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Does Personalized News Lead To Ignorance?
blackbearnh writes "As newspapers struggle to survive and local broadcasts try to find a way to compete with cable news, more and more news outlets are banking on what people want to hear about, rather than what they need to hear. Thoughtful analysis of problems is being pushed out of the way to make room for more celebrity gossip. Electronic news guru Chris Lee thinks that as people get news increasingly tailored to their tastes, the overall knowledge of important issues is plummeting. 'I think one of the observations about how consumers are behaving in the past five years that has surprised me the most is, again, this lack of feeling responsible for knowing the news of their country and their local government of that day. I don't think it's just a technology question. I think if you asked people now versus the same age group 20 years ago, I think they'd be stunningly less informed now about boring news, and tremendously more knowledgeable about bits of news that really interest them.'"
Boring news is called boring because it is indeed boring. If people were interested in boring news then it wouldn't be boring, it would be interesting. Technically anything that is newsworthy shouldn't be boring, because it would be interesting to someone.
Ok now I'm boring myself with this.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer". Telling the people only what they want to hear is just as bad (if not worse) than only telling them the news YOU want them to hear... If I was planning on becoming a repressive regime leader, ruling my country with an iron fist... I would start by telling all of the people all the "news" they wanted to hear.... In-Depth reviews of the latest "Mycountryian Idol", all the sports news they wanted, how wonderful the newest movie blockbuster is (and who the stars are sleeping with!)
Then the populace would be too busy thinking about those silly topics to even notice or care that I had just imposed mandatory impalement sentences for jaywalkers.
I get my daily news of internet meme at 4chan.
I try to use opposing viewpoints to extract a fair and balanced view of current events. Haaretz/AlJazeera/BBC/VOA... curiously, FOX doesn't actually fit in with this approach.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
So if I substituted my news sources with, say, the Washington Post, would I be better informed about Darfur? A suppressed report on Ivory Coast toxic waste dumping? Policy laundering during the ACTA negotiations? Iranian protests? SCO v. IBM? Homeopathy? Anything involving science?
My ears are deaf to these arguments as long as the mainstream press continues to do such a terrible job of keeping the public informed.
I think I'll make another donation to Wikileaks
http://outcampaign.org/
...Maybe presstv.ir; They're pretty fucking far out there.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
So you're complaining about all the other media tailoring news to fit your silly beliefs except for Fox? Spare me.
I think you prove the point that people only hear what they want. MSNBC is just as biased as Fox News. CNN is trying to stay in the middle, but they are getting the same pressures to target an audience. The most popular cable news shows draw 1-3 million people daily (1% of the US population), they don't have an incentive to be balanced and general. I suspect newspapers, online and paper, magazines, etc. all have the same issues. DON'T piss off the target audience.
I particularly enjoyed how they ripped apart so many aspects of 'news' over the past years and coming years. From "Do bikinis cause cancer? More at 11" to automated journalism. But then somehow claim that the newsreader is ignorant for seeking news that is personalized to him or her. Maybe, just maybe, if a wide reaching non-specific news source treated their readers with respect, produced quality and engaged in more investigative journalism than "look at this picture" or "Ten worst/best" lists then we would all be reading it.
Until then, I guarantee you that people will prefer to seek specialized news sources because the editors and writers for that source are often experts and their biases are often exactly what we want. Just look at the blogs of Michael Geist and Bruce Schneier, way more preferable than any big name news site's 'computer security' division.
My work here is dung.
Still smarting over Air America.. huh? :)
Camping on quad since 1996.
People discuss the controversial news on sites with other people who agree with them. And they get depth of knowledge about "their side" and get attacks, misrepresentations, and lies about "the other side". Then they often "forget" which was news, facts, or opinions and treat most of what they read on a biased site as true. It would often be better if they were ignorant on the subject.
This coming from the same mainstream media that usually just regurgitates whatever the police and prosecutors allege in a criminal report? Case in point, what happened to Ryan Frederick. Absolutely questionable and "juicy" from the beginning. At the very least, the papers should have made a scandal about why the police would be so moronic as to raid a small-time pot user 3 nights after a man with a vendetta against him burgled his home. If that isn't a public interest scandal right up there with "sex offenders are in your neighborhood," then I don't know what is because when the news poured out about what really went down, it made a lot of his community deeply uncomfortable about what the police would do to "protect them" (BTW, it gets worse, like the police using men who are active burglars to get them evidence).
Excuse me, but if Google or someone can create an active intelligent search agent which will build me a comprehensive list of public corruption news, political news, civil liberties issues, etc., then I'll be a hell of a lot more informed and less "ignorant" than I would be if I had to read a paper or magazine that caters more toward the assumption that the only thing people want to read about is celebrity news and what pretty white girl got killed after hooking up with 3 strange men in a foreign country.
Personally I'm not just bored by regular news, I also often find it depressing. All I follow is technology news, because that's what I find interesting and what I want to occupy most of my time.
News is mostly entertainment anyway; you will hear about the *really* important stuff from friends or relatives.
I would say the issue is we are force fed more and more mindless drivel the reporters are interested in and less news we need. The result is we go elsewhere and they increase the drivel level. Newspaper stories have shrunk into the same soundbites as the TV so why both to read them.
Mod parent UP. You've hit the nail on the head.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Repeat with me... Corporations and Governments losing power to people is gooooooood.
Exactly. Todays youth have a much more balanced and informed opinion than any other time in history - now that the hierarchical control of information flow is breaking down. The ability to balance out corporate/government-MIC propaganda that has dominated News and print media almost since its inception with alternative points of view is a very good thing. From "New Media"
it has been the contention of scholars such as Douglas Kellner, Callum Rymer and James Bohman that new media, and particularly the Internet, provide the potential for a democratic postmodern public sphere, in which citizens can participate in well informed, non-hierarchical debate pertaining to their social structures. Contradicting these positive appraisals of the potential social impacts of new media are scholars such as Ed Herman and Robert McChesney who have suggested that the transition to new media has seen a handful of powerful transnational telecommunications corporations who achieve a level of global influence which was hitherto unimaginable.
It will affect social interaction in some way or the other, since you cannot be sure people heard something just in was in your news. This will lead to coordination problems due to the lack of common knowledge. (There is a nice book about culture, coordination, and common knowledge Michael Suk-Young Chwe.)
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
If you're a right-winger, then yes, you will consider Obama a leftist. If you're a leftist (not a Democrat, those guys are center-right at best), no, Obama is not a leftist.
In the end though, it doesn't matter, both "rightists" and "leftists" are in the pocket of the same corporations and will essentially pass the same corporation friendly and regular people hostile laws.
