I think it has more to do with the average age people tend to get the disease. Heart disease won’t affect most people until their 60’s
My Google results:
“ Average age of first heart attack is 65.0 years for men and 71.8 years for women. About 80% of people who die of CHD are age 65 or older”
“ Almost half – 46% in 2017 – of all people who die from cancer are 70 or older. Another 41 percent are between 50 and 69 years old – so that 87% of all cancer victims are older than 50 years."
It's pretty apparent at this point that COVID was heavily politicized, which would explain its dominating prevalence in media and culture. An American has a heart attack every 40 seconds, and it's been this way for almost two decades.
Feels like your own comment explained why “heavily politicized” had nothing to do with it. (There’s a reason almost every country in the world took action against covid-19, despite vastly differing politics and influences)
People have about the same number of heart attacks every year. In the USA, Covid-19 added about a half million deaths additional to what normally would be expected.
People get used to what normally happens but when a new additional source of death comes up, they’ll be more concerned. Especially because covid is contagious and heart attacks aren’t.
> Covid-19 added about a half million deaths additional to what normally would be expected.
Not true. Death rates aren't a linear scale. The total number of deaths last year was already set up to be significantly higher than in previous years (not accounting for covid). The actual death rates were lower than expected the past 4-5 years, which tells us there were many additional people on the brink of death. Also, there's a significantly higher number of
baby boomers reaching the likelihood-of-death-from-strong-illness age over the past year. These are the types of people who more easily die from the normal flu, so the common sense explanation is that they wouldn't stand a chance with a stronger flu-like illness. That also explains why normal flu deaths were basically non-existent last year. (No, it's not because the normal flu didn't happen last year, or because of masks, it's obviously because covid wiped those susceptible people out)
My guess is we'd be in about the same situation had we done nothing at all (no masks, no vaccines, etc). It's all political theater, cash-grabbing corporations, and there's lots of suckers in the world who believe everything they're told.
> The total number of deaths last year was already set up to be significantly higher than in previous years...That also explains why normal flu deaths were basically non-existent last year...it's obviously because covid wiped those susceptible people out.
I honestly can't tell whether or not this is meant to be satirical, but if you're being serious then I would be interested to see your sources for this data.
If you know anyone who’s been sick with Covid when hospitals were overwhelmed in a foreign country, deaths and bad outcomes are highly different when hospitals can’t help you. They also every single time chose to save younger patients, for obvious reasons.
> It's pretty apparent at this point that COVID was heavily politicized, which would explain its dominating prevalence in media and culture
It seems to me that its "dominating prevalence in media and culture" came as a result of being a once-in-a-generation global plague that killed millions of people, shut down much of the world, and fundamentally altered the way humans live their lives for the better part of two years.
Lockdowns and the mass hysteria began somewhere around March. Everyone believed the virus spread from major points of entry around sometime in January. Yet we now have evidence that this was widespread as early as December 2019 (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-offe...) and the study is undergoing replication as we speak. So were people just not dying in December?
I am not a denialist. I personally known quite a few people that have caught it. It's a real, terrible illness. But I have always remained skeptical about the true risks, the approach to handling the virus, and the testing numbers. Not helping the case was how much we've been lied to or misinformed by public health officials.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. COVID was and is heavily politicized.
Baltimore Maryland, for example, is still very strict about masks, yet they are closing schools because of lack of air conditioning and Fells Point seems to be disturbingly close to requiring assistance from the National Guard, violence is quite literally out of control. Crime and children be damned, better put a mask on!
The difference is you can clearly do something about Covid and prevent all those deaths, where-as cancer and heart disease we still don't know how to prevent, and what we do know, we are similarly vocal and annoying about: lose weight, exercise, eat healthier, etc.
So it makes sense to mobilize in order to stop the spread of Covid and save all those people from dying from it.
Another aspect is long Covid, where it could be 2 to 20 percent especially younger people, have long lasting symptoms. We don't know the real long term risks here. Not knowing is always scarier, people don't want to risk things. Heart Disease and Cancer to some extent are well understood.
Then you have to consider that the Covid death numbers are with all the measures that were put in place to stop it, and with a lot more people getting intensive care which would have died without. What's still unclear is what would death numbers look like if we'd done nothing to stop the spread and breached medical capacity.
Finally, I think Covid is scary, because as a virus it can mutate, and again, that fear kicks in, where you think it's only killing older people, but maybe at anytime there could be a variant that is more lethal and starts skewing things to younger people.
I don't think any of this is related to politics. It all just seems like expected reaction, a contagious disease that kills lots of people, but can be stopped if you could prevent its spread, which has unknown long term effects, and could possibly grow more lethal any day, and which will still screw you over for a few days even as a young lad. I think that's enough to explain the reaction the world over.
> I don't think any of this is related to politics
I seriously urge you to check your cognitive dissonance to the situation as a whole. This is literally the definition of political theater.
> Covid has actually outpaced cancer and heart disease to become the number 1 cause of death
Not true at all. Did you miss the months of heated discussion when it was found out that hospitals received lump sums of additional money if they checked off "covid" as the "cause" of death? Then they clarified that by making it acceptable to consider covid as the "cause" of death if the patient had any "flu-like symptoms"...aka coughing, shortness of breath. Is it even possible to die without at least one of those "flu-like symptoms"?
I hate to break it to everyone, but we did absolutely nothing to slow down covid. Everything we've seen over the past year has simply been placebos, population control, and political opportunism. Buy hey, can't wait to read Fauci's new book!
Different landscapes between cities, different population sprawl, different customs/lifestyles, etc. E.g. cities in northern Australia are separated by vast jungles. Those areas have warmer/dryer climates. Easier to achieve herd immunity in countries like those. Achieve herd immunity in multiple small areas, it turns into achieving herd immunity everywhere.
Obviously if you can force people by gunpoint to not leave their homes, you can slow the spread (i.e. China)
90% of Australia's population is packed into its large cities Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Every single one of them had outbreaks, which were successfully tamped down with lockdowns, masks, and contact tracing, the tools you earlier decried as useless.
There are no cities worthy of the name in northern Australia: Darwin, the largest by some measure, is only 140k. The entire Northern Territory has a population of only 240,000, or 1% of Australia.
You can't get herd immunity without a vast majority of the population getting sick, which demonstrably (antigen tests) did not happen in any of those countries.
Last but not least, COVID spread like hotcakes in the warm/dry (often oven-like) temperatures of central India in April.
> which were successfully tamped down with lockdowns, masks, and contact tracing, the tools you earlier decried as useless
Not true. That's what you want to believe, and what you've been led to believe. Show me the science that proves this isn't all a load of horse shit. Show me literally anything that remotely proves any of this had a meaningful impact. Anything. Oh yeah I forgot, people here aren't a fan of science and data when it goes against their fragile leftist beliefs.
If what I said is in fact true, it would all appear the exact same.
There's many more. At this point there's a pretty good set of studies on transmission data. It seems to all indicate that proximity to other infected people increases risk of transmission, and that contact of contaminated surfaces or others is not necessary. Then you can see that transmission in the air in aerosol and droplets are both possible, and then you can reason about this with the physics on them. The closer to someone else breathing the more virus particle is in the air for you to breathe, the further away, the less of it. The more ventilated the place you are in, the less you breath in other people's air.
The CDC also does a great job at being transparent about their assessment and sources. Read those, and if you scroll down on each page you'll see large list of reference to the studies they've based their assessment on.
I live in Melbourne, the city that had the worst outbreak in Australia, and I have followed the news and scientific discussion across the political spectrum very closely from when the virus was first identified in early 2020.
Melbourne really did suppress the virus, after it started spreading wildly in July/August (mid winter – Melbourne is the only large Australian city that has a cool winter climate comparable to Europe and Northern US) last year, particularly in aged care homes. By November we were getting zero daily cases, and it has mostly remained that way until the past few weeks, when winter weather and hotel quarantine leaks have led to another small outbreak, which is again successfully being suppressed.
The measures used to achieve suppression: lockdowns of varying severity, masks, and smartphone-based contact-tracing.
That said, Australia's isolation from other countries, spread out geography, lower population density and climate absolutely make it easier to achieve suppression. I don't believe what we've done would have been possible in the Europe or the US, though I believe the evidence that these measures slow the spread anywhere they're implemented.
> I seriously urge you to check your cognitive dissonance to the situation as a whole. This is literally the definition of political theater
You have Republicans who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have Democrats who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have communist run countries who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have democractic run countries who chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
You have many other countries of various political entities that all chose to impose lockdowns and mask mandates.
To me it seems like a cross-cutting concern that affects everyone no matter their political leanings.
Now the decision to have lockdowns and mask mandates where you reside is obviously political, that's the point of politics, to dictate the laws and regulations for residents in a particular place, but I don't see a political motive behind it. The motives seem very much about controlling the spread of Covid within an area and balancing that with the economic impact. Politicians will make their own assessment for this and determine the public policy they think best manages the spread and maximizes the economy.
I would say there is some appearance of political motives from politician who seem to play the "conspiracy" card. Those seem to have self-driven motivation. But I really doubt any politician putting lockdowns and mask mandates in place is having a good time, being the one to do this is possibly a career ending move, it's a big deal, and I can't imagine what political driver you'd have for it, beyond wanting to not cause a mass spread of Covid in your population and look like a failure at preventing it.
Lethality is not the only metric of interest for any disease, including COVID. There have been reported long term health effects, which matter to people who contract the disease.
Further, if the best you can find for source data is a conservative interest group, you should ask yourself if you are looking for truth, or pushing an agenda.
Ton of people care about heart disease, and care about it a lot.
From a "stock" perspective, all of the health and nutrition and fitness related industries are based on Heart Disease and people caring about it. When people say exercise and healthy eating makes you "healthier", it almost always refers to risk of heart disease and sometimes a little bit of cancer.
When some state passed laws to tax sugary drink, that's also related to heart disease.
When people say there is an "obesity epidemic", that's talking about heart disease.
I am not sure the nutrition and fitness industries are based on heart disease. If anything, they're based on sex drive.
Sure, eating healthy and going to the gym might save your life but the money makers are people who buy expensive supplements and specialist equipment, not those that eat more salad and less beef and walk ten miles every day.
I guess I'd be a data-point against your claim haha. Purchasing beyond meat over red meat, stevia based sodas, signing up to Orange Theory and Spin classes, getting a Peloton, signing up to a gym membership, buying a Keto diet book or magazine, buying an Apple Watch to track my steps and heart rate and remind me to stand up, buying a weight lifting app and program, buying protein powder and easy low calorie snacks, etc.
The casual "exerciser" is a large market and I'd say it boomed in recent years driven mostly by a desire from people to be healthier and live longer, and not so much because they wanted the beach bod. The latter is still part of the equation too I'm sure, but so is the health crave.
> Doing so helped me to make lots of money in the second half of 2020 betting on pandemic-sensitive stocks (not Hertz), since most investors were too pessimistic about vaccines for much of that period
Sounds like a Monday-morning quarterback to me. I am guessing he lost money as the maret crashed due to covid unless he was in cash. if he truly had a sure-fire system of filtering out bad narratives, he would have gotten out before the crash in jan-feb as the virus was getting media attention, and then bought near the bottom. He would have known beforehand that Covid was different from SARS or Bird Flu and sold, anticipating a crash.
Reading this story makes me draw the opposite conclusions to the author. Instead of ignoring the news let’s pay attention to it, and then do the opposite of what the storytellers are recommending.
Also, when you trade you expect the value of a security to go up in the future. When it is in the news you have an observation of an event of t-1 due to the fact that people have already written about it and others have taken actions already.
Legalize insider trading and make large trades go through very slowly while small trades go through in milliseconds.
This would allow common people with a few thousand dollars to act on news and make meaningful amounts of money, while hedgehog funds have to wait for their transaction to painfully slowly go through.
(Very) Large trades already go through slowly unless you’re buying/selling a high volume stock at market. Also when they say insiders already heard the news it’s more like days ahead, not hours.
If you own 100000 shares of AMZN, it should take an entire quarter for your trade to go through. You will lose money if there is bad news.
If you own 1 share of AMZN, it should take 1 ms. If you are a super well-networked intern and figured out the bad news, bravo, you just made a bunch of money.
That would cause an fake increase of stock price temporary keeping it artificially higher. Meaning anyone buying would be paying more than the actual value. The next thought would be wouldn't the market correct for this? It doesn't know if I'm going to sell 100,000 at once or 1,000 shares daily for 100 days.
I was thinking that if you possess a lot of shares, your orders are all forced to go through with a several-day (even -month) delay, regardless of the size of your trade.
Would need to get rid of dark pools, or at least completely open up their visibility. (should be more transparent anyways)
And would need a way to backwards-track trades to make sure a single entity isn't placing millions of small trades...which would also require individual verifiable identities being linked to each trade.
Why would you want 100 people to have wealth instead of just one? I feel there's some related questions about utility being non-linear that matter here
No, because you can make the same argument against any improvement in efficiency and productivity. It's like arguing against division of labor or automation in a factory because less people will be employed by the factory. It's anti-prosperity.
You joke, but there are serious economists suggesting that we _should_ in fact legalize insider trading. (Though your employment contract might still forbid you.)
In any case, your suggestion wouldn't really work: the insider who would benefit would mostly be high up managers, not anymore 'real people' than the (relative) corporate outsiders who run the hedge funds and vulture funds etc.
Second, who would the retail traders trade with on those news? Market makers would go on to quote huge spreads, or not trade at all. Those institutional investors you want to hobble ain't so stupid. (And those that are, wouldn't last long.)
I actually am not joking; I don't think access to information should be discriminated upon.
If you have better access to information, because of a leak, you are better fit, better networked, and should be rewarded for it.
At the same time, those high up managers would probably be trading millions of dollars worth of shares -- their trades should go through slowly, and that is a mechanism that would prevent them from benefitting from it.
The person who benefits the most, percentage-wise, will be the dude who sweeps the floors at Amazon and sniffed the bad news based on, say, the times that people were coming in and out of work. Or the intern who found a huge security vulnerability and shorted the stock before disclosing it. These people should be rewarded. These people will get a few months' worth of rent while the millionaire just gets an additional Michelin one-star dinner, at best. And the billionaire CEO who owns a shitton of shares will lose money because he has enough shares that his trades will be delayed by an entire quarter.
