This idea that "truth" and "facts" was ever a profitable business comes from a very naive place. With the exception of encyclopedias (and even then...), newspapers (owned by robber barons since day one, and then later mega-corps), text books (read "lies my teacher told me") etc have always been about profit.
Newspapers historically were not driven by facts but by classified ads and cartoons.
TV, even in its golden age, was always about advertisement. And as much as we pine for the days of Walter Cronkite etc, the truth perpetuated in media has always skewed white (fear of the minorities), status quo (fear of a revolution), and capitalist (fear of commies).
Tweet storms and pontifications like these are grand standing but devoid of any real grounded perspective. Just because you're 40 now, and realizing that there's a bunch of bad shit that you don't have control over (and maybe even contributed to) doesn't mean that "tech" or "media" has "gone away from truth."
> With the exception of encyclopedias (and even then...), newspapers (owned by robber barons since day one, and then later mega-corps), text books (read "lies my teacher told me") etc have always been about profit.
This is a profoundly naive view of how media works. In the past, advertisers made ad buying decisions based in part on the reputation of the outlet, and circulation of media was dependent on public consensus that something was a reliable source of fact. Tabloids were a niche market that people did not take seriously. Newspapers might make their money on ads and cartoons, but the only reason they were able to command money for their ad space was because people bought and trusted the paper. Now, the profit motive for content creation relies far less on reputation effects. It is possible to make enormous amounts of money even when most people think your content is complete bullshit.
The reputation is where the bias lies. Consider the new york times: you probably respect it if you agree with it. If you don’t, it’s crappy narrative journalism. This certainly aligns with the parent comment’s claim that “facts” have never been the forte of any media; they simply need to agree with their readers. There’s simply little need to get 100% accuracy when 70% suffices to continue subscriptions.
Also, note that you can only see the issues in reporting if you’re closer to the story than the reporter is.
So there's a difference between bias, which exists in every human communication imaginable, and abjectly bad writing and reporting. The major problem today is the latter.
> Also, note that you can only see the issues in reporting if you’re closer to the story than the reporter is.
Basically, it is a puff piece about how George Clooney doesn't like Trump and has said as much. This article is clickbait designed to get likes on social media. Much of what is stated is probably true (I would not doubt that George Clooney said these things), but ultimately it doesn't matter. The point of the article is not to inform, it is to provoke a reaction.
Salon used to be a reasonably thoughtful outlet. They now appear to be a tabloid. This is a pattern that has played out over the internet media for the past several years, and we are all definitely worse off for it.
It’s easy to find poor reporting, but many people are blind to the flaws in each outlet. I don’t see any issue with rejecting the idea that any news source is “factual”. That is a downright harmful idea. You want to be sure about something? Go there yourself, or pay someone a lot of money to convincingly verify it.
You know what’s hard? Finding good reporting. Everyone is selling you something, even if it’s just a comfortable world view.
What you're describing is the narrative that most media barons pushed from the 50's onwards - the notion of "quality journalism" - it's the reason the Pulitzer prize exists at all (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/2015-pulitzer...). It was built to legitimize newspapers.
Media barons didn't hire journalists because they were ethical and factually accurate. They created that narrative because otherwise those people wouldn't churn out relevant and timely content to suit their readership. When the readership changes, media follows it. There is no intrinsic value in serving up the truth as it pertains to stock price.
Now you may argue that places like the NYT are the exception. But even here, this high falutin branding is there only to justify the power of ads for a different (read: intellectual) audience. If the NYT was forced to focus on one of their verticals today, would it be news? No. It would be food, fashion, and lifestyle because that's what drives all their traffic.
There are dozens of papers written about this - but the main thought exercise is to just consider that if the "truth" was the core value of media, of course they would double down on it.
Your replies telegraphed not curiosity or interest but just standard internet "source?" flame posts. It's not hard to google any element of what I'm saying to read countless articles in Poynter, NYT, CRJ etc to find stuff to back this up. Why should I waste my time when your mind is already made up?
