Will 'News Influencers' Replace Traditional Media? (msn.com) 123
The Washington Post looks at the "millions of independent creators reshaping how people get their news, especially the youngest viewers."
News consumption hit a tipping point around the globe during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, with more people turning to social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram than to websites maintained by traditional news outlets, according to the latest Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. One in 5 adults under 24 use TikTok as a source for news, the report said, up five percentage points from last year. According to Britain's Office of Communications, young adults in the United Kingdom now spend more time watching TikTok than broadcast television. This shift has been driven in part by a desire for "more accessible, informal, and entertaining news formats, often delivered by influencers rather than journalists," the Reuters Institute report says, adding that consumers are looking for news that "feels more relevant...."
While a few national publications such as the New York Times and The Washington Post have seen their digital audiences grow, allowing them to reach hundreds of thousands more readers than they did a decade ago, the economics of journalism have shifted. Well-known news outlets have seen a decline in the amount of traffic flowing to them from social media sites, and some of the money that advertisers previously might have spent with them is now flowing to creators. Even some outlets that began life on the internet have struggled, with BuzzFeed News shuttering in April, Vice entering into bankruptcy and Gawker shutting down for a second time in February. The trend is likely to continue. "There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older," Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said in the report, which is based on an online survey of roughly 94,000 adults in 46 national markets, including the United States...
While many online news creators are, like Al-Khatahtbeh, trained journalists collecting new information, others are aggregators and partisan commentators sometimes masquerading as journalists. The transformation has made the public sphere much more "chaotic and contradictory," said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the PressThink blog, adding that it has never been easier to be both informed and misinformed about world events. "The internet makes possible much more content, and reaching all kinds of people," Rosen said. "But it also makes disinformation spread."
The article notes that "some content creators don't follow the same ethical guidelines that are guideposts in more traditional newsrooms, especially creators who seek to build audiences based on outrage."
The article also points out that "The ramifications for society are still coming into focus."
While a few national publications such as the New York Times and The Washington Post have seen their digital audiences grow, allowing them to reach hundreds of thousands more readers than they did a decade ago, the economics of journalism have shifted. Well-known news outlets have seen a decline in the amount of traffic flowing to them from social media sites, and some of the money that advertisers previously might have spent with them is now flowing to creators. Even some outlets that began life on the internet have struggled, with BuzzFeed News shuttering in April, Vice entering into bankruptcy and Gawker shutting down for a second time in February. The trend is likely to continue. "There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older," Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said in the report, which is based on an online survey of roughly 94,000 adults in 46 national markets, including the United States...
While many online news creators are, like Al-Khatahtbeh, trained journalists collecting new information, others are aggregators and partisan commentators sometimes masquerading as journalists. The transformation has made the public sphere much more "chaotic and contradictory," said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the PressThink blog, adding that it has never been easier to be both informed and misinformed about world events. "The internet makes possible much more content, and reaching all kinds of people," Rosen said. "But it also makes disinformation spread."
The article notes that "some content creators don't follow the same ethical guidelines that are guideposts in more traditional newsrooms, especially creators who seek to build audiences based on outrage."
The article also points out that "The ramifications for society are still coming into focus."
Pundits (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They're called Pundits. Getting news from people with little information and strong opinions has been the norm for a while now, this is the source of many of our problems. TikTok is the only part of that which is new.
You've already got 'sports entertainment' in the form of things like pro wrestling.
You've got 'science entertainment' in the form of things like ancient aliens.
And you've got 'news entertainment' in the form of things like Fox News and, in the UK, the Daily Mail and The Sun. I'm certain there are better examples though, if anyone would care to offer some for our amusement it'd be much appreciated.
So I think we're pretty much covered already, thanks!
What is the news for, if not to entertain?
Re:Pundits (Score:4, Interesting)
But things *have* changed. The main function of news organizations used to be fact gathering and confirmation. Opinion journalism was an added extra, a little condiment to sprinkle on your fact diet. Now we're all feasting on the ketchup, because it's tasty and cheap to produce. We're living in an increasingly fact-free choose-your-own-adventure media world where it probably doesn't matter whether you select your opinion sources wholesale (by choosing a media outlet) or retail (by subscribing on social media).
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Pundits (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the first time I've seen Tucker Carlsen described as "woke", no wonder Fox sacked him.
Re: (Score:1)
It was Tucker's monologue where he cited the "End of neoliberalism" that remains my favorite. He's rich and educated enough to know what that word actually means, and that the candidates he supports are very much supporters of neoliberalism. I think he's right, we're going to witness the end of neoliberalism. It's not going to go down without a fight, but like disease infested livestock, it needs to be purified by fire.