OK, those economists are also not joking. Though they have different reasons to allow insider trading. Mostly to make markets more efficient by making them incorporate more information. In the end, that's good for productivity.
In any case: you can remove the laws that make insider trading various shades of illegal in various countries around the globe. However, companies would very likely still insert clauses in their employment contracts that forbid insider trading. (And have you eg forfeit any profits you make to the company plus a hefty extra penalty on top.)
If you wanted to get to the situation you describe, you'd have to make a law that makes these kinds of clauses unenforceable. That's probably pretty hard to get right, if you still want companies to be able to protect trade secrets with contracts.
How are you planning to make big trades go slow? I mean, mechanically? And, as I asked earlier, who do you think would be the willing counterparties for those retail trades when you make the life of market makers harder?
> How are you planning to make big trades go slow? I mean, mechanically?
Sure, why not? I mean, impose either on a broker-level or on an exchange-level that if an account which holds 100K shares of X makes a trade of X, it will be 3 months between clicking "place order" and when that trade actually gets put into the order book. But if an account that holds 1 share of X makes a trade of X, it goes into the order book as soon as they click the "place order" button.
Optionally, also make the order book publicly visible and anonymized.
Optionally, also make pending delayed orders to go into the order book publicly visible and anonymized as well.
Your restrictions wouldn't really work on the broker level: people would just shop around to get a different broker, or just connect to the exchanges directly. (After all, that's what brokers do.)
You'd also have to apply the same treatment to all derivatives. Especially in-kind settled futures.
You'd also need to take dark pools and internalisers into account, ie people trading outside of the exchanges.
You'd also need extra rules that would prevent people from splitting their portfolio over multiple accounts.
How would you deal with eg indexing mutual funds that are held by retail investors? Presumably you want retail investors to be able to trade as fast as before, and I also assume that you don't want to force retail investors to do all their investing in individual stocks. Now, if money is flowing into a index fund, should they be allowed to buy more stocks?
I specifically picked indexing funds here, because they don't trade because of any information they got: they just want to mechanically hold the index. I also specifically picked mutual funds, because ETFs typically don't _trade_ in the traditional sense when money comes in or goes out.
You'd also have to enforce your delay globally, as otherwise people will trade in other countries.
And, after you fixed all those issues, my question remains: who would trade with all those retail traders? Institutional trading on exchanges would largely cease.
> Also, when you trade you expect the value of a security to go up in the future.
Not necessarily. You can also trade on securities going down in value (via shorting). Or you can even just bet on eg volatility going up or down or staying the same. (Eg via some derivatives and options.)
Or you can bet on relative price movements of some security vs another.
You are right about financial prices being forward looking, and news being backwards looking. And: by the time you have heard of something in the news, the professionals and their computers will have already traded on it a million times over.
This mostly applies to deeply liquid markets. If you are trading rare Lego sets or Magic the Gathering cards, you might still benefit from news.
One of the main drivers of a stock price is the assumption of earnings. New product ? Slash cost? Higher taxes / interest? If it's a surprise, then the reaction can be quick. If it's quick its much more profitable or disastrous (depending on which side you are on).
> pay attention to it, and then do the opposite of what the storytellers are recommending
Ignore the advice. Pay attention to the topic. The same heuristic works surprisingly well for politics. Whether a thing is going up or down won’t be gleaned from the news. But the fact that we’re talking about that thing versus this is material.
There is a fun strategy trading the sessions in the US market. Basically some days the selling pressure can come from Europe, and as soon as those traders go to sleep (mid US trading session) the market reverses where Americans have different sentiment.
Just something to watch for and assume happens just like you might assume your bollinger band wedge breakout doji is telling you anything too. Itll probably fail a backtest, or you buy some SPY dailies and are right one or two times to retire.
> Basically some days the selling pressure can come from Europe, and as soon as those traders go to sleep (mid US trading session)
The trading session ends at 4 PM ET, which is 8-9 PM in Western/Central Europe. I guess you meant when professional traders in Europe “leave the office”?
From here in Europe it seems the opposite way. We are having a good or bad day, then the US markets open and we follow them up and down like a lost puppy.
Covid is an interesting case for backtesting this. Would following the opposite of what NYT recommended since BoY 2020 have gone well for an individual price-taker?
If you don't trust news sources, why would you trust this person?
At least news sources have editorial processes, reputations, trained, experienced, professional journalists. They aren't perfect, but they're much better than random bloggers.
When reputable and trusted journalists are leaving their industry and sounding the alarm while becoming bloggers on Substack, it is not so easy to maintain faith in the process.
> When reputable and trusted journalists are leaving their industry and sounding the alarm while becoming bloggers on Substack, it is not so easy to maintain faith in the process.
They aren't saying news is unreliable, they are saying they can make more money on Substack.
I don't trust this person. But there is nothing in this post that I need to take on faith, as you kinda need to do with the news.
And even then, yeah I kinda trust random bloggers more at this point. Why? Because 90% of the "news" is just blogspam anyway, where one news org will write something "original" (frequently just an editorialized summary of a primary source you as the reader could consume directly) and tweet about it, at which point all the other journos will see it on twitter and write their own "coverage" of the story, which is usually just creatively re-wording the original story without doing much digging themselves as if they're still in high school copying each other's assignments with just enough changes so they don't get flagged by Turnitin.
> there is nothing in this post that I need to take on faith, as you kinda need to do with the news
It's the opposite: Journalism presents claims based on corroboration, presents all (corroborated) sides of the story, and tells you what the sources are, with the idea that you can decide for yourself.
You must be a journalist because anyone else who is paying attention does not believe for one second that the average modern journalist is presenting all sides of a story, much less properly corroborating them.
I recall that they announced this change. I think they had been getting too much flak for providing screen time and publicity for the loonier sides. Sucks if they have traded one journalistic failure for another.
All you've posted are typical Internet rants of emotion and exaggeration, which not only are empty of any argument, they shut down the flow of knowledge and understanding. If you are unhappy with journalism, I can't imagine how people ranting on the Internet is better? I'm sure you have something substantive to say.
If you think everyone agrees, I encourage you to listen a bit more and broaden your experience. I know and encounter many who agree with me (and many who don't).
I wish I was a journalist, but it's not my skillset.
Just because my comments aren't singlehandedly fixing journalism doesn't mean they are rants or "shut down the flow of knowledge and understanding". You wanted to paint a rosier picture of journalism than exists in reality. I decided not to let you do so unquestioned. I believe this is substantive, and if you really want to appeal to the people ("many who agree with me") then I guess I'll point out that my comments are more highly upvoted than yours.
But sure, let's get more substantive: if you can find a single news article from a mainstream news website that has the things you've claimed they have then I will concede the point. A reminder of your claim:
> Journalism presents... all (corroborated) sides of the story
Repeating, insisting, exaggerating, emoting, etc. don't make something more likely to be true, or have any relationship with truth (nor does fabricating, of course). They have no value in science, law, serious news, or in reason in general. Somehow, they still do on some social media (though not as much on HN). IMHO, those kinds of rhetoric make something less likely - there's a reason people don't make a substantive argument, and the rhetoric distracts us from getting anywhere (which is sometimes intentional).
We can see now in the world that these aren't trivial issues, not sport and not isolated in effect to a fictional online universe; they have real, very serious impact on the real world. To me, this rhetoric is also boorish and a waste of my time. I am moving on to something worth my time. I hope it goes better next time.
Edit: I want to preserve this part, in case the parent is edited. Maybe you don't understand evidence and reason and argument? Sincerely, that would explain it and I'd be happy to help out.
> I guess I'll point out that my comments are more highly upvoted than yours
That's a long-winded way of saying "I made a bold claim that I can't back up with evidence and people on HN can see straight through it, so I'm taking my toys and leaving".
Again, I tried to make this more substantive by giving you space to provide a single example of modern journalism living up to the lofty ideals you claim they already live up to, and you either would not or could not do so.
And then there is your little edit at the end. If you'll allow me some recap of my own:
> you use an appeal to the people, "many people agree with me", as if people agreeing with you has any bearing on whether or not you are correct about journalism.
> when this fallacious reasoning is turned around on you, you accuse me of not understanding evidence/reason/argument.
> you feel the need to "preserve" my reversal, therefore enshrining your own hypocrisy.
Is that about right? Rest assured, I will not edit my previous comment, as it contains the full context where I point out your appeal to the people and counter with my own, unlike your excerpt which seems selectively extracted to make it look like I was just bragging about upvotes.
> Doing so helped me to make lots of money in the second half of 2020 betting on pandemic-sensitive stocks (not Hertz), since most investors were too pessimistic about vaccines for much of that period.
You can make money by betting against politically-motivated "common wisdom". Trump said the vaccines would be ready before 2021, and everyone else said it was impossible. Some said it could take two years. That became the common wisdom. But in this case they were wrong, and the stock market roared back when the results were released right after the election.
Many people realized Trump had a clear motive to shade the truth on vaccine readiness, but they didn't realize that anyone who opposed to Trump had a motive to shade it in the opposite direction.
Anyone else burnt out from the outrage cycle in recent times?
I don’t know if it’s selfish but I just don’t have the energy anymore to care about what bad thing person X or company Y did this week.
My current philosophy is to treat news/Reddit/social media like email in the old days.
That is: log on to a desktop computer once a week and read the highlights. It is not accessible except through the desktop computer.
The funny thing is this approach is completely opposite the “stories” trend in social media. It makes you really aware of the FOMO-by-design pattern these days.
Thank you! Bloomberg browsing is quite a thing I agree. Now that I think about it, I haven't found Bloomberg to be all that good except for Matt's news letter.
When you're trading, you're also less likely to read newsletters, which are not a source of accurate information. In that respect, Bloomberg is pretty good since their information service on the Terminal is unmatched.
I’m glad I’m not alone doing this! I’ve gone so far as setting up a content blocker on my phone and putting Reddit on a blocklist.
I just can’t handle all the front page content that elicits outrage and/or incredulity, and the comment threads can be just as outrageous as the content itself.
Still, I dig so many of the communities on there, so I browse by setting aside time and hopping on my desktop.
I don’t use my desktop much (maybe a couple times a week), so I find it creates a nice mental partition from my day-to-day life and let’s me engage with Reddit on my own terms. Frankly, Reddit is a blast in small doses, so I’m happy with the balance I’ve struck.
Reddit is just too far gone now. If you pay attention to the front page, different celebrities will be plastered over it at different times, usually coinciding with some new release.
The politics subreddit is an absolute abomination of one sided debate and everything else is shut down.
World news is basically America bad everywhere else good (but especially Canada and Scandinavia).
Trump was hitler.
Some small subreddits are useful but it’s exceptionally hard not to be sucked in to the rest of it, by design.
I've found using old.reddit.com, unsubscribing from the default subs, and adblock still leave Reddit as one of the few enjoyable places on the internet for me. There is still legitimate, organic discovery and discourse that I find there.
The times I occasionally get pulled into the void are when following a user's content/comment that I found interesting, then finding all kinds of bile that they push to the main forums.
Reddit also has an underappreciated feature of being able to sort posts database style (e.g. Top Posts > All Time) to get a sense of what a particular community found transcendent or controversial. If the top posts are any kind of angry response to a current event that's one you can typically ignore.
Reddit has turned into a clownish propoganda website. It is exponentially worse than any other social media website. It is a complete failure at every level.
My trading system works similar. It presents me a list of stocks ranked by that they had some coverage in social and traditional media + my preferences. This allows me to quickly check what is important and what not.
Minus a lot of the noise. Makes me a happy trader.
My general philosophy is that if I’m not going to take action on a piece of news, it’s fairly pointless. Keeping somewhat up to date is important as a citizen, but staying on the news treadmill is only important in as much as it effects my decision making. If I’m not going to donate money/time to dealing with an issue, keeping up to the minute on it isn’t something that is worth my attention. Similarly with companies, with few exceptions it won’t make a difference if news that an establishment doesn’t deserve my money takes an extra week or month to reach my attention. And if that sort of news isn’t going to effect my purchasing habits, once again it doesn’t matter.
As such, yeah, checking in once a week seems fine to me on most topics.
I've really enjoyed https://www.slowboring.com/ for this reason. There are plenty of hot takes that shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value, but I appreciate how the site focuses on long term trends rather than the news treadmill.
I tappped out a couple of years ago. I don't have agency over most of the issues and if I did have agency I would probably already know about it from the community.
It's not willful ignorance, I have just acknowleded that I have limited time and resources and I should put those back into my local community. Being angry at stories on the internet helps no one.
I check in periodically, like once a month, to make sure I can still talk to people about stuff and am not too far out of the loop. But the daily scoop is not necessary.
When nothing resulted of the "Panama papers", I admit I basically checked out of active politics and reading the news. On occasion, I'll read some long-form journalism, but I am done with daily "news".
Actually, this very common misunderstanding of the outcome is very illustrative of the journalism problem in America.
A number of high profile people were held accountable for their tax evasion. Multiple people were prosecuted, and many politicians, including heads of state were forced to resign.
But because the Panama Papers did not contain US citizens (Panama is not a useful refuge for US tax evaders because Panama cooperates with the IRS), the reporting of such consequences was not politically useful, and thus not reported.
In fact, it was more useful to propagate the lie that there were NO consequences to the leak - something you are perpetuating here.
>Anyone else burnt out from the outrage cycle in recent times?
Yes, and it's not surprising.
The solution to everything in society now is "let the individual provide the solution":
* Democracy = "if a politician is shit then just vote them out, you really should do your research before voting"
* Capitalism = "if they're using slave labour then just vote with your wallet til they go bankrupt - if you simply buy an object with decent specs without looking into the company's track record on labour rights, then you're complicit"
* Broken system = "call your local politician to demand reform, the problem is ultimately caused by your inaction"
* Bad news source = "spend your spare time doing research before believing random stuff on the internet then"
Society has no cap on its complexity, nor boundaries for individual responsibility in a utilitarian world. This ultimately means that the stability and moral rightness is directly limited by how much effort You The Individual are willing/able to apply at any given time.
Is it really that surprising that when people have a choice between being Atlas or living a good life, they'll choose the latter?
More to the point, this is precisely why companies specifically push for "individualism" and "freedom" from regulation - because they know people don't have time or energy to police every single organisation under the sun.
