Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft than actually finding, or learning about, facts. Tribalism at it's finest.

The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings and original sources.

But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and straight forward source of a summary. And it takes a lot of time. And doesn't always end in rewarding information (lies/bias in original sources exist too - eg: watching hours upon hours of live impeachment hearings was full of lies/half-truths/obfuscation coming from all sides).

> Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team

Indeed, what’s being provided is infotainment / soft news. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infotainment

I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes, but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed curation algos.

Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to:

- Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course)

- Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and other stores long before it was in common use and the value of masks had been acknowledged

- Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was broadly acknowledged

It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information, but like you I've been increasingly relying on it for news. I'm not sure where else you can collect so many different perspectives on any given piece of news. Overtime, you learn how many grains of salt to take with each person in your timeline, and you get a sense of their personal biases. And if you can brush off the trolls, it's instructive to read the arguments that happen in the replies.

The way I use twitter, it serves the same purpose as hacker news, but with a much broader scope.

> It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information

My feeling has been there are nuggets of really good and really up-to-date information there, and there are some threads that are extremely informative, but signal-to-noise ratio is in general extremely close to zero and the hostility of the surrounding environment is unbelievably terrible.

A BIG advantage of Twitter is that get to hear from the persons themselves totally without filtering by the media. Maybe you do or don't like what some public figure who posts on Twitter says, but at least DO get just what THEY said.

This. The slanted editorializing and purposefully misconstrued out-of-context quoting by the media long ago turned me off.

My response some years ago was just to turn the mainstream media (MSM) off. On paper they can't compete with Charmin, and on the Internet they are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. Some of their material is worse than just misleading and down to manipulative, deceptive, dangerous, and even destructive. I don't want even to hear the MSM and, then, have to debunk them or risk being influenced. I hope the Internet enables some replacements, many more outlets but focused on smaller audiences.

I've resisted Twitter for a long time, but this would be the only reason I could see myself becoming a user.

In the past I've had a hard time finding people to follow with a high enough signal to noise ratio (or who don't flood my feed with a new tweet about their cat every 5 mins). Do you have any tips for picking sources? Or choosing when to fill them? And how do you stay on top of the flood of information?

For covid-19 I've curated this list:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489

All the people on it are serious experts. I've also left out some people who are worth listening to, but have a political bias or express a lot of emotion (it's hard not to be angry).

I spend way too much time getting up to speed, but (a) there's a lot of stuff I find interesting (I studied molecular and cell bio a bit during my Masters), and (b) would rather err on the side of over-learning than being misinformed.

If you want secondary sources rather than primary, try STAT news. They've been excellent.

The quality of discussion in other fora (including HN) has been quite disappointing.

Thank you so much for this! I recently got into Twitter and following local news in an effort to stay informed but boy do the comments enrage/scare me. It’s just crazy how tribal things have gotten. Is there any end of this sort of division in sight? Every year I think it will get better but it doesn’t.

Would you mind sharing the twitter handles you recommend following?

Agreed. I’d also add selling stocks when they were hitting highs.

I’ve been sorting reddit comments by controversial. There’s a lot of junk sure, but it’s you also get away from people parroting the standard lines and sometimes get some unique insight.

That's an interesting idea. I need to try this too!

Oh I didn't know you could do that! In the old days when I used to visit another site, I gave bonus points to Flamebait and read at +4. As other p said, a lot of crap, but also a lot of insight. (I also took a point off "Insightful", since +4 Insightful was usually more like "a good but well known perspective which you have probably encountered before". The genuine insightful stuff was always +5.)

I kinda miss the ability to make my own comment thread. My social media was much more efficient back then.

Out of curiosity, and because I'm a Canadian out of the loop with respect to American news networks, how can there be news being at ends with each other? That's something I have difficulty putting into perspective (referring to the Team CNN vs Team Fox comparison)

This is just my hypothesis: news networks discovered that they can cater to 30% of the population with an extreme message and get more viewership than they would have catering to 50% or 100%. A side effect is that the permissible extremity increases over time as radical becomes the new norm. Both sides can play off each other's increasingly radical messages.

two comments:

1) the american TV news industry has slowly blurred, then obliterated, the line between straight news and editorial opinion. they're now often intermixed, with slanted analysis weaved throughout reporting. things like those news panel shows are particularly bad about this.

many people don't like to admit it because it challenges their centrist pretensions, but in the modern era, fox news started it and the remaining TV news outlets followed suit over the years.