Tucker may be more woke than any of us thinks.
Re: (Score:3)
It was Tucker's monologue where he cited the "End of neoliberalism" that remains my favorite. He's rich and educated enough to know what that word actually means, and that the candidates he supports are very much supporters of neoliberalism. I think he's right, we're going to witness the end of neoliberalism. It's not going to go down without a fight, but like disease infested livestock, it needs to be purified by fire.
Tucker may be more woke than any of us thinks.
Tucker just really appealed to the ordinary American. That carefully cultivated look he did, which surely he must have practiced long and hard in a mirror.
That look that says "I'm trying SO hard to rub two braincells together to come up with an opinion... bear with me..."
People can relate to him. Especially with declining IQ's, declining testosterone (isn't he a hero with his ball tanning?), expanding waistlines (he almost doesn't look obese at all).
Tucker is an American Hero.
Re:Pundits (Score:5, Insightful)
What I want is a news organisation that doesn't inject any opinion into their presentation of the news. I'd prefer that they not do any opinion pieces at all. News shouldn't be "we want to hear this" or "we don't want to hear that." Presented properly, news is news is news.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
And then beyond that; how do you make it all fit? There are too many events around the world for any one channel to cover all of it and do it any kind of justice. If you choose to run the story about the local councilman being accused of accepting bribes you are at the same time choosing not to run the story about the single mother being forced to choose between feeding her child or giving her child the medicine said child needs. There is not enough time for all of it.
Re: (Score:2)
And then beyond that; how do you make it all fit? There are too many events around the world for any one channel to cover all of it and do it any kind of justice. If you choose to run the story about the local councilman being accused of accepting bribes you are at the same time choosing not to run the story about the single mother being forced to choose between feeding her child or giving her child the medicine said child needs. There is not enough time for all of it.
And all of this, is how democracies are inherently vulnerable to subversion.
Its built into democracy, because people really are pretty gullible and easily fooled. Otherwise advertising wouldn't get the huge amounts of investment that it sees.
Advertising really does work, people really are easily manipulated and influenced, and somehow we are supposed to believe that we have 'free and fair elections'.
Its just a gigantic scam and is the entire reason that the USA pushes democracy around the world; not so the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even so, a democracy with stabilizing features (such as laws that require a supermajority to change, such as altering the Constitution) is as good as it gets. Taking Charge Because You Know Better does not work. Ultimately we humans are animals and we are not going to create a utopia for ourselves. Never did, never will.
Democracy, as you know it, is industrialised and commercialised and operates at a massive scale, where people are totally disconnected from the process and the personalities.
For democracy to work, you need to be voting for people who you know, personally. Not talking heads on tv.
Re: (Score:2)
There have to be higher levels of government. But then you have individuals governing over groups far too large for all their constituents to know them personally.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not possible to govern a world of 8 billion people in that way. Let's say we restrict ourselves tribes small enough to know each other, Dunbar's number = 150. Now we have 8e9/150 = 53 million tribes. Democracy within them (of course not actually, but let's go with it), but anarchy between them.
There have to be higher levels of government. But then you have individuals governing over groups far too large for all their constituents to know them personally.
Each small group chooses a representative, they make contact with the representatives from their neighboring groups etc. It works its way up like that...
Re: (Score:2)
Reuters? AP?
Re: Pundits (Score:4, Interesting)
Even without injecting any opinions, the choice of what stories to discuss is effectively creating your own personal narrative.
When it comes to very complex issues, it's even harder. And when someone is presented with something that conflicts with their beliefs, they will likely reject it and claim that it is just "the biased media pushing their opinions", which is 90% of where we are today.
Re: (Score:2)
Even without injecting any opinions, the choice of what stories to discuss is effectively creating your own personal narrative.
You are not wrong; however, you conveniently ignore the elephant in the room: They were talking about intentional manipulation and you are conflating it with perspective bias. They are two entirely different things and can be dealt with separately. Is there a reason why you want the two concepts combined?
"Newtons laws of motion are completely and utterly useless because Relativity is how it really works"
Mostly true, but Newtons laws are still useful for computing most motions. I would rather have Newtons la
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess this is what happens when media like CNN, NBC, ABC and others turn into entertainment, carefully crafted to attract eyeballs with divisive, but addictive content
We need to return to the era of Walter Cronkite
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Cronkite took a paycheck from the CIA to downplay the atrocities in the Vietnam War.
This was one of JFK's peeves.
Re: (Score:3)
So many people I see pining for a return to a Cronkite style news system were not actually alive during it, green grass over there.
