The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating.
I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it.
By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material into maximally entertaining spectacle. The factual raw material can even be done away with sometimes as evidenced by how much of the news is just media reporting on itself (often centering on Twitter!).
There is not a technical solution to any of this. "Decentralization" into forums and social media and whatnot is not a solution. At best it's a good way for some of us to discuss the problem among ourselves as it unfolds. Decentralization is better termed "de-professionalization." The institutions which used to, at the very least, dedicate serious resources to going out into the world and gathering facts no longer function properly or just don't exist.
I remember seeing an interview with Christopher Hitchens where somebody asked him how he informed himself about the world, what news he liked to read. He said, not much. Mostly he relied on people he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. Must be nice!
> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating.
Honestly, I think the standards you seem to be setting for yourself are too high. As far as I know, none of us are God, so it is completely impossible for us to know what's going on in the world.
> according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material into maximally entertaining spectacle.
Which ones are you referring to, specifically? While there are certainly some companies that just want to turn the news into "entertaining spectacle," I think it's over-cynical to say they all do. I try to focus on the ones that seem to feel they have a duty to report on the news and columnists who seem to feel they have something important to say (and whose columns are interesting enough that that may actually be true).
> There is not a technical solution to any of this. "Decentralization" into forums and social media and whatnot is not a solution. At best it's a good way for some of us to discuss the problem among ourselves as it unfolds. Decentralization is better termed "de-professionalization." The institutions which used to, at the very least, dedicate serious resources to going out into the world and gathering facts no longer function properly or just don't exist.
I totally agree with you here about de-professionalization, but I'm less dejected about traditional news gathering institutions. They're definitely on the decline, but they're not dead yet. Some are still soldiering on and functioning reasonably well, especially if you're interested in national/international news or live in a major city.
Not just about corporations turning the news into "entertaining spectacle". Its scary from a climate change perspective that in my country (Australia), that people invested in the mining and fossil fuel industries are also investing in TV.
The NYTimes definitely prints stuff that is factual. A lot of the entertaining stuff is factual. It just depends on your goals. For example, if you read NYTimes every day since March, you'd sell at the bottom of the fastest stock market recovery in history.
Things can be factual and yet point you in the 200% wrong direction. And since that direction, for the average person, really means, on average, making tons of money, the average news source's pessimism (the actual continuity between 1807 and now) is going to... lose you a ton of money.
I think it makes perfect logical sense though. Any (large) business is vulnerable to the government. Having a large amount of control over the media allows those companies to mitigate the risk from the government a little.
I think wire services are generally pretty good, and Wikipedia Current Events Portal has a decent roundup of wire reports (AP, BBC, Reuters, etc) for stuff going on in the world.
There's a great deal that can be criticized about the journalism provided by mainstream media outlets (which news is considered newsworthy, which experts are consulted, etc.), but I don't know of any evidence suggesting that the standards for factual reporting have slipped any. The question of who can be trusted to provide analysis is as relevant as it's ever been.
Also... I feel for GP. I check out all kinds of sources because there are all kinds of biases. It's crazy how clickbait has changed the news business.
That... and thinking about it --- the REMOVAL of brand authority from media. Instead of democratizing, it has devolved in some ways - though clearly empowered in others.
It sounds like you're suggesting that it is possible to get unbiased factual information about the world? Am I correct in that assessment? I think that's what the parent comment was saying is not really possible to do and I think is the salient point and something that I agree with.
I think that the best thing, which is really hard to do with the internet, is to let time pass. If you're 1-2 weeks, 1 month behind the news, you will probably get only the important news. Following daily news is madness and useless unless you're making money out of it.
As someone I know said when I mentioned a new revolutionary battery technology has been discovered: I'll believe it when the researchers get the Nobel prize for it, in 10 years.
This is good advice but I want to clarify that the problem I'm trying to highlight here is structural - historical and political, and we should be thinking about it that way too, as well trying to figure out how to cope with the situation as individuals.
>> The feeling that it's just completely impossible to know what's going on in the world is really debilitating.
Is it? Why? Does it meaningfully change your life to know what's going on everywhere from the mundane to the impactful?
Our lives are lived in the present, locally. You interact with people in your community thousands of times more than people you read about thousands of miles away.
