see people asking why we can't have a meaningful dialog about the subject and it's because at least half of us don't understand the basics of the issue.

You see this all the time with startup news. Read a mainstream article about a startup you know personally.

Sure the main details are all there, but the small details are changed/ omitted to fit the mould of the story the author had in mind.

>read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate

This was not stated. The opposite was implied in GP's case.

It's relevant to mention this, but it is emphatically not what was being described.

I don't see this effect. The more inaccurate and biased stories I read makes me read the other stories actively looking for biases.

I think people are turning off MSM big time after this election.

Michael Crichton? The xenophobe and anthropocentric climate change denier? Pot, meet kettle.

He should have stuck to fantasy land, err, show business.

The quote can stand on its own merit. Discrediting the source doesn't change the words.

I've changed my mind. Thank you.

Who better to explain profiteering from misogyny, lying, hysteria, anti-intellectionalism, war-mongering, amnesia, obfuscation than Micheal Crichton?

More people are interested in world events than in science, so it's reasonable to assume a newspaper will set a higher standard of reporting for those events. A journalist who studied political science isn't equally inept at writing on all subjects; he might have some very good insights on politics. Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields.

> Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields.

Wow, that could hardly be more wrong. HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects. Sure there is a bias towards software but that's hardly the limit. Even if HN was only read by SW exports assuming that they don't know about anything else is ridiculous. Not that HN is nonsense free. Your comment for example.

> HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects.

Although I agree with this, there is also a lot of nonsense and factually incorrect statements. Not everyone is an expert in every field, and many people will make bold claims about topics in which they're not well versed – even on HN. Unfortunately, this applies to me as well sometimes.

The media is shocked even after all newspapers and TV backed a single candidate, she lost. I speculate internally they blame alternative media, so now they run a campaign against 'fake news'. Of course it couldn't just have been the fact that most states and rural counties did not like Clinton much at all - the media's headquarters are all located in big cities so they were all blind. They are now blaming and accusing 'fake news' instead of taking a good look at themselves.

The media wants to be shocked that covering Trump 24/7 yielded a victory for Trump.

And by complete coincidence, they now have a lot more to get people riled up about (and more clicks to sell) for the next four years.

That goes along with my thought that sometimes the NRA would rather have a Democrat in office for much the same reasons.

They covered the election 24/7, not just Trump, and why not?

It probably applies more to the Republican primaries, where Trump seemed to get as much publicity as the other candidates put together (and much more in international media)

Negative publicity from news sources the typical registered Republican had a fairly low opinion of almost certainly helped him greatly in what was arguably the more difficult contest for him to win.

This is pretty much the DNC playbook from the election, elevate a fringe candidate and marginalize the moderates during the primaries, to make it easier to tear down the candidate during the election. Problem is Dr. Frankenstein wasn't able to control her monster

Operation Pied Piper, The DNCs 2016 Strategy From Wikileaks part of Podesta release

1) Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election;

2) Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents;

3) Muddy the waters on any potential attack lodged against HRC.

Pied Piper Candidates

Ted Cruz

Donald Trump

Ben Carson

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120.

see the attachment with email for the Strategy.

Negative publicity can swing both ways though, it could just as well sink him.

Maybe Ron Paul should have gone for that kind of infamy :-D

It definitely is frightening at times. And frustrating at all other times too. I remember when news articles reported all the known facts up front, or they would do some research to post base facts. Talking about air accidents above, I remember when the first lines of a news article would contain the location, info on the airline as well as the aircraft type, departure and destination information etc.

But it appears that these days, the rush to post something that will get clicked on bypasses all the actual information that people might want to know.

Take the recent tragic crash in South America that wiped out a whole football team. When I heard about the scale of the accident, one of my first questions (as a former pilot, and knowing the carrying capacity and safety reputation of most aircraft) was "I wonder what aircraft model it was?".

I read through 3 articles on common news sites which didn't state this information at all. Two of them didn't even have the airline or carrier name published in their story. I ended up resorting to a pilot discussion forum, where I found out the information I wanted.