EDIT: apparently HN doesn't support markdown lists. It does have a feature for stripping single newlines (like what you'd use to format a list), though.
I've been largely acting the same way my whole life. I never really got into social media, it mostly felt creepy to me, though I admittedly have been using twitter more lately.
That being said, I've seen friends and family become radicalized from social media. I think there is a nuance that people miss, radicalized doesn't just mean storming the capital or antifa, it also means jumping down someone's throat when they don't want to engage in your favorite content. This isn't just about politics, there are the conspiracy people, the UFO people, the spirituality people, etc. It really just seems like everyone is so energized towards making you the other if you're not in their subgroup.
The really dark thing about this is that I find myself not caring about things that are pretty important because it's filled with extreme people yelling at each other. I actually deleted a recent example that I was going to put in this post because I don't want anyone to pick up a pitchfork.
I take umbrage at the use of the word storytelling to describe news media. Stories have narrative arcs of growth and resolution. Most of what the author is talking about is a repetitive information game with society, a form of social entertainment that hooks people into a feeling of participation. The “narratives” of the day are better described (as they’re coming to be) as memes.
It's been covered, but unsurprisingly I've never seen a news segment go after the Sackler family. Probably because the 24/7 news channels are flush with medication ads.
Ignoring news outright seems like a terrible idea for the stock market. Focus more on objective news, especially from areas that impact stocks. In Jan. 2020, once news came out about Chinese factories shutting down and whole cities being locked down, it was pretty easy to see the effect that would have on the market. Now, I definitely didn't foresee amazon and tech's meteoric rise, but it wasn't hard to predict what would happen in other areas.
It was not easy to see that the market would move incredibly higher over the course of the pandemic. Not in January 2020, nor any time since then. People can't even explain it after it has happened.
The best news for the stock market is from outlets that are not focused on you investing in anything. For example, when I kept reading on /r/hardware that Intel wasn't getting anywhere with their process improvements, I invested in AMD before they had their big run up. I knew this was actionable analysis because when I checked the financial press, nobody was talking about this yet and AMD's stock was going sideways, so the analysts hadn't caught on yet. That's where the value in investing is. Once the mainstream financial press has the same idea you do, the big gains from that news are likely over.
Why are the internet companies worth more? Just ask yourself if you bought more online than the previous year and whether or not that consumption changes moving forward. For the vast majority of Americans, it is clear 2020 was an amazing year for Amazon.
I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now. You have to ask why they chose to report this, why they slant things one way or another with their choice of wording and emphasis. What is the aspect of this story that is too politically incorrect or unfashionable to be included?
I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever. The harsh truth is that generally speaking the news is almost completely useless. You might as well just never watch it.
I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued. The main tool they use to do this is the emotion of fear, and it was for this reason and no other that they created a COVID death counter. And every single one of those points is explicitly, literally and plainly stated on video by a very senior employee of CNN for all to see. so I’m afraid that I can’t be brushed aside as a Russian bot. It’s right there on YouTube.
And what about all the other media companies? This CNN leak, which is maybe the very embodiment of a scoop, was not on the front page of any major newspaper or news website. It was not elaborated on. It was basically not reported.
I used to think "winners write the history books" was pithy and false. Then I realized that in the moment we can barely come to a consensus reality on even the most obvious and well-evidenced topics and that every historical account I had ever read was completely devoid of the debate over what was true. History is mostly propaganda. I'm sure if you get deep enough in the academic discipline you will find honest attempts to reconstruct the past in all its messiness, instead of just explain a preferred conclusion. Don't know that I have ever read a thing like that though, and certainly never read it in a book or seen it on tv.
Then... you have never engaged with actual history?
Historians are extremely aware of the difficulty of determining what is true, and they certainly have no problem engaging with the messiness of it all.
Can you blame him? Throughout all my schooling at least, history was always presented as “this is what happened”. Never once in any history class I took was there ever any doubt presented about historic events. It was never “well, a lot of evidence shows that this probably happened for that reason, but theres also potential that it might have happened for this other reason.”
I’m sure real actual historians in universities have these sort of discussions, but history class as it’s used in schooling is pure propaganda.
I'm fairly certain I was taught about conflicting evidence and, even more importantly, differing interpretation of events in school, for example we discussed the role of the US and the Soviet Union in the cold war quite extensively and controversially.
You really went to a different school than I did then. In the 90's, I was taught history purely as "This is what happened" with zero mention of debate, evidence or conflicting conclusions. I was explicitly taught that the civil war was fought over states rights alone. I was taught that the US was sparsely populated before Europeans arrived with glorious civilization. I was taught that democracy was triumphant and the best system of government that could ever be, and better in every way than the failure of Communism. I was taught that we alone saved the world from fascism in WW2 with barely a mention of the eastern front. I was graded on my ability to recite these facts.
Sure, I am aware that actual high quality historical scholarship must exist, but I honestly wouldn't know where to find it without waking into a university and asking someone close to the field for research help. Nearly every book of history on the shelf of my local library is in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel. I enjoy listening to some history podcasts, but have mainly experienced them as good storytelling and nothing about how the sausage is made.
Of course, if you went to school in the northern United States, you learned the Civil War was about slavery disguised as state's rights.
But yeah, 5th through 10th grade history, there was no nuance, just "this is what happened, this is History, this is the textbook, this will be on the test, the end."
A handful of excellent grade 9-12 teachers would have you do primary source research[1], and there you might get some conflicting sources, but you just discarded the sources that didn't work with your thesis topic. (See how this works? Thesis first, then sources...)
It was only once I was in college that we really got into some of the nuance of multiple sources and working from the ground up instead of the top down.
[1] Specific examples that I recall: did an astronaut biography in 5th grade, I interviewed my grandparents on 1930s Depression-era life in 9th grade; I did a primary sources (newspaper on microfilm) paper in my college sophomore year (14th grade) on the The Rainhill Locomotive Trials of 1829 in London, England.
We teach high schoolers that F=ma. That’s not true either, but it’s approximately true. So it’s in no way unique that history is taught as approximation and simplification.
> I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever.
Maybe that's because of the stories you select for checking. Did you ever deeply research something non-sensational? Like a feature about new-years celebrations in Nepal?
I've looked at coverage of things I was personally familiar with - particular subcultures, the rural area I grew up in, the field I work in - and seen a similar pattern. The inaccuracies didn't seem to be ideologically driven (indeed they sometimes went against what I think of as particular outlets' biases) but they were very much there.
Anecdotally, whenever I've had insider knowledge of a news story, it's always been the case that some of the basic facts are reported wrong. Even small local newspapers twist the truth slightly in order to present a more easily digested narrative.
More like, the zoo pr team reached out to news and other organizations months in advance of the panda birth to create tens of thousands of dollars of marketing and word of mouth, in order to increase zoo attendance, donations, and memberships.
It's not a capitalist conspiracy, it's just the path of least resistance, if you are in the morning meeting deciding what stories to cover, it's a slow newsday and you have a press release from the zoo announcing the birth of the panda it's easier to just report on that than to go looking for a story.
You're right, but that's not the scenario the comment I responded to was implying.
There's a difference between "oh look, there's a baby panda, this is an easy one" and participating in a months-long coordinated campaign designed to make money.
When I was in my late teens and eagerly devouring the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor Coevolution Quarterly for their reviews and pointers to new tools and ideas, it was easy to trust what I saw written there. Until one issue when they had a long survey of backpacking equipment, which even at 17 was something I knew quite a lot about. It was ridiculous, so bad (*)
Most people who write for a living don't know as much about the things they write about as people who do those things as the central part of their lives.
But it's worse than that: even when the author is a bona fide expert in the subject, there's still plenty of room for disagreement within the field.
The dream of reading "authoritative" accounts of more or less anything is a dream. Instead of being mad that journalists and other writers don't live up to your dream, accept this situation as it is, and understand that deepening your understanding of anything will require significant effort on your part. That doesn't mean that there are not better and worse sources of information, and understanding how to identify this is important. But there's nobody who is going to write "the true story" because there is no true story, just a complicated mess that you can put more or less effort into understanding.
(*) granted, some of what made it so bad was the clash between my UK-based understanding of gear and conditions, and their western US equivalent.
To be fair I learned that at 7 in civic education class in Normandy...
The media is a counter power but a power nonetheless. Just like you cant trust the president to judge a criminal, you shouldn't trust the media to judge the president. Just let everyone speak, make your soup yourself and split responsibilities: the executive lead the police and military, the judiciary protects criminals as much as society , the media warns of big and small events and they each compete and drag the carpet to themselves.
This is healthy. The alternative is hanging liars and people with difficult truths rather than letting them both speak. Or: detecting lies from truth is only possible by opposing several (and not just two or the border is skewed towards the most sensational) views.
CNN will say there a radioactive event south of China, China will say there s absolutely nothing wrong, the minority owner of the plant will say it s worrying but the problems lies in China moving the red line regulation, experienced people will say this probably warrant waiting, panicked people will say it must shut down now, ecologists will say any nuclear plant is too risky for the cost, and the truth is somewhere in the merging of all these but you can only have a gradually improving view of the event as pawns position themselves over time.
Is it? Is it not the main power? What politician could rise whose profile wasn’t vetted by the media? Can any politician decide something different than what is broadcasted by the media, for example if all media say we should lock down for Covid, despite population disapproval, can any politician resist?
Media is probably the power, and the 3 other heads (executive, legislative, judiciary) are basically following, at our current point, in 2021. At least, if they want to stay relevant.
Corollary: The definition of democracy should include the 4 powers. Media should be free, and due to Loi Avia in France, and due to the state of emergency, media is not currently free to say what it deems correct.
Lots of politicians and wealthy people control some media. Also, "what politician could rise whose profile wasn’t vetted by the media?" -> isn't Trump a strong countexample?
Putting aside that the election wasn’t forged, didn’t the media make him fall too?
It is true that there was a breach in the fabric, which allowed someone billionaire to become president (albeit with little control over other key institutions), and that was probably because they hadn’t harnessed control over internet when it took off, circa 2012-2016, but that gaping hole is now closed: Someone reasonable is back as the head of state, media now agree with the president, social networks put a cap on network effect for viral news, people can be arrested in UK and Canada for mistweeting, and the accusations of rape/pedophilia will do the rest for the remaining figureheads - In France for the last 3 elections, accusations/investigations on tax evasion hit 4 figureheads (excluding the DSK story, not talking about Assange accused of rape intermittently). Everything is back on track, “Oops, you saw through the matrix, move on”.
>I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now.
I used to subscribe to The Economist. I then realized, after they kept getting a lot of things wrong over the years, that in my humble opinion, a lot of their headlines should be read prepending the phrase "We would like you to believe that..."
A lot of "movements" these days are completely astroturfed.
There's a few foundations that sponsor thousands of institutions all with the same mission statement to make things look like they're a grassroots movement, but nobody really wanted any of it. That's what disconnecting from the media gets you. All that astroturfing flooding in from everywhere stops infecting one's understanding of the world with useless B.S. I've given up almost all mainstream media for podcasts because they can be produced for nothing and spend a long-time looking deeply into issues. They cost nothing to produce and host, so it's really hard to cancel them as well. It's not like video. Hosting audio costs very little.
Listening to random podcasts I find from guest appearances on other people's podcasts and on and on almost feels like eavesdropping on real people talking instead of the same simple message broadcast over and over again via every notable news outlet.[1]
As a subscriber to the Economist myself, would you be able to give examples as to what you found wrong and in bad faith? I have found errors in the past, especially in subjects that I am more of an expert on, but none (so far) in bad faith. If you know of some, I’d very much like to know so as to reassess who my trust lies with.
For one, regularly since the early 1990s, they've been predicting a Japan style credit crisis in China. That credit crisis never comes. They have had article after article talking about huge debt levels in the banks, etc. Nothing ever happens.
When you get stuff wrong regularly for 3 decades it's kind of a substantial error in my opinion. They also kept criticizing China's economic policies and banking regulations saying that they needed to change how they did things to avoid doom. Open up their financial system, etc. The Economist representing the perspective of western financial power, it just had the appearance of being self-serving, or at least arrogant. They couldn't get out of their orthodoxy and at least investigate what was going on to correct their analysis.
Not like I am a big fan of the CCP, but give the devil its due from time to time, or at least figure out how the magic tricks work.
I would say that the economist represents what remains of the British imperial perspective, not western financial power if it diverges from that, and that it is pretty clear about that perspective. It wants to imagine that it is advising British industry on how to strike out and dominate.
Why are they printing these articles? I assume to change the future, warning of a financial crisis should lessen the effects as fewer people put money into the broken system. So maybe they averted the future by predicting it
Well, it doesn't end with China. Around ~2010, once you scrub off the weasel word hedging, The Economist was predicting an imminent Eurozone breakup. It didn't predict the entirely predictable austerity recessions of 2012-2015. They were fairly bullish on Abenomics in Japan. They were very bullish on the future of BRICS around ~2008, out of which Brazil, Russia and South Africa are stagnating ever since.
Then, there's a very important tool in forming editorial slant - omitting reporting on inconvenient facts. Italy and Spain, the putatively sluggish laggards strangled by overly strict labor protection laws, have somehow overtaken the allegedly dynamic UK in labor productivity. Ireland, the purported economic wonder, have a household disposable income (a fairly good metric of material standards of living), lower than Italy and much lower than France. We keep hearing about the importance of education, competitiveness, R&D and ease of doing business, yet somehow Finland, which tops the rankings, is in year 14 of it's economic stagnation. Have you heard any of this from The Economist?
Median household disposable income, at PPP, after taxes and transfers is higher in Ireland than France, Italy, UK.
It is behind all those on a per capita basis, but that's the mean, not the median. I infer that this means Ireland has less income inequality.
(Ireland's economic wonder was growth from the 90s through to the early 2000s, largely via foreign direct investment, incentivized by low corporate tax rates. This structurally inflates GDP and makes the country look artificially good on international comparisons, but this is fairly well known, I believe. Irish economic commentary often uses GNI instead, and in fact the Irish central bank replaced GDP with GNI for its own measurements of the economy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_gross_national_income.)
What are the time scales for their predictions? I could easily imagine (say) today's US national debt taking 25-50 years to cause {insert some particular catastrophe here}.