If anything the media could be considered far easier to manipulate then simply because there was no much less of it, Cronkite was from an era where there were like 3 total TV stations with way less resources to verify if things reported were true. It's easy to have big trust in one outlet when there are barely any alternatives.
Re:Pundits (Score:4, Insightful)
Really though, I think the biggest difference was the deregulation of the nightly news. The news was at one time a requirement imposed upon the networks in exchange for using the public airwaves. Once that was dropped and TV networks could then show ads during the news, their incentive changed.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember the Cronkite era, and watched his newscast every evening.
The news absolutely was far more balanced and much much better back then (fair, balanced, investigated, in depth and relevant to the people in the country).
Today the "news" (if you can even call it that) is a bunch of clickbaity (online) divisive woke garbage designed to get ratings and enrage people (as enragement increases "engagement", i.e. to sell more ads). Not worth watching at all, and it is no wonder that trust in mass news media in
Re: (Score:2)
I remember the Cronkite era, and watched his newscast every evening.
The news absolutely was far more balanced and much much better back then (fair, balanced, investigated, in depth and relevant to the people in the country).
Today the "news" (if you can even call it that) is a bunch of clickbaity (online) divisive woke garbage designed to get ratings and enrage people (as enragement increases "engagement", i.e. to sell more ads). Not worth watching at all, and it is no wonder that trust in mass news media in this country is at an all time low... that low trust is well deserved in every way.
But they had to be more careful, and craft the propaganda oh sorry *NEWS* back then, because peoples brains hadn't been addled by TikTok, YouTube and influencers... and the various pollutants in your water supply hadn't had a chance to work their effect either, I mean the list of influences attenuating peoples minds and consciousness just go on and on.
So, of course, in the Cronkite era they had to be more subtle. It must have been such hard work.
No wonder they had to introduce all that other stuff to make i
Re: Pundits (Score:2)
This seems to be wild speculation based on the Church Committee saying 400 unnamed reporters were on the CIA payroll. [wikipedia.org] Without names, everyone became a suspect.
Re: (Score:2)
Kennedy barely had any involvement with Vietnam. The number I heard was that we had 52 people in the country at the end of his administration. Johnson is the one who ramped that up.
Re:Pundits (Score:5, Informative)
Your history is lacking.
Vietnam didn't start to really get going until after the Gulf of Tonkin excuse....errr....."incident" under Johnson. He single handedly increased the U.S. presence in country from 16,000 "advisors" under Kennedy to 500,000+ full blown combat troops by 1967.
Johnson was scared witless about how Cronkite might influence people, and for good reason.
Re: (Score:1)
I have been thinking about Vietnam lately, in the context of what is going on right now. It wasn't Cronkite that turned the tide of Vietnam; it was guerilla journalists and most importantly photographers on the ground showing the world the reality of war. The US military has done everything in it's power to prevent such access ever since. The only only allow "embedded" reporters to travel with carefully selected units so that they can control the narrative.
That is what a billion phone cameras gives us no
Pot, Meet Kettle (Score:3)
Corporations, who make money by carefully curating a viewpoint that's truthful, misleading, and which provides confirmation bias to their audience, are unhappy by a bunch of young bucks who provide a different set of true but misleading facts?
I am shocked! Shocked, I say!
Certainly, the distinction between more rigorous journalism and either selective aggregation or less rigorous work shouldn't be ignored, but all of this pales in comparison to the fact that every single news agency has their (whether written or unwritten) list of stories that they're not allowed to report on, because it doesn't align with the actual goal of making money.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless we are willing to publicly fund news orgs which can carry it's own sets of problems then realizing that fact is part and parcel of navigating modern media. There are somewhat unbiased sources that are either non-profit style or association driven like AP, Reuters, PBS, NPR but those are dry and boring so people don't want that and folks always on the lookout for bias will see it no matter what because they will take any statement of fact counter to their worldview as bias and dismiss it.
I would also
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think "unbiased news" is even a theoretic possibility. When you're reporting on a fire, where do you focus your story? That's a bias. (Being biased doesn't mean being wrong.)
When different groups, with different biases, observe the same event, their descriptions can be radically different, and still both be factually accurate.
Re: (Score:2)
Hell, just get rid of the requirement that all news stories have to be bad, or have bad outcomes. Nobody wants to hear 100% gloom, doom, and death every evening.
Re:Pot, Meet Kettle (Score:4, Insightful)
woketard
No greater signal on Earth that you can safely assume a person nothing relevant, insightful or accurate about whatever topic is brought up. Thank you letting us know up front we can ignore you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You might want to check out the Reporters Without Borders RWB/RSF's Press Freedom Index for different countries.