You hit the proverbial "nail on the head." Before 24/7 news channels and online access, the rush to "scoop" another newspaper still had a 16-hour cycle due to daily print runs. The infamous incorrect front page presidential election result made editors back up and double check things before rushing a story, but it didn't last long. Many years later, Dan Rather lost his job for not fact checking before reporting something he wanted to believe.

When television news first appeared in the US, some claimed the death unfiltered information, which was already filtered, while others claimed the death of newspapers. The first didn't change much and the second barely changed.

24/7 cable news was already in vogue before Dan Rather's incident, who I believe claimed the high road, which helped remove Dan Rather. All that changed when the revenue sources changed.

What I personally find hypocritical is the different standard for "breaking" news versus "regularly scheduled" news. Bryan Williams was excoriated for honoring veterans and having a normal, human memory. Breaking news and special updates are blatantly suspect and misleading, feeling line "spray and pray", with minimal or no fact or source checking, and there appears to be no consequence. I believe the Rather case was egregious and the Williams case trivial.

I have a link to a study I need to find and post relating to the amount of international news viewing by country. More international news generally means more sources, purportedly meaning more viewpoints and balance.

It feels like P. T. Barnum is running much of today's media outlets. Sensationalism combined with instant gratification gets more views = more ad revenue. "Always follow the money." as told to Bob Woodward in _All The President's Men_.

The Rather case really changed my view on the mainstream media. It isn't just that they went on-air with something without any fact checking, which even the most cursory fact-checking would show to be fabricated, because it fit the narrative that they wanted to tell. It's that not only them, but the entire rest of the mainstream media, continued to defend it, even as the evidence accumulated that it was not only fake, but a really lazy, badly-done fake. Aren't these companies supposed to be in competition? Shouldn't they call each other out for blatantly biased, shoddy journalism? I guess pushing their chosen narrative is more important than that.

Really makes you wonder how many other con jobs they've tried to sell us, before the tools existed for independent parties to get their own research out to the public. And now they're telling us to beware of "fake news", as if they haven't been publishing it themselves for decades at least.

> What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.

I am surprised by that too. This whole "fake news" thing appeared out of thin air around the US election and is reportedly a new phenomenon - as if most of the "regular" news coverage wasn't already of various degrees of fakeness.

The fake news being talked about is actually fake, as in nearly 100% made up with the intention to misinform. It's definitely not new but I saw it way more during the election and it's very different from shittt reporting.

Maybe I am misreading you and other posters here, but I am getting the idea that people don't think this is a real thing or that it's no worse then actual news. This shit is real, harmful, and really not hard to find. I have a pretty trimmed down Facebook account but I would see multiple fake news posts shared by people every other week or so this past year. The way people talk about manipulative ads here could be applied to these articles. The worst part is they are incredibly easy to debunk, but no one gives a shit about checking what they read.

> Maybe I am misreading you and other posters here, but I am getting the idea that people don't think this is a real thing or that it's no worse then actual news.

Can't say for others, but personally, I do believe the phenomenon is real. But I don't see it as something significantly different than "regular" reporting. It's a difference in degree, but not in kind. Regular news already only pays lip service to factual accuracy.

It was an undefined talking point that has spread farther and faster than it was likely intended. I suspect it will disappear soon as the stupidity of it starts to affect the major news agencies and social media.

It referred to a real and serious phenomena, but now the phrase has been muddied by political rhetoric. It's still a problem, and it's different enough from the old clickbait sensationalism and conspiracy theory chain emails that it deserves its own name.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-the-new-yellow-j...

https://medium.com/@ev/i-found-it-interesting-that-when-i-we...

Nah, for the most part what some are calling "fake news" is still the old-fashioned clickbait.

I can remember several scandals over the years from the big news agencies that would be considered "fake news" by today's standards. They range from just being wrong to outright fraud. This is nothing new, this crap existed before there were websites. It's just that people simply choose not to remember to continue their desire to have something whine about.