Well if you are asking in good faith, then deep dive and find out if the allegation made here are true or not
The Govt of India has basically stated that Economist peddled baseless allegations and if look deeper you will see it is wrong and in deliberate bad faith.
If you're trying to rebut the Economist with OpIndia you'll have to try harder, likewise with accusing the Economist of "deliberate bad faith" and linking to a page that is not afraid to wear its ideological biases on its sleeve.
There's a lot of indicators of bad faith in the OpIndia article, but I don't see any in the Economist article.
From the OpIndia article:
- "A few weeks back, controversial left-wing US media outlet New York Times had come up with imaginary numbers..." (hyperbole, ad-hominem)
- "The low death rate in the country has become a major concern for the western press, who are trying hard to depict India in a bad light." (Are they? Why? Is the "western press" working in concert on this project?)
- "However, the entire analysis done in the article was based on ‘estimates’ based on randomly selected numbers" (So the allegation is that the researcher and/or the Economist selected numbers randomly to represent the Covid death toll in India?)
- "[...] it seems like the Indian government has finally decided to take on the misinformation warfare being propagated by a certain section of western media" (Does this seem like an unbiased presentation of facts?)
The implication, as far as I can tell, is that "western media" is seeking to embarrass the current leaders of Indian government out of pure spite. However, to my eyes, a more believable story is that the government of India is embarrassed by the high Covid death tolls and would like to adjust the numbers downward.
From a story in NPR:
> FRAYER: There is another reason why India's coronavirus numbers may be skewed - hubris. In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over, but cases were actually creeping up, and some politicians didn't want to ruin the narrative. Dr. A. Velumani runs a nationwide chain of medical labs. He told local media his labs have come under pressure from local politicians to manipulate coronavirus tests and report fewer positive results. [^1]
We saw this very same narrative play out here in the United States under the Trump administration, and just like in the OpIndia story, when confronted with evidence they had mishandled the response to the pandemic, the government responded, "Fake news! They're out to get me!"
The New York Times article mentioned in the OpIndia piece [^2] also seems to be in good faith, explaining how they arrived at their estimates in great detail.
To summarize: when I put on my critical-thinking cap, what I see is the Economist, the New York Times, and NPR presenting good-faith, easy-to-believe arguments that the death toll in India is higher than reported by the Indian government, and OpIndia presenting the difficult-to-believe argument that it isn't, but that western media wants to depict the government of India in a bad light for unknown reasons.
> There's a lot of indicators of bad faith in the OpIndia article, but I don't see any in the Economist article.
claim was it is true and nothing fake there, so you did a strawman there. Since that is true, it shows economist as acting in bad faith in best case scenario.
Opindia is reporting on Govt of India rebutting the Economists argument. These are not opindia arguments, they are paraphrasing GoI's. So the below part you quoted is a paraphrase of GoI
> "However, the entire analysis done in the article was based on ‘estimates’ based on randomly selected numbers"
I am reproducing part that shows Economist acted at the least in bad faith and you have continued on same basis by claiming that you checked out their research and back it over the actual data given out by experts in field of health and agency that collates the actual data
***
The unsound analysis of the said article is based on extrapolation of data without any epidemiological evidence.
Studies which are used by the magazine as an estimate of excess mortality are not validated tools for determining mortality rate of any country or region.
The so called “evidence” cited by the magazine is a study supposedly done by Christopher Laffler of Virginia Commonwealth University. An internet search of research studies in scientific database such Pubmed, Research Gate, etc., did not locate this study and the detailed methodology of this study has not been provided by the magazine.
Another evidence given is the study done in Telengana based on insurance claims. Again, there is no peer reviewed scientific data available on suchstudy.
Two other studies relied upon are those done by Psephology groups namely “Prashnam” and “C-Voter” who are well versed in conducting, predicting and analysing poll results. They were never ever associated with public health research. Even in their own area of work of psephology, their methodologies for predicting poll results have been wide off the mark many times.
By their own submission, the magazine states that ‘such estimates have been extrapolated from patchy and often unreliable local government data, from company records and from analyses of such things as obituaries’.
Union Government has been transparent in its approach to COVID data management. As early as May 2020, to avoid inconsistency in number of deaths being reported, Indian Council of Medical Research has issued ‘Guidance for appropriate recording of COVID-19 related deaths in India’ for correct recording of all deaths as per ICD-10 codes recommended by WHO for mortality coding. States and UTs have been urged through formal communications, multiple video conferences and through deployment of Central teams for correct recording of deaths in accordance with laid down guidelines.
***
> In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over,
NPR has not given any source for this claim and if you look at the Minister's twitter timeline for the period , it shows the opposite.
All proof there shows that he & ministry was calling for people to be careful, warning about increasing cases, updating on vaccines & health protocols. Not the actions of someone who declared it is over.
So that is a explicit lie/untruth from NPR and your comments also show that you find it easier to believe that India is hiding deaths at unimaginable rates than India has done exceedingly well given its challenges.
Other publications which carried out the same news
> An internet search of research studies in scientific database such Pubmed, Research Gate, etc., did not locate this study and the detailed methodology of this study has not been provided by the magazine.
>> There's a lot of indicators of bad faith in the OpIndia article, but I don't see any in the Economist article.
> claim was it is true and nothing fake there, so you did a strawman there
...sorry, the claim is that what is true? I'm not following you on that one. For me to have "done a strawman" means I would have asserted you were making an argument that you weren't making. As I understand it, you said the Economist was making claims in "deliberate bad faith", and presented an article to rebut the Economist's claims. It appeared to me that was exactly backward. I don't see how that qualifies as anything close to a strawman.
>> In early March, India's health minister declared the pandemic over,
> NPR has not given any source for this claim and if you look at the Minister's twitter timeline for the period, it shows the opposite.
...which I admit isn't the same as "declaring it over" but which could arguably be considered wrong. Which is fine; I'm wrong all the time, as is every other human. Acknowledging when you're wrong is one of the requirements of arguing in good faith. Wrongness doesn't imply incompetence, but failure to admit and correct mistakes does.
Anyway, I have zero interest in "making India look bad", and I wish the people of India well, as I'm sure you do. Here is all I am saying:
* I don't see "deliberate bad faith" in the Economist article, and I see an above-and-beyond effort by the New York Times to explain their methodology
* I have seen with my own eyes members of the government of the United States play down the impact of pandemic out of short-sighted self interest, and so it is easy for me to believe another government would do that
* The arguments made in the official press release linked above strike me as overly defensive and don't offer anything more than "no, that's not true" with no additional evidence provided
* And once again, I wish the people of India well, and I hope the government of India acts in the best interest of its citizens with competence, pragmatism, honesty, and efficiency.
In any case, best of luck to you! I hope we can both think critically about the information we consume.
here is another indicator of bad faith from Economist since you are all in on thinking critically. Since it it paywalled , I have outlined it
https://outline.com/mumxhq
**
True, the official death toll has fallen steadily for the past month, to half its peak of over 4,000 a day in mid-May. But evidence continues to accumulate that the government’s numbers represent a disturbingly small fraction of the real figure. This discrepancy does not just mean that the true level of India’s suffering has been glossed over. It has made the crisis worse, for instance by causing authorities to underestimate demand for oxygen and drugs.
News organisations including The Economist, as well as independent epidemiologists, have speculated that India has suffered perhaps five-to-seven times more “excess deaths” than the official number of covid-19 fatalities, currently just over 355,000.
***
The GoI press release has said that the methodology used by Christopher Leffler is not used anywhere else to estimate deaths.
You disagree and back it. Can you point out where this is accepted practice.
Using occam's razor. If cases & Deaths as 5-7 times, then this would be easily detectable, especially as the second wave dies down as per official figures.
So at peak the cases were 350,000 per day officially, as per economist it is over 2 million. This week the cases are 65k, so then it must be 380k cases as per economist. Same for deaths, officially 500 deaths and should be 3000 deaths as per economist.
Where are all these invisible cases & deaths?
If as per economist there were all these 5-7 times extra cases/deaths, the need for O2 would be far greater. There has been no crisi on that side for weeks now. Only for a 2 week period did capital Delhi have shortage due to the mismanagement of the state govt there that was pulled up by the courts.
So you are willing to consider opinion polling and patchy insurance claims( in a country that has minimal insurance coverage) that compared India with US figures over official figures that are collated by heath authorities.
It is far more believable that US media that has persistently painted India in negative light wants to continue the practice even when there are reasons to state facts as is and risk India being shown in a positive light.
I have already give you one data point where NPR pushed a untruth that you conceded. That was not even bad faith, direct fakery.
Is this how one thinks critically?
I have no problem if you want to believe fake news but lets drop the charade that you have no option other than trusting Economist or that they have a good track record. Information is easy to get in this day and age.
It is your laziness that lets such media spread fake news by appealing to your biases.
I remember when them and other news media pilloried Iceland for not honouring foreign debts taken out by private Icelandic banks during the recession. It was going to be the end of country since no one would loan them money in the future. Iceland was one of the first countries to emerge the recession.
As a former subscriber I can point this out:
One gigantic error: they have not seen the 2007/2008 crisis coming.
Their policy recommendations are always the same: "cut red tape", privatize, remove tariffs..., and this mirrors their ideological beliefs, not any hard won expertise.
They are also in denial about the unfolding ecological crisis.
Look also at their job ads to understand with whom they are aligned.
In sum, The Economist is a propaganda paper, that is well written, informative even if you can remove their rather obvious slant.
You're really giving too much credit to podcasts here. If you were to look at your argument from the other side, the fact that it costs next to nothing makes it a really cheap way to spread biased/false information. (See: Alex Jones)
The majority of podcasts I've listened to have an obvious political bias, even the ones I would deem mostly objective clearly show some of the hosts biases. I've actually stopped listening to some because of this. ('Reply All' and 'Rich Dad Radio Show', for example, at opposite ends of the spectrum.)
If you know of a podcast that purely, subjectively presents news, I'd love to hear it!
Alex Jones's biggest sin is he's boring. He repeats himself over and over again. You could listen to him for 30 minutes and then tune in 12 months later and it's the same stuff, whatever you make of it. Art Bell was a conspiracy theory guy back in the day on late night radio, but he was damned interesting and talked to all kinds of random interesting weirdos. Many of them not that credible, but at least interesting. Not to sound old and cranky, but back in my day, when you heard someone interviewed, it was up to the person listening to evaluate their credibility and not to be protected in a little bubble because one was assumed to be too easily influenced to listen to the unvetted.
Podcasts are by no means "The Truth", but at least they are not on the mainstream narrative script and they often don't have a purely political focus. As long as they aren't solely discussing the mainstream news narrative or reacting to it, they can be very interesting. I think Bret Weinstein can be pretty interesting as far as media criticism goes. The Other Life podcast[1] is an example of a podcast that's very disconnected from the mainstream narratives and feels like I'm sitting in a cafe in the 90s drinking coffee with a bunch of intellectual weirdos. Maybe not your cup of tea, or coffee, but it's better than listening to the mainstream news and filling myself with that garbage.
Also podcasts are mostly assumed to be biased by the host, as he directs the conversation. Mainstream news has more indirection from reader to writer so the bias is less tangible.
How could one listen to enough Alex Jones to know this? I like the idea of Alex Jones, paranoid style American politics is a tradition and has its uses, but it’s to me a bit like pro wrestling. It’s not content that’s pitched toward the upper 2/3rds of the bell curve. He is a canary.
With low budget operations there is at least the possibility of objectivity. When there is a bunch of money involved there is not. And that’s not my opinion, it’s the opinion and words of the technical director of CNN.
On the other hand if it's a low budget op it will be bought cheaply like buying troll farms or paying "influencers" to promote all kind of crap. In the end you may get the same crap but in a more distributed manner.
There's almost zero political topics where objectivity is possible. That goal itself is usually already ideology (the goal of unbiasedness often stands in opposition of truth).
Look at global warming: Either it is man-made or not, either it is a problem for our future or not. There's no objective middle ground. Sure, one could simply have news that say "there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.
Or let's use a real historical example: The Soviet Union's invasion into Poland in 1939. Without any context, the SU is clearly the agressor. But with the context of Polands invasion into the SU in 1919 things suddenly look different. And with the additional context of Russia annecting polish territory in the 18th century it looks different again and so on and so on. There clearly is no way to communicate this objectively (i.e. in this case, pro-Russia people could ask why I'd stop here and not with some polish-lithuanian action before the 18th century).
there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.
Why? You can’t explain all the things (even if you’re backed with true data) in one article – that would take a library. A drought by itself doesn’t skew anything, but maybe your intent is more that just that.
The Soviet Union's invasion into Poland in 1939
This is a circular problem. Either do not call it “invasion” or do and so be it. The fact that some monkey punched some other in year 40000 BC has nothing to do with active political contracts. I will not even downvote you on the internet if I find out that our gggps shot at each other in ww1/2, it’s irrelevant now. Most of these people are dead. If you want to remain neutral (nearest to “objective”, which isn’t a thing in case of a physical land), call it a conflict based on historical events and let a reader investigate, discuss and decide who is right and who is wrong, if any, if they ever want that decision. Maybe most people don’t really give a genuine fuck about who is right (if that was a bet, I’d go all in with it).
I would even read political news then. Modern “good boys bad boys” or “oh see you see what you done” stories only make me laugh or facepalm. I’m a reader, not a puppet. No surprise younger people only want tiktok and clothes.
I think we'd first have to find common ground on what the purpose of a free press is. In my opinion the goal is to have informed citizens that can have informed participation in the democratic decision-making process.
For that, we not only have to know the what, but also the why behind a news item. We have to know the relationships between things.
So while we can't indeed can't explain everything completely, that doesn't mean we can't explain anything.
In hindsight the drought/global warming example is bad because there can indeed be another reason for the ocurrence, but even telling multiple possible reasons (e.g. by asking an expert) makes the news item more insightful than any context at all.
> This is a circular problem.
Yes, that was my point! There is no arbitrary threshold where we could stop referring to things happening in the past and get unbiased news.
Or yet another example: The current debate around minimum wage increases. The news could simply state the positions of the two parties, and the current nominal number of $7.25. But that wouldn't make this unbiased, because the $7.25 at inception had a different purchasing power than now. And a different ratio to GPD per capita. Thus omitting this context skews the news item towards the side that is against an increase. But adding the context favors the side that is for the increase.
