https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...
This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.
Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.
This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.
Yes.
> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases
No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.
The facts chosen to include in a report are chosen with bias. There's no neutral subset of facts about any event.
And while humans can't be without bias, there is a big difference between trying to be factual while leaving your biases aside, and having an agenda or outright reporting propaganda.
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
[1] https://apnews.com/article/correspondents-dinner-trump-shoot...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/democrats-senate-fisa-trump-pulte...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/california-tank-leak-explosion-ga...
The 2020 tune sang, worldwide, comes to mind: "Anyone believing SaRS-COV2 may have originated in a lab is a conspiracy cracknut, like those who believe we didn't land on the moon".
This was everywhere and very few, including here on HN, did dare to question the official version.
Now the official report mandated by US Congress says the virus has non-zootropic properties and the "expert" who explained it couldn't possibly be a lab-leak is prevented from ever getting funding from the US. And it's not just US congress: the CIA changed its stance too and publicly said it's leaning towards a lab-leak after all. The examples are countless.
And yet the bile spilled and the attacks on those disputing the mainstream media version were incessant.
I posted links, back then, to an article by an actual investigative journalist who explained how Peter Daszak was doing gain-of-function research on bat-modified viruses only to be met with derision.
It's sickening, really.
People would do well to assume that, by default, mainstream media "journalists" aren't journalists but pawns relaying state propaganda.
It wouldn't change where we buried him at all, but it would materially change many other things, at least in the minds of people opposed to murder.
The media is absolutely just state propaganda.
Not that the US government has any credibility left after current admin, but the statements in here are factual, they really did take down youtube videos that were speculating about lab leak. I saw it happen.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
Maybe they can't credibly fudge the numbers, but they can find enough data to agenda-set pretty much anything.
Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.
Now Trump offers privileged access to his "tweets" for money.
Late stage capitalism indeed.
News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:
1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)
2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online
Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.
Yesterday I watched a fabulous piece by the Australian 4 Corners on food fraud in our country. They did forensic research into what food on our supermarket shelves actually contains. Shocking, but excellent journalism. Four Corners is a journalism arm of the Australian ABC - our national broadcaster. They’re funded by my tax dollars.
I don’t know what people mean when they say “mainstream media”. There’s lots of organisations out there - some of them doing really great work. But journalism is time intensive to do well, so it costs money. News you get for free is often either junk or it’s propaganda.
Economist always was good but I have not read it in a while so I can't speak to it. If it has not changed, that would be great.
If the report exonerated them, and showed they even have a Israeli bias, why would they spend 50k in lawyer fees (disclosed so far, real number is probably higher) to hide that report?
There is obvious distrust on western sources of the conflict and the UK active participation in the creation of the 2 state solution, as well as its alliance with America all taint the possible impartiality or accuracy of the BBC. But the accusations against them for antisemitism and anti israeli bias go back decades
The covererage of the Genocide in Palestine (and I'm betraying my view just by calling it that) just brings this into incredibly sharp relief as there are, to a first approximation, no real centrists in that discussion. And yet you still get the same 5 minutes of interview for a doctor on the ground in Palestine and for Ben Gvir, presented as if there's some kind of happy middle ground that everyone can broadly agree on.
Their entire political reporting side is headlined by Laura Kuenssberg who is on her best day mediocre and on her worst actively participatory on the decline of democratic principles in the UK. Her "mistakes" such as giving her questions to Boris Johnson ahead of time, would be fireable offenses in any other high stakes job. But despite repeated mistakes all somehow helping the more radical, anti democratic, side of the conservative spectrum her position has never been in danger. She also hosts far right parties 500% more time than their current seats in parliment and is directly responsible for the cleaning of image of repudiable characters such as Nigel Farage.
So if becoming a slightly less abrasive Daily Mail while being paid with public money is not worthy of being called Trash, then idk what is. Its becoming the New York Post but without slurs
yeah so the story about that... its mostly a right wing hoax.
The real story is as follows, many police departments refused to help working class people specially women. This was repeatedly reported and demanded to eb reformed multiple times.
A woman finally got the story through in the early 2010s. Which led to a big trial.
Due to reporting laws in the UK, newspapers couldn't report on it. Names are sealed until the trail and a bunch of other protections.
However Facebook and Twitter were blooming. And a man by the name of Yaxley, now Tommy Robinson, decided to make the case about race before any news could report on it. He spent years calling the case "Asian Grooming gangs" without any news reporting due to trail muzzle laws in the UK.
By the time the case was out in the open, the name had made the rounds and newspapers like the Sun and Daily Mail used it from day one.