It is also an old tactic by people wishing to discredit those that disagree with their agenda, whether it is political or economic.

I suppose fake news has been totally normal in the showbizz coverage world - and popular. Now it goes mainstream and people complain...

> is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.

I believe that was the intent all along.

Blocking the bad ones and blessing the good ones are two sides of the same coin. We seem to think as long as government isn't doing it, it's not "censorship" and no problem. But we learn that time and time again, various governments major tech firms are actively working together.

Even more fun.. where did you hear the term "fake news" or where do you hear it regularly? Is it the same people who claim they're the "real news"?

Whether you agree or not, if you ask any suspect if they're guilty, the answer is "No!"

Sorry, but there actually are people who admit to writing fake news: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...

Yes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

The first two were both NYT journalists - one a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1932 - and the third covers the 1890s, so let's stop acting like it's new, unique, or exists exclusively on one side or the other. This is how much of the modern press started.

Do I understand correctly that you would like to take back your earlier claim: >Whether you agree or not, if you ask any suspect if they're guilty, the answer is "No!"

I'm sorry but even I don't follow your logic. AFAICT your parent is simply pointing out the pot calling the kettle black.

He's saying that if the "suspect" is NYT, then his logic fails because they're reporting on their own fake news.

I believe the parent poster is saying that fake news isn't a new phenomena; I don't believe it was condemnation of any specific news outlet.

Any search of history can find fake news going way back; the difference today is the ease of producing it and how easy it is to spread rapidly.

Yes: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/

I mean, obviously: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/photos/barack-michelle-obama...

Blame OJ Simpson and that fucking white Bronco.

That started this era of nonsensical analysis and up to the second coverage of random car chases, progressed to constant updates about other random things, and then the 9/11 ticker sent it to the moon.

> What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.

I'm genuinely curious to know where it's talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are the pinnacle of reporting?

Honestly I never hear/read anything but hate for them?

>What's really really scary to me lately is all of this talk about "fake news", which originally referred to outright lies that were part of click-farms, but is now being talked about as if CNN and MSNBC are somehow the only source of "real" news.

this is an intentional ploy designed to conflate the issues of tabloid-trash and dissent.

we don't even need a ban for the tabloid trash... but once we link it to dissenting from the mainline and call it the deciding factor of the election (a huge leap...), we put the mainstream media who have proven to be incompetent and dishonest back at the wheel.

> frightening

Well, it's sad. But, in part, you can relax: The "fake news" is just a current meme and will go away in at most a few weeks.

You can hear so much about such a meme because the news organizations form herds, gang up, pile on.

Tribal instincts, competing for scarce resources?

Maybe you were responding to "form herds, gang up, pile on". My explanation for why they do that: For a newsie, if some of the bigger guns in the MSM are saying that some candidate is a dirty rat, then it is both safe and easy for all the other newsies in the MSM to do the same. Just one newsie calling dirty rat likely won't have enough credibility to get much traction, but, if all the MSM newsies are saying dirty rat, then they all get credibility, not just for a claim of dirty rat but maybe also even for little green men from Mars. More generally, gangs offer to their members some safety of numbers, and people in gangs are more willing to throw stones.

A friend of mine who remembers NYC some decades ago explains that the NYT wrote the stories and the rest of the MSM, especially the TV evening news, just went along -- easy, "no real work about it".

Yes, no doubt much the same applied to tribes. If everyone joins in, then can bring down an elephant, mastodon, bison, reindeer or some such, no one member of the tribe is at much risk of injury, and everyone in the tribe eats that day. If some guy in the tribe just wants to sleep through the effort, then maybe the rest of the tribe won't let him eat!

> Frightening. Really truly actually frightening to me.

Don't worry, Congress is going to fix that for you if the "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 ", H.R. 5181 passes. We'll have trusty folks over at the "Center for Information Analysis and Response" [1] to help us by "disseminating fact-based narratives" (!) to aide in determining whats true and whats false. How handy!