I see it as a source of events that then can be discussed with actual people around you to create a world view. This way an information either misses you completely or you relate to a trusted group that has it. In a world where news are complete, there is nothing to discuss, because authoritative (or not, it’s hard to check) sources already said everything. This swithces discussion from learning all the details to taking the presented details. This is a problem known as “what’s not being said”, and personally I see it everywhere now. I.e. if we disagreed on an interpretation, it was you versus me (both at least knowing each other). With context-ed news it’s your sources versus my sources, which we both are unable to really check adequately, because it’s a recursive problem. That induces beliefs instead of thinking. I believe that context should be left vague at least. If there are questions, press should formulate them, not answer.
I think the primary purpose of the press should be to hold people in position of power accountable for their actions. That's pretty much it. The role of reporting on world events and generating a shared reality can be useful and informative, but is mainly a distraction from the first (and primary) role that media plays in society.
The press is never unbiased - look at newspapers from the 50s or 60s which had strong anti-communist propaganda. Everything has a slant - I don't understand where the obsession with "unbiasedness" came from.
The only question that matters (in a democracy or anywhere with a free press) is - does the media hold people in positions of power (whether political-power, wealth-power or celebrity-power) accountable for their misdeeds or not. Bias is only a problem when it interferes [directly] with this purpose.
> There's almost zero political topics where objectivity is possible. That goal itself is usually already ideology (the goal of unbiasedness often stands in opposition of truth).
> Look at global warming: Either it is man-made or not, either it is a problem for our future or not. There's no objective middle ground. Sure, one could simply have news that say "there is a drougth in the center of the US, stronger than other droughts in the last 50 years", without any context. But even this is not objective, because omitting the context of global warming already skews the message.
There is an objectivity here: scientific consensus, aka naked provable facts. And climate change is proven to be man-made, and it is proven that if humanity does nothing to curb CO2 emissions it will spiral out of control.
Objectivity in news as a result means to not give those who go against scientific consensus any platform.
News doesn’t need to provide context. It’s possible to remove words like unprovoked from the reporting and just list the facts. We don’t hear that neutral point of view because it makes things boring.
That said, push any ideology far enough and they all start to disagree with objective reality. That doesn’t mean accurate information is somehow slanted or facts are somehow political because objective reality doesn’t care, it just is. If every day you list the ~9,250 Americans that died yesterday you’re going to cover mostly natural causes but also plenty of hot button issues for both sides of the isle.
There is insufficient time to list every fact from every event. The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.
Ideally, the goal would be to minimize bias, however I see the opposite many times, and I see it actually as a result of reduced revenue for people that make news.
We, the public at large, responded to information that evokes emotion (especially outrage). We rewarded it with clicks, translating into money for the people that collect and curate it for us. And that is what we get now. We get information, that has been compressed, and while factual many times, it is without the necessary context to come to an appropriate conclusion.
I think the antidote to this might be consumers rewarding publishers and journalists that wait before publishing. They wait so that there is time for the relevant facts to be gathered, there is time for the editors and journalists to write and edit properly. And, to still keep in mind, that it is still insanely difficult to provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion. As one should know if they have ever read an article about a field they are intimately familiar with and have spent thousands of hours in.
> There is insufficient time to list every fact from every event.
Facts relating to events aren’t news their just facts.
> The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.
You can come up with the threshold for what’s news long before individual stories show up. It’s filtering based on political context that’s the problem not simply filtering. Aka, decide ahead of time that a president being impeached is news that’s fine. However, if your coverage depends on their party affiliation that’s a problem.
> provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion.
I don’t see why people need to be making conclusions from the news. A Twitter account tweeting any earthquake over 7.0 is fine on it’s own.
If the news is that three people died in a shooting, would you not be better informed by knowing the context that they were drug dealers in a conflict over territory?
Personally I would prefer reporters to stick with known accurate information rather than what whoever they spoke with believed to be accurate context. Shootouts between drug dealers could be over territory, or just about anything else. Unless they spoke with the people actually involved it’s all supposition.
I don't think that it is difficult to determine the scope of the violence, eg: 'gang on gang' compared to 'an angry mentally ill person shooting random people'... which is typically peoples main concern, and you can explain that in a matter of seconds.
It seems like the lack of context gets used to skew peoples perception of an issue just as often as false information, for example classifying gang violence and robberies as "mass shootings" without giving any other details. This can be applied to just about any topic out there. It's easier to leave out details and use esoteric language, than it is to lie about what happened. People can at-least deduce bias/flaws given enough narrative, and a track record of inaccurate context damages an organization's reputation.
The root issue is I don’t want reporters to guess and report what something probably is. Flight 123 an Airbus XYZ crashed at on takeoff from location Z. Fine that’s all verifiable, what the cause was isn’t known don’t even guess you’re just wasting my time.
Most shootings that look like ‘gang in gang’ are probably ‘gang on gang’ violence. But, that doesn’t mean a specific shooting was actually ‘gang on gang’ violence. Gang members also shoot people for personal reasons unrelated to being a gang member. And they also get shot for reasons unrelated to being a gang member. If the assumption is it’s always ‘gang in gang’ and it’s always reported as such then that’s a lot of biased and often incorrect information being reported as fact.
It’s not uncommon for gang members to just go out and randomly shoot stuff the same way young rednecks shoot at road signs. The difference is gang members in cites are vastly more likely to randomly hit someone due to population density.
For something more recent, the Russian annexation of Crimea. Or rejoining depending on how you interpret history (or get your news) - but western media leaves the important historical bits out because they have a specific political agenda.
Doesn't Joe Rogan typically have a bigger audience than an average so-called-mainstream news program? The economics might play out that it is more expensive to get him to endorse something than get it run on a major network.
There aren't many (any, really) quality guarantees on non-podcast media anyway. It isn't like they get any negative feedback when they lie or make mistakes. Viewers can't even withdraw support for specific known liars on a channel. It is unclear why a podcast would be at a structural disadvantage to any other media source, and probably higher reputational stakes.
same here. spotify does not seem to get the user experience right unfortunately, particularly around offline/low data use. or may be it’s just me not liking “one stop shops” when it comes to podcasts and music.
Reply All is (or was, before it imploded) an interesting one as a stand in for how this has played out on the left. They got more and more blatant about their views over the years, and even though I generally ascribe to the same views, I would rather not have them put forth so blatantly, especially in a program that purports to be investigative.
My assumption is that with the increasing polarization, many shows followed their audiences to the poles. It feels rare these days for someone to not stake out a stance on some culture war battle, whether subtly or not.
It's honestly weird that Joe Rogan feel like one of the least biased popular programs to listen to out there, or the least biased in a consistent direction at least. You also get a lot of off the wall crazy shit on there, but honestly someone willing to have enough of an open mind to have people on like that not just to make fun of is a nice change of pace, even if the things are ridiculous, given how entrenched everyone else is in their positions.
>It's honestly weird that Joe Rogan feel like one of the least biased popular programs to listen to out there,
There are plenty of other hosts that do a much better job than Rogan (David French & Yascha Mounk). Rogan does indeed have a slant, it just doesn't fit into the most stereotypical red v blue one.
Eh, it is pretty tough to stay purely objective about political reporting these days. "Both sides" play political messaging games, but the Republican party led by Mitch McConnell is a pack of barbarians at the gates of our political system. They'll destroy all Americans' faith in democracy and each other, if it means the GOP can suppress minorities and keep their own pockets lined.
So while "Pod Save America" for example is biased, I still believe their takes on what is happening at the federal level are informative and thought-provoking.
Take a look at this opinion from a distance and see if you think it accurately reflects the views of half of the American population or if you might have internalized some biases
It is a fact that there was an insurrectionist attack on congress on Jan 6, that there were obvious lies about false election fraud pushed by the president and eventually by the majority of the Republican party.
What are you getting at by saying whether it reflects the views of half of America? Those views are objectively incorrect, not based on reality. Reality here is not based on someone's opinion, no matter how widespread the belief in it is.
Note that I said the Republican party. I know there are many decent humans in this country who have small-c conservative beliefs, and I can have reasonable discussion with some of them.
And I pity those who don't take the time to create their own philosophical defense of their beliefs, and only parrot what Fox News tells them to think.
When I start getting into a heated discussion, I like to turn away from arguing about specific people (too much) and say "What do you want this country to be? What matters to you?" and the discussion becomes a lot more enlightening.
So yeah, if someone really believes that the poor deserve to die because said person, making $60k a year, thinks that taxing the ultra-wealthy is unethical, I'm gonna have some problems with your character.
> So yeah, if someone really believes that the poor deserve to die because said person, making $60k a year, thinks that taxing the ultra-wealthy is unethical, I'm gonna have some problems with your character.
For someone who extols “philosophical defenses of beliefs”, you certainly make use of shitty straw men to do so. I suppose you didn’t say anything about the quality of the philosophy.
And the politicians in red states are conspicuously making efforts to restrict voters, in ways that they know are more likely to apply to voters who oppose them, going well beyond just voter ID:
So no, it's not just the OP's internalized bias. It's a simple, objective fact that they are attempting to make it harder for their opponents to win elections, based on an objectively false narrative.
I will bend over backwards to try to reach a common point from which to move forward and share a country together. I want to be aware of my own biases and the places where I disagree with the people who share some of my views. But that simply cannot happen in an environment like this, and nothing I do can change that.
It's what they are saying, in public. The large number of them saying so doesn't make it less true, only much scarier. It would seem impossible that so much of the country should be so objectively deluded, but it's literally their own words.
With the amount of people in the country that are not legally allowed to vote it is not crazy or restrictive to require some proof that you are a citizen to vote in a national election.
Where in the US do you think you can vote without providing any proof that you're a citizen? Tell me, and I'll tell you what proof was actually required.
California is the big one. Many states only require proof of residency to vote. Any state that allows something like a utility bill as ID is allowing all residents regardless of citizenship to vote. Not being a citizen isn't an issue for state level elections if that is what the state chooses to allow. But, national election voting rights are only extended to citizens.
Thank you for being specific. You're ignoring the fact that for the requirements listed here [1] to be valid, you need to have already registered to vote. To register, you need to (among other things) sign an affidavit affirming that you are a US citizen. It sounds like your real complaint is about CA not following through on punishment for those who lie on this form.
If all it takes is a simple lie, you’re not really doing any meaningful verification. If that level of trust was good enough, why not just drop all checks entirely at voting booths and just have a brief questionnaire that asks “are you allowed to vote?”
Higher ID requirements increase security, but also improve republican result b/c democratic voters are less likely to have certain IDs (I think). As a result this can be spun either way as Republicans restricting voters, or Democrats opposing countermeasures to fraud.
Personally I don't know, I think I'd focus on Democrat behaviour; Given they just got off the back of Russia-gate, and accusing a foreign superpower of interfering in the election, they should also theoretically have a stake in voter fraud. I'd expect them to be focusing more on driving their demographics to acquire ID, rather than loosening requirements. Mail-in voting is a hard one though.
As an aside - I'm unconvinced by reports that voter fraud are low. No evidence of fraud isn't evidence of no fraud, and too many news articles or "explainers" seem to focus on lack of evidence versus a secure and airtight verification process.
election officials .. referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting.. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.
Forty of the jurisdictions .. reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting..
In the ten counties with the largest populations of noncitizens in 2016, only one reported any instances of noncitizen voting..
In .. the states where Trump claimed the problem of noncitizen voting was especially acute — no official we spoke with identified an incident of noncitizen voting in 2016
The headline claims "no noncitizen voting" but the actual process implies "no noncitizen voting, that officials know about, (or are willing to say)". What it doesn't account for is incompetence, poor vetting/fraud detection and complicity among officials. For the strong claims coming from self-proclaimed voting experts, I'd expect some kind of random sampling of votes, not "we asked the people who counted the votes" - well, they're not likely to condemn their own reports, are they? The fact that a lot of hot air and political context is upfront, and self-critical analysis of their own process is not is what makes me doubtful of these kind of text, despite the credentials/qualifications of the authors.
You're asking people to spend a lot of time, money, and political capital, on an issue that you admit there is little to no evidence is actually a problem. I'm sorry, but that is not reasonable or realistic. I understand the whole issue of "no evidence of fraud doesn't mean no fraud" but if we treated every problem like this we would never run out of problems. When you combine all of what I just said with the fact that we know certain groups are disproportionately effected by these rules...it just comes across as you saying "yes I know there's no evidence that this is a serious problem but I care more about the process being abstractly and theoretically perfect than the people these rule changes would actually effect."
> on an issue that you admit there is little to no evidence is actually a problem
Because "no evidence" isn't relevant. If it was, no one would care about Trumps taxes; and the IRS would happily decrease reporting requirements, and work on an honour system.
The mechanism by which the ruling powers of the nation are decided is pretty important, so the requirement on "time, money, and political capital" is not at un unreasonable - it isn't important if "we treated every problem like this.." because every problem is not equally as important.
The fact is there are huge incentives to cheat, and undeveloped nations across the world are characterised by unfair elections, it's not unreasonable, then, to place importance on the veracity of the election process, more than just a glib "there's no evidence that this is a serious problem".
> I care more about the process being abstractly and theoretically perfect than the people these rule changes would actually effect
fairness is dictated by the rules you dismiss as "abstract and theoretical". You talks about "facts" and what "we know", but that is the very issue - what we don't know. It's convenient to discount the value of what we don't know when the current worldview favours your opinion. I don't know anything about undetected fraud, and neither do you; neither of us know how much a problem this is, or who/how it affects people. The only solution is an airtight process, and you seem to dismiss that, worse still, attempting to characterise me as unsympathetic for placing value on such a thing.
The US is the richest country in the world, and it's government richer than most nations of the world. Why should it lack the resources to secure the most significant process in the nation, while poorer corporations (mastercard, veritas etc), and even the military can secure their own, lesser processes much better.
My local concert venue could sign their tickets with 4096-bit RSA, and make us take our shoes off and go through an x-ray before we come in like at an airport. They could have an airtight process; it would stop almost nothing, while making the process far more difficult for patrons.
Yes, I dismiss your desire for an airtight process, because I think it's security theater, whose actual outcomes would be massive and largely detrimental relative to the actual desired outcomes.
I am talking about the usefulness of security theater on the margins. At a concert venue, and at a polling place, we can do things that, in the abstract, increase security, but provide little to no actual benefit and actually serve to make the process more difficult and unpleasant on the whole.