See: https://rsf.org/en/index [rsf.org]
Norway comes in first place and the USA in 45th place.
Re: (Score:3)
When GE and NBC split this ended, perhaps because I wasn't the only person that noticed and they had to split willingly or face the government forcing it.
No, the US government was skeptical of the NBC sale, because the buyer was Comcast (major/largest cable TV and Internet service provider) and would result in a vertical transaction and possible monopoly. And GE "owned" NBC originally by way of RCA; that's when the government forced GE to sell NBC (meaning they sold RCA). GE got NBC back in the 80's...by buying RCA (again).
If anything, GE shareholders like me were pissed, because the company was cratering due to the 2008 financial crisis and NBCUniversal was
Re:Pot, Meet Kettle (Score:5, Insightful)
They wanted an audience that cared more about getting entertained and outraged than informed, they got it.
And now they complain about it.
Re:Pot, Meet Kettle (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but which is "better"?
If you watch Fox news, you know what you're getting, same way if you watch MSNBC.
But some "influencer" on a social media platform where you have no idea what their agenda is? Like QAnon, for example, and many of the BS conspiracy theory nonsense that they pushed and people fell for? Often posting things just to see how many people would fall for them?
Yeah, I'll take corporate-based news any day of the week.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, but which is "better"?
A corporate news source with a well established and known agenda.
An "influencer" who has no established or known agenda.
Do corporate news sources openly admit to their bias? I don't believe so.
People that follow the news closely will pick up on the bias but those that do not follow closely will not. I've talked with people that knew deep down that this politician or that CEO was a very bad man but when I would ask what this person did that was so bad they could not name a thing. There's plenty of people in the news that we consider "bad" because they were reported in the news to have been convicted of some serious crime,
Re: (Score:2)
Do corporate news sources openly admit to their bias? I don't believe so.
No, Fox doesn't come out and say "we push a conservative agenda", but if you want to know that, you can easily find it. Plus they will tend to be consistent in filtering for their conservative agenda.
Perhaps a relatively safe example is how the reporting on Elon Musk changed over time. Musk was just loved in the media because he was putting people (and a car) into space, making electric cars, and making a lot of money doing it. When Musk bought Twitter and started to become competition then Musk became a very bad man, someone terrible at making cars and rockets (and can you believe he littered space with his old car?) while losing billions of dollars in the process.
Yeah, I love the Musk joke:
Most any "influencer" will tell everyone up front where their bias lies, and that establishes their agenda. Because they don't try to hide behind reporting unbiased news is why I find them more trustworthy. Even better are the "influencers" that admit to their ignorance up front, they tell people where their expertise lies so the viewer knows when and where their reporting is veering into a topic that should be taken with some doubt. I'll see traditional news outlets give reports with confidence when I know what they are saying is complete BS. How do I know they are giving BS? Because they stepped into something that I have some experience with. I have to remind myself that just because they report with confidence that they may not know what they are talking about. I might not know where the BS lies because I have no experience with the topic to tune my BS detector, but I have to know that I could find a news report to be fantasy later once I learn more.
You're joking, right? I don't remember anyone pushing ivermectin ever declaring their biases or agendas, nor any of the anti-vaxxers or anti-maskers or any of the QAnon people, ... Are there some responsible
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. As a famous band from Australia says:
Who picked up the bill, and who made who?
Yeah
Who made who
Who turned the screw?
Re: Pot, Meet Kettle (Score:2)
Remember the big reveal in XFiles, when the fed reveals in fact he is feeding the tinfoil hat wearing nut jobs most of their little tidbits to make up stories?
Yeah, this is going to be so much worse, this will be international feds guys from all regimes and coleurs, even more than they already do.
Re: (Score:1)
Yup. I loathe most of the influencer culture, but Post Media is even more insidious in their own way. Most news media is just awful, no matter where you get it from. Powerful wealthy people have bought most of the large news services, and they exert extremely strong, heavy-handed editorial biases that are directed from the ownership.
Re: (Score:3)
The traditional news media are (were?) less likely to actually lie. But you're exactly correct about "deceptive truths". Even when it's just to make things more exciting, they'll cut away the dull context, and when they have a point to make ....
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that corporate journalism are often tied to the wishes of government or extra-government organizations. (This is a problem with the UK's BBC, Canada's CBC and Japan's NHK.) You don't want news to be parroting a narrow point of views all the time.