[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr5181/text

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-07/propaganda-bill-con...

Done. It passed and we now have a Ministry Of Truth.

>"I've seen this directly, too. I've been on the local news quite a few times, and EVERY TIME what they end up broadcasting, and what I was explaining to them are different things."

Completely agreed from personal experience. Not new but always worth re-iterating.

The news can't even get the basic facts right without twisting through addition or omission.

How are we supposed to rely on them when factual sources are suspect/false in the age of fake/lie-news?

Find experts. Do your own research.

I have seen this happen to a friend. He was active in a political party, and was interviewed by a local station which was doing a piece on politically active millenials.

They sent a reporter with a camera crew and he spoke to them for over one hour about his political views and ambitions. In the end, only a single soundbite ended up in the piece. It was a metaphor he used somewhere inbetween, so forgettable that I can't even recall it.

In an extension to what I wrote above, I used to follow my local newspaper on Facebook a couple of years ago, just in order to keep in touch with local events seeing as I don't have a TV.

I noticed their feed back then starting to change from a simple and useful dissemination of their newspaper articles, into a conduit for posting tabloid style or inflammatory/unverified web links and popular memes.

I questioned them a couple of times on this in the comments area, but was told on both occasions by the page admins that their Facebook page was a 'fun and social' outlet for their paper, and if I wanted 'real news', I should just buy a copy of their actual paper.

Shortly after, I noticed that their print paper started to echo their Facebook feed, in terms of unresearched articles simple copied and pasted from other sources. I stopped following them on Facebook and stopped buying their paper shortly after.

When clicks, eyeballs and stickiness trumps good journalism, then that pretty much closes the door for me.

My theory is that profit destroys many news channels from the inside out.

The channel start with the best intentions of conveying legitimate unbiased news to inquisitive educated audiences... but eventually the supply of news seekers gets depleted, while investors and advertisers demand more. The channel is "forced" to keep expanding so they start catering to people that don't seek out news... steadily devolving into click-bait infotainment articles.

Low-brow content alienates the original news seekers, and they leave for cleaner sources of information... but by now the channel's legitimate reputation is lost. They must double down on the infotainment market to keep turning a profit.

Eventually that gets saturated too, so the channel abandons their original (expensive) legitimate news reporting and continue chasing low-brow audiences, competing against all the other devolved spam-news sites. If their name held enough trust, they might chase profitable corporate/political puff-pieces ("fake news" aka lies).

It feels like an awful game-theory scenario.

I'm sure this is what is happening. Income from readership of physical paper goes down, pressure mounts and even reputable news papers feel thsy have little choice... ask any journalist. It is brutal, earning a decent living is hard, earning it from actual quality reporting is impossible because the vast majority of customers can't separate anote article written in 10 minutes without any research or fact checking from the results of a 1 year research has undercover project...

So yeah, no surprise they deliver more of the 10 minute pieces and quality goes down. If we don't pay we get what we pay for - nothing. Hot air..

I'm not disagreeing with any of your post but one bombardment which I can't stand now that someone "helpfully" pointed it out to me, is when I was a kid and still watched news, "breaking news" complete with animation and breathless commentary and interruption to regular programming, this meant that a pope had died, or Reagan was shot, or a new Russian leader, another war or coup started, or at minimum a major airliner crash, Challenger explosion, that level of significance.

In the 2010s, "breaking news" apparently means early news cycle filler as opposed to late cycle filler that's already been reported 47 times in the last 24 hours, so after the attention grabbing fanfare, the breaking news is the national christmas tree lighting ceremony in DC, or surprisingly it snowed in the winter in the midwest yesterday, or congress is boringly making sausage as usual, while I'm sitting there waiting, come on, whats the breaking news part, did the ISS re-enter, has a political leader died, has a new war begun? And then they go to yet another old person pharmaceutical commercial, because those are the only people who still watch news channels, and I'm all question marks. Where's my important news?