In the US at least, knowing a lot about ANYTHING makes you a nerd, a social outcast, the non-cool guy. Ask a coworker how their boiler works, or how to change their oil. Ask them how to chainsaw a tree. Ask them how to wire a switch, or pull a shot of espresso. Most will look at you like you showed them dirty pictures - "What? Me? Do actual labor?" Combine this with the steady erosion of the effects of causality (helicopter parents, welfare system), combined with the death of Civics as a school subject, and you have population of effete, spoiled sheep, ready to accept whatever shackles are imposed, in order that they be safe and comfortable.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
People who choose to be ignorant are the same as they've alwas been. The big difference today is that more claim to be informed because the gossip is now labeled news.
It is easier than ever to find out about world events and local happenings. Add that there is fast access to historical information on any topic and there is no excuse not to be an informed person. A bigger problem is filtering out the relevant from the banal which is what the pros are supposed to be paid to do yet they seem to be failing and probably for the same reason as the rest of us.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
More and more people are starting to view news as little more than propaganda. They dont use that word of course, but people are sick of being constantly manipulated by subtly twisted information and they are starting to react to that by tuning out.
Well slashdot is fairly personalized. You can make your own opinion about our collective ignorance.
Politicians are like little children and are arguing and pestering eachother through the media and there's indeed the tendency to serve more news which seem to draw in more people, align with their soap-series, or magazine style "sex-facts", upskirts and what have you.
I've disconnected from "tv" because of that purpose, but now the crap is entering into my online experience and I choose to ignore it; for one it causes less frustration when "yet another important sounding headline" preaches nonsense. Or there's yet someone pushing some FUD through articles...
Important news will reach me one way or another, but I don't care about 90% in "news" these days and wont waste time being "in the loop" constantly... I would if the quality would be much much better.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
I don't think it's just a matter of liking the flexibility, customization, individuality, etc. We live in a world where we're barraged with news sources; there's far more than any one person could keep up with, even if they spent most of their time worrying about it. People are overwhelmed, so they throw up their hands and stick to their little corner. It's a distinctly modern phenomenon.
Boring people choose electronic media that complete their central core of boringness and others choose portals like -- well, you know.
I feel that I am _far_ more knowledgeable about current events using portals like buzzflash, crooksandliars and /. than I would be dodging the ads and cherry pie recipes in a morning newspaper. Who are we kidding to think the editorial board of your "local" newspaper isn't in bed with power?
Checking out my Google Reader account leaves me a bit shocked.
~300-400 articles per day, and only about 30 of those (from Reuters and BBC) are actual news. The rest is gadgets, software and other tech stuff.
Oh well, other people waste their time with Twitter, Facebook and the like.
I read what is important for *me*, thank you.
Does reading Slashdot lead to ignorance? Nothing about the State of The Union here! Just news for nerds. If that is ignorance, give me a steaming platter!
... comes responsibility. of people using it, to use it as best they know, and people creating, legislating, and distributing it. i'm actually an isp and content provider in one, running a cyber cafe. want to help publish educational content for people here? no, it's not terribly profitable, games are more profitable, so we'll have to work for very little money, or publish stupid content, games and facebook, beer and porn and silly entertainment that sells, and have more users. that's how the money distribution system works, like it or not, people are rewarded for creating stupid content or punished financially for creating smart content. complaining about it has been done plenty, and changed nothing, so waste your time complaining if you want, and get nothing done. if you want something done, do it. organize some people to research or create better work compensation and recognition mechanisms, and then maybe we will stop having poor repairmen and teachers, and rich sportspeople and prostitutes and corrupt politicians.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Example: slashdot.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I disagree with you. I think giving people the news they want is the only way this has worked. Because who else is there in the equation to please with the news? You have the newsmakers, the government and the newsreaders. And only the last one makes sense.
... even breaking the possibility in advance before the law is passed ... will generate higher ratings than their competitor.
Allow me to point out what is wrong with your simplified explanation. Sure, news has relied on "Mycountryian Idol" and movie reviews on slow news days or even on a site where they can present a dearth of information. However, once the jaywalking impalement law is passed, some people are going to experience a loved one being impaled for jaywalking. Now what do people want to hear news about? TV or the impalement of citizens for jaywalking? The reporters understand this and know that breaking this now
This sort of capitalistic scheme for news is not without faults but your example is down right disingenuous. A single news source breaking the story of someone passing laws to impale jaywalkers would bring down their site as people rushed to read more about where and how this is happening. Despite the lack of bad things happening resulting in crap news on TV and in print, you must understand that people (at least Americans) still are very concerned with themselves and their well being above anything or anybody else.
My work here is dung.
Those are not even the tip of the iceberg; I follow at least three dozen or so sites. The point is to even out the bias: some of the most biased ones are actually painful to read. BTW AlJazeera covers world news fairly well, not quite BBC, but as good as Reuters IMO.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
False, Al-Jazeera (at least the English version) gives coverage to international news. And even in the Arabic version of the website I see news related to Toyota in the US, to Obama and to UK sports.
Dilbert RSS feed
Thank you for so eloquently proving my point.
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Sorry, I know is a requirement to bash Fox here, but honestly I don't see the level of hostility in any Fox commentator I see from Olberman. Let alone the absolute in the pocket attitude of Mathews who crosses over to condescending in his praise for our President.
I use Google News and Drudge for my kickoff sources. Why? Because both present headlines I know I will want to read with a little fluff somewhere else. Google because they tend to list a lot of sources which they have done much better with covering the political spectrum lately. Drudge because too many times it is the truth more than the sensation.
Still, the number of head nodding latte sipping Fox bash bunnies that infest /. is distressing but typical of a techy site where people are more willing to boast and vent than do anything. In other words, perfect little drones to the government.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Having the news more and more "personalized" to what the consumer wants, not what the consumer needs, is essentially like inbreeding for the brain. The outcome is not going to be pleasing in the end.
It's sad that the average attention span is so short these days that many people are only interested in things interesting *to them*. Uninteresting or boring things, which may themselves be very important to society as a whole, do not even show up on the radar because they are not interesting *to them*.
Nope. They never had a chance anyway, as their audience doesn't need to be told what to think.