Most cases found had white perpetrators, but the ones with Asian men got all the headlines due to the Tommy Robinson years of shit stirring.
The most famous case found that the police had been investigated twice over their lack of helping vulnerable girls. A judge had ignored a video of a girl being taken advantage of, saying "this girls like it". No prior investigation found race to be a reason why they weren't helped.
In 2016, the chief of police was fired because he was found to be responsible in part for the 17 years of abuse this girls suffered as something he actively ignored.
After he was fired, he repeated a twitter talking point "we didnt help because we were scared of being accused of being racist". This was repeated by other fired member in the 2020 report, but somehow didnt show up in the 2011 report, the 2007 report or the 2001 report. All of which highlighted ignoring girls for being poor, drug users, sex workers, or coming from foster homes and nothing about the race of the abusers.
So its funny how right wing people complain about the bbc not reporting about the gangs, when its a conspiracy made up by a neo nazi felon, in active contradiction to every police investigation from before twitter narratives and which is now a talking point in most far right circles.
So I dont think it averages out, making up shit to be angry about when police reform is something they have opposed for decades is not warranty to keep an incompetent far right spokesperson in the most important political journalistic office in the country.
Between 1997 and 2013, girls were abused by grooming gangs of predominantly Pakistani men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
However they also got a fraction of the news coverage.
The Rotherdam police had been investigated 3 times before 2013, and they failed all the inspections.
The Sarah Everatt investigation found serious deficiencies in UK policing.
The last 300 page comprehensive report on UK police found systemic mysoginy, classicism and racism at all levels across the ranks and had very direct improvement plans all of which have not even began to be implemented.
EDIT no, wikipedia says plural "gangs" also. I have zero idea what a rape gang even is, an organized crime group providing access to foster home girls?
1) is that the main predictor is race
2) that the cases were uninvestigated because of race
Neither is true. Dozens of cases all found commonalities, and they were working class victims and police lack of professionalism.
> I have zero idea what a rape gang even is, an organized crime group providing access to foster home girls?
Its an umbrella term for multiple men, having a system to take advantage of women. In some cases its offering access to drugs, in other cases is giving them gifts, sometimes its using an attractive man as bait.
A famous case happened recently in france where a man was basically drugging his wife and when she was passed out allowing men to come to his house.
Every case its a different type of horrific nightmare. People who try to make it about race instead of finding proactive solutions (like investigating how a judge in Rotherdam with video evidence in front of him ignored it) give 0 fucks about the victims.
And its unsurprising that in protests against this cases, 70% of the men attending had domestic abuse cases. Because protecting women is not their cause, hating brown people is.
Many of the girls are underage, and cannot consent, coercing them to do it will always be ra pe
Possibly you mean David Clementi who was appointed in 2017 as Chair of the BBC, but he was a financier, with no background in journalism tabloids or otherwise, so not sure what you are talking about.
Laura Kuenssberg hasn’t been political editor since spring 2022. The political editor is Chris Mason.
I’m going to take the rest of your comments with a pinch salt.
i don't agree that I should do all the work to prove something while the person (GP) whose naked opinion I was responding to is not asked the same about his opinion. This leads me to believe on the basis of evidence that you are selective and share his bias.
so yeah, let's pick one, you: How are you not biased?
Asking "are you a dumb conservative bigot" is offensive and shuts down dialogue even when the person wasn't. Better to ask for the fellow to expand on their comment
I personally don’t think the 24 hour news cycle is healthy. I pretty much abstain from it except it’s so prevalent in our culture there’s a lot of second hand exposure.
Sometimes you just have to accept that you still know nothing despite 100 articles describing a topic.
I think we have over a million games that visualize war more clearly than any news agency.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...
And if you're a billionaire there's a lot of intangible value in owning news outlets.
The industry got it wrong when it digitized
Hard to build a business that requires changing user behavior on pennies. Seriously, make the math and strategy work - requires a Herculean effort to hit ramen profitability for all involved.
I mean as an Australian taxpayer I am partly funding the ABC. And its following the exact same trends.
Todays crop of journalists are more likely to repeat absurd claims from social media as true, and shop around among experts to find the one that will support the crazy assertions.
I send more letters to the editor and to politicians today than ever before. Its getting stupid.
The real deep dives are hard to find.
And I don't think only money brings quality. Hobbyists tend to do great work especially because they're not making money. For them quality can be a goal. Not getting the most money with the least amount of effort.
A lot of the content and software I value most is by people who are doing it just for fun or because they care.
And the newspaper world in particular was oversaturated. Every little town had one or more local dailies. That was never sustainable in the digital age.