I personally view it as a duty. Part of being a citizen in a (kind of) functioning democracy is understanding the nuances of the stuff that is screwed up around you to the best of your ability so that when the time comes to vote or have a meaningful discussion with others around you, you can be a voice of reason. Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11. I may not know everything, but I'm trying and putting an honest effort into learning as much as I can every single day. Reading NYT, WaPo, etc. is my version of putting an American flag out front, or a Support the Troops sticker on my car, or singing the National Anthem or whatever people do to feel like they're doing their part.
That being said, your approach is probably a lot healthier in the long-run. I always get really depressed after reading the papers. Usually I just call a buddy after and we both rant about things and afterwards everyone feels ok.
>> Ignoring the world around them is how so many Americans still think Iraq had something to do with 9/11.
Consider that maybe them ingesting news from the President and other "news sources" are the reason they think this. Not because they are ignoring the world. If they ignored the world around them, they wouldn't have an opinion at all.
So in that case, how good is the consumption of information?
This is a lot like people saying that the people from thousands of years ago thought the world was flat. Then there is a rebuttal saying "no, Eratosthenes proved it was round forever ago, people knew that." The reality is people didn't think about if the world was round or not and it had zero impact on their life and vice versa.
People consume so much news information thinking it makes them a good citizen or something. But our power to change what happens 7000 miles away is basically nil; the power to change the lives of people within 7 miles of you is massive. And if we all did that... the people 7000 miles away would probably get a lot better results than us whining and wringing our hands about it while hoping politicians did something.
I don't mean to be dismissive of your argument. I'm trying to follow it. However, your argument seems to be for a country of passive, ignorant sheep that let whoever is in the White House do whatever they want?
The problem in '03 wasn't that people were reading too much, it was that they had no idea what was going on. The more you read, the more news from the President becomes contextualized, and you can have a more nuanced opinion on it. If the President says "Iraq bad" and you don't know anything about Iraq, it's hard to go "well, actually, it's a little more complicated than that."
Edit: I have a masters in international affairs. But, when I want to talk international affairs, the person I call up is my buddy with a high-school diploma, not people from my cohort. My less-formally-educated friend reads widely, and has a much more grounded take on everything going on around us that sometimes makes me stop and rethink my own opinions. The power of reading widely and often is pretty spectacular in my opinion, and can sometimes trump a formal education in a subject.
>> However, your argument seems to be for a country of passive, ignorant sheep that let whoever is in the White House do whatever they want?
My argument is that people have vanishingly little power as-is anyway, as evidenced by both executive and legislative branches ignoring the popular sentiments and securing their power first and foremost. In which case, time spent in that area is an absurdly low ROI compared to just helping your neighbors with the groceries, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, or stocking your Little Free Libraries/Pantries near you, rather than worrying what is happening in Tibet.
I disagree in that I believe that states and localities can be an agent of broader change. Sure, the feds won't reform drug laws, but locally our states and localities are simply working around the feds! So we should know what's wrong in a broad sense to push our localities in the right direction. And I believe in keeping tabs on the feds so if we get a chance to nudge them in the right direction, we can.
Despite disagreeing with you on that point, I think you are 100% right, and if we were all acting locally to make the world a better place....well, it probably would be.
I don't agree with the characterization of "passive, ignorant sheep", but otherwise I'll bite that bullet. My attitude towards the US government is very similar to my attitude towards McDonalds Corporation; I learn a bit about their operations because I'm curious about large and powerful organizations, but I don't feel much obligation to keep my knowledge up to date.
I will say, you are the perfect user/customer to have for media companies. Given the moral duty you ascribe to information consumption from these sites, I'd imagine it'd take a lot to lose you as a user.
As a user researcher, I'm really curious on how you think about what matters/what doesn't matter in terms of your news consumption. Obviously, there is a near infinite amount of things that happen every day/week/month/year/decade, but we all have a very finite amount of attention we can give to all of the information & potential news.
What issues/information/stories do you think matter? Is there a strong correlation between what you think matters and what NYT, WaPo, etc. are producing? Did you independently come up with the topics that most matter and then you track news on them, or you decide what matters after consuming news on the news sites?
