[asjdflakjsdf]

I'm at the point where I instantly dismiss any "world" news that comes from the US. I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.

I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself. Every argument is wedged into an imaginary Team A vs Team B battle and it seems that to remain relevant as a publisher, you have to play that game. People feel personally attacked/validated by every article now because those are the most engaging and publishers will omit certain contexts and facts in any story to facilitate that emotional trigger.

Given that the journalism industry is energised by advertising and political propaganda, it has reached a point where it has become nothing more than an itchy wound that the public keep scratching.

The 24 hour news cycle isn't an issue in itself, but the power games combined with a dangerous economic model and all of the mass media manipulation on sites like reddit, are the core of the issues imo. Having the 24hr cycle (online, and on cable) just amplifies it all and makes it so omnipresent to the fact that despite the great efforts of dictators who put their picture in every place they can, I can bet that Trump managed to become a part of everyones daily life, and in a much more direct fashion, than any dictator could ever dream of, in the anglosphere during his term.

[crmd]

What has been most shocking to me is the normalizing of postmodern thinking in American politics and journalism. The idea that there is an objective reality, facts, truth/falseness, e.g. the sum of votes for candidate A was greater than for candidate B, seems quaint and naive. There are now only competing narratives and “alternative facts” that you have on the menu to choose from. It all seems quite fucked up to me.

[clairity]

> "What has been most shocking to me is the normalizing of postmodern thinking in American politics and journalism. The idea that there is an objective reality, facts, truth/falseness, e.g. the sum of votes for candidate A was greater than for candidate B, seems quaint and naive. There are now only competing narratives and “alternative facts” that you have on the menu to choose from. It all seems quite fucked up to me."

the irony being that this is all assertive, emotive opinion and no rationale, no chain of plausible statements to consider and weigh, a narrative to either agree with or implicitly be relegated to the "fucked up" contingent.

emotions, which lead to narratives, are (perhaps more primitive) mental processes that help us survive (perhaps imperfectly) in the world. it's worth understanding and exploring that, rather than reeling off an overly dismissive, and ironically twitter-worthy, rant.

[crmd]

I know. This epistemological self-referentiality, i.e. "whether or not objective reality exists is itself a matter of opinion, therefore there is no objective reality", is why I consider postmodernism an intellectual dead-end.

[clairity]

but you're railing against the limits of epistemology then, not postmodernism, but ascribing your frustrations to the latter. the amount of things we can know with any certainty is (infinitely?) many, many orders of magnitude smaller than all the information in the universe, doubly so for sociopolitically-mediated information. postmodernism is simply a mechanism for understanding/coping with how little certainty there actually is.

[read_if_gay_]

> I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.

Which countries specifically? I know that German-speaking news outlets aren’t any less partisan, and I have little reason to think that the rest of Europe is much better.

[jjk166]

There's nothing wrong with being partisan. Bias is inevitable but you can still be biased and correct. Known biases can be compensated for so long as the source is otherwise principled.

The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness. While luckily it's rare major media sources to just straight up fabricate false claims, fact checking has become virtually non-existent. Parroting the reporting of other journalists word for word is considered acceptable, and it has become common to see articles cite "according to another paper's anonymous sources." Articles get stuffed with filler disguised as context which often gets filtered as it gets rereported to cut out important details. Retractions are rare, and never prominent despite the clear prioritization of publishing quickly over taking the time to write a well researched article. They've also noticed its cheaper and easier to put the words "breaking news" in front of a headline which by no measure is than to actually go out and find urgent stories.

The partisanship and hyperpolarization is simply there to kind of cover up the laziness. Someone questions my lack of evidence? They're just a sea-lioning troll with an obvious partisan goal. Lots of other sites disagree with me? Clearly they're just shills. Someone points out I don't know the difference between a russian and a ukrainian? How would you know unless you're a russian bot! The gibberish of a monkey with a typewriter would be defended if the monkey had the right political leanings. We accept the shortcomings of many institutions because the ends justify the means, even though those ends could have been achieved with better means.

[tzs]

> The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness.

After Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, I heard a discussion on NPR where they talked about failures of the coverage of the primaries [1]. There were a lot of candidates in the Republican primaries: besides Trump there was Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and a few others.