At my place (me, my wife, 6yo and 1yo daughters) we have done the same (got rid of our TV about 5 years ago).

We watch the occasional TV show via on demand streaming (guilty pleasure="The Voice", food for thought="several long form journalistic features, tv documentaries etc")

The improvement to our quality of life at home as been significant. In the little free time our daily chores still leave us, we simply play with our daughters (lego, board games, silly play) or read a book with them.

The only concern I have is with the kids growing up. Is the lack of exposure to daily news going to make them less aware of the "world out there"?

After all we could make the choice to live without TV/News after growing up with it. All that news noise is part of our accumulated view of the world. How will this affect someone growing up?

Good move. How I counter this news awareness in our house is to actually have discussions with my kids about news that I know they are interested in.

For instance, my younger son is super interested in space and space exploration. Whenever I see a news article or announcement on the web (or even right here on HN), I read up a little about it and then seek him out with a "Hey, did you hear about ...". This often leads to a great discussion, and ends up with us sitting in front of the computer to visit the NASA or ESA websites to get more information, photos or videos direct from the source, without much editorial slant on it.

It's all about piquing their interests, without overloading them with a lot of garbage. They've got enough on their plates with school and social activities etc., so curating their news for them like this is I think useful, plus also leads to some good father/son bonding time where we talk about big ideas like adults.

With 1 daughter in university and 2 in high school, I do something similar, adding in listening to their viewpoints, and asking them critical thinking questions about their views without necessarily disagreeing with them. It doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree, I simply ask them to think for themselves and question the reason they feel the way they do. It's often quite interesting to go into a direction which I had not considered. I've also found flaws in my own views from the exercise.

As may be expected, they also get tired of this sometimes, and they know it's coming, so I try to pick and choose items at random and just let others go. I believe--well hope really, that this encourages them to think and ask questions themselves and not dread another dinner with dad :)

And if you have the technology to subscribe to video RSS feeds there's news such as:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/twan_index.html

Only two things to not like about TWAN, coverage of politicians photo ops, and for a weekly show its simply too short.

Thanks, that's great advice.

My advice to you would be to get a subscription to a quality newspaper, even if it's only on a weekly basis. Newspapers have come to terms with their position, as last in the news race, so they tend to make up for it with articles pondering the why's of news, rather than the what's. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and they will absolutely read a newspaper while eating breakfast, if you leave one out for them.

Yeah I thought about subscribing to a weekly newspaper. The problem is that over here (Portugal) all the weekly news papers are of a particular political "lean". To get a balanced view I would need to subscribe to at least 2 of them.

But I guess as the kids grow older they will inevitably come into contact with the mother of all noise machines... the internet. Then the problem will be to teach them how to filter...

> All that news noise is part of our accumulated view of the world

All that news noise is part of an unreliable, distorted view of the world. The article gave you the solution: read books.

With respect to the kids, its worth looking at the demographics of actual viewers leading to interesting commercial choices where the ads are mostly old people pills and old people cars. Meanwhile the content is aimed, narrowcasting style, right back at the old people to steal old people from other news channels rather than to try and appeal generally, so there's lots of coverage of the 2010s antics (or deaths) of 1970s child TV stars, 60s musicians, and so forth that mean nothing culturally to a 2010s kid.

No 2010s kid is going to get "street cred" socially by walking into school talking about how sick Buicks are and Crestor is awesome and its almost but not quite the 15th anniversary of John Ritter's death.

Don't worry over it, your local school will gladly accept that responsibility for you and play the news of their choice directly to the class room.

In general, I agree with everything you said. However,

> No thanks. I would rather control my own news firehose, and be selective about the information that I want to learn more about.

My worry is: Isn't this what caused the fake news / misinformation silos? By being selective about our information sources, aren't we distancing ourselves from how a majority of the world lives and thinks? And as product developers (as majority HNers are), isn't it in our benefit to understand as much of the world as possible?