I do understand your feelings of a responsibility to be up to date on news, especially when it is regarding political events. It's easy to get the facts from a report on the weather, a tornado devastated a town, you know this is true because you can see the photos (selected for drama) taken of the damage.
It's more difficult when reporting is on things that are a little more fluffy. Claims a politician did something are almost impossible to verify and reporting on this ends up being an exercise in spin. One of the best things about politicians taking to twitter to directly communicate is that you have an unfiltered direct message. If something is in a tweet from a politician then you can be pretty sure that is the message they want to get out. If they same something stupid or ill considered at least you can judge them on that, not so much the actual facts of the content.
So media of all types allow you to judge the messenger, less so the message.
But you still don’t know what’s going on in the world. You just know slightly more superficial coverage of the topics du jour that NYTimes, WaPo, etc care to push.
It’s worse to read the news and think yourself informed than to be ignorant and know it.
That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t take an attempt to learn about heart surgery techniques to recognize that you can’t perform or have any meaningful opinions about heart surgery.
People who don't follow the politics or news regularly often believe that complex problems have simple fixes, hence the popularity of soundbite politics.
The only computer person I've ever met who was confident he knew everything there was to know about computers had never strayed outside building desktops.
The more you know about something, generally the more you recognize how much more there is to it that you don't know. A first-year medical student almost certainly is more keenly aware of how complex open-heart surgery is than someone whose knowledge is limited to watching it on Scrubs.
People who read the NYTimes/WaPo are the ones who enjoy sound bite politics. Whether it’s a 8 paragraph article or a 20 second sound bite, they are the same class of understanding.
Someone who is ignorant and understands what not knowing something means eschews sound bite politics and any other simplifications due to all of the biases that come with any reduction.
> You interact with people in your community thousands of times more than people you read about thousands of miles away.
So? How does that invalidate your civic obligation to be aware of the decisions made in the centers of power outside your community? This whole dichotomy between the "local interactions" / socializing vs. governance that happens "thousands of miles away" has no basis.
> Be where your feet are.
Try living in a real hell hole and see if you find self-help phrases like this useful.
We live in a democracy. If you vote, I hope you feel a responsibility to only vote on what you think you're reasonably informed about. It's really hard to do. I'm in California (SF), where we have a zillion things on the ballot. Half the time, it's something that sounds obviously good, but on doing research there are probably terrible unintended consequences (like so much of the news). Or look at voting Biden vs Trump. They, and papers on their respective sides of the divide will tell you entirely different things about what reality is and what's going wrong. I have to learn about what's happening beyond me to decide. If we get medicare for all, will it mean horrible wait times or death panels or will it turn us into a Narnian Scandanavian utopia? The firmer a grip we collectively have on how the world works and what's happening, the better the results of our democracy, directly affecting us.
And there's more than just us. Take BLM, or the conditions of sweatshop workers who made my shoes, or the kinds of people trying to immigrate. Should I vote for changes to policing or for crackdowns on rioters? Should I buy someone else's brand of shoes or is fair trade just to make ignorant hippies feel good? Should I help innocent people escape terrible conditions, or are they largely violent criminals to be kept out? It won't affect me either way, but that's a cop out anyways.
> Decentralization is better termed "de-professionalization." The institutions which used to, at the very least, dedicate serious resources to going out into the world and gathering facts no longer function properly or just don't exist.
But now the people they were gathering the facts from are connected to the internet.
Local newspapers often had a police blotter publishing the police reports in the locality. Now you can get that directly from the police department, because they have a website.
Once upon a time if you wanted to get stories from Turkey and Israel and Brazil then you had to send reporters to those places to collect the stories of the people there. Now the people there are on the internet and can post their stories themselves.
You're getting closer to the sources instead of having a "professional" as an intermediary. But you're also getting access to more sources, with more differing opinions, and it's driving people nuts because they don't know who to believe. But there weren't any fewer sources before, you just weren't hearing from so many of them because the traditional gatekeepers decided for you what you got to hear. If you assume they were doing a good job of that then we've lost something, but what evidence is there of that?
This is why I'm convinced independent journalists are the future. Fact finding itself is a shrinking part of the job. Fact checking the monunental amount of data out there is increasingly important. As such, the need for these megacorp publishers is going away.