The reporters in the field covering each candidate would send in items, both positive and negative, about all the candidates.

For all the candidates except Trump, they were seeing about the same ratio of positive to negative. For Trump, the ratio of positive things he did/said to negative things was quite a bit lower than that of other candidates.

The editors and producers had an implicit assumption that all candidates would be about the same in this regard and so killed a lot of the negative Trump items so as to keep in line with the number of negatives for the other candidates.

It wasn't until after Trump had locked up the nomination that they realized that Trump really did do/say more negative newsworthy things than the others, and that in trying to avoid bias or the appearance of bias they had actually introduce a pro-Trump bias.

[1] For those not familiar with the US system, each major party holds elections to determine who its nominees will be, and then those nominees compete with the nominees from the other parties in the general election.

[zwieback]

In fact, when I was growing up in Germany there was a discussion about whether the US' noble goals of achieving a balanced media was possible or even desirable. The general agreement was that recognizing news sources implicit bias made more sense than trying to balance out reporting. This was in the 70s and 80s, I've been away from Germany for so long now I have no idea which direction things have taken there.

[raxxorrax]

I think if you arithmetically add a US and a Russian article and divide it by two, you are as informed as if you had read them separately. Obvious advantage: You can read two articles in one.

[asjdflakjsdf]

I just mean for news that comes directly from US sources. I find things like the Wuhan lab theory to be fascinating, worrying and plausable. But I struggle to find any reliable information about it because (not just, but mainly) US publications have saturated the media with politically driven articles instead of just trying to get to the bottom of it.

I get the impression that most Americans see the rest of the world like some form of a cartoon. They are weirdly detached from the reality of it all. I even get that impression when speaking to regular Americans about other countries and I think the media feeds on, and feeds, this incredibly strange outlook.

If there is any truth to the Wuhan lab leak story, it is an incredibly important thing for every single human on the planet. The idea of a country purposfully, or accidentally, releasing a lab made virus is such a massive threat to every society in the world, even worse than chernobyl, that we need the story to be scrutinised and and reported on with perfect accuracy. Instead, it has somehow become a fuel left/right wing driven click-bait. The articles I have come across on this subject have been pretty much baseless nonsense, or incredibly untrustworthy, and that is just scary.

Europe has problems of course, but it is definitely better. They are partisan but they are less at taking digs at the opposition. America seems to be going through a media war. In the UK it is pretty rotten too, but the writing is usually more accurate and one can find well researched articles.

The most striking thing for me during covid was when it started to make daily news in the US. Up until that point, I felt like I had a really good understanding of what was going on. I found there to be a lot of scientific reporting making it to the mainstream etc.. As soon as it reached America though, it was game over. I was lost. I genuinely just couldn't follow what was going on because of all the noise generated by US media, which inevitably spills over, and intertwines, with all other media.

I probably can't explain it very well, but the amount of noise in American news just seems to drown out anything that can actually help regular people get a grasp on what is actually happening.

[read_if_gay_]

> They are partisan but they are less at taking digs at the opposition.

Funny, just yesterday I got convinced of the opposite. So yesterday Germany played Hungary in the European Soccer Championship; before that Hungary passed some anti-gay legislation and in response some German activists wanted to light the Munich stadium up in rainbow colors, which UEFA ultimately forbid.

Watching the match on ZDF (the most well known German TV channel), literally 50% of halftime was spent talking about how great of an effort that was. There was zero talk about the actual game (and there was enough to talk about), instead they showed people handing out rainbow flags and snippets of interviews, where everyone basically agreed that "soccer is unpolitical but the Hungarians definitely crossed a line with this law."

They never mentioned the actual law. Hungary banned homosexuality from children's movies. If you ask me that's about as softcore as homophobia gets, yet everyone in the segment was completely dramatic, like the Hungarians were going to deport gay people or something. The whole thing was devoid of actual information, instead basically just repeating "Hungary bad! UEFA bad! Activists good! Everyone agrees!" (keep in mind, without telling you what Hungary even did!) It was kind of surreal to watch, completely unlike what you would expect from a reputable TV station, and utterly out of the blue if you just followed the sport casually. Definitely a cheap stab at the opposition.

[ToFab123]

I specifically wait The Guardian. That newspaper has gained my trust because of Snowden.

