Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time.
So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” is the answer, but it’s not entirely fair. Kind of like saying the cooks at McDonald’s have always been this bad; in fact it has never been their job to do world-class work.
Why would they bother with it when what they're doing is way more profitable? They also have a reputation for being the partisan press. They'd have to completely rebrand to get into a less lucrative area.
The long form journalism that the partisan press produces, both sides here, amounts to little more than fan service. It's incapable of investigating things out of public interest without it relating to their kayfabe. MSNBC can produce thousands of hours about Trump/Russia, but the for the Snowden leaks you get a few seconds of a professional talking head telling you how Snowden is a bad man.
The WSJ on the other hand has excellent investigative journalism which is usually well separated from conservative partisan commentary - see Carreyrou as a good example.
There is, but if you're ever exposed to it it's probably in the context of brutal point-by-point debunking. On account of how it tends to be hilariously bad. Like that recent Mules "documentary" from D'Souza, or various Sinclair must-run pieces. Typically they're just very-slanted advocacy masquerading as investigative reporting. Or they take the form of popular opinion-jockeys running special "exposé" episodes that are also mostly or entirely easily-dismissed-with-public-info BS. Collectively, these seem to sate the conservative demand for conservative-flavored investigative journalism, and are all much cheaper than doing actual investigation, especially since you'll always find something to "expose" and there are never any dead-ends wasting time and money (since there's no need for actual substance behind the whole exercise).
If you mean from actual newsrooms, sure, those don't do much investigative reporting, but then there aren't a lot of conservative newsrooms. And it's not like the non-conservatives ones do much, either, with a few exceptions.
They're often good material. But they are way way way fringe. 60 Minutes especially is probably only still around because it would be a public embarrassment to kill it.
I mean, the heavy metal sonic aesthetic is not well suited for Mariachi music. The fact that Metalachi exists and has a following doesn't disprove the hypothesis.
Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay.
Anybody who took money from these people is not a victim.
Yes. Being discussed now on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593234
> And more generally, how do you square this stance with the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too biased against tech companies?
Cynically, they give negative coverage by default to encourage "charitable giving". When the org starts "donating" money to journalists, the tone of the coverage flips.
It's not a "defense", it's just reality. When it snows, do you say that sounds like the "triple point defense" of frozen water?
People are by and large fallible. I am. And we're wired to prioritize our immediate family over nebulous ideas like The World Must Know The Truth. I am full of nothing but admiration if you are the rare exception who is doing only the post principled of things, with complete confidence that everyone you work for is upright, and that you have optimized your labor to produce the most good for the world in general, not just you and yours.
But I honestly don't blame those "Yuppie Nuremberg" people, and if you see shallow news reporting as the moral equivalent of lobbying for tobacco, I can't really disagree. I just don't have the energy to pass moral judgment on everyone, so I'm content with understanding the phenomenon.
It's even worse. 50 years ago that's still what they were, but they had the "power" of defining reality. Politicians, millionaires, and other actually powerful people had to suck up to them or with the narrative-shapers against them they would have real problems.
But that reality is breaking (if not totally broken). Social media, feed algorythms, recomendation engines, etc, are taking those narrative-shaping powers from them. So they get less respect.
Correct answer.
People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish.
Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The business being covered will issue a press release and it gets rewritten into articles.
The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything about whether X is true or not.
But of course this would be expensive to operate, difficult to insulate from corruption and compromise, and unlikely to be popular with advertisers, whose objectives constitute the epitome of conflicted interest with such an outlet's stated core principle.
As you shade over from news to analysis, there are outlets like that. The Economist comes to mind; I don't think I've ever felt that their content was written from press releases. But it's also at least a day, usually a week, later than the actual news.
There's probably a project management style triangle here: fast, accurate, and, um. Some third thing. Pick two.
I think it’s entirely possible that an industry with low competition and high nepotism could just be doing their jobs poorly.
Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?
You say this as if it's an inherently bad thing. There's nothing wrong with some MSG as a flavor enhancer.
They're not trying to be gourmet food, they're trying to be fast food. They were very bad by even that low standard, and they became better by that standard. I'm still not a fan, but to give credit where credit is due, they did improve.
So yeah, some credit, that's fair. But I think the lesson is that good management recognizes when quality is falling off the bottom of the bottom rung, and makes adjustments to get back on that bottom rung.
We can both recognize the limits of mass market news and think that, eg, CNN is delivering a product below that standard.
How is Rogan an an example of good journalism? He doesn't do background research or push back on guests.
Vass you dere, Charlie? [1]
Misinformation/disinformation may, I suppose, have always been pretty much this bad, but the writing quality and intelligence in the mainstream media was not.
"Journalism" today reads like an assignment written by a near-illiterate freshman engineering student in the compulsory English class, by the standards of the mid-90s. At best.
And I think the reason is obvious - modern advertising technology proved that decent writing adds essentially zero value and forced everybody to accept it.
So the people with liberal arts degrees are not wrong to hate techies. But once, even techies wrote better.
We used to live in a world where elites guessed at what ordinary people wanted, and once the data-driven creed took over, it turned out they were mostly wrong. But optimization taken too far is evil.