Nothings changed (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
TV and radio talk show hosts, where the quality of the info and analysis ranges from excellent to dumbo-the-clown-level
Dumbo is a nice and dandy elephant you insensitive clod! I am sure that he would only report accurate news and I'd have no problems trusting him over some news source.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry (Score:1)
The quality of the news will not deteriorate.
That's by now almost impossible. News already IS more opinion than information. A sliver of information rolled into a package of how you should think about it. That's what you get today from the news.
Unless you go out of your way to find a source that only gives you the news... and even there you get a lot of opinion by omission.
So don't worry, nothing will change. You'll get the same crap, just with bigger tits and probably the entertainment of watching the infl
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Eww. Put these things into a bra, will ya?
Either that or don't complain when someone has you on them if you keep waving them about.
Re: (Score:1)
and even there you get a lot of opinion by omission.
Precisely.
By watching and listening to nontraditional news sources I often see how different news sources report differently by just leaving out important details. I have greater trust in nontraditional news because they openly admit to their bias, and by knowing their bias I can know how to interpret what they choose to report. Traditional news outlets have a bias, but they will claim to report the news "evenly". To be "even" is to first pick the balance point, think "Overton window". https://en.wikipe [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
If you want "unbiased" news, you have to shop around and get them from a lot of sources. The less they align with your personal opinion, the better. That's not to say you should turn to the yellow press and Fox News, garbage is still garbage, but there are quality liberal and conservative newspapers and even TV channels (well, at least in some countries) that offer the "other" view.
Try your best to avoid falling into the comfort zone of the filter bubble. Far too many people already do that.
Nope! (Score:3)
Because these people aren't journalists, they collate shit FROM traditional media. They don't go out and collect it.
There has to be actual sources, otherwise it all goes away.
Re: (Score:2)
Sources, investigative work, reporting...
Hell, these guys don't even get to offer source confidentiality to their sources - cause they're not journalists.
An influencer who would do an actual investigative story about crime would be charged as an accomplice should he/she deny the police access to EVERYTHING gathered during the investigation.
And that's in a strong democracy, where cops and courts actually follow rules and they don't simply disappear you and your family for asking too many questions.
And that's
"investigating actual events and stories" (Score:2)
Or they get it from OSINT sources. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually they are worse. Also better. They've got a wider distribution of qualities.
When I'm interested in a bit of science, I read the popular science journalism (in print). If I'm *REALLY* interested, I go to an internet source that I respect on that topic. Perhaps https://arxiv.org/ [arxiv.org] . But https://www.science.org/ [science.org] Is generally too technical for me, and often too expensive. And the print edition is definitely too expensive. Scientific American is about my level.
But in other subjects, who do you trus
Re:Nope! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Nope! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you've been fed that narrative by the alternative news you consume doesn't make it actually true. The people telling you that have a vested and financial interest in you believing that is the case. Meanwhile the news orgs they tell you to ignore actually still do have hundreds if not thousands of people in countries across the globe.
That doesn't mean you should trust those orgs out of hand or that sources from Telegram and such aren't valuable but those sources still have to be checked, need some sort of 3rd party verification and should also not be taken as sacrosanct by default. How much Arma 3 footage got picked up over Telegram allegedly "from Ukraine" or I have seen plenty of stuff on Twitter and from Telegram claiming to be Gaza but was actually Syria from 2021.
Re: (Score:2)
It is a narrative, the fact that you can't outright believe every piece of media should be self evident, its a fact so obvious it shouldn't need to be stated but yet here we are.
And while the hospital bombing was a case of several reputable outlets jumping the gun from the outset the fact is as you said a number of outlets did correct and adjust their reporting as the facts that came in, something that most of the alternative media in fact does not and often doesn't do because on the one hand we like when t
Re: (Score:2)
If you think that, you just still haven't found the right sources yet.
This alone is a fallacy, can you define "right" in that context without using normativity?
I am not outright defending mainstream as in they did a good thing, it was bad, but you are not proposing dropping the system entirely without any better alternative, thus making everything worse.
Everything you say mainstream news does alternative news does as well and usually worse. If your answer is "read a bunch of sources and be skeptical", well fuck me what are we even arguing about?
Re: (Score:2)
You're moving the goalposts by claiming I'm talking about "alternative media" and "alternative press" when I only mentioned people. They are not press or media.
So you are actually not even arguing anything, your stance is "can't trust anything, so fuck it, i'll just take whatever seems to agree with my worldview and discard everything else" that essentially what you are proposing. You're in a scenario where you can never be wrong, convienent.