Also, I worked in journalism for years and have met with and worked with most of the major media entities, specifically around editorial and business model, so I guess technically I'm a source too.
You're right, my mind is made up - to a certain extent. If your parent comments would actually be written well and contain strong arguments, I could change my mind.
But instead, your parent comments reek of the same absence of essence as a lot of modern "high-brow" journalism - and that's exactly why I was so irritated. I'm sick and tired of longreads in NYT, New Yorker, Slate and other presumably good publications that focus on stories, narratives and individuals instead of facts and arguments. How many times have a opened a story about some kind of global phenomena that affects millions and instead of statistics and studies saw most text dedicated to few particular people affected by it! Just like your text - makes a good and emotional narrative, but doesn't have any logical arguments to support author's viewpoint.
The author missed the biggest economic difference between fact-driven businesses and signal-driven businesses.
Today, to make money in a fact-driven business, you must restrict access to information.
For example, those who originate high-quality news have large payrolls of journalists in the field, layers of editors and fact-checkers, etc. They typically fund the business by restricting access with subscriptions, paywalls, premium content, and the like.
Fact-based businesses have small audiences with high cost per customer.
But signal-based businesses that sell opinion, tribal identification, status and emotion thrive through broad distribution. They need to maximize social sharing and generate large audiences.
Signal-based businesses are typically free or have very low per-user costs. They selectively remix content from fact-based businesses for their audiences, and add commentary, outrage, emotion and tribal identity.
Good point. Do you have any examples of fact based businesses? I can think of ONE(!) - Stratecherry by Ben Thompson, but I'm really craving more.
Its not just facts, its facts in service of telling a story - truth. "Raw" facts by themselves are hard to contextualize for an uninformed person. I really want more like that.
This is manifestly not true in public journalism. In the UK the paywalled newspaper all produce opinion propped up by heavily editorialised reporting, which tries hard to appear fact based but is anything but.
As others have pointed out, what has happened is that the status of "fact-based journaiism" has been degraded - because most "fact-based journalism" was only ever opinionation written in a high-status social register.
The real change has been the obvious shift in the social register of public writing, from schoolmaster-ish formal and paternal authority, to inclusive, child-like, and trivial accessibility.
It's not quite true that neither was ever in the fact business, and the old model did a far better job of hiding it.
But it was much less fact-oriented than it appeared to be. And the old long-form journalistic style of writing used to describe factual experiences - e.g. travelogues - has been replaced by short-form subjective quick-hit social media posts, often supported by amateur photos or captioned memes. (I.e. fixed-format DIY cartoons.)
The most perverse part of this whole thing is that people cant/wont pay appropriately for truth. Otherwise it would be as simple as setting up a newspaper that is fully paid for by people - no ad money, no one pulling your strings.
Lies are only unmasked as lies months/years later where no one even remembers the whole arc of the conversation well enough, or sees the actors that spread lies to think "huh if we all had known the truth at the outset, none of this shit would have happened".
Its the same problem with online education - you can put up courses but there are many more courses than motivated learners, even fewer who would pay for it except to signal worth to employers.
Do you have any ideas on how to make truth even slightly profitable?
(Tangent: many countries have national tv channels that are paid by license fees or taxation. These channels strive to be independent, neutral and objective. And although it's quite in fashion to be negative about eg the bbc, I think they succeed really very well.)
From my perspective, as a leftist and not a liberal, I'd describe the BBC and NPR as having, largely, a liberal / centrist viewpoint. I don't think I've ever heard the BBC advocating seizing the means of production or NPR agitating for a general strike. If you are in the US, consider that our entire political compass is shifted very far to the right. In Europe, the Democrats would be considered a center-right party and the Republicans would be a far-right, borderline extremist party. Regardless of where you fall on this spectrum, it's important not to fool yourself into thinking you are in the "center" or have some "objective" viewpoint from which you can label things "left" and "right", when everything in politics is so contextual.