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Really, as soon as we got more than one TV channel with the news on it, we had the option of picking and choosing the news that causes us the least discomfort and appeals to our personal biases. The internet has of course taken this to the extreme, now we have news and information sites tailor-made to appeal to the cognitive biases of whatever demograph you fit into. You can spend your entire life on the internet as a young-earth creationist and never challenge your beliefs once. The problem of course is human nature. If you are a conspiracy theorist there is plenty of media available depending on your political spectrum, from the Obama Deception to Zeitgeist. Both examples take advantage of the ability our human brains have for associating things that may have no relation to each other at all. All you have to do is take little snippets of media, string them together into some kind of narrative complete with Scary Music (tm) and you can make up any kind of "facts" you want. I've actually heard some people on the net defend the absurdity that is Zeitgeist by claiming it is anti-propaganda, as if there is some kind of information war going on and we must fight 'bad' information with 'good' information. Nowadays I frequently run into people who believe in 2012, and they provide me with tons of videos full of 'proof' of their conjecture. I run into people who believe that Obama is not an American citizen, they likewise have tons of 'proof'. This is just the beginning of a phenomenon made possible by information customized to appeal to cognitive bias. The article above is really just the tip of the iceberg.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
The obvious problem with your approach is sometimes people on both extremes of an argument pull their "facts" out of their ass.
The reason Fox is even less useful than most extreme information sources is that it has relatively less information. You can watch it for five minutes and figure out what the message of the day is. The only reason to watch it longer is to have it drilled into your worldview more firmly.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I really have to wonder what metric they use for deciding whether or not news is important. I stubbed my toe today, is that important?
The president of Monaco (.7 square miles) tried to push his/her agenda onto Canada, is that important?
Man, your education is showing. There is no president of Monaco. I know that little detail is unimportant to the argument at hand, but come *the fucking* on!
Anyways, taking your comic hypothetical scenario, it could be, depending on the agenda, which might affect, I dunno, banking or investors who own assets in your country, or what not. If you are in the habit of taking news superficially, in particular international news, with nothing more than country size, population or distance from your TiVo and super-sized McDonalds combo, of course you will be tempted to ask such a silly question (who decides what's important).
But that's a function of you, not the news. The importance of a piece of news is not a function of your perception, or anyone. It is important or it is not.
You can't measure the importance of news by their (apparent) immediate impact on your life or your impression of how important and impervious your country is to external events originating from a seemingly unimportant (and perhaps backward-looking) place in the world... like Afghanistan in 1991.
Remember that time, when no one gave a shit, when many retarded animals used to say Afgha-what-how-the-fuck-you-call that shit? That "Arab (or whatever)" place where people where towels on their heads and ride camels. Whatever, I'm so like whatever! Why should I care? Fucking SuperBowl, that's important, lemme watch Chuck Norris kick some ass, we are awesome!!!!. Remember that time?
Turn the clock to 1994 for another example... being aware of the Rwandan Genocide over following the O.J. Simpson shitfest would seem to have been a very important news to watch and be aware off, even for someone living in a little cow town in the middle of nowhere. Not because it might have a direct impact, but at least showing you have something resembling a moral compass.
But that's just me... plus the media is incredibly guilty at that:
http://www.journalismethics.ca/interviews/media_failure_in_Rwanda.htm
All in all, a piece of news does not have to have an immediate, tangible and direct impact in your life, your town or your country. Gross violation of human rights, international news, science news, global and regional politics, global/regional/even local historic events, those are important news. The mark of the uneducated is that he will find those boring and "non-important" compare to watching "American Idol", some dude dancing on his head on MTV or "Real Shallow Stupid Whores of Orange County."
The idea that you need to have someone decide which news are important or not is stupid. There are important news, and there are non-important news.
The perception of their importance is a function of the audience's intelligence, education, and to a degree, their moral ability to give a shit about things. Important news are important news, independently of whether people can understand their importance.
One trouble is that news sources are no longer monolithic, and therefore folks don't know how to quantify objectivity and quality. Name any news source, and you're likely to find some sort of bent, depending upon who you are and where you come from... It has been noted that Slashdot is a specialized/personal technical news source (for geeks!). It is a great place to get a smattering of all sorts of news going on out there, but if one considers the sorts of stories as being objective, well, they'd have to be daft. Slashdot is full of opinion pieces, entertainment pieces, news rumors, leaks and actual news stories, and then there's the political leanings of this place, and the way the stories are summarized, and the tendency to favor certain software rights models... etc... I guess the question arises, exactly who decides what is a decent news source? Is it based upon popularity? Is there some sort of objectivity sensor that I'm unaware of? And what criteria would that broader, less specialized news content be based upon? Locality? Topicality? Banality? Frivolity? There will always be an expectation for a more objective newssource, and more than enough nonobjective news sources claiming they're filling that gap, but as the audience and news provider communicate, the profit model and the desire to please one another for profit corrupts the whole.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
My ears are deaf to these arguments as long as the mainstream press continues to do such a terrible job of keeping the public informed.
That's the entire point.
The mainstream press is delivering what people want to see, rather than what they need to see. Namely, lots of celebrity gossip and very little of substance.
People like fluffy stories... They like to hear about who is sleeping with who... They're interested in shiny bits of tinsel and sparkly rocks...
Businesses, including those who print newspapers, like money.
So the businesses print stories that appeal to people, so the people will buy their newspapers, and the businesses will make money.
And the depressing, complicated, truly important stories that people don't really want to read about... But really should... Get dropped in favor of popular fluff.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
What people don't understand about "Fox" news is that they're just bad at spelling. It's really "Faux News. Far unbalanced."
Free Martian Whores!
Good God, folks, he graded out as the most leftist Senator, by far.
Why the hell is anyone surprised that he's governed from the hard left?
As a republican who voted for McCain, I gotta tell you, stop that stupid shit. Who graded him out, creationists? I don't like some of his policies (fuck I didn't even voted for him), but he's far from being a leftist.
In fact, you have no idea of what a "hard left" is. People like you whorify what it means to be to left or to the right, to the point that those labels become meaningless. They become more and more like elementary school taunting name tagging than actual classifications of ideology and policy. I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.
Yes and no. Everyone tends to have some sort of slant, but how much they choose to reign in that slant and the extent and kind of the slant actually expressed varies. As far as news goes, I'd say things like the BBC and the Newshour on PBS both do rather good jobs of covering the news, although both express clearly British-centric and American-centric slants. Given your latter point, I think it holds true. I'm more interested, in general, to hear about American interests than, say, the local news of Mumbai, India.
Actually, the interesting part about Fox News is it spends much more time focusing on sex stories than other news. This, of course, doesn't excuse CNN/MSNBC which seem to have a faux celebrity fixation. Overall, though, no news should be slobbering over any politician or critiquing policy. It's the job of news to, you know, report news. The real issue, then, is Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC aren't news networks (just MTV isn't music television); they're 10% or less news and 90% opinion or other fluff. The real answer to that, of course, is to stop watching Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC outright.
Granted. You should watch "Worldfocus" on PBS (or visit worldfocus.org) to see some strong non-America bias (note, I didn't say anti-America bias). It might give you some more perspective on where bias really lies in many news shows. There's also, of course, Iranian news to watch. If you're one of the people who watch Fox News precisely because you know where their biases lie, you'd probably love Iranian news.