I think we can probably agree that the vast majority of Social media is complete bullshit not worth anyone's time. Maybe you can come to accept it's not all like that. Some of the people report the facts as best they can and help point out the bullshit from others.
Wrong entirely and an absolute strawman, that is never what i statd what i stated is that they are be default no more or no less trustworthy then any mainstream or alternative news and just as much bullshit or even more comes
Re: (Score:2)
Holy shit, lil' bro that's terrible
No. (Score:3)
It's just the next step (Score:3)
15 years ago, this video [youtube.com] came out.
And nothing changed. If anything, it only got worse.
So of course people who know fuck all about reporting and only care about getting people entertained and "engaged" (read: outraged over nothing) can easily take over from here.
Corporate nonsense for corporate morons... (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember back in the day when this same idea, "journalists being replaced by X", was touted about - bloggers.
Remember that?
Guess what?
No bloggers ever were "embedded" with US military, bloggers tend not to be invited, go to or allowed at government briefings for the press, bloggers get neither the support of news networks NOR any kind of protections in front of courts OR guns for being... you know... journalists.
Blogger gets caught taping a conversation or photographing people without their consent - blogger gets sued and blogger can't use "ama press" defense.
Same goes for "influencers".
Only real difference being that when someone is trying to INFLUENCE the news, that's not called reporting or investigative journalism.
That's called PROPAGANDA.
And while People For Freedom of Propaganda will gladly use both genuine useful idiots AND astroturfed ones - a big point about propaganda is having direct editorial control.
I.e. Propaganda is too serious a business to be left to the amateur propagandists.
Re: (Score:2)
DIVERSITY of news sources and limited influence from powerful groups/individuals is how one can counter organized propaganda. Now we have the blind leading the blind becoming "reporters" (more like news readers and commentators) and it'll likely get worse on all fronts as people become more self isolated fragile snowflakes who prefer some influencer until they are told something they dislike and then switch to another one.
I think it should be a crime to call anybody who does not have the degree, a journalis
Betteridge says: 'No' (Score:2)
Betteridge's Law of Headlines:
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Local news sources all withered away. (Score:2)
Brought to you by Pfizer (Score:3)
The Legacy Media business model makes news impossible.
Millions are dead as a result, going back many decades.
Re: (Score:1)
Some newsrooms (Score:2)
Funny, "some content creators don't follow the same ethical guidelines that are guideposts in more traditional newsrooms," because some newsrooms also don't follow the same ethical guidelines. I'm looking at you Bezos Post.
Perhaps if newsrooms had cleaved closer to the traditional ethical guidelines and didn't obviously shade their reporting so much in the recent past, they would have more relevance today and people wouldn't have turned to other sources?
Trust me! (Score:2)
News? (Score:3)
This news influencer business reminds me of the idea of selling eggs, but getting rid of all the chickens.
(The news influencers rely on more traditional news gathering organizations to find out what happened in the first place.)
One in 5 adults under 24 use (Score:3)
People under 27 are not adults.
Re: (Score:2)
Gotta draw the line somewhere. I personally didn't feel like an adult until I was in my 30s... but you don't get there without having the training wheels taken off in your 20s.
And for you younger folks out there, know this - even adults usually aren't adults. Regardless of age, most people try to avoid responsibility, take the easy path regardless of whether or not it's a good one, and often have no damn idea what they're doing.
You can be an adult any time you're ready to take responsibility for your acti
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like the last paragraph of my post applies to you. Circumstances forced you to get there earlier than most.
My mother had a similar start, but it messed her up a bit and she never really recovered completely.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
People under 27 are not adults.
I would say nobody under 36 is an adult.
(each person develops (or not) differently. There are no hard ages at which a stage of growth is guaranteed to have happened. I have seen actual adults who are no more mature than a three year old. I have seen three year old's process stuff better than some adults ever do.)
TL;DR, define "adult" (I bet I can find numerous examples proving that your definition is inadequate)
Traditonal news resortig to clickbait (Score:5, Interesting)
I learned in high school that a good news headline includes who, what, when, and where. Maybe the headline didn't include every one of those details but the news report certainly should, and if it did not then it is just rumor.
A good headline is something like "Provasic Proves Effective for Heart Disease, FDA Approval Expected", while a bad headline leaves out an important detail like "New Drug Proves Effective for Heart Disease, FDA Approval Expected". See the difference? The words "new drug" instead of "Provasic" means that to find out what drug the news is about requires clicking on the link to the news story to get that detail. There's no reason to use "new drug" instead of "Provasic" since it isn't saving room in the headline or providing some other benefit.
(FYI, Provasic is the fictional drug from The Fugitive, so don't get excited about some new drug on the market if you didn't catch the reference.)
