> I was just addressing an issue somebody else raised earlier about the blurring of news and opinion, by pointing out that the author directly contributes to this problem by the way he wrote his article.
I guess I just really strongly disagree that the sentence you quoted constitutes "blurring the line." It says that some people think something and then went on to detail who these people were. Further more, David Brooks is possibly one of the most well known columnists for one of the most well read newspapers in the world. It's labeled "Opinion" and "Op-ed Columnist" at the top. It has an editorialized title, "How Evil is Tech?" It's so clearly NOT news. Nitpicking this one sentence to say that somehow David Brooks is masquerading as news is absurd.
>Politics are completely different from tech news because in order to write about them, you need to do lots of research.
Disagree. I don't think tech news are any quality. Also, we have issues like encryption which can be regarded as a mix, but like FBI vs Apple is more of a politics issue imho, yet reporters can't even get the basic terminology right.
> There’s a specific kind of misunderstanding [about journalism] that’s pervasive in tech, and it falls in this taxonomy of fallacies somewhere between the commentary/reporting confusion, and Uncle Chico [who is the most prolific Facebook shitposter I’ve ever met, who thinks journalists who do not work at Fox have all coordinated to ruin Donald Trump’s life]. It is like the former in that it fails to understand processes and classifications that are integral to how journalism is done, and necessary, and it’s like the latter in the sense that it attributes personal qualities to journalists that both comically overstate the level of personal investment journalists have in the people they cover, and assumes that journalists are motivated by (maybe even primarily by) assorted flavors of malice....
> There’s also a related fallacy that’s not universal, but inasmuch as it exists, it seems uniquely endemic to tech: the idea that tech journalism should support the tech industry. This interprets journalism as public relations, which it is not. Journalists are not supposed to cheerlead the industry; they’re supposed to cover it, and that means writing the good things and the bad with no overriding preference for one over the other.
> While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic.
That's true of most topics; having the lay public vote on credibility ratingd does nothing to address this, though (and probably makes it worse on issues where the truth clashes with the popular misconception.)
> one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there
NY Times, Huffington Post and many other outlets have a social justice agenda so this is easily shown to be false. Any news publication regularly read by left leaning Americans stay uncritical of anything that furthers a social justice agenda.
How often do you see news articles critical of the prevailing viewpoints? How often do you see articles critical of the prevailing viewpoints on the left?
> The articles can be summarized as Facebook bad, digital maps bad, Apple bad, Tesla bad and big-tech bad
Even from the headlines, it’s clear the criticism is more targeted than that. To generalise so aggressively is either bad faith (ironic, no?) or poor reading comprehension.
Are youtube personalities journalists? Is it the job of journalists to be popular? Should it be?
> The beauty of this fiction that journalists are not making a judgment call in choosing who to quote, on what topic,
What are you talking about? Careful language regarding certainty of a statement has got nothing to do with choice of interviewee or subject matter.
Of course journalists make judgement calls about what subjects to cover and of course this shapes news coverage.
You present this as some super-secret conspiracy, ‘broken wide open’ by the Internet. Did you really not know before then? Did you not read differing newspapers and spot that the choice of story and spin differed.
Historically , what is pejoratively described as the ‘Main Stream Media’ has hosted journalists who care deeply about quality of reporting and getting the story straight, fact-checking and making sure that quotes are obtained from opposing points of view.
It’s the internet and rolling news which has put a strain on the consensus.
> People are misinterpreting the news. It seems like your position is to blame the news, and you seem to think this is a new issue.
Do you deny that it is possible in the English language to write things in a way that are technically and pedantically true, but misleading? I suspect not since you mention Manufacturing Consent, so what is it that you mean?
> I don't think that forcing news agencies or social media companies to change is a real solution. The solution lies in improving people's ability to read news critically across all mediums and to understand the context of media and social conversation and how it subtly serves those in power.
You have two groups: producers of news, and consumers. The former is small, organized, generally well educated, and already subject to regulations. None of this can be said about the latter group. Do you actually think the optimum approach is targeting the latter group? This seems logical to you? (Not to say that we shouldn't also be doing that.....that we aren't is suspicious in itself if you ask me.)