So, are you more interested in oneupmanship and glory or actual discourse? Modding can be useful to filter needless cruft. But trying to "pwn" people and get a medal for it really seems pointless; if you have enough of an ego to believe you're right on an unprovable subject, why do you feel a need for validation?
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Face it: Every news outlet filters and edits, so what you see or hear is at the very least a subset of the reported item. Even if a news outlet just regurgitates a syndicated column or wire report, someone did the original filtering and editing.
Every journalist spin a story a different way. Whether to sensationalize it, make it fit a more conservative or liberal viewpoint, or even just to make a printed story fit into a certain column length or a video fit into a certain time segment. We never hear the whole story from a single news outlet.
What I want is an aggregation of viewpoints. For a given issue, I want to read the just-the-facts story, the liberal newspaper's story, and the version that appeared in Hey, I'm a Wacko, Too monthly. Ideally, some magical technology will gather all those different versions and sift the contents, remove the duplicated stuff (even opinions!), then present me with a single chunk of news to digest. Properly annotated, of course, so I know which news outlet reported what. Even Fox News' stuff could be included, for hilarity if nothing else.
To be truly informed about the "important issue" I would need to see all the angles. I can do what I described above myself, manually, but it takes so much time that I usually don't bother unless the issue is truly important to me. So yes, I want my "personalized news" and I think it would better than what I see now.
Sounds like your just angry and pick out Fox because Fox News is the undisputed leader in news today, and is smoking all these lefty, old-guard stations. They're the only ones who don't slobber over Obama every day.
I think there are lots of people that would dispute that. A lot of people. Fox News may have a huge viewership, but even many of those viewers understand that Fox News is as much Political Entertainment as News. I love watching Fox News to see conservatives drooling over democrat misteps and competing with each other in an apparent "who loves our country and hates terrorists more" contest. I don't see them as a top news source, but I do see stories reported there that I would not expect to see on MSNBC (and vice versa).
I like your point about networks having specific slant. Fox has an intriguing blend of actual news and punditry; as much as they like to claim they are "fair and balanced", careful observation of their content indicates otherwise (/Captain Obvious). Fox seems very comfortable blurring the line, and their personalities are very good at it. The difference between Fox and others is the obviousness of their political leanings. Fox is very, very blunt about where their support lies. Some organizations are more subtle, but that slant still exists.
"But Corporations and Governments is people!"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Strangely enough, presstv.ir has a FOX related article at the top of their front page right now. I especially enjoy their comments section, they cater to the Persian version of the same demographic of ignorant haters, and so far, none of my comments have espoused enough hate or ignorance to make it past their moderators.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I don't like sports, I don't like gossip, I don't like "faits divers", I don't like political squabbling. I don't care for most mainstream media "news".
Thus I'm ignorant because I don't care about this crap? So be it.
I need the time for the stuff I like and care about. For instance science, technology, entertainment, computing, bikes, etc. And all the stuff mainstream media usually don't report due to their political allegiance and political correctness. I'll leave to the "gurus" like the one who pontified about this the job to know all the mainstream media junk if that's so important for them.
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
...you can make that argument for other things, not just current events. Once you start limiting people's exposure to things outside of their interest, it closes their mind off. Ask your average World of Warcraft addict about anything other than World of Warcraft, and they'll say they have a guild meeting to go to or that you're interrupting their grinding. I'm a technology nut, but even I know when to get off the computer and keep an eye on what's going on around me.
The problem is that feeding someone a steady diet of personalized content means that eventually they stop seeing other points of view. For example, I'm a left-leaning person, but I occasionally listen to the conservative talking heads screaming about what's going on. It may be comic relief for me, but at least I'm informed. Anyone who isn't becomes more and more entrenched in their belief system. Your average conservative hears nothing but Fox News, the conservative talk show crowd and the Tea Party Movement people, and refuses to believe that anyone else has a better idea. It's the same kind of groupthink that goes on in poorly-managed companies. I may think the conservative side of the house has things totally backwards, as I'm sure they think I do. But, I have both sides...once you start homing in on people's interests, their interests become narrower because of the lack of exposure.
Once you strip out the sensationalism, you frequently find that there is a basis from a story which is not in mainstream media. Sources are scarce, of course, but once you have a basic grasp of the issue you can usually find some blogs or local news which covers the issues being discussed.
IMHO, the biggest issue is people are too used to having opinions spoon-fed to them through the idiot box, and have forgotten where the good sources of reliable information are.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I realize now and then that I'm doing that.. reading only tech sites and the like. I'll try and hit a more general news site like CNN or the BBC and try and see what else is going on in the world, even if I'm not all that interested just so people don't say 'Oh hey, that's terrible about Haiti' and I turn around to say 'What? What's going on?'. It's easier with print media since the 'important' things are right there on the front page, but when you tailor your news sites around one or two topics, you can't help but miss other important events in the world.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
So if there's a car crash near where I live, that (could) affect me and is therefore newsworthy. If a car crashed in a town 50 miles away, that's no longer news and I don't want to hear about it. (Presuming I'm not one of the sick puppies who gets off on gory pictures and other people's suffering). Likewise if the government is going to increase my tax burden: that's news, but on a bigger and more abstract scale.
If there's a natural disaster in a faraway place, is that news? Well, it almost certainly doesn't affect me so no. However, it is worthy of reporting (but not reveling in) as part of a duty to inform about events that shape or change the world we live in.
However, there's also current affairs: providing background information about WHY things happen, WHY decisions (that will affect me) are made, or what risks I could be exposed to in the future - including information about options or duties I may have as a result. Climate change (or the debate about it) comes into this category. It's not news per. se. but it is something worthy of informing "the public" about.
The problem is (as the OP says) we're barraged by "news" from all over the place - most of which is distributed because the source is cheap / easy or spectacular, rather than because of it's importance. Almost all of this is inconsequential and is a very good reason for filtering it out. If we don't than the stuff that matters to each one of us, individually gets lost and we become desensitised by all the bad things that are being reported, so when something significant happens that does or should affect us, we fail to appreciate what it means. That's why news should be tailored for the individual
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Lately, Haiti has been in the news, and for good reason. The problem I have is that I think Haiti is over-reported. Every major news site pounces on the same bit of news I've already read elsewhere, and they are of course dropping other news I might be a bit more interested in. When every news outlet everywhere ALL decide I "need to know" news X, that's a personal affront.