A big part of confusion is that the left is no longer interested in the common man and elevating the lower classes. So no, they won't advocate seizing the means. They are instead obsessed with identity politics, which seems to be another aspect of signaling and status seeking. Those who have victim cred wield it, those who don't will display excessive concern to try and be a good ally.
The BBC, like so many others, will absolutely maintain certain narratives from a left Orthodox view, particularly anything to do with sexism, racism or islamophobia.
They decide ahead of time who the victim and oppressor is, and quote only what works to support that hypothesis. There is still a pretense of impartiality, but that's all. There's a reason many classic liberal and alt types have adopted a policy of recording their own interviews and publishing them alongside any outlet featuring them.
It wasn't always so, if you look at articles from their archive of 10+ years ago, you find a much more balanced and neutral perspective.
It's amazing how much the end-user cost of facts has dropped. I used to ride my bike across town to a library and spend an hour finding a fact. Now I can have them on my screen in seconds.
One might have thought that as the cost of obtaining facts dropped by 100x, people would consume higher-quality facts. But consuming higher-quality facts requires more effort, so in the end people consume more low-quality facts, like listicles of celeb gossip.
As a thought experiment, what is the cost per-fact that would make people consume the maximum quantity of high-quality facts? Too high and they consume less facts overall. Too low and they consume crap.
Even inside of it, there is obviously difference between the fixed cost of obtaining one fact, and the marginal cost of each additional fact. Riding to the library took time, but once you were there each additional fact cost less due to curation. In fact, the traditional library seems close to optimal for encouraging consumption of facts in volume (modulo institutional/cultural biases like the winners writing history).
Furthermore, while being able to look up a fact quickly ostensibly reduces the work to obtain that fact, it also discourages one's ability to perform educated guesses, reason from first principles, operate with uncertainty, etc. Intellectual effort/ability isn't zero sum.
It never even occurred to me to look up 99% of the useless facts I now can't help but look up on the Internet. The questions slipped out of my mind before they were fully formed, but now I think "who was that one guy in that one show?" and because I know I can find out in 30 seconds or less, I look it up.
This ability adds almost no actual value to my life, while taking time. But each individual thing is so quick to find.
It's also much easier to get lost trying to find the very best resource(s) for something, wasting time on that rather than digging into what's at hand. Because it's possible to refine one's selection now, it's so tempting to do so, even if a few hours' head start on lesser works would have been a better use of time. The same extends to entertainment.
What's lost is peace of mind, focus, serendipity, and contentment. I'm not sure the benefit's really been worth it, for me. Libraries were actually a pretty good solution for finding useful-enough information, fast enough, in most cases. How much would I pay for a mini-OED-style IMDB? TVtropes? Zero dollars, probably. I might not even keep them around if I received them for free. Not worth the fraction of a cubic foot each takes up. But I've got this Internet connection and all these devices anyway, so....
[EDIT] OECD corrected to OED. I've clearly wasted too much time arguing politics on the Internet.
Fair enough, a big component of the quality of a fact is how much context and related facts are bundled with it. A book in a library is one extreme, browsing Reddit r/popular is the other extreme. Perhaps the cost per-fact is similar, and what's different is the cost per context-switch.
Information used to be expensive to produce. Today, facts are expensive to produce (although not as expensive as before) but other option floods the zone because it’s cheap to produce.
The cost of high-quality facts should be minimal; the cost of low-quality facts should be higher. But how could such a thing be enforced when the marginal cost of all information regardless of quality is basically flattened?
Well, search engine can rank high-quality facts higher and low-quality facts lower. It's rather intractable in general, but Google Scholar is one approximation, I think mostly using citation.
I agree to almost everything he said and I am also avoiding all the social media. It's surprising that he didn't use his blog to share, instead a social media. He has intentionally not mentioned Twitter. Was/ Is he an investor in Twitter?