"Donald Trump frequently attacks the American media as having a left-wing bias and being "corrupt", and also uses a variety of insults when speaking about outlets that give him unfavorable coverage. Trump has sued various media outlets for perceived inaccuracies or biases, and has used his position as president to pressure outlets he dislikes by interfering in their business operations, launching investigations, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and cutting funding for public broadcasting."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_conflict_with...
The primary reason is the click metrics, they realized quality didn't matter as much as emotions and outrage and validating peoples own beliefs.
It doesn't matter how much you pay for it when they will just invest more into those things. You can see this in gaming, the more people paid for Ubisoft games the more toxic transactions Ubisoft put into them.
No, that’s not a new phenomenon. Tabloids and political rags filled that market well before the Internet. News organizations aren’t static entities, they come in a wide variety of flavors.
everything is broadly declining, too, as we grow up taking it for granted while the older generation retires, and we also are too busy working menial jobs to pay the rent.
Free, consumer website: https://www.forth.news Paid site with custom notifications and feeds: https://pro.forth.news
Btw, nice initiative with Forth! That's why I clicked.
Looks like I didn’t rotate my certificate. Eek
The Pro site is all self-curated by the user, and forth.news is a series of LLMs doing grouping, summarization/headline writing, measuring urgency, categorization, etc.
Wrong. Great effort goes into ensuring only the desired statements are regurgitated, and the undesirable ones omitted: https://www.foxnews.com/media/ap-report-slain-north-dakota-t...
This is not a cherry-picked example, but the policy of most major media, explicitly outlined in their style guides: https://jfulford.substack.com/p/hiding-the-race-of-criminals...
[0] https://cbc.ca/
[1] https://bbc.com/
[2] https://npr.org/
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
I like to check this every so often as a palette cleanser for the endless bad news that is available elsewhere
I dont see any bias in their journalism, but they have a tendency to just accept everything at face value. They will also shop around for experts that support their opinions. One person will write an article about housing referring to housing experts, and get one view, and then a few years later another will instead quote a public housing expert getting another view. Theres never any "Lets test the quality of each expert and try and figure out whats true"
4 corners and foreign correspondant however are still absolute top tier journalism. Its a shame they dont apply those standards everywhere.
A recent, prominent example is [1] where they edited footage to make it look like a soldier was shooting at an innocent civilian. They then appointed a 40 year abc/sbs veteran to investigate the incident who unsurprisingly found no wrong doing.
All of this on a topic that isn't even super political...
Granted they are still probably the best journalists in the country, but when you can't trust them to not alter primary evidence, or admit real fault when something has gone wrong, you cant really trust them for much.
For day to day stuff I still find them an ok source, it just needs to be taken with a very heavy dose of salt.
[1] https://7news.com.au/spotlight/7news-spotlight-abc-launches-...
>where they edited footage to make it look like a soldier was shooting at an innocent civilian.
In your link the ABC is claiming the footage wasnt edited by them. I mean its still a bit of weak journalism to publish it. Did that ever get resolved either way?
I'll admit I don't fully understand what they were claiming/how it changed over time but they later issued an apology for the incident [1].
From what I can work out the thrust of the abc claim is "don't blame our journalists, the editors on multiple occasions accidentally did this for no reason at all and we then failed to catch it".
Then midway through the apology they pivot to blaming twitter, or at least that is the flow of the guardian article.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/sep/17/abc-australion...
Outside of tech because it affects my work, I've stopped reading online news altogether. There's a bookstore down the road from me which sells the daily and weekend editions of a couple papers. On a slow weekend I'll walk over there, buy the weekend edition of some reputable paper, and peruse it over coffee. The stories are invariably better than anything I see online, as well as in the daily editions. None of this stuff is urgent. I don't need up to the minute. I just need to kill some time, preferably with higher quality information.
Honestly the old ways were better in this case. Just stop reading online news. Grab a weekend edition of a paper when you're bored instead. Couple bucks. No subscription. Better. They haven't changed much.
that is EXACTLY what i want in news.
i do not want your summarization opinion out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet.
just be a parrot.
"We've always been at war with Eurasia." -Politimouth
The news should say this is not true when it is not true.
Now i have to research whether two sources are true or not.
I want my news to say, "politician say x; and is a liar, here is the evidence." Nobody should want a propaganda parrot. If I look into it and the politician is not lying, I know to trust the source less.
It probably has something to do with the decline of quality journalism.
Kierkegaard in the 1850s:
"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control."
I’m sure there was still some funny business going on. They didn’t report so heavily on tabloid stuff and probably protected people in power more. But there was absolutely some level of investigative journalism in every article.