(Ignoring RSA tangent, making all concert-goers go through an X-Ray to screen for weapons and drugs would catch more weapons and drugs than the current pat down/bag check process does. It would undeniably increase the security of the venue, while slowing down entry, exposing concertgoers to X-Rays, and IMO providing more annoyance than actual extra security)
It seems that you think, for voting, that's a fine trade-off. I do not.
edit: not disagreeing that signed tickets would prevent fraud. Disagreeing that it would be worth, say, an additional $5 fee on the tickets, plus slower more expensive readers to verify that they're signed correctly, plus plus plus etc etc. My entire argument here is based on the net utility of additional security measures, not whether or not those measures provide additional security.
Security theatre often refers to security from physical threat. I'm not talking about undetected fraud in a sense where that makes sense, but rather a verifiable, auditable process.
The only thing you referred to that was process related (versus physical security) was use of encryption keys. Why not talk about the pros/cons of that?
> It seems that you think, for voting, that's a fine trade-off
With respect to x-ray screens? Not at all, nor did I say such a thing. Nor do I think all things that could be described as "security" are exactly equivalent to each other, such that you can mention x-ray scans, and the argument automatically extends to RSA keys.
...I'm putting myself in the shoes of a person who is in the united states without authorization...and with that in mind, why in the world would I risk exposing myself and my illegal status by participating in something as pointless as voting in US elections...
I just don't see how an average person concerned with being deported is willing to risk exposing themselves by registering with the state government, especially in the last 8 years of ICE really pushing the limits on what they can do.
You conflate election fraud (hacking machines), voter fraud (individuals illicitly casting ballots), and state-sponsored misinformation campaigns. Those are three distinct problems with very different challenges.
You say "no evidence of $x != evidence of (not x)" which is true in theory, but let's step into reality: "No evidence, despite systems built to detect evidence".
You act as if people aren't already on the lookout for fraud, or that systems are not already resistant to them.
As I said, the laws in question have nothing to do with the basically-nonexistent "voter fraud". Nothing about voting on Sunday could possibly have anything to do with voter fraud, but that's one of the things they're trying to ban. They're limiting voting hour and removing polling stations, and then making it illegal to give people water while they stand in line.
Even if voter fraud were a problem (it isn't), they're not even pretending that these measures have anything to do with it. And that makes it incredibly clear that they don't believe that voter fraud is the reason for any of it.
That issue is a perfect microcosm to explain both the problem with polarization and information silos, and why progress on an issue like this is so hard, and why no progress is made forming consensus because neither side wants there to be.
The left presents the issue as:
- People already verify themselves
- Voter fraud doesn't happen
- This is used to disenfranchise voters by making it harder because poor people are less likely to have a valid ID.
The right presents this as:
- No proof is required in many jurisdictions
- There are instances of voter fraud, and while few, there may be a lot we don't see
- Voting is important, so we should take it seriously and require people prove their identity to vote
The problem is that both of these sides are entirely true. Namely, verify != proof, and people talk past each other on this, and selective omission of the other side's valid points lets people believe the other side is irrational or wants it in bad faith (Republican operatives may want to make it harder for certain groups of people to vote, but from what I've seen Republican citizens do not).
The respective parties have no interest in bringing people to consensus on this issue because right now it's one that activates the bases of the respective parties. It's a way to take moderates that might be tempted to vote against the party line or for the other side for select positions and people that they respect and radicalize them by papering over the real positions of those people with the twisted narrative put forth by the media that caters to that side.
People are for the most part rational and compassionate and don't want to hurt each other. But people are also easily misled into believing things because of curated information presented when they don't have counterexamples that they trust or first hand experience to the contrary, and those beliefs cause what is considered rational and compassionate to differ from person to person. We shouldn't hate or dislike the people on the other side, they are just like us. We should engage them usefully, and the first step of engaging usefully is accepting that we're like them also in that we're presented with curated facts, so we should be open to their points when we engage and accept them in good faith.
I haven't seen the left claim that fraud doesn't happen, that is demonstrably false. There are a few convicted vote fraud cases annually. The claim is that it is insignificant.
> I haven't seen the left claim that fraud doesn't happen
Some will claim it, or say it's a myth, and if anyone points out those few cases, they'll say it's statistically insignificant to the point of not being something we should worry about.
It is strictly incorrect, but colloquially accepted as okay to say, which is yet another thing argued about from each side.
I suspect that you thinking you haven't seen it is likely because you're interpreting their intent and not reading the words strictly, or they followed up to clarify and that's the part you remember, because it's common to see. The problem is that the other side remembers the first claim or the strict interpretation of the statement, so both come away thinking they were correct, one in that the statement was "true", the other that the person was not being "truthful".
>pack of barbarians at the gates of our political system
It's quotes like this that make it hard for non-Americans like myself to take American political discourse seriously. To me, takes like this are at a similar effort level to the "Obama is a socialist!" cries heard in the 2008 election. Yawn.
So, are you a bot? Or are you just not thinking independently? I strongly suggest spending less time on social media. You’ll find that both sides of the political spectrum are just people, like you and me. Not “monsters” as the news would like you to believe.
I think plenty on my own. Like many humans, I occasionally use terms in vogue to get the point across. You must not work in technology or communications. (see how asinine that sounds?)
I'll forgive you for not seeing my other comment in the thread, but to be clear, my beef is with the political establishment on the right. My feelings toward "normal human beings" who are conservative are much more varied.
The Republican party as an organization at the federal level is indisputably a less patriotic, more malicious organization than the Democratic party, which has its own problems of infighting, horse-trading, and "everyday" corruption.
But instead of posting the latest trove of articles describing McConnell threatening SCOTUS appointments again, or Trump trying to use the Justice Department to investigate debunked claims of voter fraud for his own benefit, or the million other datapoints about how awful the GOP leadership is - please, continue calling me a bot.
I didn't mean to insult your intelligence. I see plenty of intelligent people acting irrationally these days.
I suggest checking out right-wing Twitter/corporate news to see how they're using the same words ("unpatriotic", "malicious") in the exact same way to describe the democrats. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. It's not black and white, evil vs. good. At least not in the real world.
That's when YOU have to look at the facts and decide for yourself. For example, looking at the footage from the Capitol on January 6th and decide for yourself if those were just people on a "normal tour of the Capitol" like some Republicans are claiming, or if it was a criminal mob trying to thwart the election like almost everyone claimed at the time.
Thanks, I looked it up, but it seems very left-oriented. So it really kinda confirms my point. Unless I'm missing something, since I only briefly looked into it.
Sometimes I think it would be comforting to write off the opinions of my fellow citizens as (influenced by) paid shills. But I’m pretty sure it would be a rationalization to avoid the unpleasant reality of genuine conflicts and differences.
I also see a lot of genuine local grassroots stuff that makes my blood boil (NIMBYism), so I don’t really attach a moral credit to those qualities.
The Economist definitely have a specific world-view and to be fair they would probably be the first to tell you that. I now read their articles with a certain amount of scepticism, particularly if it's topical but not necessarily current affairs.
There is still value to be gotten out of the magazine but if you're looking for accuracy or truth that can be relied on then I think that ship sailed a long time ago. "Thankfully" the internet has allowed everybody to finally realise that.
No such thing as subjectivity. What's important is that people are looking for the truth and reporting accurately as possible. I'm more interested in penetrating analysis than "subjectivity". I read the news with a skeptics eye, knowing that they always have an agenda.
Yeah, and that's true. Because people are biased. Not saying CNN is the benchmark so. But deriving that all news is bad because of that is going too far.
Don’t mix up intrinsic human bias with deliberate misinformation (which in the context of big media companies is informally called “bias”). I haven’t derived anything.
There's a difference between news that is trying to enlighten vs. trying to convince. When I start to feel like the news is doing the latter, I would call it biased.
Yes. But news should strive for thruth, not for objectivity. For example, if the president says something that is evidently false, the press IMO has the responsibility to say so, even if this is clearly biased towards the interests of the opposition.
Oh it's not a leaked video, it's an interview of an audiovisual technician done by Project Veritas, who are among the most biased and cynically named outfits in journalism. Cynically named (veritas is Latin for "truth") because they don't try to make their message correspond to reality (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/), but instead go to great pains to twist, alter, edit and selectively curate reality to fit their message. They're permanently suspended from Twitter. In my mind they are enemies of the truth. They were fertilizing the soil for the Big Lie before the 2020 US elections, spreading their deceitful manure into the minds of the vulnerable. Please watch more of their work.
From MediaBiasFactCheck:
> Project Veritas was created by James Edward O’Keefe III, an American conservative political activist. He produces secretly recorded undercover audio and video encounters, some selectively edited to imply its subjects said things they did not, with figures and workers in academic, governmental, and social service organizations, purporting to show abusive or allegedly illegal behavior by employees and/or representatives of those organizations. Project Veritas primarily targets liberals and liberal organizations.
Meanwhile the person interviewed was a technical director, as I understand it meaning an audiovisual equipment guy, so I don't know why you'd consider him an authority on editorial decisions. That all media has some bias doesn't seem so shocking, but rather mere common sense.
It's amazing how people will go from "mainstream media has bias" to "... but this random guy on Youtube doesn't!" despite the youtuber being far worse. As if they can only handle one level of critical thinking.
My brother used to be a sound technician (and sound engineer on a lot of non-paid projects), and was named technical director on a small TV plateau during a cold epidemic, because his (our) family name came first in the technician list, and the 3 higher ranked/paid employees were sick.
Nope. I wouldnt care if it was Alex Jones who published the footage and neither should you. The footage is raw and not a reflection of any party other than the subject. It’s not edited or altered in any significant way let alone in a way that would change its meaning. Technical director is certainly not a low title and his station is irrelevant anyway because anyone who was senior enough apparently was in the room to witness phone calls coming from headquarters mandating that the death counter be put back up to “sustain engagement.” And as you say yourself, the fact that CNN is financially incentivized to do all of these things is common sense, so why are you denying that they happen?
And finally, you are dead weight on society. It’s also common sense that officers require a bribe and that people who speak up against vested interests fall out of windows. Every stage of societal breakdown is considered common sense by the people who are born into it and this attitude of shoulder shrugging is the reason why our institutions are disintegrating. If it is so normal for the media to brazenly lie, then why doesn’t the media in the Netherlands do it? Or Denmark? Or maybe it has something to do with the fact they they are in the top 3 least corrupt countries in the world, and don’t bend over for bullshit like you? Perhaps idiotic shoulder shrugging is not a good idea after all?
Could be, depends on the organisation. I've met "Executive Directors" at major banks who had a team of 20 people and "Vice Presidents" who were effectively dev team leads with 5 guys working for them in a company of hundreds of thousands.
In the context of a TV news channel, it could be basically anyone. He could be responsible for making sure the weather desk have the correct lighting setup.
> but instead go to great pains to twist, alter, edit and selectively curate reality to fit their message.
The video had long segments without cuts, that seemed to include enough context. Do you have any examples from that video in mind as to how it could have been misleading despite this?
> Meanwhile the person interviewed was a technical director, as I understand it meaning an audiovisual equipment guy, so I don't know why you'd consider him an authority on editorial decisions.
If I recall correctly, he only spoke of his first-hand experiences. So even if he were just a janitor, that would not cast doubt on his claims.
People keep repeating it almost as if there's no way to improve. I think that if we instead of classifying news as real/fake or neutral/biased, we should classify it as honest/misleading. If a story gives a different impression to reality, it's misleading. That can be easily identified sometimes, especially in articles based on numerical data. Has a stock price "plummeted" or fallen by 2 percentage points?
This criterion would only apply to the presentation of the information within a story, not the choice of stories or even the choice of information sources, since there could be too much to choose from. There, traditional honest unavoidable bias would still exist. But without this blatant dishonesty that commonly occurs, people wouldn't be quite so misled.
This sounds like a pretty childish take to be honest.
Of course there is no such thing as objective news, but that's because reality isn't that simple either. CNN and most mainstream news are indeed trash (more like entertainment), but there is very good news out there. You have to find the right news source for the right topic.
For American foreign policy, read The Intercept; for American domestic issues - Propublica, for middle eastern news - Al Jazeera English, and so on and so forth.
News is never "objective facts" and neither should it be. Good journalists put news in the context of reality.
I’d be skeptical of Al Jazeera’s Middle East coverage. They are pretty much a Qatari state outlet and Qatar isn’t friendly with a lot of countries in the region.
I (and a lot many other residents and citizens of ME countries) find Al Jazeera English to be pretty okay. They give very neutral reporting, and when they do shit on someone, it's usually against someone with a vested interest against Muslims (such as Netanyahu or Narendra Modi), which is to be expected from a Mideast media outlet.
Now Al Jazeera Arabic though, that is one steaming hot pile of bullshit, that is still so popular in the Arab World that they call it the "people's news". Saudis and Emiratis alike used to watch it, likely because of their strongly biased reporting against their respective governments, as well as their pro-Muslim position on all matters. And interestingly, they were mostly allowed to broadcast in those countries up until recently.
I mean, if i was looking for objective coverage of the middle east, your comment sounds more like a criticism of Al Jazeera English than a support of it. Like, if i'm looking for neutral coverage of a region known for its religious conflicts, i wouldn't look for the news source that is pro a specific religion.
I don't think you'll find objective coverage of about anywhere - objectivity itself is an impossible goal and the more you look into you consider objective the less likely you are to find it. Even the driest readout of action/reaction has to decide what the scope of the reporting is. Any mention of blame, motivation, etc is inherently subjective. My rule to cut through this is try to watch reporting foreign to the place its produced, and then apply it through a lens of my personal values.
AJE does a lot of reporting on the daily lives of people in the middle east, and for that its a very welcome source for me. Also if you know Qatar's particular political stance you can sort of de-slant a lot of reporting. Criticism of the west, especially of western militaries are something you literally cannot hear within US news.
"region known for its religious conflicts" - I would sort of state that you're not being very objective there yourself. Islam is a religion but its also a really ingrained part of the culture in ways that christianity is not. It just means they're reflective of the culture thats produced it.
> "region known for its religious conflicts" - I would sort of state that you're not being very objective there yourself. Islam is a religion but its also a really ingrained part of the culture in ways that christianity is not. It just means they're reflective of the culture thats produced it.