POSSE (Post on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) is a thing. I don't think you can turn off replies on Twitter at least, though, so you'd still potentially end up with fragmented conversation, although you could just choose not to care about the Twitter side of it.
Yes, he is/was an investor in Twitter (according to his AngelList profile).
Although, I find Twitter the simplest social media platform to control the information stream that you consume. Actually, because of that, it is the only social media site that I usually visit.
"Want to escape? Avoid Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. Avoid venues and media built around group signaling and conspicuous consumption."
There won't be any escape, just a move toward smaller more focused online groups each with their own mores. The future looks more like a world of Slacks than a Facebook.
It's fascinating that this is happening in both social media and the world (Brexit and the fragmentation of Europe) at the same time.
> smaller more focused online groups each with their own mores
So, more what the Internet looked like before 2007 or so. I was there for that, and won't say it was without its drawbacks - but it is starting to look as though the drawbacks of the current fashion outweigh them.
> It's fascinating that this is happening in both social media and the world (Brexit and the fragmentation of Europe) at the same time
Indeed it is. Perhaps there's a larger lesson to be drawn.
Finding and distributing facts has a lower cost / benefit than finding and distributing opinions.
I feel this similarly for constructive debate online. The cost of creating constructive comments is much more than the cost of creative "destructive" (not sure it's the right word) comments. So more comments are "destructive" than constructive.
Unless the value of constructive comments is larger than the perceived cost (hn might be an example?).
>So more comments are "destructive" than constructive.
Tell me about it! It’s gotten so bad that many times I would respond to someone’s comment to expand on what they’re saying or provide context for readers who might not have it and they will reply back to me with something like “I already know this. That’s what I was talking about.”
I know that’s what you were talking about! I’m just further reinforcing what you were trying to say! I think I probably fall into this sometimes myself. Online comments are just so reflexively argumentative sometimes it's hard to switch gears into discussing things.
The internet has definitely killed the profitability of distributing facts, if it ever existed. The rest of the tweets about "signaling goods" are the type of hogwash you end up with when you confuse Ted talks with actual intellectual activity.
Oversimplified. Largely, the internet has reduced the profitability of distributing facts because it gives them all away for free (how much can you learn online that you used to have to pay for? encyclopedia, years of video, stanford courses, books, scihub)
The problem isn't an absence of facts. It's whether the layperson is both capable and motivated to seek out correct facts vs incorrect facts or unfalsifiable narratives.
While I agree with all that is said here, I feel like its far more easier to observe existing systems and explain them, than to prescribe a solution that is practical and workable.
The press has never been about distributing facts. It’s mostly about manufacturing consent, with small, and quickly corrected deviations from its main purpose.
This is a massive signally piece from the Hacker News socially-naive cynicism clique peddling its myths about how society works.
Half-baked unempirical soap-boxing with your Headline Hits from "College Campuses Arent What They Used to Be" to Oh! Think of the Children! and the New York Times Best Seller: "STOP LABELLING YOURSELF PEOPLE!?!?!"
Ugh. It's a parody of itself. If you want to make this point then you need to do so by presenting an actual analysis of social dynamics on the internet, their changes, and so on. Not this pseudo-intellectual apocalypticism that was once phoned-in to broadsheet Op-Eds and now fills 20 tweets.
Newspapers historically were not driven by facts but by classified ads and cartoons.
TV, even in its golden age, was always about advertisement. And as much as we pine for the days of Walter Cronkite etc, the truth perpetuated in media has always skewed white (fear of the minorities), status quo (fear of a revolution), and capitalist (fear of commies).
Tweet storms and pontifications like these are grand standing but devoid of any real grounded perspective. Just because you're 40 now, and realizing that there's a bunch of bad shit that you don't have control over (and maybe even contributed to) doesn't mean that "tech" or "media" has "gone away from truth."