Edit: Just look at the BLM movement. Lots of people believe these are peaceful civil disobedience and lots of people believe they're communist race riots. Right now, the question is basically "who do you want to believe?" I don't claim to have an answer but I just hope that the right ideas will win in an open space with small creators.
Most of what gets uploaded anywhere or even worse, the stuff that goes viral, has a pretty heavy selection bias. To know whether the stuff that got shared publicly tells the whole story or a misleading story, you have to know more than just what got shared publicly.
Maybe the event that everyone pulled out their phones for had some important context beforehand, but at that point it didn't look noteworthy enough to pull out anyone's phone for. Now you'll have tons of recordings of the same event, but that doesn't mean any more context than one video.
I prefer a story written by someone who was there to a story written by someone who looked through all the thousands of posts to social media, but wasn't there.
The vast vast majority of news isn't actionable in our daily lives, at all. At the core of it, we read the news to satisfy our human curiosity.
Once I came to realize this, it was like a weight was lifted off me. For the last few months, I've only been reading news regarding specific topics I'm genuinely interested in (new gadgets, tech/startups in general, new skyscraper projects, etc).
This way, it's like I'm reading books about my interests that were written very very recently. General news seems to add a net negative to my life with very little upside, so I just stopped reading it.
> Thankfully we live in the safest period of human history. Thankfully many smart people want to focus their time on doing good things.
The obvious counter is "but you learned this from headlines" (assuming you're not like Hitchens with a bunch of intercontinental friends to be your eyes and ears.
My personal favorite example to get some perspective is from the book Days of Rage. During the 1970s domestic bombings were a daily occurrence, and at the peak there were over 2000 a year. Even the massive amount of violence in modern day Chicago is nothing in comparison to what was happening as recently as the 90s.
It's an interesting thing how crime rates in the US peaked right after the fall of the Soviet Union and then went into deep decline: It's as if having the visible external enemy was the factor that allowed it to increase, and the post-Cold War paralysis deescalated this process. The Soviet bogeyman was replaced in turn with terrorists, but this too is increasingly seen as a domestic issue of "right wing militia v. antifa", lacking in credible affiliations abroad as the Mid-Eastern interventions have wound down.
And that is perhaps the real source of the frantic polarization: Look anywhere, just not in the mirror.
Agreed. Probably aren't too many Yemenis on here. Part of reading the news is to see how bad it really is for some people, and drum up ideas for how you can help them in your own way (donating to a public interest group, volunteering, raising awareness, etc).
I think the best approach is to read a story from a left, right and centrist source. The intersection of "facts" is probably all true and the things that point far one direction or the other are probably in the middle somewhere.
This reads to me like saying "the best way to determine if god exists is to read the hebrew bible, the koran, and the book of mormon and take the average".
It starts with the assumption left, right, and centrist sources all have biases, but those biases cancel out. That the "middle" of those things is meaningfully better.
I see no evidence that that's the case. All popular news sources these days seem to be biased towards corporate profit.
"Left" and "right" both exist relative to each other more than they exist relative to the truth.
Reading several news sources to find the truth begs the question of if modern news sources, regardless of political bent, are meaningful sources of factual information vs sources of advertisements and outrage.
For the sake of presenting a counter argument, I think that keeping up with the constant inflow of news doesn't get you meaningfully closer to the truth compared to reading well-regarded books on recent history around the world, and using that as a lens to understand the present. Well-regarded non-fiction books are generally better researched than stories on "this senator just had a haircut", and the recent past shapes the present significantly, not to mention repeats itself shockingly often.
By reading left and right sources, you're assuming you can find similar stories on similar matters, when the most important matters are not "the president tweeted X" (which both sources will report on), but rather information about the structure of cities, the human condition, and changes thereof ("a postmortem on this transit project shows that we, as a society, should think in this way"), which usually no news agency will report on. It's just too dry, unless the researcher dresses it up and makes it flashy.
The thing with those books is, they are 100% based on faith. There are no underlying facts that they're based on. They're independently constructed origin myths and allegorical morality tales.
With an article in the NYT, it's a narrative representation of objective facts as filtered through the lens of a reporter. If you think it's B.S. check Reuters, check WaPo, check NPR, hell check Fox reporting on the same core set of facts.
