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.

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.

If I was going to pick a journalism problem to solve, the accuracy of technical details would not be it.

If I could solve one or both of (a) funding and (b) deceptive balance, then I would quite happily sell 'technical accuracy' down the river.

This is still a result of the fact that technical journalists get paid a fraction of what an engineer gets paid. So if you have the knowledge to write good articles, you're rather going to work in the field than report on it.

While it sounds very good in theory, we both know the readers are not qualified enough to distinguish between fact and nonsense. If enough big newspapers tell people 5G causes covid, eventually a majority will believe it is so.

You need aan independent entity that removes incorrect information, but it must be just and transparent.

Usually the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. What did the journalists say and how was it wrong? You said they all got it wrong, but do you have an example? What is the "right" interpretation and what in the bill text makes you think that?

> Imagine that I used those words intentionally and avoided saying "smarter" and "everyone else" and all that.

"it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news."

That's just a coded way of saying "they aren't smart enough to do anything specific so they do something I think is easy". You clearly think techies are smarter than others and are better at doing a job the journalists spent years in school learning.

While I agree, I don’t think we can expect everyone to do this research themselves, and we can’t always trust others opinions on the matter either.

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.

I'd expect better from them than from technologists who actually understand the technology, becuase the latter typically have unreserved praise for their creations and complete blindness to the negative effects of technology on society.

These are uncharted waters. I’d be wary of mistaking such hypotheses for absolute truths.

When mass journalism arrived we had yellow journalism. Journalistic standards arose, people chose their papers, and while it wasn’t a monotonic rise to goodness, what followed was better than what was.

I don’t know what the Internet will look like in a few years. But I’m fairly confident it won’t be laissez faire.

Isn't there a serious risk of bias, there, though? For example, if a journalist is specialized in CS and have to write about the ecological impact of technology, you can expect them to be biased in favor of technology, even in good faith.

While what you're suggesting seems common sense and is indeed better than current situation, I think it could be even better if rather than having one journalist writing one piece, every piece was a joint effort by several journalists, some expert on the subject and some not.

Most of the National Press (NTY, WaPo etc.) is profit-driven though, isn't it? They're the one's who generally report and decide what's authoritative...

Me too, but i'm just as sceptical when it comes to "real" journalists. Journalists aren't domain experts in everything. Read some random news about tech stuff, it's often times filled with clear indications of them not really understanding the topic. Which isn't meant to bash journalists, they have limited time for research, need to write an article, and again are usually not domain experts.

The question is how do we fix this?

Why do you believe this is limited to these two areas?

I see HN has imported the cynicism of the 2020 slashdot crowd. I'm sick and tired of this viewpoint.

Your false dichotomy is eyerolling - either we have total faith in all stories we read, with zero attention to detail and context, or we condemn all journalists as hacks, bad faith actors, and relics of the past: That knowledge is either meaningless, or easily compiled and comprehended in its raw format to the layman.

We need journalism. And in the new century where we will have stronger disinformation campaigns, better deepfakes, and the potential collapse of local news as we know it, "trust" in institutions and particular sources, based on their track record and credibility, will be all we have. Not everything is verifiable, and we as humans need to act on information we can't verify all the time.

So instead of going on about how all journalists suck, let's call out errors and bad work when we see it, and continue to push for better journalism and new ways of researching, citing, and reporting facts.

Mainstream news is not information, it's entertainment. The sooner your realize it the better.

Journalists have nor the time, nor the expertise or the means to write a purely accurate objective articles (that nobody wants to read because it's purely informational). I cannot count the times I read articles about my field of expertise, that are laughably inaccurate or pain false.

Journalists crunch out quick stories that are exaggerated or come from one angle, so that people would read it after seeing the headline, and get agitated enough to share it. Remark that this is not the fault of the journalists, but just how that whole system works.

You should read "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" by Ryan Holiday, and see how fragile that whole system is. And because of its fragility, can be easily manipulated on top of it.

If you want to get informed, either read books written by experts (like suggested), read the original scientific paper and draw your own conclusions, or stay ahead of your game by getting news from sources other than media. That last part will show you that by the time it's covered by main stream news, it's already old news (think bitcoin etc.)

When I read something, first thing I check is "who is this person?". If it's an expert on the subject, or has his own experience and tells the story, I'm happy to read it. If it's a journalist that is crunching out stories every week, I skip it.

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.

That’s “victims of misinformation”.

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.