alt Hacker News"News" is just entertainment and fear mongering for money. Always has been. There is no other point to reading the news. Or as someone else put it: "Newspapers are the original doom scrolling".
It would be nice to have a populus informed about what's going on in local government and actually understand the issues. But nobody really wants to be informed. They want biased ragebait.
Journalism pretends like it's fair and balanced while simultaneously only reporting part of a story that's much longer than presented, in order to provide the reader a specific perception. In other words: manipulation. Ignorance is a better outcome, because then at least people aren't overconfident in their wrongness.
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Frankly, the pitch of news - the 'moat' - is a lack of bias. You pay to have someone who is not actually an expert in the field being discussed (or even a beginner, in most cases today) give you an unbiased view of the situation. The idea is that the expert is too close to the situation and can be biased, so the journalist is the filter. They supposedly know enough about the subject to ask smart questions about it, and their capability to do that is judged by other journalists with... even less understanding of the subject at hand. If journalists violate this assumption by being so blatantly biased, like they were at outlets like Salon, there is no information being shared anymore AND no benefit to listening to them outside of having your assumptions hopefully reassured by another ignorant person. Journalism moving from a comparably open and meritocratic field to being entirely populated by PMC failsons about as illiterate as their peer majors doesn't help this.
The only other real value-add is that the journalist is a better 'communicator', an assumption mostly based on stereotypes about the people being interviewed, especially with tech journalism. This has broken down too - the largest outlets regularly release pieces filled with run-on sentences and typos now, and often obfuscate the point rather than clarify it. See any NYT article about any hot-button issue over the past ten years or so.
It's spelled "populace". I learned that by reading newspapers!
Are you saying that journalism, though inherently biased, serves no useful function in our society and only ever serves to mislead people?