[Nursie]

The Guardian is openly biased. But it is at least open.

That's not to say its reporting on the facts is wrong, but its editorials are very definitely partisan and what they choose to report/how they choose to report it often shows this too.

In general it's my favourite news source, but you do have to account for its slant.

[throwaway894345]

> I also hold the opinion on US political news that it is beyond the stage of a possible recovery without some dramatic changes to the fabric of the country itself

What does "fabric of the country" mean? Is it a euphemism for American culture? If so, I definitely think there's a problem with American culture (i.e., political polarization), but I think it's largely a product of this manipulative media model rather than the cause. Note that we're not just seeing this in America, but also in Britain and Europe (and certainly elsewhere), although perhaps to a lesser extent.

I would be interested in solutions. Specifically, I'm curious if there's an intelligent way to limit the amount of revenue media companies can generate from online advertising. For example, 75% of a media business's revenue must be from subscriptions.

[yojo]

Can you elaborate on the ad revenue vs subscriptions issue?

Naively it seems like people are more likely to subscribe to news that aligns to and reinforces their political ideology, which could lead to more polarization/bifurcation, not less

[throwaway894345]

I don't exactly understand the mechanics, but it seems pretty widely accepted that the polarization of media outlets and the rejection of journalistic ethics are a consequence of the online advertising business model. Before the last decade, a larger share of media business revenue came from sources other than online advertising, and the media was less polarized as a consequence.

As for my speculation about the underlying mechanics, perhaps people who are willing to subscribe to media (rather than consume it for free) are more likely to be interested in the truth (i.e., useful information about the world) rather than having their biases reinforced and their hateful prejudices stroked.

[jjk166]

The online advertising business model simply made it possible for small publishers, which in an earlier era would have been small time tabloids, to reach a wide audience that previously would have required a vast media empire. Back when things had to be printed on paper, it was really hard to get an article in front of millions of people, and throwing lots of shit at the wall to see what sticks was simply impossible. Nowadays, instead of competing with a dozen national papers and a handful of local ones, there were essentially unlimited numbers of competing headlines. In this new land of competition, everyone raced to the bottom. There is virtually no cost in publishing 100 crappy stories to have 1 take off and go viral, indeed that's an optimal strategy.

There's nothing special about advertising revenue. It's incredibly rare that I see an ad on a site that's related in anyway to the article that I'm reading, nonetheless that there is some financial motive to modify the article. I'm no more likely to click on an ad for diet pills on an article saying there was voter fraud then on one saying there wasn't.

If I were required to read every single thing published by an outlet I subscribe to, then I would definitely reserve my money for institutions that published a small number of high quality works. But if I can select which articles I read, it makes sense for an institution to produce as many options as they can so that I'll be more likely to find at least one thing I want to read.

[wutbrodo]

> I don't exactly understand the mechanics, but it seems pretty widely accepted that the polarization of media outlets and the rejection of journalistic ethics are a consequence of the online advertising business model

I don't know that this is true, nor widely accepted. I think it'd be accurate to say that the decline in general _quality_ of journalism is downstream of the dynamics you describe. But there are ways to be click-driven beyond building closed-loop narrative worlds for your readers. The obvious example is sensationalism and disproportionate emphasis on catastrophizing negative news for your readers, and this is entirely possible without being partisan. If anything, committing to a dishonest narrative view of the world cuts off half of your potential pearl-clutching: if the New York Times were breathlessly writing about the dangers of critical race theory the way Fox does, they would get _more_ clicks, not less.

Subscriptions work the opposite way here. Most people don't care about (or aren't capable of?) being informed, and subscriptions to the correct news source serves roughly the same function as choosing a church to hear your Sunday sermon at and make a part of your identity.

As far as I can tell, it fits the evidence much more cleanly to model journalism's narrative/polemical turn as downstream of the broader increase in polarization in society in general. The NYT spins alternative-fact fantasies not because of the economics of ad-based serving, but because of the characteristics of contemporary consumer demand.

[throwaway894345]

> I think it'd be accurate to say that the decline in general _quality_ of journalism is downstream of the dynamics you describe. But there are ways to be click-driven beyond building closed-loop narrative worlds for your readers. The obvious example is sensationalism and disproportionate emphasis on catastrophizing negative news for your readers, and this is entirely possible without being partisan.