You are correct. My viewpoint was mainly about being fed a constant stream of nonsense and/or distractions along with the general feed.

For instance, I absolutely loathe 'celebrity news', but most main news sites here that I go to have at least one or two articles on rubbish like that as their lead, and I have to dig to find the stuff that is relevant to me.

To use the example of air accidents above - I rarely find out anything useful that I want to know from popular news sources. Of course, I hear about the incidents on them, but when I want to dive deep, I go to specialist forums or sites where people in the know are talking about it.

Similarly for mundane things like sport. If I want to find out more about, say, Formula 1 races, I will visit certain sites that I know have motor heads discussing things. That way I can learn about future car developments, driver contracts etc. Mainstream sports news seems to want to talk about dirt and gossip for just a handful of drivers.

> gossip for just a handful of drivers.

They are using the technique of formula fiction, that is, what the ancient Greeks discovered as a sure-fire way to get and hold the attention of an audience.

So, in that formula, there is a protagonist the audience comes to identify with, that is, care about. Then the protagonist has a problem. Through various highly in doubt and improbable victories, from skill, guts, determination, smarts, luck, whatever, the protagonist wins and at the end gets the girl.

Can see a version of this formula fiction just as orchestral music with no words at all in the Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben as at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2-dLoWorUs

So, to use some words, there is a man, the hero, aka, protagonist, nice guy, cruising along in life. Then he encounters his adversary, nasty, menacing, bad dude (flute, etc.). Then starting at about 10:00 in the performance above, he sees HER, the girl (solo violin -- IMHO one of the best solo violin parts in orchestral music)! She's a dream! But, soon, she's also darned hard to get and gives him a really tough time, a worse time than even Isolde gave Tristan in http://www.exoticitaly.com/images/Tristan-and-Isolde.jpg

where he wouldn't take his eyes off of her and she flatly refused even to look at him.

Near 14:00 she really chews him out!

Soon she starts to be nice.

About 15:00 they really start to smile at each other!

Around 16:00 they are together.

He keeps trying and eventually hear the music of the climax when he kisses her or whatever.

Teenage boys, your life is so much easier now: Have that climax music queued up ready to go at a single button click at just the right time with her on the living room sofa. Trust me: Richard Strauss understood her much better than you do!

Just about the time the hero is to settle down to a wonderful life of love, home, marriage, children, the adversary returns. The hero goes off to battle, maybe as in the Edmund Blair Leighton God Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Speed_(painting)

There is a big battle with the bad dude. Tough battle. Comes and goes. Finally the hero wins the battle.

Then there is victory music. Terrific victory music. As in art, the "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", the victory music communicates well what a really big victory must feel like, bigger than getting 10 KLOC of code to run, a Series A, a big M&A offer, an IPO, anything in business. Really great victory music. If want to do a foil deck with a mash up of some media content for a presentation to investors, maybe in the last slide in the foil deck use the Ein Heldenleben victory music as background. No words, but it would be tough to miss the message! Of course, not even a big IPO could come up to the Richard Strauss music, but, well, there were no words for lawyers to use to sue for breach of promise!

In the performance at the link above, the victory music is before 30:00 with the climax in the next minute or so.

At the end, after the hero has hung up his sword and is fading away, the girl is really nice to him.

If going to play with formula fiction, then might as well play with some of the best of it! Right, at one point the treble line suddenly goes up and the bass line, down. So, it feels, say, expansive, grand.

Ah, Richard Strauss, expert in applied psychology of human emotions! Good thing that human emotions haven't changed much since he wrote his music!

So, the race car drivers are made into protagonists people identify with. Similarly for what the tabloids do with celebrities. Similar to what a lot of TV news show producers try to do with their anchors.

Put all of it into various buckets, e.g., manipulation, light entertainment. But it's not information.

Mad props for the _ Ein Heldenleben_ reference. Richard Strauss was a genius, following in the footsteps and improving on Wagner.