If the story is important, it's going to be out on the wire feeds, and other major outlets. The narratives average out, the facts (mostly) stay the same.
That's the whole point of college. So we can learn to think about complicated things and draw on multiple sources to paint a cohesive picture.
I don't accept your premise that books are not factual and news media is more/entirely factual. Do you have any evidence on that?
The evidence I've got generally sways towards well-regarded non-fiction book authors generally having more expertise in the area they write about than well-regarded journalists. This also makes intuitive sense - journalists often write about many subjects and act as second-hand sources, while researchers and authors are often first-hand sources and write about fewer subjects.
My point is not that most news organizations don't publish similar articles. My point is that they do, but them doing so is not evidence that what they post is useful factual information for staying informed.
Just because you consulted multiple sources doesn't mean you get a true picture. 3 bibles all will tell you there is 1 god because those three sources share the same underlying bias.
A dozen news sources will tell you the same thing, but that could also mean that they share the same underlying biases (the bias towards a quick and profitable news cycle vs a slow and thoughtful conveyance of meaningful fact).
The fact that NYT, Reuters, etc are all reporting on a fast news cycle and using similar content doesn't mean that the content they're reporting is intended to inform me and give me a more realistic grounding necessarily. It could also mean they all have the same profit motives and all optimize to produce more clicks rather than inform more meaningfully.
To make sure I'm not being taken the wrong way, I do think the news generally does strive to be both true and to convey information. I think that the competing need to drive clicks/ad-dollars/etc results in it conveying information poorly. It frames true facts in ways that drive outrage to drive clicks. It tries to create a quick news cycles so there's always new things to publish. The faster news cycle favors reporters creating quick pieces, and disfavors serious investigative reporting. I don't think the news media succeeds on informing me well of important things, but rather succeeds on making me weary with a deluge of facts that won't matter in 2 weeks.
With regard to the first point, I meant those particular religious texts you cited. I'm a huge fan of nonfiction books in general.
When I open NYT, Politico, and WaPo I see:
> Justice Dept. Plans to File Antitrust Charges Against Google in Coming Weeks
> Justice Department expected to file antitrust suit against Google
> The Justice Department could file a lawsuit against Google this month, overriding skepticism from its own top lawyers
Based off of this, I figure the Justice Department will probably do some antitrust stuff involving Google in the near future.
It's probably not 100% a sure thing that it's going to happen, but it probably will, and it's now on my radar to keep an eye on since that might actually wind up being a big deal.
That's what I want out of the news. I'm not sure what else I would expect? If I open and read any of those articles, there will be different takes on the Justice department's plan to go after google, and I can read into those however much I want, but the core facts are that the Justice department is planning on going after Google. I don't think that's made up, and I think antitrust + big tech is a pretty important issue to keep an eye on.
Ah, yup, on the first point I misunderstood what you meant. Apologies for reading your comment in a poorer light than it was.
We agree in some broad strokes, but seem to disagree on other points.
The original comment I wrote was contesting the idea that averaging multiple points of view necessarily mean that you're getting closer to the truth. It can mean that, but it doesn't have to if there's a shared underlying bias.
I think we'd also disagree on the value of being informed about current things similar to your example of a google anti-trust suit. I would personally expect that reading the average news article on it does not make me meaningfully more informed (since journalists digest the original court filing or whatever prompted it into a piece devoid of value in my experience).
I'd say that you get more value out of understanding the broader context: how anti-trust suits in the US generally go. In all probability, in 4 months that headline will be completely irrelevant and nothing will have happened. It's more likely that it's a clickbait bit of news churn based on a fragment of truth than that it's both true, and the implication that it's meaningful and important news for us to know is also true.
>>>This reads to me like saying "the best way to determine if god exists is to read the hebrew bible, the koran, and the book of mormon and take the average".
That's kinda what led Aleister Crowley to create Thelema. In a very broad sense, he learned about belief systems from around the world, especially focused on "Messiah" type characters and the similarities in their experiences/stories/methods of enlightment, and then built a system that was somewhat of a fusion of all methodologies, largely as an extension of Jewish mysticism.