> your characterization of very standard reporting practices as "presenting speculation as fact" and I've clearly explained why above
You aren't even able to acknowledge that talking about something that didn't actually occur is necessarily speculation, it's not surprising we disagree.
> Journalists do in-depth investigative reporting, they submit FOIA requests, they cultivate connections with other institutions in order to get stories of public interest to the public.
Some do. Others maliciously crop social media comments and provoke twitter flamewars to create content.
I think the biggest problem with the tech industry is that it's insufficiently self-critical. But I think journalism has the same problem; I rarely see journalists writing articles about other journalists behaving badly. They have a tendency to protect their own, which mirrors my observations of how people in the tech industry generally respond to criticism of the tech industry.
>I have the feeling that in the last few years all political discussions have become more extreme.
No doubt true. The reason is the important problem.
>Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue.
Filter bubbles are a thing no doubt and certainly dont help but imagine your average person at the bar talking to his friends. They have a filter as established by tables IRL. Or imagine 100 years ago where someone had 1 newspaper to read and that was the most they knew about the world.
>It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently.
I called this 15 years ago with google news. They kind of just aggregated the news and didnt put any slant or bias. You could see for yourself the lies made up by the journalists.
>This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to .
I would say your implementation is nicer than https://www.improvethenews.org/ from MIT but you're right. People are opposed to reading outside their bubble.
If I may make a recommendation. Dont try to fix this problem the way you are doing it.
Dont try to show the news but rather let people rate and search via authors. Do like Elon musk states and let people call journalists out on their bullshit. Have rankings on the site showing how rottentomatos the news is.
>And the argument that news reportage has to protect the ignorant from their own ignorance by not accidentally un-ignoranting them is ... tired.
I don't think I made that argument.
Keeping content simple isn't about protecting anyone from their ignorance, it is writing to serve an audience's wants. People who read publications like Medium generally want bite-size overviews and entertainment. There is a reason the vast majority of people would rather read Scientific American or The Economist instead of picking up an IEEE journal.
Google News doesn't have journalists. Tech company CEOs have never been expected to keep things impersonal.
> the nyt famously caught and killed several whistle blowers because the owners family wanted to stay tight with the administration
Scummy, but not an editorial decision.
> WSJ regularly publishes Murdoch op-eds and cutouts
Sure, owners and the editorial board put their slant on opinion sections. Granted. You’ve not really given any indication that the actual journalism is being toyed with.
The best examples you might have put forward would be the Murdochs. But their nonsense tends to focus around TV.
> Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism.
I don't think there is anything wrong with this industry. This seems to be how most 'news' is made these days. I'm guessing that people who closely follow a non-technical industry have seen similar sensationalism on other issues.
> I hate this trend in modern journalism where anytime consumers show preferences for something a journalist doesn't like, they are written about like some sort of victim in an information war.
> 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.
> I sense that they are intentionally covering the situation in non-inflammatory way.
We want more of this though right?
I sense that many people can't understand the difference between opinions or editorials and news.
I sense that many people actually enjoy the inflammatory way news is sometimes covered unless it's different from the way they'd like to see it.
I sense that people can't understand how a single new outlet can have varying opinions and points of view on a single issue and will choose a single one out of many to make their point.
Imagine how different things would be if people were intelligent consumers of news.
I don't think you can have a news industry dependent on clicks and profits and have no sensationalism. I also don't think you can have a completely unbiased media when people, based on their consumption, don't seem to want it. It's unrealistic given the different biases and motivations that people have.
I guess I just really strongly disagree that the sentence you quoted constitutes "blurring the line." It says that some people think something and then went on to detail who these people were. Further more, David Brooks is possibly one of the most well known columnists for one of the most well read newspapers in the world. It's labeled "Opinion" and "Op-ed Columnist" at the top. It has an editorialized title, "How Evil is Tech?" It's so clearly NOT news. Nitpicking this one sentence to say that somehow David Brooks is masquerading as news is absurd.
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