2) but more fundamentally, there is probably no such thing as truly unbiased straight news reporting. the choosing of which facts to present is itself still an editorial process subject to human prejudice.

You're forgetting the most important point. There's no law requiring a "news" agency to report the facts. In fact there's no laws requiring them to not lie about everything they say. It seems crazy to admit, because news is suppose to be useful and factual information surrounding current events, but in America it doesn't have to be and it stopped being that way when they realize that sensational and entertaining stories got better ratings.

If you read the Globe and Mail (Liberal) and National Post (Conservative), you'll see a similar -- though not quite as extreme -- phenomenon.

My approach is to include one or two news sources from the "other team" in my daily news diet.

It adds a nice grain of salt for when I read "my team's" news.

I think the Tory/Labor division that existed in the newspapers, and the way that dynamic changed in the Rupert Murdoch era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Activities_in_t...) should be studied in light of emerging polarization you're discussing in the US. Creates a self-reinforcing news duopoly that is very persistent and harmful. I suspect that as people look back on the end of Great Britain that we are living through and how it has fallen as a global power it will be interesting to see how media driven internal division was a factor.

There are still plenty of real news outlets, they just aren't on TV. You can pull up the Reuters web site, spend a few minutes reading the front page, and come out with more actual information than somebody who spent all day watching CNN.

I don’t think “real news” has ever died - it was always dead. The term “Yellow Journalism” has been around since the late 1800s.

I don’t think news that tries to push a narrative is useless. You just have to understand the viewpoint that they’re providing. By reading several different conflicting sources, and trying to understand each viewpoint and why they disagree, you can become informed on the issue.

The problem is, many people would rather take the easy route and treat every issue as if it were black and white. This opinion is right, that opinion is wrong. This news outlet is right, this news outlet is wrong.

Reading different sources doesn't help if all news is biased towards trying to report a coherent and easily understood narrative if the world is complicated and nuanced. In which case all you'll get is, to steal an expression, "the nearest common cliche" to the truth.

WaitButWhy's "The Story of Us" (https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html), in particular "The Sick Giant" (https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html), provides a really good explanation of what might be going on here.

It's the effects of the free market on journalism. The drive for profit means boosting ad revenue which in turns requires drawing an audience... actual journalism isn't profitable enough.

Each day, you have to read CNN, Fox, Reuters, the Economist, the Center for Disease Control, and some of the better local newspaper sites to figure out what's going on. Ignore what they choose to put on the home page. Even Fox News is not totally out of touch with reality once you get off the home page and ignore the opinion section.

Even Noam Chomsky, who co-authored Manufacturing Consent, practices this method. Read and dissect a wide range of sources.

> Real news died when reporters stopped having to craft a story

Or stopped fact-checking--you know, doing your homework. Real journalists used to interview one person at a time, ask them direct questions, call them on their bullshit, and fact check them in real-time. Nowadays what passes as journalism is to put two people from different "sides" on at the same time and watch them fling crap at each other. Or put two people from the same "side" on to have them take turns ripping someone else to shreds.

Frankly, it's disgusting. I have literally felt myself close to vomiting while watching TV these days. The fact the people on TV new wears suits and business attire is the worst irony; all they do is fling mudwrestling now. Just another one of the present debasement of all things past good and wholesome.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUDP6e5N9gw

If anything, with the rise of targeted advertising and paywalls, this kind of thing was encouraged. Why write articles hoping they get picked up on their merits when you can just pitch partisan articles to partisan people and get the desired home-run every single time?

I'm a Pepsi guy. It always annoys me when someone offers me a Pepsi and then gives me Coke. I can tell, and I don't drink it.

People don't get my attitude. "How can you even tell the difference?" they say. "It's pretty much the same!"

This is because when your favorite soda is Mountain Dew, you can barely tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. They're both a heck of a lot different from Mtn Dew, and there's only the tiniest difference between Pepsi and Coke when you contrast with Fanta, Mtn Dew, Sprite, 7Up, etc.

(I'm not making this up merely as an argument - the above is my reality, and yes, people do say that to me).

When you get accustomed to good quality journalism (which WaPo isn't), the differences between CNN and Fox are miniscule. When you consider all the news topics out there, and all the diverse perspectives on them out there, you'll see that CNN and Fox more or less cover the same tiny fraction of topics. Sure, if your world consists of only that tiny fraction, then the differences between CNN and Fox seem stark.