Part of the problem with sticking to recently-published books is the lag time involved. Consuming a variety of current news sources can not only lead you toward a "ground truth" for that particular case, but can also frame a better understanding of other evolving situations, and arm you with a better frame of reference to not only understand those as well, but shape your actions in yet a third actively-developing scenario.
I know it's hip to be pathologically cynical about the news media, especially in a thread like this, but that hot take flies past hyperbole and right into farce.
This is the argument to moderation [1] also known as the golden mean fallacy. If one person says the sky is blue and another person says the sky is yellow, by taking the middle position you would conclude that the sky is green. This is clearly not correct.
That's such a stupid example though. I'd assume the sky was looking in such a way that it could be interpreted as either. A nice sunset gradient perhaps? Averaging the color spectrum values or hypothetically mixing colors is ridiculous.
If you have reason to assume atleast some measure of good faith, I think it's reasonable to try to cancel out biases between sources to get closer to the truth.
I've found that even "liberal" media is heavily biased to favor corporate sponsors.
Sometimes journalists can sneak small (actually) progressive articles through but are often followed up by large front-page hit pieces on those same ideas.
I've had a slow descent not getting away from reading the news over the last several years. It's been incredibly gradual, but further to your point about firsthand experiences from people I know personally, I have to admit that has been truly transformative. I've now made it a point to find any which way I can to find friends or make acquaintances in other countries and actively nurture a relationship with them in order to get a better picture of what's going on. It's been truly refreshing. That said, I'm still not sure what a technical, automated and scalable solution accessible to the masses for this would look like and if it could or would even work, but nonetheless, there's definitely something in this idea.
> Mostly he relied on people he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. Must be nice
It is not that difficult.
In the world of internet, there are many prolific writers who have lived very public lives. There are quite a few specific opinion/news writers who I've read long enough to know their biases or the lack there of, depending on what they are reporting. These individual actors being the feet-on-the-ground lends a large amount of credibility to them as well.
I think the best solution is to cast a wide net, gather information from as many viewpoints as possible, and then look for correlations to narrow down on the truth.
The human brain is surprisingly good at this. The brain is constantly doing this with our various senses. None of those senses is perfect and they are fooled easily yet by examining the overlap we are able to create a surprisingly accurate picture of reality.
Is it, though? Confirmation bias is a pretty big factor in how we parse incoming information. I try to read a variety of sources and see where different folks are coming from, but I wouldn't delude myself to think that I'm some ultra-rational arbiter of truth.
We need only look as far as the growing(!) popularity of the flat-earth conspiracy to see that the population at large is no better at this than I think I am.
> cast a wide net, gather information from as many viewpoints as possible,
I agree that's the best thing to do. It's a rational choice. I do it and recommend others do it.
But there's still this historical problem of divestment from traditional journalistic practices (going out into the world, gathering facts, interviewing people, observing -- it's expensive). Without that factual raw material it doesn't matter how diverse your set of sources is, your ability to know your own world is impoverished.
I find that Youtube is a very underrated source for those traditional journalistic practices. It's amazing how many great interviews there are with formats that allow interviewees to actually answer a question rather than provide a TV sound-bite. There's such a huge variety of content creators that you can often find a primary-source for major events.
It also helps the recommendation algo if you use separate accounts for watching entertainment vids vs. this more serious content.
What I see is that foreign news have no idea of what is happening in my country, they all just repeat some superficial and normally wrong pieces.
At the same time, domestic media is all lying through their teeth.
With some work one can disecate the news, separate what can't possibly be lies (because it would lead to problems), and reassembly something into an overall picture. (Who has the time for all this?) But one can never know what is being omitted, either intentionally or by incompetency.
The BBC is not 'wrong' - it's maybe just superficial and doesn't have enough detail.
The anecdotes about 'lying press' on this thread are misleading. 'Respected' news entities do not just 'make stuff up'. Definitely no the BBC, they have standards.
The problem with the bigger agencies is narrative bias, and yes, if 'within America' the narrative is pushed to 'one side' hard by the local press, then the international press will be influenced by that, but it's not as bad.
Edit: got to CNN.com right now and give some examples of their 'blatant lying'. Because they're not. Editorial bias, of course, but 'making up stories' - this is wrong. The onus would be on you to provide evidence they are doing this consistently.
