alt Hacker NewsOne thing that has really frustrated me with "mainstream media" in the last few years is that the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline. I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort. Outrageous claims are just taken at face value, or at best just put alongside quotes from other officials/politicians saying the opposite. As an example, how many times has the strait of Hormuz been declared open by the US, when it turns out it really wasn't? And every time these low-effort articles just echo that statement without even trying to evaluate if that is true. I mean, the transponder data on shipping is publicly available, there's a dozen websites you could use to actually see passage through the strait to verify the claim. If you don't do even the most basic follow ups, is that even a news article? Or is it just a more elaborate form of re-tweeting?
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I don't know what qualifies as "mainstream media" here, but I feel various public broadcasters have served me well over the years: CBC[0] in Canada, BBC[1] in United Kingdom, NPR[2] in America, ABC[3] in Australia, NHK[4] in Japan... switching around the world also gives reprieve from local politics letting you tune into someone else's local politics practically recreationally, which seems more and more necessary in the modern world of today. Streaming radio is one of the best things about the contemporary internet.
[0] https://cbc.ca/
[1] https://bbc.com/
[2] https://npr.org/
News is perpetually in decline just like the old perpetually fear the young will bring humanity to ruin.
Kierkegaard in the 1850s:
"The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control."
I was glad to see a bit of a decline in the “Worrying Trend: (a dozen) People (on Twitter) are saying [controversial thing]!” type of articles filter down through whatever algorithm I was subject to at the moment, but notes they’ve just replaced it with TikTok.
This is not exactly a new criticism. See e.g. Fisk's complaint from decades ago r.e. "US Officials Say"
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...
Look at how many times the current government has tried to shut down reporting that didn't tow the current party line. Selective access, prosecutions, lawsuits, threats to block mergers, comedians being cancelled while the administration cheers, there's a (s)hitlist of journalists on the whitehouse site, etc.
It probably has something to do with the decline of quality journalism.
For what its worth, I'm a former journalist looking to automate this. Getting on those newsmaking lists, and automating the rest.
Free, consumer website: https://www.forth.news Paid site with custom notifications and feeds: https://pro.forth.news
isn't this an attempt at 'neutral journalism'? I am not old enough to be able to compare to what journalism might once have been, but it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases. Also, I often hear stuff like: don't put too much weight on what X says, he was wrong about Y. Lower journalist wages, a need for immediate reporting that undermines in-depth research and risking your own rep every time you put more than 'facts' out there just don't give any incentive to do more than pick out the quotes you want to use.
I’ve also seen a trend of news organizations sane washing statements when they are too crazy, which is modifying the facts. Take this AP news article for instance[1].
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
[1] https://apnews.com/article/correspondents-dinner-trump-shoot...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/democrats-senate-fisa-trump-pulte...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/california-tank-leak-explosion-ga...
> half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort
that is EXACTLY what i want in news.
i do not want your summarization opinion out-of-context clickbait eye-catching headline snippet.
just be a parrot.
I think a lot of it has to do with the desire and pressure to publish as fast as possible. Online, EVERYTHING is rushed and even published before the facts are known. The story may or may not get updated as the situation develops.
Outside of tech because it affects my work, I've stopped reading online news altogether. There's a bookstore down the road from me which sells the daily and weekend editions of a couple papers. On a slow weekend I'll walk over there, buy the weekend edition of some reputable paper, and peruse it over coffee. The stories are invariably better than anything I see online, as well as in the daily editions. None of this stuff is urgent. I don't need up to the minute. I just need to kill some time, preferably with higher quality information.
Honestly the old ways were better in this case. Just stop reading online news. Grab a weekend edition of a paper when you're bored instead. Couple bucks. No subscription. Better. They haven't changed much.
I suspect this is more due to cost cutting and the fact that context would likely paint the people who own these media outlets in a bad light. Keeping their readers underinformed is win-win for them.
I follow the New York Times, as well as being an avid news follower and have found them to be of poor reporting quality a handful of times over the past year.
> regurgitated without any additional effort.
Wrong. Great effort goes into ensuring only the desired statements are regurgitated, and the undesirable ones omitted: https://www.foxnews.com/media/ap-report-slain-north-dakota-t...
This is not a cherry-picked example, but the policy of most major media, explicitly outlined in their style guides: https://jfulford.substack.com/p/hiding-the-race-of-criminals...
> I feel like half of the news articles are just a collection of quotes from officials or politicians in public statements, being regurgitated without any additional effort.
The 2020 tune sang, worldwide, comes to mind: "Anyone believing SaRS-COV2 may have originated in a lab is a conspiracy cracknut, like those who believe we didn't land on the moon".
This was everywhere and very few, including here on HN, did dare to question the official version.
Now the official report mandated by US Congress says the virus has non-zootropic properties and the "expert" who explained it couldn't possibly be a lab-leak is prevented from ever getting funding from the US. And it's not just US congress: the CIA changed its stance too and publicly said it's leaning towards a lab-leak after all. The examples are countless.
And yet the bile spilled and the attacks on those disputing the mainstream media version were incessant.
I posted links, back then, to an article by an actual investigative journalist who explained how Peter Daszak was doing gain-of-function research on bat-modified viruses only to be met with derision.
It's sickening, really.
People would do well to assume that, by default, mainstream media "journalists" aren't journalists but pawns relaying state propaganda.
>the level of effort being put into journalism seems to be on decline
Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.
How much money are you directly paying per month to news organizations?
News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:
1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)
2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online
Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.