Side note: I'm continuously amazed at the breadth of knowledge and reference on HN. Is it perfect? No. It is, however, frequently a breath of fresh air. It reminds me that polymaths still abound, and fondly reminiscent of the old /.

> Richard Strauss was a genius, following in the footsteps and improving on Wagner.

Yup.

For some more good Richard Strauss, there is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuS337uc-4Y

with the scene of the presentation of the rose from his opera Der Rosenkavalier (rose carrier) where the two women are Anne Sophie von Otter (Octavian) and Barbara Bonney (Sophie). So, in the story Octavian is dressed as a man and is delivering the rose to Sophie, the one dressed as a woman. Super nice singing by the female voices with a super nice duet. Bonney is cute as a kitten.

>"Teenage boys, your life is so much easier now: Have that climax music queued up ready to go at a single button click at just the right time with her on the living room sofa. Trust me: Richard Strauss understood her much better than you do!"

While I appreciate your commentary on the music of Strauss, I disliked this particular comment. Is encouraging emotional manipulation really what we want for the younger generations?

If mood-setting music is unacceptable emotional manipulation, we'd better all stop interacting with one another to avoid the great crimes we're all (apparently) constantly committing, because that's about as benign as it gets.

Not really.

There's nothing wrong with sharing music with others, what matters is the intent. Sharing music to enjoy together, great. Sharing music you may not enjoy just to get your rocks off, not exactly the best thing in the world.

I don't know what social interaction generally, and especially relations between the sexes, would look like absent anything that's at least as "manipulative" as mood music, of all things. It'd be some extreme sci-fi material, probably considered highly dystopic by most exposed to it.

You don't get it. There's nothing wrong with mood music. It's about the reason you put it on.

Anytime a woman puts makeup on her face, or a man takes a date to a nice restaurant - isn't this manipulation of the same type?

Only if the enjoyment is one-sided.

> Is encouraging emotional manipulation really what we want for the younger generations?

You are fully correct. We don't want that.

But, then, is there an alternative? My first girlfriend, she was 12 and I, 14, I regarded as an angel. She was and remains the prettiest human female I ever saw, in person or otherwise. She was burned into my brain: For the rest of my life I will no more be able to forget her than I will be able to forget my own name.

My goal with her was for us to be early teen boyfriend-girlfriend, with some protection against being lonely, some additional affection and compassion, one more person who really cared about us, some romance, security of knowing that our relationship was going to continue, hold hands, hug, and kiss, with nothing wrong and nothing dangerous.

I never tried to manipulate her emotionally, but there were a few times when she got emotional anyway; those times, I declined to take advantage of her; i guessed that a day later she or her mother would be angry. No way did I want her hurt, in any way, from any source, for any reason, at any time, and I was ready to risk my life to protect her from being hurt.

So, in reality, what I actually did was what you want teen boys to do.

My remark, the one you didn't like, was partly a joke, but there is a germ of inconvenient truth there -- it can appear that too often there is such manipulation, taking advantage, or overpowering emotions or nothing at all. Or, maybe it's as in the Strauss music or too often just doesn't happen.

Maybe the larger lesson to teen boys is, really love the girl, no way hurt her, seek to protect and care for her, but realize what an expert once told me, "Of COURSE, women are MUCH more emotional than men. That is the cause of all the problems." So, net, maybe, the boy should try to let her be as emotional as she wants but stay rational and prudent himself and do his best to let her have, help her have her emotions with full safety.

Usually it appears that not many people in our society are quite as sensitive to protecting girls, emotionally or even physically, as you are, or I was with that girl I loved, but I can partly agree with your point.

But I will say, there is evidence that some girls very much seek some of various possible forms of emotional experiences and will resent a boy who does not so contribute and respect a boy who does.

Ah, someday I'll write a book, Girls 101 for Dummies -- Boys.

The Strauss music was about all of life, and I was just mentioning the part where the two fell in love! I was mentioning the Strauss music as a grand example of formula fiction, and that is one of the pillars of the news business which the OP was talking about.