No doubt there are other ways, but partisanship seems to be the optimal way at least in today's social media landscape.

> If anything, committing to a dishonest narrative view of the world cuts off half of your potential pearl-clutching: if the New York Times were breathlessly writing about the dangers of critical race theory the way Fox does, they would get _more_ clicks, not less.

That's kind of the point: NYT isn't going to write breathlessly about CRT because that's a conservative boogeyman (to be clear, there are a lot of valid criticisms of CRT or at least the movement born out of CRT, but as it's just entered the conservative lexicon 5 minutes ago they don't understand it well enough to critique it gracefully). NYT have their own topics about which they write breathlessly, consider from whence the 1619 Project came, after all.

The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.

> Subscriptions work the opposite way here. Most people don't care about (or aren't capable of?) being informed, and subscriptions to the correct news source serves roughly the same function as choosing a church to hear your Sunday sermon at and make a part of your identity.

I agree that most people aren't interested in being informed, but I disagree that subscriptions work the opposite way. First of all, there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low. IIRC there was some increasing partisanship as a consequence of cable news advertising which is just a less-gripping form of online advertising (if only because online media is truly on-demand and we carry access to it in our pockets 24/7), which is to say this observation supports the thesis that advertising and not subscriptions drive partisanship.

Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.

> As far as I can tell, it fits the evidence much more cleanly to model journalism's narrative/polemical turn as downstream of the broader increase in polarization in society in general. The NYT spins alternative-fact fantasies not because of the economics of ad-based serving, but because of the characteristics of contemporary consumer demand.

As previously discussed, if traditional and social media companies' ad-based revenue model were torpedoed tomorrow (say, due to legislation prohibiting ad revenue altogether, or at least online ad revenue) I strongly suspect the market for partisan media would largely evaporate. To say that media companies increasing polarization is just "responding to demand" in the same way that the tobacco industry was just "responding to demand" by making their cigarettes ever more addictive.

[wutbrodo]

> No doubt there are other ways, but partisanship seems to be the optimal way at least in today's social media landscape.

Yes, of course, but the statement I'm responding to was claiming that the economics of ad-based publishing drives agenda-driven "news". I'm saying that this doesn't fit the evidence, as agenda-driven reporting is if anything more consistent with a subscription-based system. The fact that it's agenda-driven instead of broadly sensationalist has roughly nothing to do (at least first-order) with the Internet and everything to do with consumer demand. To put it another way, in a hypothetical parallel universe where ad-funded news was banned, you would still see the turn towards agenda-driven reporting, as it's reflective of much broader trends in journalism and independent of ads-funding.

> The idea that NYT would get more clicks by appealing to both the left and the right assumes that there is a fixed number of clicks, but that's not true. By focusing on right wing partisanship, Fox gets the right to engage far more than they would if the writing were more or less neutral. These additional clicks dwarf the clicks lost because they alienate left-wing and moderate readers. The NYT has roughly the same strategy with respect to left-wing clicks (although I don't think the NYT is exactly the mirror image of Fox). Partisanship grows the market such that either the left-wing partisan or right-wing partisan markets are individually larger than the entire nonpartisan market.

Yes, I agree, but my point is that this is an _exogenous_ factor. Competition from an ads-funded Internet had nothing to do with driving newspapers towards partisanship; an exogenous shift in consumer demand did. I brought this example up not as a description of the world as it is but as a contradiction in your hypothesis. My claim is that consumer demand for partisanship is driving partisan news. Whether it's funded by ads or subscriptions is irrelevant.

> there were many decades during which online advertising was nil and during which partisanship was low

I know it's trite to say that correlation doesn't equal causation, but it's very relevant in this case. The postwar decades of relatively high journalistic standards were a historical anomaly. Yellow journalism existed in the past, well before online advertising, and the strategy that got people to buy newspapers was broad-based sensationalism, not the construction of elaborate filter bubbles.

I get that it's cheap to dismiss correlation without elaborating, but the causal hypothesis (ads -> partisan news) both has data pts contradicting it[1] and a more-plausible alternative mechanism, or at least the sketch of one[2].