I think a more concise way to put it is: If you assign 100% to the universal set of topics/opinions, then perhaps Fox is at 2% and CNN at 3%. Sure, CNN is 50% better than Fox, but from a whole picture standpoint it's really only a 1% delta between the two.

LOL.

I don't have time to compile the numerous examples of CNN maliciously, cynically, and shamelessly to their users, so I'll just post my favorite example:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/787749117502119936?lang...

Chris Cuomo looking into the camera, and telling America it is illegal for them to go to wikileaks. But it's ok, the media is exempted from that and they'll make sure to tell you ALL of the important information you need to know.

Sorry, but give me a break. Not only do they lie, they try to scare you into not informing yourself.

I don't disagree with your CNN comment, but the severity, consistency and magnitude of F-NEWS's lies doesn't compete with anyone tbh. They're on their own category.

Exactly - I'm not sure how anyone can say with a straight face that the Dijon-mustard-tan-suit-latte-salute network has ever been anything but the #1 producer of bullshit on TV.

Fair. I should have clarified that I wasn’t nominating CNN for first place. But just because they are not the worst doesn’t mean you can let your guard down while watching CNN. In a way it’s more dangerous at least for people like me. I can watch Fox News to see what the other side is saying, but I roll my eyes enough to remind myself to take everything with a big grain of salt. It’s easier to be lulled into being less skeptical while watching CNN, MSNBC, etc.

Do you think the Red Sox are not like the Yankees?

They're just different teams playing the same game.

Fans always defend their team and vilify the other. Always. With every dispute they're able to convince themselves it's the other side that are the cheaters. They can't both be right, but yet each side feels equally certain of their position.

"I'm the most correct because I don't care about anything and trivialize important matters to just differences of opinion!"

>They can't both be right

But that also doesn't mean, as you and so many imply with these kind of statements, that both sides are wrong. It can be the case that one side is, in fact, correct, or less at fault than the other.

It's a fallacy that in a dispute both sides are always equally wrong, or that the answer is always exactly in the middle.

Yes, that's not what I was implying though (or at least didn't mean to). I meant they can't both be right all the time. The point being that fans think their side is always right and the other always wrong. When the reality is their side is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

Certainly in any specific dispute one may be correct. Or both partially correct. Or both wrong. And one may be better or worse than the other in sum.

On the contrary, not only is this type of "both sideism" incredibly harmful to healthy political discourse (because it discourages engagement and breeds cynicism), both sides are not in fact equal, or even similar.

There are always bad apples, but you just need to look at how they are treated (e.g. whether they are rewarded or punished).

Dismissing it as "both sideism" just allows mediocrity to thrive. On both sides, as it happens. It's an endless loop of "they're the problem, not us". Deflecting any responsibility and avoiding self-reflection. Nothing changes or improves as a result.

Why not demand better on all fronts? None of the aforementioned media are doing grade A work.

CNN's website spent weeks running the "you should be more worried about the flu" lie.

I'm not an American and far from Trumps target audience but the CNN is bad as Fox. I have them both on TV. It truly is a kettle and pot situation, I believe so many Americans have grown so deeply into either culture that unfortunately you can't comprehend it anymore.

Every single journalist in the video Paul Graham linked was on Fox News/Fox Business.

The video appears that it was put together by the folks at The Daily Show. You really think they went looking for clips from the "other side?"

Is the a similar video with other news stations and their similarly incorrect reporting?

Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVDPVBZF2Xg

Should be easy to do if it's as equivalent as you're assuming, no?

Late-night satire shows are not politically unbiased, nor do they attempt to be. They cater to their audience, the same way those who they satirize do.

Right, but I expressed my opinion on your political divide and newspapers, not PG's links.

The NYC health commissioner was saying to go outside and take the subway Feb 7th, 4 days after Trump's China ban went into effect.

https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1243539189020401664?s...

Literally everyone was saying it's not as bad as the Flu. I don't see why we're playing the blame game in the peak of things.

I could definitely tell you WHO (China) is to blame, but now isn't the time.

Also:

https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1245478539018805251?s=20

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/31/how-our-br...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavirus-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/the-flu-has-already-killed-1...

https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1225937322694381568

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/122367623706063667...

https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/124526211463933952...

https://i.imgur.com/43n4HWK.png

I'm curious as to why you think China is to blame for American politicians ignoring precautions and prioritizing their own wealth over the well-being of their citizens?

Because China covered it up and misled the experts.

