[unabst]

In business, the survival motive becomes the profit motive. For content creators, the profit motive then manifests online as attention grabbing content. However, virality and truth are highly specific properties that rarely overlap. Clickbait is the author stretching virality to somewhat overlap with their message which hopefully holds some truth, but the entire piece can also just be an attention grabber.

If you work at a news source that values truth, sadly you're still not immune to the profit motive, so long as the content at any level is still required to make money. Hypocrisy arises when they begin to deny this.

But without the profit motive, outlets can easily become ideology driven. As hard as NPR may try not to be this, to some their bend is obvious. And then their is ideology as part of the profit motive. Like Fox.

What I would love to see is a platform that simply collects and sorts the events of the world as they unfold. Covid sites are one example. No agenda, no authors. Just the information that accurately describes the world as it unfold, or at least in theory. Another example would a police log published live at every department aggregated at the national level. No decisions would be involved in the publishing except that the post is accurate. The rest is each officer simply doing their job, and hopefully a great job. But the leap is in considering this a more valuable form of news. From attention grabbing to accurately exposing the state of affairs for easy consumption.

The problem with this of course is politics. When the events are what these representatives say, and what they say is dishonest, then even the honest news is the state of the dishonest affairs.

[vharuck]

Police logs only seem easy to consume because they don't contain context. Context is prone to bias or intentional distortion, but it's still necessary for non-experts.

Does a recent spike in bar fights mean your town is in hard economic times, or was there a giant music festival nearby that attracted thousands of people? That influences whether I should worry the next time I go to the bar; if it's the economy, this will keep happening, but if it's the festival, we'll be fine once they leave. That context also helps me decide how to act on the information. Do I petition for downtown revitalization or for neighboring towns' police to help with events?

It's on the audience to demand good evidence to back up the context (e.g., did the guys in the fight recently lose their jobs or just came from the festival). That's hard, but I have yet to see another good way.