Would it be better if i said ethno-religious conflicts? Regardless, one of the biggest conflicts in the middle east is probably Israel-Palestine, and its been that way for a long time. I'm not sure i would look to AJE for neutral coverage of that (I definitely wouldn't look towards western media either though)
One thing that AJE will show is the conflict from the Palestinian side, which is not something western media shows. They will show actual towns and cities in the west bank and Gaza, the israeli settlements which are what are actually causing the flareups in violence. There may not be a neutral source available - reuters and the AP have a pretty consistent bias of rarely mentioning settlements or evictions.
At the very least its nice to put human faces and see real communities in what is often a more rhetorical exercise.
> Would it be better if i said ethno-religious conflicts
Perhaps, I would just say a reading of the situation shows its less a religious conflict and more a political apartheid state. The borders and political rights are the true conflict here, with the religious element sometimes there to inflame and balkanize the factions. Having been raised in the US to think that its this mighty crusade-like undertaking of the jewish/christian world vs the heathen muslims, a real examination of the factors causing protest, violence and conflict has a lot more to do with secular power structures - thats why I think its pretty safe to say its much more akin to South African apartheid the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time. It also helps that the solution must be political.
> One thing that AJE will show is the conflict from the Palestinian side, which is not something western media shows. They will show actual towns and cities in the west bank and Gaza, the israeli settlements which are what are actually causing the flareups in violence. There may not be a neutral source available - reuters and the AP have a pretty consistent bias of rarely mentioning settlements or evictions.
I'm not saying that sort of thing isn't valuable or important, just that showing the suffering of one side in a conflict is not neutral reporting.
And to be clear, not everything should be neutral reporting. Understanding the struggles that the Palestinian people face is very valuable. Its just a different sort of thing than a neutral report on the situation in the area.
Re characterization of the conflict:
I'm not sure i agree with your characterization, although i do agree that most of the time religion is an excuse for secular geopolitical ends. Regardless i'm not sure it matters for the main point of this argument.
> I'm not saying that sort of thing isn't valuable or important, just that showing the suffering of one side in a conflict is not neutral reporting.
I’m not trying to claim its neutral, but that it is a perspective you don’t often get, and is helpful for building empathy for the people living there as humans rather than pieces on a chess board of geopolitics.
I don’t call my characterization the unfallable truth, just for me it’s a lot closer to reality than what a lot of lenses I’ve had to view the conflict in the past :)
I'm a fan of AJE for my headline blast style news. They're far enough removed from my day to day in the US that it manages to give a good "rest of the world" vantage point. It is often the case that a big story for a few days on AJE is some sort of major unrest in this or that country but on all the US networks it is something inane.
Because of their ownership I do tend to take a more critical view of their Middle East coverage. Need to view it (and everything really) through the "What does Qatar want?" lens. Although sometimes even that helps give a good "both sides" style comparison. For coverage on Israeli/Palestinian tensions I can use both that and the more standard US options and get a more well rounded view.
The Intercept? Even if I agreed with Glem Greenwald's world view, I'd recognize it as among the most biased out there. for American foreign policy, I have a much simpler suggestion: any news from sources that aren't in the US or its chief geopolitical rivals (Russia and China). As a special bonus, you'll get less garbage news about things that don't matter, like the political ramifications of what Joe Biden had for lunch. And you might even learn something about the rest of the world, which is practically impossible from US media.
Greenwald is no longer with the intercept, and he hasn't been an editor for a long time.
Much of the world is a part of the USs economic imperialism, and hence isn't as far from the mothership as you'd imagine. All sources have biases. At least TI does fully independent reporting.
Nice bit of cherry-picking there. NYT (for example) also produces some excellent journalism. Little gems buried in mountains of crap. Making either your only recommendation will leave people who follow that recommendation covered in crap. They're sources to be used sparingly when those good articles appear, not as part of one's day-to-day effort to stay informed.
Founders' influence often lingers long after the founders themselves. You think Greenwald didn't hire/collaborate with others who shared a similar world view?
Looking at the front page of Propublica right now and it's just a straight up checklist of stories that people of a certain ideology believe. There's no opposing ideas or viewpoints present. They only run stories that the people reading it expect to read.
One test I came up with recently is that if a source doesn't run stories that I disagree with, if they only have stories which I nod along to and agree with, then that source is horribly biased. It isn't that they're "right", that they only run "right" stories, it's that they're horribly biased.
I don't think that test does much. The original point was that there's no such thing as objective news, but rather facts put into context.
If you're finding that context setting is consistent in its narrative, that's not a reason to recoil.
As an example, put yourself in a highly contentious context of a historical situation - say the apartheid in South Africa. If you found a newspaper that always took a position counter to the white south African government, you would have found a good newspaper.
That doesn't always work, but neither does a simple test like you've deviced.
Without having watched all of the CNN "leak" linked below, I'd like to point out two things that will color my viewing of it:
1 - Project Veritas has a history of misleading / baiting subjects into saying things that sound bad, and of taking pieces of conversation out of context.
2 - A "technical director" in television isn't an editorial role, nor is it very high ranking. The job of a technical director is to physically operate things like the video switcher to choose which camera is on screen or to put up a lower third; their job typically would not be to decide who to interview, what to ask in an interview, direct the on screen talent, etc.
I am sure CNN, like most workplaces, has employees with varied opinions and political views. Seeing any one of those employees statements as evidence of the overall views of the company is kind of ridiculous.
Project Veritas is great at getting low-level scoops and inflating their importance for views. Almost like the mainstream news sources they transparently claim to be "above."
During the 2016 presidential race they promised to drop a big discovery about the Hillary campaign's corruption, and it literally turned out that it was something to do with canvassers dressed as ducks who got into some kind of minor altercation. It was the cringiest non-story of all time.
A disease kills more Americans, and you question why there was a death counter? I hope that every here reading this sees through the very thing he is trying to use to spin your mind against reality. It's damm effective too, but you can't unsee the death this disease caused first hand. You can't trick me.
It's also interesting to check who owns a media outlet and what companies are its largest customers by placing ads. I find Russell Brand's YT Channel frankly speaking surprisingly illuminating on many subjects like deep state*, corona, environmentalism, data protection. According to him most of the largest news papers in the States are basically controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Guess who they will be catering to.
*: I know this is a trigger word and I don't use it exactly in the sense of AJ or reptiloids. But it has its merit as a concise term refering to invisible power structures in the government.
I find it crazy that Russell is one of a very few people providing analysis of how power works. He’s extremely well informed and has gone away and educated himself. He also never gives out conspiracy theories, all of the things he says are based on experiences, for example being asked to leave Richard Brandson’s island because he suggested people in the British Virgin Islands pay their tax…
I respect him for his ability to think for himself and express his thoughts pretty eloquently. He's no doubt very intelligent. Having said - I find him absolutely not funny ... his humor leaves me completely cold.
I don’t know how you learned about how media worked, but when I was taught about it in elementary school in Italy, I clearly remember my teacher explaining the concept of Agenda and News Cycle. Maybe I just had an amazing teacher (she is, indeed).
That said, this is not a new development. Mainstream media today are doing this in subtler ways because they are forced to transparency by the rise of the Internet.
As long as media organization need to turn a profit, this will always be the case.
By having a rich media landscape, with different point of views, we were always able to keep a general balance despite the singular imbalances. The radicalization of opinions and the outrage economy, along with the Internet, have disrupted that general balance, with mostly right-wing leaning medias seizing that unethical advantage, and liberal left-leaning media trying to decry it, while having a hard time swiping their own conflicts of interest under the rug.
Surprisingly enough, this is mostly true for generalist media, though. I’m lucky enough to be a tech journalist, and despite having to deal with a lot of companies and a lot of products that they want to ultimately sell, I feel that our conflicts of interest are way easier to navigate, and easier to address.
Picking your news from carefully selected sector-specific publications, and putting together your own media diet, is the equivalent of eating organic and cooking your own meals vs eating out at McDonald’s every night.
The equivalence, sadly, is true also for the level of education and income (and time) you need to have to do that, though.
"Balanced"? There's far more to the world than politically exciting topics. News media is entertainment, it's optimizing for engagement, not producing accurate impressions in the viewer's mind. Following multiple sources of news just means you are being focused on lots of things of questionable relevance and importance.
An example that comes to mind is the various investigative interviews being conducted in the UK about the covid response last year. The news media focuses on gossip rather than the structural issues, institutional biases and lessons. Though even covid itself is probably not the most important issue today, it'll probably be something obscure like the reverse Flynn effect in Europe.
The British media's coverage of the Covid-19 crisis was and still is really blatant. For example, there have been a lot of decisions which involved tradeoffs, with each option having both upsides and downsides, and the press has pretty consistently focused on the downsides - you could pretty much pinpoint the moment the government decided to put off the latest loosening of restrictions based just on when the BBC switched from pushing the reasons to delay it to focusing heavily on the downsides of doing so.
Basically every single story was either placed by an interested party or hits our emotions in a way to keep us clicking. Lots of companies, political campaigns and advocacy organizations have highly skilled media relations departments that know exactly how to get a story printed on any topic. I have been on that side and basically have seen our talking points published word for word without being challenged or examined, which was the goal.
For awhile last year I felt like I needed the news to keep my family safe. After a while stewing in the fear factory, I realized that that the reporting didn't bare much relation to the actual scientific studies it claimed to be based on when I bothered to actually go and read them. I unplugged and only check niche interest news now.
I was becoming a worse citizen and person for reading the news, not a better one.
> I have never researched a topic deeply and found that the media had been covering that topic accurately, ever.
This applies to a lot more than just media, including important to mundane issues inside of an organization. Path of least resistance (aka bullshit) and all that.
I think that news stories are more about the 'story' than the 'news'. They are about framing some perhaps genuine facts (but perhaps not) in a specific way, in such a way that a genuinely independent assessment is impossible for anyone taking their information from these sources.
I think when the stories and angles are so detached from reality, it is fair to wonder what is going on. You can call it conspiracy, or companies working together in a co-ordinated way for their best interests, fascism (with corporations and governments working in tandem), etc but its hard to dispute that there is an agenda to prevent the general population from receiving information that would allow them to make straightforward judgements.
The internet destroyed the business model for old-school media.
So now they just generate a never-ending stream of fake controversy to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
I think "the technical director" and "very senior" bits are misleading. You can google "cnn" "technical director" site:linkedin.com and find lots of people with that job title, some as "senior technical director" and so on. It's like "vice presidents" at banks.
It's not bias that bothers me. Attempts at neutrality can create their own bias-ish issues. Variety and independence is the best help here, IMO. Independence of outlets from one another. Independence of journalistic voices within outlets, etc.
What does bother me is quality, effort even. The majority of high visibility reporting is mostly commentary. Factual accuracy isn't even applicable.
They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc. A good example is the latest G7 meet. Every summary of the underlying tax problems I read was substandard. The speculation about what G7 decisions would mean was substandard.
No one actually understood what they were writing about. They dig just far enough to strike emotional or partisan content: "Apple paid just %X tax, because tax havens, cheating & stuff." Tax is all about details. You have t
The average engaged reader who has read dozens of articles on the topic has not learned anything, besides good guys, bad guys and moral outrages. I don't think the journalists do either. If you want to actually know something about the topic, you need to go to wikipedia or hunt down a good blog article.
> They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc.
Indeed. Many times when I look at the original sources for news articles, the sources either include major pieces of information omitted from the article, or even information that contradicts the article. There's talk about how people on Hacker News/Reddit/Twitter/etc. comment without reading an article, but it looks like most reporting is the same - writing an article without looking at the source.
When you see that neither the reporters nor the consumers of the news seem to care about this, it's clear that the purpose is to entertain and not inform.
Depth isn't all that compelling. A well researched article doesn't get more views. The incentives to do a quick write up are strong. Spend 100 hrs researching a topic, for no gain... or spend 1hr writing an article with just enough content to draw agreement or disagreement.
Counterpoint (as someone married to a journalist): most news outlets do not have the time, resources and intent to further any special interest agenda except for their front page and op-eds. To achieve Murdoch-level disinformation is hard work. It requires so much work, that most news outlets cannot compete. There just isn't enough time and money in the news business. Remember this isn't science where there is time for research. Many news outlets have individual journalists contribute 3 to 5 articles per day. Do you think this allows for a lot of spinning an agenda?
No, the reality is different. Lots of news is just repeating what others report (news agencies to online news to news papers) because there aren't that many original sources anyway.
I believe what you think is (malicious?) agenda, is really just news outlets trying to survive. Murdoch/Springer/FoxNews to the contrary, but these are easy to avoid.
I think the argument here is more about what journalists know that they can cover, what goes onto the front page and in headings, rather than journalists themselves writing with a hidden agenda. Also who is promoted, Greenwald wrote about a particularly bad example: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/cnns-new-reporter-natasha-b...
In addition, no news outlet seemed to be in enough of a survival mode to report on the Hunter Biden story for example.
> Remember this isn't science where there is time for research. Many news outlets have individual journalists contribute 3 to 5 articles per day. Do you think this allows for a lot of spinning an agenda?
I always thought of this as exact the problem. There isn’t time for a journalist to do their research (and the bar is low enough), so instead of reporting the truth, you get what they already thought and already wanted to say, sprinkled with a tiny bit of new info.
You used CNN as an example but these tactics apply to most media outlets. Isn’t this the thesis of Manufacturing Consent? Crafted mass messages to sway public opinion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
And this is why state sponsored, but _not_ controlled media is what you want.
In most countries that have these institutions, these media outlets are consistently rated, by both sides of the local spectrums, as being the most balanced.
Note, that this is _not_ the same as saying that they cannot be biased, since at the end of the day every decision is the result of some bias or another, but their mandate is to serve the greater public, and so they don't try to carve out and to chase a specific demographic.
Being published independently doesn't guarantee honesty or the lack of an agenda or bias, it only guarantees any agenda or bias isn't being dictated by a third party, rather than the company itself.
Also, The Juice Media appear to be satirists, not journalists. While this and other satirical sources like the Daily Show may seem more truthful than mainstream news because they provide an emotional catharsis, they can actually be far more distorted than the mainstream media in terms of fact. Because while satire can express the truth, being honest isn't its purpose, so much as being funny.