Yeah but they'll skew it based on their political leanings, too. They're just a little less invested in the geographic details. But ideologically, they want to convince/captivate people to their point of view.
It is your perspective, similar to “The World as Will and Representation” by Schopenhauer:
> Schopenhauer argues that the world we experience around us—the world of objects in space and time and related in causal ways—exists solely as ‘representation’ (Vorstellung) dependent on a cognizing subject, not as a world that can be considered to exist in itself (i.e. independently of how it appears to the subject’s mind). Our knowledge of objects is thus knowledge of mere phenomena rather than things-in-themselves.
I like to think that the recent physics discoveries are crossing the same line.
My solution is I read the Economist and the Sunday NYT (which admittedly skews too much these days but then I guess so do I). The 1 week lag gives things time to settle. And I love the ritual of the paper.
What if it was always impossible, and we're just now finally realizing it? In that case this may be a positive development. But we're just at the beginning of learning how to adapt to it.
Yeah, that is a kind of postmodern take on the situation that I have some sympathy for. I do think this attitude could lead to a kind of quietism about a problem we could actually make a dent in though, if we did some things differently.
I think we should think about the destruction of traditional journalism not as some inevitable natural evolution, like the tide coming in washing away our sand castle, but instead as a historical, political development with high stakes, winners and losers. We should fight against it, not just passievly "adapt."
That doesn't mean replicate exactly what was there before, but I don't think we have to just acquiesce before a now permanently incomprehensible world and give up on ever understanding it, either.
We're all commenting on a post from 1807 saying the same thing. Maybe it was always impossible, but we think that people used to not realize it. If that's the case, we're definitely not at the beginning and it doesn't bode particularly well.
It's new in the post WWII period though, which was characterized by a few newspapers and TV networks basically holding a consensus, with a bit of wiggle room for debate, but no outlier views. Uncle Walter and all that.
> he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it.
i cannot even be sure that my version of truth is the truthiest version of the truth out there. i cannot say much more about the people i know, even those personally affected by various events around the world. every time i feel confident about my beliefs, i remember rashomon.
everyone is affected by bias. the only way to avoid bias is to avoid observation.
how do you know those bias mitigation techniques are not skewed by bias? and if you verified it/came up with it yourself, how do you know you are not skewed by your own bias?
> There is not a technical solution to any of this.
I don't quite agree with that. In general, our best means of knowing with reasonable confidence whether some event being reported on is true is our confidence in the person telling us of the event. If it's someone we know personally, that's best. In a world of billions of people, that's not possible for most world events, so we can think of trust as being transitive. I can put more confidence in something that's reported by someone who is personally vouched for by a friend of mine, than something that's three steps removed, and so on.
The trouble is that our human brains are incapable of understanding social networks with more than a hundred or so people (i.e. Dunbar's number) and even those we have very imperfect understanding of. Computers don't have that limitation. Supposing you have a directed graph of every human who is willing to publicly vouch for the credibility of some other human, you can run something like PageRank on that to determine the degree to which you should trust some random reporter.
Better yet would be something like PageRank, but modified to handle anti-endorsements as well. There are ways to handle distrust in PageRank-like systems, but that's a little outside the scope of the point I'm trying to make.
Of course, collecting this directed graph of endorsements is outside the ability of a normal human, but sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have something like it. If they wanted to re-use that to create a news filtering service they probably could. On the other hand, the rest of us users would have no particular reason to believe they don't have their thumb on the scale, promoting news that serves their interests, or that they were paid to promote. So, I wouldn't say what I'm suggesting is purely a "technical solution", there are social and cultural aspects to it as well, but the one aspect of the problem -- that are human brains can't cope with large social networks -- is one that we can use computers to solve, if we have the right data.
> Supposing you have a directed graph of every human who is willing to publicly vouch for the credibility of some other human, you can run something like PageRank on that to determine the degree to which you should trust some random reporter.
I'm not sure that would work particularly well. People are often subject to Confirmation bias and Authority bias which lead them to put too much credibility on people who say what they want to hear or who hold a position o power.
Your idea would only work in a context where we can trust participants to make accurate judgements of credibility.