Click bait headlines used to live in the realm of rumor, sketchy websites looking to make a buck selling adverts or to spread some opinion held by the authors. Now click bait headlines are the norm. I try to hold myself back from falling for click bait because I know bad headlines means the reporting is likely equally bad but I'm weak at times and my curiosity gets the best of me, I'll click on the headline knowing that what comes is likely full of BS but I want to know what BS they are trying to spread.
It is difficult to hold traditional news outlets in high regard if they are resorting to tactics of those spreading rumors to attract views. I realize that it is impossible to fit an entire news story in a headline so some details will have to be left out and/or implied, but if the headline includes "you won't believe" or something of that sort then it is clearly not something that is trying to inform because that is headline space used but adds no information. If the intent is not to inform then it is to influence, or just make some dollars on selling advert views. It is possible to make money informing people, just make quality news reports so people come back for more news to sell advertising.
Re: (Score:2)
For traditional media there is no longer "the" headline for a story...print media in particular, the headline in print may be completely different from online. There's SEO involved for online headlines, space constraints for print headlines. See:
those would be an improvement, though (Score:2)
>"New Drug Proves Effective for Heart Disease, FDA Approval Expected". See the difference?
it would be an improvement over most of what many sites use these days.
"This Drug May be Effective for Life Threatening Disease"
"Potential New Treatment Coming Soon!"
"Company Reveals Drug Effectiveness".
I really want a scraper to present me the headlines from my regular sources *after* applying a filter.
Anything headline with "this", "the reason", or "I" tops the negative scoring, along with using the word "reveals"
They already have (Score:1)
For example Sucker Carlson.
Coffeezilla (Score:4, Interesting)
Coffeezilla does better reporting and investigative journalism on crypto schemes than any major news outlet, by a wide margin. It's not rocket science, he mostly peruses white papers and press releases and lines them up with other things the people running these things say, but it's a lot of work, and he finds scam after scam, along with other people doing the same thing whom he often collaborates with.
He's months ahead of the mainstream news in reporting on this stuff. He's generally accurate and provides sources for the stuff he reports on.
Also:
Steve Lehto/Legal Eagle - re-report on legal cases covered in the news, helpfully correcting all the errors they usually make.
Breaking Points/The Hill - Offer roundups of news with their own clearly stated ideological bent, IE this is how progressives see things, this is how conservatives see things, and this is where they agree and disagree
That Chapter - Recaps true crime stories, but amalgamates *all* the news stories and writeups, covers where there is ambiguity, and provides context and backstory. To get the same thing via traditional news, you'd have to read dozens of news articles and watch multiple TV pieces about the subject. He condenses the entire story down to about 20 minutes. His coverage of the insane Murdaugh case is lightyears more in-depth and succinct than the Netflix documentary series.
Re: Coffeezilla (Score:3)
I love Coffee but he is a different format compared to the typical daily news media entirely.
The daily news are suffering from having to be fast and clickbaity more than anything. Weekly/monthly magazines can bring more context and make you understand the whole better, and they have more time to investigate. And utubers like coffee are essentially a similar format, just on a different medium. And that is a very good format, getting context and well researched info over being faster than the other clueless f
Comparisons (Score:2)
That being said, I doubt the average unwashed masses would pick well researched videos from coffee over some curvy bimbo doing dances and jiggles and blurting her corpo or regime overlords latest propaganda and hysteria hype piece⦠just add up all subs your list has, and compare it to the top ten curvy bimbos.
That's the thing, though. You don't compare to the OnlyFans sites. I picked a random Coffeezilla video and it has about 3.5 million views. The NBC nightly news has 7 million viewers average per show.
Granted, NBC nightly news is on, well, every night. But, one guy, and likely a small team of editors/sound/GFX people, are producing content with half the viewership of a big three network television program on, what I can only imagine, is a tiny fraction of their budget. It covers a niche area, but it better re
Garbage in garbage out is still law of the land (Score:2)
More ignorant early twenty something twits giving their half baked news analysis? We have this already, it's called "Tiktok." And it's an Idiocracy shit show.
Society is only as good as the actions of its members. It's member's actions are only as good as the quality of information available for it to base its actions. Unfortunately this is yet another area where people with knowledge, experience, and expertise are pushed aside for someone with "an opinion".
Every day I'm happy as hell to be on track to r
MSM Went Woke Going Broke (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Literally, when you read the news, when you watch the news, when you hear the news — except for here and a couple of other places — you are actually watching, reading, listening to the Hillary Clinton campaign. And you have to tell yourself that. Every time you watch the news, a story, particularly if it’s about Trump and it’s negative, you have to understand, you’re not watching the news, you’re not watching the media. You are watching the Clinton campaign. There is evidence.