And more importantly, someone is deciding what it is I "DON'T need to know". That's even worse, because if they choose not to publish it, I can't make the choice for myself. But that's the beauty of "citizen journalism" -- that coverage is unfiltered and raw, and I can get to it before some editor decides to drop it unto the floor. Case in point: The G20 summit in Pittsburgh and how the police there attacked the University of Pittsburgh students. There were lots of videos uploaded to YouTube about what was really happening in the streets -- a lot that I never saw on the major news outlets like CNN and FOX. Students that had nothing to do with the protests were being gassed, tasered, and chased around their own campus. You'd think that should've gotten a lot of attention by the news as something we need to know. Nope.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
The mainstream press is delivering what people want to see, rather than what they need to see. Namely, lots of celebrity gossip and very little of substance.
^^^This, plus a bit of "opinion as news" thrown in as well.
The fact that people take folks like Beck and Olbermann seriously is frightening. Even more frightening is when someone's ideas or responses in a political discussion all come from a single news source.
I can accept people willingly living as sheep (hell, I certainly do), but people should at least form their own opinions. Sheesh.
Living With a Nerd
I have to agree.
It was happening even before personalized news. If you are into X, you tend to make friends and surround yourself with people who are into X. You read books by people into X about X. You to conventions for X. Now, just add reading web sites, email lists and personalized news for X. The news will increasingly become done by non-journalists on top of that.
60 years ago most people did not even own a television, let alone even know about the existence of the internet. Many had a newspaper and perhaps a radio. Neither of which offered the volume of content available to individuals today.
I think the OP missed the point. It's not the availability of news that is the problem, nor is it the filtering to tastes, it's a combination of apathy, time, and format.
Voters just do not feel connected to their government anymore, and many politicians have a hard time connecting with voters. Reporters have a 30 second spot on which to discuss a topic - plenty of time I'm sure to explore anything complex. The Internet offers the ability to more closely follow a given subject, but time pushes back as to what extent the individual can digest information in volume.
What you see now are a bunch of semi-informed folks jumping from one site to another, posting witty comments based on their narrow view of a subject, without ever really appreciating the depth/breadth of the subject.
I would attribute this in part to the culture shift underway in our society, where discussion among individuals has been relegated to trite comments on /. and bulletin boards, as opposed to attending meetings and engaging in real dialogue with other individuals in a face to face fashion. People are not invested in the dialogue, therefore their knowledge suffers as does the content of the conversation.
Something is being lost when we are not held accountable for our words, and not expecting our words to count. Have you ever watched a politician attend / speak at a town hall meeting? They struggle through with their sound bites, because the format forces a more thorough dialogue of the subject matter.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
It's funny you mention science and the Washington Post. They recently revamped their weekly science/health section, and in all honesty, it's really great stuff now. There is a wide range of well-reported articles; I don't recall ever seeing anything like it in a newspaper before.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
Most of the newcasters broadcasting the news and deciding its content are only slightly less stupid than the general populace (when I was in the news businesses, there was a surpising dearth of History and Physics Ph.D.'s floatng around the office, making the decisions). So would their decisions about what constitutes "important news" really be so much better than Joe-Sixpack determining for himself what's important and what isn't?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The reason people are less informed, IMO, is not because there's not enough news out there, it's that there are far too many.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there should be less. However, the pervasiveness of "news sites" and aggregators means that people can make sure that the news they are exposed to is stuff they know they will likely agree with, and furthermore, omits any details that might make that news less positive or shed any negative light at all on the causes and groups they favor. People can ensure, today, that they are only going to receive the kinds of news they want to hear and that reinforces their already-held beliefs.
My mother would keep Fox News on every television in the house so when walking from one room to another, she wouldn't miss a thing. She'd turn it off only to listen to Rush or the like on the radio, and she got her online news and opinions from Fox, Townhall, etc. This meant that everything she was exposed to not only was something she was likely to agree with, but it reinforced her beliefs, leading to her implicitly trusting everything they said - even if it was demonstrably untrue.
My aunt is the opposite, reading DailyKos daily and Rachel Maddow. It doesn't matter whether it's the left or the right - what matters is that with so many news sources today, you can make sure that the news you see, read, and hear, is news that the source knows you'll agree with, and they can take advantage of that.
A great example is getting on the Metro to go to work this morning, I was handed both the Express (slanted left) and the Examiner (slanted right). The Express cover story was on the State of the Union address. The Examiner cover headline was "GOP Governor Challenges Obama on National TV", with a big picture of said governor, and you'd never even know that the reason was the State of the Union address and they were highlighting primarily the Republican response.
The problem with this is that it leads to severe polarization - my mother trusted Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to the point that even when it could be proved beyond all doubt that something they said was 100% false (or even contradictory), it instead led to her shouting at the person because she agrees with so much of what they said on other topics that they can't possibly be wrong. The fact that almost anything positive done by the "other side" would be ignored, never reported on, twisted into having "her side" take credit for it, or the like.
If someone dislikes gay people, they can be sure to find a news organization that will only post negative stories, ignoring all else, even if a gay person cured cancer or saved a thousand children from a fire. And they go on happy that their opinion is being reinforced because hey, look at all these nasty people, and don't have to feel uncomfortable by being exposed to stories that potentially might challenge that worldview. If they dislike organized religion, there's sites out that that will make sure to only point out the negatives thereof.
The polarization this leads to is tearing not just this, but many countries apart, with sides that, day after day, are hearing nothing but awful things being said about the "other side", and nothing but good things said to them about "their own side", daily reinforcement of something they're already predisposed to believe. This ends any possibility of compromise, of discussion, of reasonable governance, because the other side is not just wrong, but evil, and compromise with evil is abhorrent. The left can't just be to the left, they must be Communist and Socialist, and the right can't just be to the right, they are Fascist and Authoritarian. No wonder we can't get anything done.
This was rather explicitly covered in Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age. In the Neo Victorian phyle, the higher social ranking a member has the less personalized their newspaper is due to the thought that there are certain things higher ups need to know and it's best if they were all on the same page.
Then again, the Vickies are also depicted as un-curious and possessing of a stagnant society, so take from that what you will.
I have the same feeling on that point. I even stopped watching tv news 18 months ago as all I had to look at was :
1 - Israel/Palestine
2 - Terrorism/War
3 - Wall Street collapsing
4 - shit I didn't care enough about to keep interested
As usual.
And for most points I had the "news" some time before on a webfeed.
The only advantage of newspaper is that the journalist is conveying an OPINION on what he reports. TV is giving the same slanted view, but no arguments carefuuly constructed, just a "here is what we think you should think about it in 90 seconds"
I now use google news and tailored it according to my points of interest, and I get the luxury of actually ignoring the rest as I DON'T CARE. I also get to make my own opinion.
"A specialist is someone who knows more and more things on less and less subjects"
So I am now a specialist news consumer.