Wouldn't this directed graph endorsement approach just devolve into more followers = more endorsements? There's nothing built into the system to ensure quality whatsoever.
That's why I mentioned anti-endorsements. Pure PageRank doesn't have any notion of negative reputation, so by itself it's more of a popularity metric than a quality metric.
> The factual raw material can even be done away with sometimes as evidenced by how much of the news is just media reporting on itself (often centering on Twitter!).
I don't think we can know everything by any means, but I've started getting my news from subject matter experts who show their work & give full access to their research vs. the spectacle of corporate news.
I'll still skim for anything important, but I'm not even reading what they say, I'm looking for actual sources. Outlets that don't bother to give any sources are generally not worth reading.
I am surprised at how few people understand this basic bit of economics - perhaps marketers are to blame for the obvious being inconceivable.
Just because you are paying more doesn't mean you will get more for it. If you go with a niche specialization you may well pay through the nose for very expensive lies. See Spectrum, the HIV-AIDS Denialism magazine that went defunct after all editors died of AIDS for an example.
Customers of newspaper pay for the political aligned viewpoint, most people like their viewpoint confirmed. Look out for people needing information to make money. Money does not care about political bias. E.g. I think the "financial times" quite unbiased (of course there is no perfection).
Political alignment isn't the problem. Every outlet will spin the same facts differently, sometimes intentionally sometimes not, because of this or that ideological commitment. They will choose which facts to foreground and which to background ("framing"), etc, etc, all that media studies stuff. Bias is fine. There is no such thing as an unbiased media outlet.
I'm talking about a different problem, which is that increasingly, the basic facts don't even enter into the discourse at all! That's the case because the institutions that used to carry out the basic functions of journalism are now facing tons of pressure to cut their costs, and all of that.
Disruptive "decentralization" pressure from the tech industry, often discussed as a "solution" to this mess, is actually a major cause. And it's of course not a solution at all because it has no answer to the basic material problem: once we've defunded traditional journalism, who is actually going to do the work? News is basically the production of information about the facts of unfolding world events. Now that we have no foreign correspondents etc, news ends up just being the production of information about the news itself (the only part left is the bias!). How long can we keep doing this, I wonder?
- If you're a proclaimed CENTRIST, read everything.
Schools don't teach us how to read and process information objectively but hopefully your first history professor explained that historical bias and bias in writing well...is human and old as history itself. Embrace it!
1. Check the veracity of claims and statements made in popular news stories, social media posts and political statements.
2. Additionally, there is a separate body, International Fact-Checking Network, that checks the common fact-checking organizations above for bias and truth as well in their fact checking.
3. There's also the independently run MediaBiasFactCheck site which has found that the fact-checking sites above are pretty close to the center in their fact-checking and myth-busting.
The stuff you really have to worry about is the stuff that the liberal, right wing and centrist billionaire owned media outlets all agree upon or agree isn't important enough to talk about.
It's an interesting exercise to read contrasting viewpoints from opposing sides though (e.g. Russian media vs. American media on a us-russia conflict).
You could read wire services like Associated Press, Reuters, and United Press International, which are the sources from which mainstream outlets buy their news. Just be warned that the stories are exceptionally dry
I spend probably an hour a day reading headlines from major outlets with a bunch of different political alignments, and to be honest, I don't really know why I even do it.
By the end of it, all I really have is a vague silhouette of a picture of what might have happened, according to a handful of corporations whose job it is to turn the smallest amount of factual raw material into maximally entertaining spectacle. The factual raw material can even be done away with sometimes as evidenced by how much of the news is just media reporting on itself (often centering on Twitter!).
There is not a technical solution to any of this. "Decentralization" into forums and social media and whatnot is not a solution. At best it's a good way for some of us to discuss the problem among ourselves as it unfolds. Decentralization is better termed "de-professionalization." The institutions which used to, at the very least, dedicate serious resources to going out into the world and gathering facts no longer function properly or just don't exist.
I remember seeing an interview with Christopher Hitchens where somebody asked him how he informed himself about the world, what news he liked to read. He said, not much. Mostly he relied on people he knew personally in various parts of the world who have firsthand experience and write him about it. Must be nice!