As you know, ladies and gentlemen, I have often described the news every day as actually a scripted soap opera, the daily Washington soap opera, reality TV. It is scripted. There are narratives every day that are not based on the news. There are narratives based on advancing the agenda — the agenda of Obama, the agenda of the Democrats — in this case the election of Hillary Clinton. The WikiLeaks email hack is producing incredible evidence.
As (actual) journalists Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang reported on October 9, the Intercept exclusively” This is a left-wing outfit, by the way. Glenn Greenwald is the guy that was simpatico with Edward Snowden. Greenwald, I think he’s written for Salon or Slate, I forget which. He’s independent now. The point is a bunch of leftists, and even they are fit to be tied. See, they don’t think Hillary is left wing enough, is their grievance.
But they have uncovered documents from hackers that illustrate the “Clinton campaign tactics to court journalists portraying [Hillary] in a positive light.” There are dinner invitations to all of the named journalists, dinners at Podesta’s house and at other places throughout the campaign year. These are for coordination. You might say, “Well, Rush, that’s understandable. I mean, you worked for a sports team. Didn’t they court the media?” Yeah, but you didn’t host dinner at your house for ’em to come over!
You fed them before games and that kind of stuff ’cause everybody has to eat, but you don’t do what they did. This is actual collaboration. Sixty-five reporters. You know the names. You know the pictures if you would see them. Maggie Haberman, Politico, is one. She’s now at the New York Times. Stephanopoulos is another. In fact, “Specifically named as a suggested journalist plant is Maggie Haberman of Politico, whom they note will assist in doing ‘the most shaping’ of the narrative they have in mind.”
Here’s an internal memo within the Clinton campaign, and it’s called, “Placing a Story — As we discussed on our call, we are all in agreement that the time is right, place a story with a friendly journalist in the coming days that positions us a little more transparently while achieving the above goals.” They’re listed in a different section. “For something like this, especially in the absence of us teasing things out to others, we feel it’s important to go with what’s safe and what’s worked in the past, and to a publication that will reach industry people for recruitment purposes.”
So they admit here that they choose journalists who are read by other journalists, who will then spread narratives within journalism, and that’s how they get everybody on the same page, with the same phraseology and the same take on everything. “We have a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year. We’ve had here tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed. While we should have a larger conversation in the future about a broad strategy for reengaging the beat press that covers [Hillary], for this we think that we can achieve our objective and do the most shaping by going to Maggie.”
And she’s just one of 65.
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/d... [rushlimbaugh.com]
The biggest reason people do not trust the media is how they acted in coordination to cover up the events surrounding the surveillance and investigation of President Trump. https://directorblue.blogspot.... [blogspot.com]
Tru
Mainstream Media Is Upset (Score:2)
It doesn't matter. (Score:2)
No matter what the quality of information available, people simple can't be trusted to make good judgments based on it. The sources might suck but the people hearing it suck harder. As soon as the information available becomes diverse, people retreat to their corners and build their porcupine defense. If the Starr of anything is even slightly nuanced, people will cling to the exception, however minuscule. And if it's truly in agreement with itself, people will deny the source.
That's why the idea that you ca
I don't trust 'influencers' ... (Score:2)
... and neither should you. They're all paid to lie and sell you misinformation.
Stating opinions is not news/journalism (Score:2)
So that is how democracy dies⦠(Score:2)
â¦with ridiculous dances, low attention spans and entertainment ranking higher than well researched, hard hitting journalism.
The corpo and regime overlords the world over will be delighted, no more investigative journalists annoying them - just sponsor the most important dancing morons to influence the masses.
Re: (Score:1)
why shouldn't they? (Score:2)
Why shouldn't pundits replace traditional media sources, since traditional sources long ago set aside any mantle of objectivity anyway?
Per the chief editor of the NYT, June 2020 in an interview on mpr: Trump was such a threat to democracy, classical journalistic objectivity needed to be "set aside".
Fox cross programs "entertainment" programs with "news" programs, claiming they're distinct but conveniently confusing grandpa between the two.
Well fuck you fox for your deliberate deception.
And fuck you NYT. Yo
already happened (Score:2)
For a lot of people this already happened. There so many people who use social media as a primary information source... This is bad, as social media is full of disinformation and manipulation, but is also understandable, considering how superficial, corrupt and lying traditional media is.
Re: (Score:2)
fucking finally.