Actually, China was thought to have covered it up because the whistleblower originally sent a message[1] to a WeChat group of his, telling group members that 7 people from the wet markets had been diagnosed with SARS. The government had no idea what it was and I'm sure nobody in the world knew what it was at the time, hence how it's a novel virus.

[1]: https://mmbiz.qpic.cn/mmbiz_jpg/jvumSxUR3OrjfcgXFibaich6y6Z6...

You're leaving out a lot of details and what a spin that was.

The Chinese government was informed and chose to cover it up.

https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coro...

https://nypost.com/2020/02/29/china-officials-knew-of-corona...

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/10/21124881/coronavirus-outbreak-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/08/8037667...

Thanks for the links. It seems that the response went along the following timeline according to my understanding:

  1. Dec. 30 - Doctors from the first few cases have analyzed the samples and discover how similar the new virus is to SARS. Officials tell them not to spread information to the public about the virus.

  2. Dec. 31 - China tells WHO about new virus (not that they know much at this point)

  3. Jan. 1 - Provincial health committee orders provincial labs to destroy samples, samples are transported to larger state facility to do testing there. The reason for this is due to the samples being considered "highly pathogenic microorganisms", and that only approved facilities should test it. (I'm guessing due to the risk of acting on the sample and contracting it?)

  4. Jan. 2nd - State approved facilities map the genetic sequence but an official national statement doesn't get made until a week later, Jan. 9th.

So from lab work, until international statement, that's two weeks. During that time, wouldn't it make sense for the doctors and researchers to keep their results hidden until it can be verified lest they risk causing unwarranted panic? Considering how carriers of COVID19 can be asymptomatic [1], it does take time for verification to be done on whatever discovery a nation makes on the world stage. In hindsight, it's easy to say that they should have jumped the gun and done exactly that on whatever communications platform were available to them. However, had COVID-19 turn out to be a minor disease, that'd mark the end of all their careers.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/14/health/coronavirus-asymptomat...

The parts that matter are Jan 11th to the 30th.

> Jan. 11–17: Important prescheduled CCP meeting held in Wuhan. During that time, the Wuhan Health Commission insists there are no new cases.

> Jan. 14: WHO announces Chinese authorities have seen "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus."

> Jan. 20: The first case announced in South Korea. Zhong Nanshan, a top Chinese doctor who is helping to coordinate the coronavirus response, announces the virus can be passed between people.

> Jan. 23: Wuhan and three other cities are put on lockdown. Right around this time, approximately 5 million people leave the city without being screened for the illness.

> Jan. 24–30: China celebrates the Lunar New Year holiday. Hundreds of millions of people are in transit around the country as they visit relatives.

Where in this timeline do you see evidence that information their healthcare system had suggesting how severe COVID-19 was, was being intentionally covered up? I just see how unfortunate it is that they realized COVID-19's severity too late, else the Wuhan residents who left prior to the lockdown would not have been able to travel as freely as they did.

They knew how bad it was and downplayed it until it spread to the world.

Dr. Birx confirmed that they misled the experts:

https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1245138898772045824?...

> I think the medical community interpreted the Chinese data as that this was serious but smaller than anyone expected,

> Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data.

I think that shows exactly that China didn't realize how bad this was. For example, from the NPR link:

Jan 18: Wuhan hosts a holiday banquet for 40,000 attendees, despite reports of a contagious viral pneumonia.

We've seen similar things in so many countries - people don't understand how bad it is until lots of people start dying. China put 21 million people on lock-down when there were only 619 confirmed cases - compare that to elsewhere.

China notified the WHO on December 31. Anything after that date should be blamed on China.

If you want to argue really hard, then January 23 when the Wuhan quarantine was announced is the last possible date that a country could argue that China was covering up the extent. At that date countries like Australia started screening passengers (and by 31 Jan had announced isolation requirements for travellers from China).

Could that be caused by the fact that compilation authors are clearly on Dem side? Trump's travel ban was called racist by whom?

(I'm also an outsider.)

You're right. And I'd add that modern journalism has effectively become activist journalism across the board. Modern journalists are primarily ideologues - and that is the origin of the partisan spin on almost every single news outlet, especially online.

This is also why credibility in media is at all time lows. Most people are politically moderate and they're waking up to the inescapable spin. This behavior is also dangerous because it provides some justification for the infamous "enemy of the people" quote. But I think partisan reporting has become so commonplace in the industry that most journalists don't realise what they're doing - either that or they believe the end justifies the means. But when the means back away at the credibility that reporting must be based on, you are destroying your institution and possibly taking society with you.