[mherdeg]

> It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts?

Well, there have always been different sources of media contending for the narrative. My grandpa used to read both the Washington Times, which he saw as basically true news; he also read the Washington Post (affectionately: "the com-Post") because he wanted to keep an eye on the other team's plans.

What is novel here is that there are now random teenagers in Macedonia just totally making stuff up, and this is competing for reader attention with the same amount of weight as all the other stuff which we traditionally called "news" (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/).

As recently as 2009 it seemed totally crazy that, like, teenagers on the Internet could just make stuff up and it would affect world affairs -- see https://xkcd.com/635/ , Randall Munroe's September 2009 mockery of the Orson Scott Card "Ender's Game" future where blogger kids make stuff up to change national discourse.

Munroe was wrong, Card was right (?!), and it totally happened. The 2016 US elections went to /b/, /pol/, and /int/ -- congrats, folks! Interesting times.

The "old media" people who bewail this stuff may be complaining that they're losing influence, yes, but some of them actually believed the story that they were doing a public service, and those people are upset about something else, too.

A friend who spent some time in the old media told me that what worries them about this shift is that people are "no longer following a single newsgathering organization they can hold accountable" and instead use "contextless random shares via their Facebook feed (which produce a sort of race to the bottom)". He added that "the passive nature of the Facebook News Feed is one of many forces causing people to take less responsibility for their information intake and lose information literacy skills. I guess that's probably bad."

Those are reasonable things to be worried about whether you favor the Washington Times or the Washington Post or Breitbart or the Huffington Post or Coast to Coast AM.

[Asooka]

And how the hell do you "hold accountable" a traditional old media? They are big powerful conglomerates that are only really accountable to the politicians that pay their salaries, the few cents you give them by buying the paper is a drop in the ocean. At least with FaceBook you're on a level playing field with everyone else that's posting shit, and there are a LOT of people posting, so you have more freedom to pick your sources based on their objective truth or any other metric you care about. And if you don't want to hear the truth, you won't be reading the Washington Whatsit, you'll be reading the Daily Mail in the first place.

[mherdeg]

Typically the way that you would "hold accountable" the traditional old media is by ignoring sources that prove bad.

If you think the Washington Post is publishing bad, pointless nonsense news, you stop reading it. Cancel your subscription. Don't buy a copy at a newsstand. Don't buy ads for your local business. Don't place classified ads (remember those?). Tune it out.

Subscriber count will drop. The rate card will list a lower readership and ad rates will go down. The newspaper will lose revenue. It will lay off staff and implode.

"Traditional old news" was all published together in a big bundle of paper and if it was bad quality stuff you would stop reading the whole thing. That was how you held it accountable -- you stopped paying attention to junk.

This has certainly happened -- remember News of the World? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World) Certainly everyone in Liverpool remembers The Sun. Traditionally, newspapers which did bad journalism and just printed crap shaped up or they closed down.

With the advent of Facebook News Feed driven news it's harder to punish a bad source. A typical News Feed post shows me, in order, (1) the name of the friend who shared it (2) some text they wrote about it (3) a photo (4) the headline (5) some text from the article and finally (6) the actual source of the news. I have to deliberately choose to ignore or distrust stuff based on the source -- and that's after I have read the material. I had no choice in terms of, not even picking up a newspaper in the first place.

In the 2000s it was easy for me not to read the Epoch Times (the Falun Gong newspaper printed in the New York area and distributed throughout the US) and when I did read articles in it I knew that I was reading something printed by a Falun Gong mouthpiece organization. In the 2010s it is hard for me not to see videos made by Russia Today (a fascinating, viral news organization with a heavy Web presence); it's pretty common for me to see rt.com content in my various social news feeds and I incur a bunch of extra cognitive load to remember the biases that that newsgathering organization brings to the table.