Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwaway0a5e 1600 days ago
Whether or not management has approved of or nudged this change it's clear from the rhetoric of journalists discussing journalism that over the last decade or two they have gone from thinking of themselves has having a duty to simply inform the public to having a duty to engage in discretionary inclusion/omission lest the public draw the wrong conclusion.

Journalism is reaping the "people are idiots, gotta protect them from themselves" ideology we've been actively sowing since at least the 1990s.
2 comments
crocodiletears 1600 days ago
> Whether or not management has approved of or nudged this change it's clear from the rhetoric of journalists discussing journalism that over the last decade or two they have gone from thinking of themselves has having a duty to simply inform the public to having a duty to engage in discretionary inclusion/omission lest the public draw the wrong conclusion.

A few years back, I had a coworker who was working his way though a journalism major express this attitude explicitly and uncritically as authoritative information passed to him in a class.

It was an eye opening moment for me, and had significant impacts for how I consumed media, and regarded higher education.

link
pydry 1600 days ago
Managers manage. Nobody nudges a McDonalds fry chef into making you a burger with subtle hints of approval. They either do it of they are fired.

Journalists also do as they are told with the resources and time they are granted by capital.

It just turns out that once print newspapers died out it wasnt very profitable to engage in deep, thoughtful or investigative journalism so journalists rarely get paid for it - no matter how valuable it would be for the public.

link
throwaway0a5e 1600 days ago
Your comparison is ignorant of the realities of managing creative output (be it engineering or writing). There are only a few ways to cook a McDonalds Burger to spec. There are many ways to write passable articles or design passable widgets. Stuff like "don't publish stuff that embarrasses our investors" is easy to validate. Stuff like "can we focus more on leading readers to conclusions we like" is far more nebulous and requires either substantial and continuous effort or actual buy-in from the staff to make much effect. Considering that the conspiracy theories about big media trying to lead us down a particular path have been more or less unfounded the only option we're left with is that the changes in journalism are a reflection of the thousands of individual actors in that profession.
link
pydry 1600 days ago
Have you ever talked to a journalist? You cant do much investigative journalism when you're doing the same number of beats 3 people did before and are pressured to produce the same output.

The economics of writing have changed. This was something done to journalists not by them.

link