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I thought Soylent Green was people.......
because we feel we have no control over any of it. Why should i follow the health care debate if i don't get to vote on it? Either it will pass or fail without my input. Either i'll be paying for it and benefiting from it, or i won't. Writing my congress critter is as effective as prayer or wishing on a star. The 2000 election reminded us that we NOT in charge because the SCotUS can coronate whomever they please. My vote doesn't count if i happen to be in a populous area or in an area a candidate wants to disenfranchise. i could vote with my wallet but my wallet is a gnat while corporations are like those asian hornets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDSf3Kshq1M
The news is overwhelmingly negative and spinning like a top. It just makes me sad to hear people lie and how bad other people's lives are and how badly we treat each other.
Best source for news imho: Fark.com
BBC's horrific writing made me stop trying to follow it via RSS, he said.
--
Do question headlines annoy people?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I like Slashdot as a geek news source because of the unfiltered comments (I run at -1 and I like it). The summaries (of dubious accuracy) and the comments give you an unbiased feel for public sentiment on a subject. Sometimes I read TFA, sometimes not. Either way, I'm more informed about a topic even if I just read the comments and the slant comes from both sides. Were there a similar site for "real" news, I'd probably use it as my main source; unfortunately, the Internet has bred so many Trolls and Spammers that any general news site with a similar comment system would attract way more of those types than Slashdot ever will. So, for now, I'll just scan headlines and summaries at various "real" news sites and read the few articles of relevance to me.
I think the opposite is true: people who are using the internet as their main source of information are entrenching their views, not challenging them, and personalization is certainly playing a large role in that. I remember a graph I saw a while ago (would need to try find it again) which showed the political leanings of blogs in the US, and their breakdown according to left, right, or balanced (in the middle). The vast majority were at the two extremes, hardly anyone in the middle, and I would also suspect that an analysis of the links between them would show interlinking between left and right is nowhere near as strong as those linking amongst themselves.
The irony for me is that we have at our fingertips such an incredible range of information, but at the same time, we restrict ourselves to the information we're most comfortable with.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
In the case of Ryan Frederick, when the public caught wind of what went down, the public outrage was so high that the prosecution desperately tried to move the trial to another region of Virginia because the public was so incensed that they seriously feared that they would get a nullification.
The media is brilliant at manufacturing controversy in cases like Natallee Holloway. Now, if only they'd turn that power to good instead of evil, they'd be able to do a two-fer: a public service and bring in the viewers/readers. In any given community, there's always something rotten going on with which they could whip up the public like they do with stories of pretty white girls going missing.
For God's sake, the media in Maryland could have had a field day when the Mayor of Brewyn Heights was thrown to the ground and forced to lay handcuffed, in his boxers, in the blood of his two dead dogs by Prince George County police after they raided his house over a monumentally stupid, obvious drug bust screw up. If that can happen to a mayor, that can happen to any white or asian middle class family.
Just look at America.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I can't watch local news anymore. I'm tired of hearing about the next plaything that might kill my baby or the poison I've been drinking out of my tap for the past 20 years. Every story is designed to get me worried about something new, and I've already got plenty to worry about as it is.
I now use google news and tailored it according to my points of interest, and I get the luxury of actually ignoring the rest as I DON'T CARE. I also get to make my own opinion.
I think this answers the question with a solid "YES!" By putting blinders on you at best lose any concept of the broad effect that some events have on the rest of the world (even influencing those news events you may care about). At worst, you're missing out on half the argument because you don't care to acknowledge anything other than what you care to see.
"A specialist is someone who knows more and more things on less and less subjects" So I am now a specialist news consumer.
No, you're quite possibly an idiot, because if you're only reading opinions that you care to read, you're only getting a partial story. That's not an expert, that's someone who thinks they know a lot more than they do. Pull your head out of the sand.
I remember reading a study about this, about people only paying attention to the news that interested them, and completely ignoring events they don't care about.
Thing is, I read it when I was in college.
In 1980.
I don't think you can blame this one on the Internet.
Is it news companies job to keep you informed or is it your job to seek news sources that are informative? Put the blame where it is due and quite whining about how they don't inform you.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
Generally speaking, News in America is not really a product or a service and consumers of news are not really customers. The primary product of the news business is advertising and the real customers are the corporations that purchase that advertising.
The news we get to see is filtered in a big way by the system we've set up. "Keeping the public informed" is almost entirely incidental these days.
There was a time when we thought we could rely on ethics to keep things in check.... how has that worked out for us?
I see this trend also, it is almost like as a society we have turned on the herd mentality full blast. Either you are with us or you are against us. It is a sad day when I find myself listening to NPR of all places to get semi-balanced reports on stuff (even they tend to be slanted on certain issues). At least I know there I will hear stories on large variety of topics and usually with a representative of each side presenting their view of it.
It saddened me a little today when they were doing their report on the response to the State of the Union the positive thing they suggested everyone remembers is that no one booed the president.
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
There's so much information to stuff into one's brain these days..that you pretty much have to be selective.
I think the overabundance is more responsible for this than the tailoring of new input to individual preference.
Interesting list.
I know about most of those issues except Homeopathy.
The thing is that the current news system leads to extreme polarization. You do not just get to see the news subjects that you are interested in you get to see them covered the way that you want them. These days everybody gets to have their view point reinforced.
I feel this leads to extreme intolerance. Every one is so sure they are right that they think that anybody that doesn't agree with them is an idiot.
Republicans think the Democrats are idiots and the Democrats think the Republicans are idiots. I consider myself an extreme moderate...
Some of the news you mentioned you can do nothing to really influence. SCO vs IBM? That is a court case and frankly public opinion should have nothing to do with court cases. The public should be informed so they can protect the process and change unjust laws only.
The Iranian protests where all over the news.
Wikileaks I have to say I am not a fan of. Some of their leaks have the same level of journalistic integrity as the National Enquirer. I feel their publishing of the unedited pager messages from 911 to been a disgusting case of Yellow Journalism.
Had they just published some of the Governmental pages and sanitized some of the personal pages they would have been able to show just how bad the security of pagers really is and accomplished what arguably needed to be done.
I have to say at this time I have seen nothing of real value come out of wikileaks.
That is of course just my opinion.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I think this is troubling, the question we should be asking is why are are people no longer interested in the so-called boring news? This reflects that people are feeling increasingly disconnected from the real world, and becoming more immersed in their own fantasy worlds. After all, why engage with a broken political process? The more I follow politics, the more depressed I get. Who wants to feel depressed? This is great news for the people pulling the strings (elites, corporations). They have indulged escapism for a long time, and they only keep getting better at it. They have sedated the vast majority of the public with American Idol and bikini shots. Hence, there is no outrage, only apathy. Fifty years ago I bet there would be a march on Washington by now, over the health care legislation. But who wants to miss football? I wish people would wake up.
