[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> into voyeuristic spectacle, literally profiting off the pain of others (some may believe those people deserve that pain, but that's a separate issue),

The entire news media is like that in a large sense. What purpose does interviewing a family whose home got destroyed in a tornado serve? Of course they feel bad. Of course they will cry. “If it bleeds it leads”. Just like a car accident on the side of the road, people are drawn to watch. The news media profits off of that voyeuristic impulse to watch the misery of others.

[cavanasm]

And that's a fully valid criticism of a certain style of mainstream news that I completely agree with, and that is also being discussed in some circles, and even by some journalists, although it hasn't hit mainstream media level consideration openly. All falls into the massive and fraught discussion around how news gets paid for.

[kbenson]

> All falls into the massive and fraught discussion around how news gets paid for.

More appropriately I think (at least for TV), it falls into the discussion of how new doesn't see falling revenues. In the past, news was a payment back to the public major networks paid to get access to the spectrum they were using. when it became obvious there was a way to make the news divisions positive in cashflow instead of cash sinks, they were optimized for that.

Now, where most news is probably delivered through an entirely different medium, even that minimal connection to the public good incentivized through the spectrum allocation is almost gone.

In the distant past, NBC, CBS and ABC would probably have been happy to do away with their news divisions, because it cost them to run them. That they would now fight you tooth and nail to keep them for the opposite reason should put into stark contrast how the incentives have completely changed.

Is it possible to completely disentangle money from news? Probably not, and it might not be a good idea. How do you fund investigative journalism if you do? Influence will flow from the money no matter what, but then again maybe that's not any different than it is now.

I don't know the solution. I'm also aware I'm glossing over the fact that different parts of the news industry had perverse incentives long before this (newspapers...), and that news probably was never as altruistic as I'm making it out to be, but it does seem like it's gotten worse. I have to imagine if the Founding Fathers had the current status quo in mind when they wrote the constitution and initial amendments, they would have tried to put some restrictions on the ownership of the press to go along with those freedoms.

[klyrs]

> What purpose does interviewing a family whose home got destroyed in a tornado serve?

Fostering empathy, ginning up public support for emergency response. Whereas COPS etc were more effective at ginning up public support for brutal policing.

Also there's a key difference: film crews don't influence tornadoes.

[jariel]

"Whereas COPS etc were more effective at ginning up public support for brutal policing."

This is hugely speculative, in fact, I would argue just the opposite: if anything, it shows how ugly, grinding, boring and hugely 'social' policing is, as opposed to anything physical. It's literally about dealing with really weird and sketchy people in difficult situations all day every day.

[wnoise]

https://reason.com/2020/07/01/police-departments-asked-live-...