The Juice Media are satirical journalists, but as far as I can tell all the satire is contained to the presentation, not the facts. The Daily Show is not independent, so putting them in the same bag as The Juice Media doesn't seem fair.
> I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now. You have to ask why they chose to report this, why they slant things one way or another with their choice of wording and emphasis. What is the aspect of this story that is too politically incorrect or unfashionable to be included?
You say this like it’s a bad thing. That’s exactly what everyone needs to be doing.
I could easily find a lot of reporting on the "CNN leak", even in German online media, and from my understanding, we cannot, at this point in time, be sure that this leak is legit.
Right now, it's simply a news story that is very difficult to confirm.
In any case, my recommendation would be to apply "I can’t help but see some kind of special interest or agenda whenever I hear a news story now." here, too. Everything else would be a bit inconsistent.
> I think the very final nail in the coffin was the leaked recordings of the CNN technical director basically admitting what everyone pretty much already knew. That they spread misinformation deliberately, only give interviews to subject experts who they know will say what CNN prefers them to say and ultimately design everything they put on the screen to get hooks inside your limbic system and keep your eyes glued.
For anyone who may not be aware of the contents of the actual recordings, here are some quotes.
Trump was — his hand was shaking, he was losing it. He’s unfit. We were creating a story there. I think that’s propaganda.
[Trump's] hand was shaking or whatever, I think. We brought in so many medical people to tell a story that was all speculation -- that he was neurologically damaged, and he was losing it. He's unfit to - you know, whatever.
We had nothing else to run with at that time. We were like, just taking shots off a bow, just hoping something would hit, you know?
We were creating a story there that we didn't know anything about. That's what - I think that's propaganda
Look what we did, we got Trump out. I am 100 percent going to say it, and I 100 percent believe that if it wasn't for CNN, I don't know that Trump would have got voted out.
Like our focus was to get Trump out of office, right? Without saying it, that's what it was, right? So, our next thing is going to be climate change awareness.
I found this claim really intriguing and rabbit holed on researching it for a bit... but upon further research I am skeptical. It strikes me that I'm basically only seeing articles out of News Corp outlets and random blogs which appear to be rehashing the same content. News Corp outlets definitely dominate here.
But let's agree that CNN's agenda was obviously anti-Trump because it was a major driver of their traffic... here's what really made me skeptical:
> our next thing is going to be climate change awareness
This line is really telling. The CNN tech director, ostensibly caught in an unguarded moment, draws a line directly from Trump's fake news/voter fraud claim all the way to climate science. This is really, really fishy.
It is a _moral imperative_ for humanity to live in greater harmony with the planet, which includes reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. This is not politics, it's an informed take based on science that aligns with an understanding of physics, a long record of paleoclimatological data, and things I can literally see with my eyes (I enjoy mountain climbing and have seen glacial retreat firsthand over years).
I don't believe it's a coincidence that Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the News Corp outlets, has enormous fossil fuel holdings and would be negatively affected by this inconvenient moral imperative.
I hadn't heard of Project Veritas, the originators of this claim, but a little research into their past history also makes me want to take their presentation with more than a little skepticism.
Again, I don't have any _direct_ evidence to claim that the quote is fabricated. I do believe that there are significant ulterior motives here in the reporting of this claim, and the claims are reported by outlets that themselves have a spotty record of journalistic integrity.
I'm not sure you read my comment prior to replying. I didn't make a claim, only posted quotes from a video that was referenced by a different poster. That way, people unfamiliar with the video would know its contents. So, I don't understand what claim of mine you attempted to debunk.
Instead of reading endless articles about a recording to determine if the recording exists, why not watch the recording itself?
Why can't you just report facts and be done with it?
Something I always wondered, why journalists, news and journalism is always about the "story", the narrative, the emotion ? That would take away a lot of scope for manipulation, harder to misinterpret and easier to spot the culprits.
Till few years ago, it was brought to my attention, they, like all surviving orgs, adapt and simply give what "the people" want.
I think of them as PR firms now. Unfortunately, journalism has probably been like that for a long time since special interests can pitch stories to journalists. They've put a lot of effort into making themselves seem like mere unbiased reporters of what is newsworthy but it's becoming apparent that they can and do push certain viewpoints on behalf of their 'clientele' which may include political parties.
I mostly avoid the news.
However opinion articles on newspapers bother me a lot. The fact is most people will interpret these articles as the newspapers own view, increasingly so when this view is repeated again and again. However when you point out the
typical faults of the opinion article then defenders insist it's 'just an opinion'.
On a related note I hated an opinion article that came out of the guardian yesterday debunking the theory that that the Wuhan lab was responsible for covid-19. The main reason being it totally ignored all the evidence and just smugly insisted it wasn't true. It's fine to disagree but let's hear the reasons why.
I generally avoid all newspapers. The Economist does seem better.
I feel like this post has a lot of hindsight bias in it. People are going to get things wrong sometimes. I think there's a lot of things to legit criticize mainstream media for, but not having 100% accurate crystal ball isn't one of them.
If the thesis of this piece is that newswriters sometimes get things wrong, or sometimes write sensationalized things, all i can say is, no duh.
My understanding was the thesis is that paying too much attention to the news is unhelpful because newswriters (“storytellers”) don’t particularly care if what they are reporting is factually correct or not, they have different motives.
With Enron, it's not even that the financials were obviously bad. It takes skill to see danger signs in audited accounts. Recall the fraud finished off their accounting firm, then one of the Big Five.
+1 for using the term "storytellers". I call "journalists" Schreiberlinge in German, which has a similar conotation. If I have learnt one thing during the pandemic, that even supposedly serious media is not to be trusted. I always knew (from first hand experience of being interviewed) that newspapers are really not much more worth then other things you use to whipe stuff... After the pandemic, I know you can basically ignore all the media outlets. All they do is generate interactions and spread badly researched lies.
> I also looked at charts of its stock price. I saw signs that sellers were less patient than buyers. That usually indicates an ordinary fluctuation in business, but whatever, it counted as evidence that I could safely postpone buying, so I decided to wait
Any traders in the audience care to shed some light on how they would go about this?
In a similar vein, anyone knows how to read the patience of sellers and buyers by looking at the charts?
I guess one could see whether some standard price moves seem "interrupted" by intermittent selling? So e.g., the price in a previously established channel doesn't hit the upper resistance as much as the lower resistance?
This subject feels like the mirror subject to the question that was discussed on HN 2 days ago: "Do we live in political echo chambers?"
My response: Who cares? I know what my values are, I know which side I'm on, I know what I fight for.
If you're looking for new philosophies or perspectives, I strongly suggest two things:
1. fiction
2. history
I don't think day-to-day news coverage can ever be written at a level where it might affect your fundamental values; among many other problems, it is typically written in a hurry, with a lack of context, and so it lacks long-term perspective.
In terms of books that have changed my perspective on some subject, here are some important ones I've read over the last year:
Azar Nafisi's book is both a true life action story, and it's also an intellectual journey, a consideration of how authoritarianism slowly takes over.
Sarah Chayes book is remarkably ambitious, not only did I suddenly see corruption as a global issue, but she connects it to religious extremism and then reviews the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 1400s and how that lead to Martin Luther and that era's own explosion of religious extremism.
Andrew J. Bacevich's book is a sober look at all the things the USA probably cannot do, even though it has the worlds most powerful military
The Brooks book about China was eye opening for me. I previously knew nothing about the Warring States period, or the intense intellectual debate that occurred over the meaning of the state and the duties of the leader to the people. I wish more Westerners knew this story.
Should I expect this kind of writing from the daily newspaper? Absolutely not. It's ridiculous. It's a category error. That's now what the daily newspaper is for. That's certainly not what the 24 hour news cycle is for.
Sometimes I want actionable news I can use, which is partly a matter of knowing which candidates might have the best chances of advancing my goals. Especially during primary races, day-to-day political news is useful to me when it gives me the information I need to decide who of many candidates I should donate money to.
But when I want new perspectives and philosophies? I turn to books.
The idea to avoid the news and that news are biased is not new nor revolutionary. But I like this “information arbitrage” idea — most people get their news from X, Y, Z so if you can research an event more objectively you maybe able to profit from it.
Michael Capuzzo, a best selling author, has written a story making highest seriousness corruption claims against governments and their bashing of Ivermectin. Yet main stream media has been very busy running a smear campaign against Ivermectin and it's proponents like the FLCCC.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/T...
No, ivermectin is not being “smeared”. It is not an anti-viral and makes no sense to use against COVID-19. Nearly every report of its use links back to this Buffalo article, and there is no publication by that doctor on its use. It’s a hoax. There is no miracle cure, and by now doctors have a pretty good protocol on how to treat the disease already.
Your claims are unbased.
The main head of the FLCCC Paul E. Marik has 43000 citations, yet he is being called out for lacking trustworthiness, and fabricating evidence.
Reading news is an addictive habit with the downside of strong political indoctrination. I could see it in some of my family members, unfortunately.
I really would like to have a tool that can automatically put labels on news headers: clickbait, drama, speculation, she-said-he-said, or rumor. It's pretty easy to detect such headlines when reading, so training an ML model shouldn't be a problem. Removing tagged articles automatically would've made my news feed so much better.
It seems to me like it would be prudent anyway just to keep track of the news everyone else is still consuming, if you don't know what other people base their views and decisions on it becomes pretty hard to predict their behaviour.
He thinks the pandemic did not have much impact on the economy. He reads right wing economists. He was upset Trump was painted as dangerous. Is this supposed to be an example of being “free from the storytellers”? It just proved he is blindsided by reducing his news sources to a few very biased channels.
The comments here reflect a lot of backlash against mainstream media. To some extent, I could see it being a simple reflection of the media being drawn toward bad but eye-catching stories. I've heard from many outlets that the media is drawn to this because it's lucrative - and the rise of technology disrupted their traditional funding sources. Pissing people off through their stories wound up being the only way to make money. It'd only be natural then that after decades of swinging towards "birdbox stories" the media would itself be associated with the negative emotions it's been living off (as in the movie where people use a birds in a box to sense when overpowering forces are nearby). If you live off someone else's largess then you quickly become associated with them intimately.
The trouble is, journalism does fill a necessary need within society. Frankly, people are going to "talk" and without someone having a reputation for holding themselves to a standard somewhere the "talk" will back the ruling elite's objectives.
I don't have the systemic answer - but tech being the initial problem and this being a good place to discuss technical issues - the people here could probably figure out some potential options and see what springs forth.
Personally, I learned how to read the news in public school and through cross sampling from multiple outlets. Every story's got to answer the five "W"s (who, what, when, where and why). If a story has similar photos/names/content across multiple outlets then that's probably close to what happened. Over time, I've watched the rise of the "birdbox" stories and developed a thicker skin towards them.
More personally, I grew up with a parent and a large set of relatives who wanted to rebel against anything and everything without any need for justification. Sometimes it's because it makes them look smart and they like how people treat them with authority. Sometimes it's because they were wronged by someone in authority somewhere and rebellion feels like a form of righting a perceived wrong. Definitely, if a conspiracy theory landed in their laps they were receptive especially when there wasn't any evidence - just another way of bucking the trend and rebelling.
I've learned these rebellions are fundamentally destructive. Society would quickly get turned over to something more like Mad Max and regional warlords if my rebellious family were in the majority. Though sometimes society definitely is in the wrong - as in the times of slavery or oppression of women (neither of those is a US-only past practice, btw).
The news does fill a fundamental need even in its current state. But it definitely needs reformation. Probably, there's a way to fund proper journalism without burning the house down.
Bill Ackman runs a hedge fund and was a guest on CNBC right at the beginning of the US getting hit with the pandemic proclaiming travel industry going to go downhill while having made bets on that happening. [0] For those outside the US, CNBC is a business/financial/stock market news channel.
> “America will end as we know it. I’m sorry to say so, unless we take this option,” he told CNBC on March 18, five days before ending his bet against the market. “We need to shut it down now. ... This is the only answer.”
He then made $2B a week later. I would assume most guests on that network are there to make statements to try and sway the market in some way to their favor. You just don't know if they are long or short on whatever they are talking about so without those disclosures.
If you think more online based news is better like Motley Fool. They are also registered as a Hedge Fund with the SEC [1]. I can't see/find what their specific holdings are on the SEC site but isn't that a conflict of interest to publish "news" or investment information and manage over $100M?
Isn't this just exactly what we would expect though? If I think company X is gonna crash, I will short it and tell people. That's not dishonest, its 2 different but aligned ways of expressing my opinion...
Given the size of the industry, its not like he talked it into oblivion. He might have been able to do that with a single company, but we didn't stop flying because he said so, we did it because of covid...
It can be dishonest to try to persuade someone of something without revealing that you have a nonobvious interest in them being so persuaded.
It's not dishonest to talk down a stock you are shorting provided you are open about your interest, but a news outfit concealing such a fact definitely crosses the line for me.
Remember the CTS Labs thing where some Israelis from across the hall from Intel’s facility there did a giant smear job on a fake AMD vulnerability and then Bloomberg picked it up? The same Bloomberg who sells little information services which people are supposed to rely on as conveying factual information?
There's so much cynicism in this thread and lots of forcing everything into black and white. It's not black and white, life isn't black and white. Are there TV stations that show programs disguised as news to promote an agenda and make money? Of course. Are there news outlets working hard to to cover stories that are legitimate publications? Absolutely. Just because OP points out a few cases where media is wrong doesn't make it all shit that should just be ignored. That's fucking childish. Part of growing up is learning to think, and it is really, really hard, and takes work. But it seems lots of people here want everything pre-digested and handed to them on a platter saying: this is true and this is false.
If you actually speak to journalists they're very honest about how their job isn't reporting facts but it's interpreting the information and reporting it in a way with omissions or embellishments that make sure the general public, whom they look down on, have the correct takeaway from the story.
They see themselves as the chosen few who's job it is to do this and who's job it is to make the general public think and believe the things that are best for them and the believe it's a privilege to be in the position that they are to be in charge of doing that and are proud that is what they do.
"Whereas today, we have storytellers that specialize in peddling outrage."
I'd guess that media has known for ever that outrage is a potent driver of engagement. Technology today enables outrage delivery to be highly sculpted and surgically delivered. In my opinion this is a major driver of the increasing polarization of America.
The depth of our natural predilection to focus on threats has been discovered by neural networks and their systems optimized for profit, not truth and relevance.
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