Which toe?
Exactly. Todays youth have access to a much more balanced and informed opinion than any other time in history - now that the hierarchical control of information flow is breaking down. The ability to balance out corporate/government-MIC propaganda that has dominated News and print media almost since its inception with alternative points of view is a very good thing.
There .. fixed that for you.
Many of the young people I know are very polarized because they surround themselves with friends that believe the same thing, and only pay attention to articles that agree with their opinions. There is a young man at work that knows all the quotes for the stuff he believes in, but is surprised when I offer dissenting information and disparages it without knowing the source of the data. He has access to the same Internet information I have, but whatever filters he is using is not presenting it to him.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
"the overall knowledge of important issues is plummeting."
This is true. But, allowing CNN or MSNBC or Fox or even the New York Times do your analysis and filtering won't help. Drilling down to the root causes and drivers impacting the issues you care about most reveals dynamics that are never discussed by media conglomerate news outlets.
Funny, this very discussion was on NPR this morning. The guests were a journalist and a producer and they were talking about the current state of popular "news" networks. The specifically harped on NBC and FOX. These networks are getting great viewership not because they are presenting the news, but because that have celebrities presenting opinions. What you wind up with is the greatest success for capitalism (the networks produce a program that viewers want to watch) but the worst failure for information distribution (as all that is getting repeated is opinion, not fact).
So I'm all for the "get the news you want" angle, so long as it is news we are talking about. News that is factually based and composed by journalist. Not opinion pieces and partisan blowhards repeating the talking points that will help their preferred candidate/downer.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
a graph I saw a while ago... which showed the political leanings of blogs in the US, and their breakdown according to left, right, or balanced (in the middle). The vast majority were at the two extremes, hardly anyone in the middle
The US political scene (in terms of Dem OR Rep choice that Americans can choose between) is an excellent example of framing. When you take these two United states political "extremes" out of the US political frame, you find they are both very far into the Authoritarian Right compared to politics worldwide One ref of many available summed up in a nice graph of the 2008 presidential elections: http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008
Due to the global nature of the internet and the trend towards non hierarchical news sources I would wage that any normal young person growing up with internet news is much more likely to be exposed to this idea/reality at some time, than any previous generation who's only news source was corporate media.
For further information on this theme, see "Too polemical or too critical? - study of the news media and US foreign policy". Ref google scholar.
from the research article:
"While the US news media are adversarial towards the US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite... The institutional tendency to filter out anti-elite perspectives applies not only to the news media but also to academia."
propaganda model: "It explains why the agenda and framing of news reports on US foreign policy rarely deviate from those set by US corporate and political elites. Five filters function to shape news media output, which we label in turn the corporate, advertising, sourcing, flak and ideological filter. First, the ‘size, ownership and profit orientation of mass media’ and their shared ‘common interests with other major corporations, banks, and government’ creates a clash of interest between the media’s supposed role as a watchdog of the elite and the interests of that elite. Consequently news stories that run contrary to those vested interests are, on balance, less likely to surface than those consistent with the world view of major corporate conglomerates. Second, media reliance on advertising revenue introduces a further constraining link between the news media and the interests of commerce. This reliance shapes media output in order to appeal to affluent audiences, in whom the advertisers are most interested. It also limits the amount of critical and controversial programming because advertisers generally want ‘to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the “buying mood”’. Hence, money does not only talk: it also silences. Third, journalists rely overwhelmingly on elite sources when constructing the news. The need to supply a steady and rapid flow of ‘important’ news stories combined with the vast public relations apparatus of government and powerful interests more broadly means that journalists tend to become heavily reliant on public officials and corporate representatives when defining and framing the news agenda. Fourth, whenever controversial material is actually aired it generates a disproportionate degree of ‘flak’ from individuals connected with powerful interests including ‘corporate community sponsored institutions’s such as the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in Media (AIM) and government ‘spin doctors’. Such criticism serves to caution editors and journalists against putting out news stories that
The "death panels" are real. No, seriously!
I hate to have to tell you this, but the government agencies that Sarah Palin referred to as "death panels" were created by the stimulus bill passed in February of 2009. They are panels that are supposed to determine what the most cost effective treatments are for various medical maladies and there is language in the bill to penalize doctors who prescribe treatment other than what those panels have concluded are the most cost effective.
Whether or not it is accurate to call them "death panels" is a matter of opinion, but the argument of conservatives is that, if the government is paying for healthcare, it is only a matter of time until those panels decide that it is not cost effective to keep people with certain health problems alive.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I believe that in most cases, most people don't "read" news (mostly TV in the US) to learn new things, but to confirm their already held prejudices.
Their is a substantial body of psychology that says we discount things opposiste to our beliefs and pay attention to things that confirm our beliefs.
Here is a test: when was the last time facts in the "news' changed a core belief of yours; ie, to pick a controversial topic, how many /dotters have changed their veiws on abortion, or on the desirability of invading Iraq, or if Socialized medicine is a good idea ?
sure, we take in info on things that are peripheral, but on important stuff we don't read the news to learn
www.vercaro.blogspot.com
If a friend hadn't linked me to this story, I would have missed it...
The quality of "serious" journalism has always been terrible and is getting worse. People turn away from this because it is mostly an attempt to actually marginalise them from serious discussion.
Look at it this way, doing serious investigative work into systematic government lies, corporate malfeasance or issues of actual importance to people's lives inevitably pisses off a bunch of very rich and powerful people.
Given the ownership structure of the media these people are quite likely to either directly control your newspaper through ownership, or indirectly through advertising. Pissing them off is very bad for your career.
Therefore serious investigative work and reporting is rarely done. Ninety-Nine percent of the time journalists do little more than echo the words of some "offical" govenment or PR source. And the news media that is supposedly meant to protect us from the powerfull actually ends up being just a mouthpice for them. The thing is, people aren't (quite) as stupid as is commonly assumed, they know that what is presented to them as serious journalism is mostly bullshit. But they are lazy, so rather than work harder, read between the lines and try and find out what's really going on behind the headlines; they tune out the bullshit and end up ignoring the news entirely.
The introduction of entertainment into forms that were formerly reserved for "serious" journalism is an effect of this apathy rather than a primary cause. It's an attempt to win back the viewers that were previously lost. It also has the advantage of continuing to give the appearance of "doing" the news, without the inherent cost and risk associated with serious news gathering.
So, despite the fact that you can basically get news from all over the world through the internet, it's all the fault of the msm that you're ignorant.
Gotcha.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
What is the difference between not receiving the news on your personalized page and not reading it in a newspaper? If you aren't interested, you aren't interested. The same articles that I don't have on my Google page are the same articles I wouldn't read in the newspaper. I get Slashdot, Google News Top Stories and Digital Photography School. I realize I'm not very well informed on current events. If I didn't have a Google page I'd be even less so.