> Beyond the actual evidence, it doesn't make sense in theory that subscriptions would drive partisanship. To your point, most people don't care about being informed, but those people generally aren't subscribing in the first place. To the extent that people made their news sources part of their identity (prior to the significant increase in politicization of media), it was to signal their membership in the higher class, not their political identity.

Ha, we differ pretty strongly on this factual question. Though perhaps this is my fault for being a little glib: when I say people aren't interested in being informed, I am very much (perhaps centrally!) including the modern information junkie, the core of the NYT (or Fox, or CNN, or MSNBC, or WaPo) subscriber/viewer base. They would probably claim they like being informed, but my point is that watching infotainment opinion shows and reading whatever the fuck the NYT calls what they do these days is a grotesque mockery of "informing oneself". There are undoubtedly hyper-literate, intelligent news consumers out there that have every subscription and use them all sparingly, but these are a vanishingly small minority; my claim is that anyone who thinks that a single-source news subscription is likely to make you understand the world better instead of understanding it worse is not "informed" by any useful definition.

All of the educated, affluent coastals that make up my entire social group use their NYT subscriptions and John Oliver viewings as nothing more than keeping up with the latest approved narrative[3]. For them, the value of their subscription is the feeling of religious harmony and comfortable, predictable single-mindedness it delivers. Broad-based (non-partisan) sensationalism is much less compatible with subscriptions than it is ads-funded articles.

[1] a broader rise in partisanship that is not plausibly driven entirely by journalism, the fact that the NYT et al has gotten substantially _more_ partisan as they've become increasingly subscription-based, etc.

[2] Ads funding and the decline in journalistic quality were both coincident with the earth-shaking, epochal rise of the Internet. Ads funding doesn't need to be causing this decline in order for them to co-occur, because they both arise from complex changes in the way information is distributed and epistemology is carried out. To use a contrived example, the correlation claim here is like saying "literacy expansion causes urban slums, just witness the correlation across the late 19th-century Western world" and ignoring that industrialization is the shared upstream node in the causal graph.

[3] The pandemic was an incredibly stark example, since for the first time they had significant skin in the game of being informed. No surprises there: everyone did exactly what you'd expect them to do, switching multiple times from "X is a terrible anti-science Trumpist conspiracy theory that people shouldn't even be allowed to think about!!!!" to "X is the science how dare you not believe it" on a _dime_ as soon as their news orgs of choice told them to.

[asjdflakjsdf]

So, i get the sense that the political shape of the US has led to a kind of proxy war in the media. I see it as a powder keg and I really can't see it ever changing without exploding into something more real, like a succesful foreign invasion, an actual civil war, or a dictator taking power etc. Obviously some kind of regulation would be a much better approach but in my pessimism, I don't think that will ever happen in the current political climate.

Just to clarify, I don't think any of the events listed above will ever happen in our lifetime. I am just using them as a way to reinforce my expression of non-expectation on any real change to this in our new found normality.

[gpsx]

I agree it will take something dramatic to fix the divisive political environment in the US. I would add one possible mechanism to your list which I am sure we all hope is not the solution - the country uniting against a common enemy in a war, the obvious choice for now being China.

[throwaway894345]

> the obvious choice for now being China

A significant portion of our economies are interdependent at the moment. The US pays China to manufacture our products because the Chinese have fewer scruples about human rights or pollution (which obviously implies that our American scruples are at best superficial). So the only way I see us coming to a head with China is if we decide that we care about people (workers and the environment that we all depend on) and make China account for their pollution and human rights costs (either by forbidding trade with them outright or making them pay steep import taxes to level the playing field with countries who don't profit off of slave labor and pollution, including hypothetical US domestic manufacturing). That might make China desperate.

[tjs8rj]

Subscriptions make it worse: now they only publish content palatable to their audience, and only those rabid enough to subscribe. Relying on ads at least means they have to maximize eyeballs (and broad appeal means more of those)

[throwaway894345]

I disagree. See my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27619785

[disabled]

> I'm at the point where I instantly dismiss any "world" news that comes from the US. I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.

A huge problem is that the US does not have many foreign news correspondents posted abroad anymore. This leads to uncertainty and confusion when a crisis occurs. I personally rely on the Financial Times for foreign correspondent coverage. It also has great tech coverage. I have only been disappointed once when reading a tech article over 3+ years of being a subscriber.