Yes, true investigative reporting is rare (and expensive), but good work is still being done.
For the media at large, given the volume of stuff you can read, much of it is plain "story-telling" or "narratives", and I do think the media is more likely to go with things that fit the narrative of the day than look at things with a critical eye.
With Theranos, the media absolutely wanted to highlight a "female Steve Jobs", and Holmes used that to her advantage. Similarly, with SBF, given all the smarmy characters in crypto, he fit the narrative of "the good guy", "the next JP Morgan" coming to save the financial system for good.
Still, it's weird to have to read about this at poker.org first instead of any "respected" news source.
There was an editorial on CoinGeek in February casting doubt on SBF and pointing out the poker scandal: https://coingeek.com/ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-isnt-who-you-...
It's not that "the media" has gotten worse at their jobs. Rather, there simply a lot less funding for reporters. The hit in funding has become much worse in local reporting -- especially local newspapers. However, if this is viewed as a training ground for the few large national/international news organizations, it's easy to see how this has a profound impact for even the large and well funded publications.
There's simply much less reporting happening than their used to be, and it's a real problem.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroo...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/626459/number-employees-....
Newsrooms are completely different from investigative digging into stuff.
I am in UK and look at my local papers - the number of stories is massively down and the report numbers are much smaller. One reporter now for several London boroughs when there used to be several for one.
Who is looking at local government now?
Yes, news orgs could have adapted faster, but most privately held papers were in the black. Only when the debts and insane growth expectations were added were they dying.
Private equity is ruining modern democratic institutions.
The issue is lack of advertising revenue. No local classified adds or local firms. All gone to Facebook.
There's plenty of funding for and to reporters who aren't trying to discover the truth but instead manufacture it.
Is there a reason we think they persist?
Unless you are comically bad at crime, bad actors will maintain some level of misdirection to conceal their malfeasance. There are only so many hours in a day, there is not time to do a deep dive report on everything that comes across the desk (most of which would match the official narrative). Theranos took years of concentrated effort to expose, with a large amount of risk (real or implied) to those involved.
With Enron, they were very very good at obfuscating their scam. But it was the WSJ affiliate that was the first mover on Enron being fishy. A major short seller saw that article and shorted the stock, then turned a tip into another reporter. That reporter then pretty much started its downfall. It was, possibly, the best example of the media being the guardians against a scam since the internet started.
In the early days of Enron, an investigative journalist would have found a real gas trading company. But at no point in the history of Theranos would an investigative journalist worth their salt have found a real company.
Although, in the early days, a journalist wouldn't have found the gas trading. While Enron traded oil early on, they pretty much built the gas trading industry at the same time they were becoming more scammy.
Especially when there were tweets as old as 2018 at the very least describing the very scam Alameda/FTX/SBF was pulling.
@bitfinex'ed, a Twitter account which exposes tether for the scam it is since maybe a decade (and tether shall eventually fall), has been posting proof of all the wrongdoings. Including the ties between Alameda an Deltec (tether's bank in the Bahamas) since the very start of the scam.
It's also the media's fault that they re copy/pasting everywhere that it's "leveraged trades gone wrong, sending SBF in a death spiral".
That's not the story at all yet that's what these scummy media are publishing.
The story is that the goal was, from day one, to not only defraud people/investors but also to do a regulatory capture of the crypto exchanges market by greasing politicians and working hand in hand with officials and ex- officials who all knew each other.
If there were still investigative journalists around, there's material for quite a story.
But it's better to present SBF as an altruistic woke kid who, sadly, was sent into a death spiral after a few bad leveraged trades.
Going against the narrative is brave but it doesn't pay the bills. Besides would it even matter? Does anyone on r/cryptocurrency even care what the MSM writes?
And the public doesn't help with their hero worship of tech douchebags.
No, sorry, that is their job description. But since we're using radar as analogy, let me introduce to your new friend, IFF (Identify, Friend or Foe).
Part of the problem is that the press is owned/regulated by the people in the very institutions that fund the scammers.
It's stunning to me that that interview didn't crash FTX by itself, and it indicates that the industry (fintech, VCs, crypto) is engaged in a huge pump and dump. It's legitimately criminal.
[0]: https://archive.ph/fGLat#selection-3973.7-3973.12 (27:13)
Not to mention the fact that a lot of investigative leads likely either don’t pan out, are not newsworthy, or ruffle feathers better left unruffled (news media relies on connections and access for leads on stories, and their customers are advertisers, ie large corporations).
There is not much of a market for investigative journalism. IMO tort law or class-action suits could fill that niche too if the incentives were more aligned (gotta be a lawyer to make anything off a class action) and the playing field were more even - arbitration clause says what?
So lacking an incentive for either of those the next best thing is short selling, which also sucks because it’s time-based, risky, requires capital, and isn’t relevant when something doesn’t have a direct link to a tradable security
It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs or they've always been this bad and I'm just getting older. There are plenty of earlier scams and bubbles (Enron, dot-com bubble) that slipped under the radar until thing went to shit, so I suspect the latter.