[web-cowboy]

Anyone know of efforts to fix this space? Looking for a good excuse to quit my well paid corporate job and make a difference. News today is:

- Infotainment - Tribal reinforcement - Irrelevant - Not actionable (and thus, depressing) - Making people think the world is getting worse - Immediate and not well thought out or nuanced

In some ways it's their fault, but on the other hand, the modern reader won't pay for news. Maybe it's largely a business model problem?

It's literally killing people and needs to be disrupted, fixed.

[jari_mustonen]

I think is up to personal choices:

• Quit subscribing corporate media and subscribe to single reporters that are doing real reporting.

• Have zero tolerance for news that mislead you. ”Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

• Try to find reporters that are willing to give you the honest cotext even if it goes against what you expect and does not affirm your believes.

If enough people do this, those lying and misleading for profit will go out of business.

[chrisseaton]

But single reporters seem even more aggressively partisan than corporate. They're often at least fairly explicit about this though - billing themselves as a journalist of the left or of the right or whatever spectrum you want - but there's still no balance.

[foerbert]

What balance are you talking about? I've never been able to figure it out.

Are we talking just providing an equal number of sentences from the perspective of each major party? How do we decide which parties get included, here? Do we instead break it up by major ideologies? Again, which ones?

Even if we attempt to go no ideology and just raw facts, the facts you choose to report are a result of interpretation. You could easily construct an entirely factual article that contains no subjective opinions and still be majorly and intentionally deceptive. So not mentioning any perspectives is also not balanced.

What balance is everybody talking about? How is it defined? How we determine what is and is not balanced?

[chrisseaton]

> What balance are you talking about?

It’s not as complicated as you’re making out.

If I read an article about how a proposed law is bad I’d also like to read an article about how it might be good.

Not rocket science is it?

[foerbert]

You say it like it's so easy. It's not. The reality is many (maybe even most?) articles - even ones from incredibly openly biased sources - do this. It's often difficult to make many meaningful attacks on a proposed law without mentioning what the intent is.

Unless it's one of a few already highly-covered issues with fundamentally irreconcilable subjective issues where you can pretty much recall all that context with a few words... you have to say what the heck the proponents of the law say it'll do to actually attack it.

However you don't seem to find that balanced. I don't blame you. I don't either.

The problem is the arguments made cannot be equal. They are not the same thing. Even a good faith attempt to make a completely neutral article will very often fall short. Even if the author thinks they did not, others will.

The only 'balance' you can really have is a false equivalence where nothing matters because it's all the same anyway - so why even write an article? It doesn't matter what happens.

[Redoubts]

> If I read an article about how a proposed law is bad I’d also like to read an article about how it might be good.

Can you not read two articles, and do this yourself?

[chrisseaton]

That’s not very efficient is it and since they’re written separately they don’t directly address each other’s points.

[ur-whale]

Corporate news aren't partisan.

Unless you count chasing the bottom line as an ideology, that is.

Fox, to take an extreme examples, isn't really partisan. They have just found a juicy business model where they've learnt to titillate the sensitivities of a certain segment of the population to maximize revenue.

I don't have problem with a biased news source, as long as I have enough news sources to dig from and can average out the bias from multiple sources.

[strken]

It's quite cynical and unfair to say neither Fox nor (for example) Jacobin really believe in what they produce, but instead just serve whichever market segments profit them. In all probability, the employees of both believe deeply in their respective missions and in their reporting.

[MattGaiser]

>Fox, to take an extreme examples, isn't really partisan. They have just found a juicy business model where they've learnt to titillate the sensitivities of a certain segment of the population to maximize revenue.

That just describes their motivations as not being partisan. Their product is still highly partisan.

[ur-whale]

> Their product is still highly partisan.

Fair enough, but they're not really a news source.

[MattGaiser]

I agree with you there.

[chrisseaton]

> Corporate news aren't partisan.

You’ve got to be joking?

For example in the UK newspapers, even the best ones, literally declare their support for a particular party at the start of each election.

[hguant]

I think one of the foremost solutions to this problem set is Substack. There are a non-trivial number of journalists on there who's pitch is "hey, I don't want to be part of an institution that has bias/that I don't believe in, give me money and I'll deliver long form 'pure' essays to you."

The potential pitfall is that one can end up only subscribing to journalists that agree with ones point of view. I personally think this is offset by the kinds of view points that are attracted to or do well on a space like Substack, but that might just be me.

[llacb47]

Your impression of "news today" lacks nuance and does not give me confidence in your ability to "make a difference" in the journalism industry.

[zepto]

Seems pretty accurate to me. What part did you disagree with?

[GCA10]

I've been impressed with what News Literacy Project is doing, particularly in terms of helping high school students recognize the hallmarks of carefully researched material vs. the opposite. https://newslit.org/

[telesilla]

Some very important work happening at the centre for investigative journalism, there are opportunities to help for example developing programs to teach digital safety to journalists and sources. https://tcij.org

[ErikVandeWater]

I don't have an answer but these two YouTube channels look like what I hope the answer looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_42LVirfNI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXIxhF21qO4

[fragileone]

Exploiting psychology on a mass scale like this means that the only solution will be government regulation.

[andyxor]

create a better alternative to Parler, more robust against de-platforming by Bigtech, half the country will thank you