After being married over 20 years, which I still find shocking that anyone has put up with me for so long, I find that "to let her be as emotional as she wants but stay rational and prudent" frequently backfires because she wants emotional _involvement_ and support. Being rational doesn't meet her needs, even though as a man, a geek HFA man at that, I'd rather stay in the safe, predictable, rational realm. Staying married and supporting my wife is more important to me than my comfort zone, just like apologizing means you value the other person more than your own ego.

I'm not sure it's possible to invent a method of letting users select their information sources that doesn't immediately let them create their own misinformation silos.

I've only truly learned about people in other places by traveling. Anything else is mostly caricature.

Try learning foreign languages. To understand a language, one must possess a level of understanding of the underlying culture and history.

Then one discovers that dialects arise from a common language with differences in geographic or societal culture and history.

Linguistics and etymology are fascinating topics, _almost_ as much fun as building (and test breaking) fault tolerant distributed systems.

>aren't we distancing ourselves from how a majority of the world lives and thinks

If I wanted to know how majority world lives and thinks I would go and sample this information in real world by traveling and talking to different people, and not getting this info from people who have their own agendas to push onto me and who call themselves journalists.

> I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all.

I hear a lot of people say this these days but it doesn't really count for much if you regularly watch Netflix or other ondemand Internet based TV instead.

Well, full disclosure, we DO watch the odd NetFlix shows etc., but I think the biggest difference is (a) no ads at all (b) no news blasted at us and (c) we can choose exactly what we watch, and when we watch it. We can happily go weeks without turning the thing on, and we do the occasional weekend binge of a TV series.

The difference is that it is totally under our control, and we can select the content (and reject it) at will. The pure lifestyle changes around this (i.e. we as a family would far rather be caught up on other creative endeavours rather than watching TV) have been significant.

In Germany we have the term "Zeitsouveränität" which means time sovereignty.

That term originally appeared to describe workplace conditions and biography.

However, nowadays it is mostly used to describe media consumption. You decide when to listen to news or watch a certain show, the same way you decide when you read the next chapter of a novel.

Very nice. I saw the word "Zeitsouveränität" and knew the literal meaning but didn't realize it's modern usage.

In reality, time sovereignty is the only worthwhile thing wealth gets us, because time is our most valuable resource, a non-renewable one at that.

One particularily popular example are German podcasts of radio stations, which are advertised by "... zum zeitsouveränen Nachhöhren", which roughly translates to: ... for time souvereign listening.

I'm not really criticizing. I've not had a TV in the house for 20 years but I watch plenty of TV via the Internet. It's better for all the reasons you mentioned. I just don't feel right saying I don't watch TV.

ha yes! I don't have a TV but waste hours on the internet instead. Streaming shows, skimming think pieces and their comment sections (that's a form of masochism), clicking through listicles with funny pictures (that's a form of retardation). It's bad in different way. The only advantage I think is that the internet is not "loud", fewer pundits yelling, or bit narrators yapping in that childish cadence. It's a huge time-suck nonetheless.

>I haven't had a TV in the house for nearly 8 years now, and don't miss it at all.

You enjoy watching movies, sitcoms, documentaries, etc, on a 27" computer monitor? Just buy a TV and external hard drive, it's so much better watching stuff on 55" TV on a couch...

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. That was an upgraded size, and it is at my feet when my feet are on the table.

Also, my couch is a floor. It isn't as glorious to stretch out on as one might think.

I don't watch TV either (don't have a subscription or connection).

But your criticism of television does not support the idea of disengaging from news altogether.

> I used to be a commercial pilot, and I could not believe the amount of disinformation and outright ridiculous theories being bandied about by so called 'reputable' news sources.

This is what I hear from real experts every single time their subject is dealt with by the news. I've experienced it first hand myself with certain technology-related news where I've been heavily involved in the real thing. So when they report on economics, health or anything else I'm not an expert in, I assume that the real experts are shaking their heads just like I shook mine.