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by BurnGpuBurn
2394 days ago
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From the article:
"One way to restore trust is to give power back to the people, enabling them to choose what stories matter most to them. By doing this, we can revolutionise the current state of the news media — from an entity that dictates information to an industry that only reports legitimate information that has been requested by the population." That's the only solution that's offered, and a bad one at that. Letting "the people decide", e.g. democratizing the news, is a bad idea. How would we know what to choose? How would we know that there's an important issue out there that needs to be reported on, beforehand? Normal people aren't investigative reporters. I don't have a solution either, but I know what it is we need. We need good journalists to do good journalism and be able to choose freely what they research and report on. The current for-profit corporate structure of the news media is incompatible with that. That's why you get more truth nowadays from independent journalists, researchers and content creators than from the corporate media, which will almost exclusively lie to you to further an agenda. It's very hard to separate the weed from the chaff though, and it requires a lot of critical thinking and observation of the reader. |
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Well sure, but how can such a thing really be accomplished, considering all the difficult pre-requisites, one of the main ones being likely no workable business model under the current state of affairs in the world?
This fake news thing is a huge problem, but who do we expect to find a solution, under the current constraints nature forces upon us? Politicians? Media? Altruistic billionaires? Democracy ("the people")?
In the bizarre matrix of information flow that takes place on Planet Earth circa 2019, HN happens to be a unique and substantial junction, frequented by an unusually high concentration of intelligent and logical people. I propose that if something is ever going to change, if any entity is capable of bringing the mental horsepower to the table to perform a comprehensive, unbiased analysis of the problem, and come up with workable solutions that can overcome the unfortunate constraints, it is going to take the collective intelligence of something like the HN community. I further propose that not only do we have this capability, but also that we have a responsibility. The world is what we make of it, and as it is it seems like we're all using our substantial intellectual abilities to analyze the problem, but then just complain to each other about it and point out how others (the people mentioned above) "should" fix it. News flash: they're not going to fix it, for the very reasons that people are pointing out in this thread.
So, what are we going to do about this problem dang?
Or the same idea from a different perspective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKzVmVDCtFg
I've become quite fascinated lately how artists seem able to better communicate complex, multi-dimensional ideas, where plain language and logic fails. But then, this has always been the case if you stop and think about it.
I'll throw one idea in the ring: a government-sponsored, unbiased and transparent, crowd-sourced version of Snopes, that doesn't just fact-check cherry picked fake news stories, but rather does a continuous review of the daily news stream. The goal isn't to perform a full, "truthful" telling of each story, but rather to serve as a "spot the lie" service, pointing out bias, assumptions, memes, opinions, mind reading, future predicting, history rewriting, logical fallacies, different perspectives, overlooked complications, and so forth and so on. The goal is not to tell people what's really going on, but rather to make it crystal clear that in actuality, we don't really know WHAT is going on! And that's ok, because at least we'd now know that, which is quite an improvement from our current state.
Of course, this is kind of what reddit is in a sense, and it typically degrades into a shitshow of people yelling at each other and voting on their subconscious biases. Identifying that behavior as a problem, and finding a solution, is something I suspect the minds of HN could solve. Well, if we could stop fighting amongst each other that is.