Personalized ignorance leads to news here on Slashdot.
Because I just don't give a damn, basically.
I have a free local newspaper dropped through my door every week. I glance at the front page (usually an advert, or a school promoting itself with a "news" story), I skip to the classified ads / jobs for anything unusual, that's about it unless someone I know will be in the paper. My housemate doesn't even look at it. I really don't care about local news as anything more than a sideline... "Hey, did you read that someone go stabbed in town the other day?" "Oh, really? Another?" (I live in London, if they reported everything like that, it would be even more boring). The rest is filler material and promotional stuff for schools, fetes, etc.
On a country-wide scale, I often skip at least 95% of the "headline" stories entirely. I just don't care enough about politicians or scaremongering. On an international scale, I skip almost everything except for the Science sections (where I pretty much read every story). Why? Because I'm ignorant of the world? Far from it, I'm just tired of reading about it every day and want something more "interesting" and positive (reported news is almost all negative).
If something is "important" (for my definition of important) it sometimes never gets reported (science, medical breakthroughs, etc. are boring, didn't you know? And major world events, e.g. earthquakes, focus on how many British people died in Haiti... I really couldn't give a shit about that particular statistic - how about the actual news of the earthquake itself?). If it does get reported, I find more material that I'm interested in elsewhere than I do wherever I spotted that piece of news (whether that's contradictory reports, or just more details).
Localised news is, for the most part, irrelevant. I work in education in the UK so I often read about anything education-related. Does that make me ignorant because I ignore the front page story about two US celebrities possibly breaking up? Not really. Who cares?
It's all to do with your definitions of: news, important and interesting.
No, you're quite possibly an idiot, because if you're only reading opinions that you care to read, you're only getting a partial story. That's not an expert, that's someone who thinks they know a lot more than they do. Pull your head out of the sand.
Do you browse Slashdot at -1? Or do you only "read opinions that you care to read?" Honest question.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I'm just old enough to remember the Watergate hearings (early teens at the time, just starting to pay attention to politics). I remember the wall-to-wall coverage of them - the hush that fell on the hearing room when Alexander Butterfield told the Ervin commission that he had set up tape recorders to go on automatically in the Oval Office so that every word of Nixon's every discussion was recorded.
So, if that was the coverage of the hearings on a small burglary and wiretapping case, why is nobody watching the vastly more important hearings about a government systematically distorting intelligence to mislead the country into war, demanding Tom Ridge elevate terror alerts when elections were upcoming, giving the OK to warrantless wiretapping, imprisoning Americans without trial, and torturing prisoners?
Oh, yeah. There weren't any hearings.
"News" today, "Leaks" in particular, are just formal and informal press releases, respectively. And the "journalists" do stenography of those releases to maintain their precious "access". The most "Access"-heavy insider of all is former Watergate hero Bob Woodward, who writes hagiographies of pols when they are in power and mild criticism of them when they are falling out of it anyway and the criticism no longer matters.
I'll read anybody who purveys checkable facts that the powerful didn't want them to know.
Mostly, the folk expressing this sentiment don't know each other, and only a couple know me (e.g. friends, friends of friends, strangers to each other).
This isn't merely based on blatant falsehood, it's a very peculiar notion, one that stands out from the daily din. I've seen it raised, independently, three or four times this week. Where did this notion come from? Why do they uniformly cite both of those examples, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina? Coincidence, or did they get this from the same source? Perhaps it's merely because these are the two largest disasters to strike the U.S. in the past ten years, but why cite both, and not merely one, or the other, particularly when one is a man-made "disaster", not really parallel to the hurricane and the earthquake. I wonder if maybe they are parroting the same original source. Did someone like Sarah Palin tweet or MyBookFaceSpace it, as with the "death panels" thing?
Uniformly, these folk have chosen to ignore simple evidence that the claims, that other countries didn't offer assistance to the U.S. after 9/11 nor after Katrina, are false. (In fact, many nations assisted the U.S. following both incidents, offering even the lives of their sons and daughters in the case of those allies fighting in Afghanistan, and serious assistance of various kinds during the International Response to Hurricane Katrina).
This is just one example, but it's a curious one, based not only on ignorance of a few specific facts, which ought to be common knowledge, but apparently on a militant desire to remain ignorant. (Offering the link above leads them to resort immediately to changing the subject, occasionally to what they consider to be my own personal failings, particularly in people I've never met. The sudden and fairly extreme hostility offered up by both acquaintances and strangers when simple evidence is presented reminded me of the term "splitting.)
I wonder if the insulating bubble effect of modern segmented news and opinion delivery is building a society which is incapable of or at least resistant to the synthesis of new ideas, which itself is a rational response to the cognitive dissonance which results from inconvenient facts.
I still think facts matter, but if they only matter to a handful of people, can democracy survive?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Thank you for so eloquently proving my point.
Does this point need to be proven on Slashdot? Look how often it's spelled "Faux" News in posts here. You're really just preaching to the choir, honestly.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
to be honest, when I'm logged in, I'm at -1. I find it annoying to read some of the comments I see, but at least when i'm moderating I try to be impartial. I hate the moments when I see that I'm actually wrong about something (because I hate being wrong), but if it's a valid point, i'll mod it up.
the comments give you an unbiased feel for public sentiment on a subject
No, there is an inherent bias in that the site attracts and caters for a specific type of audience - the majority of people commenting here are techies of one sort or another.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You can't make people read what they don't want to read. And you can't blame media companies for catering to the majority of their customers.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I recommend that anyone interested in the issue of 'subjective reality' read Farhad Manjoo (of Slate Magazine)'s "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society". It's quite a fascinating look at the issue of our new media landscape...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
It's called a confirmation bias. People tend to pursue information that agrees with their opinions.
Now, in the past, news sources were forced to be balanced, to reach the largest possible audience. Only one newspaper in town, so it can't be too far to one side or the other unless the whole coverage area also leans that way.
Now, the market is so diverse that there is plenty of room for specialized news sources, and people can tune in to whichever one makes them feel best about their own opinions, and when all the information they receive conforms to their bias, they become more biased, and you end up with the sort of crap polarized political situation we're in right now.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
More to the point, a specialist knows MORE about the ENTIRE subject.
If people are choosing only to read what reinforces their current opinion then they are indeed idiots.
Think about how "educated" an average person would be if they were allowed that choice at age 8 instead of being taught subjects that they had no interest in at that age.
Growth requires that you leave your comfort zone.
I have several solid reasons for objecting to government run healthcare in general and the instant legislation in particular. The problem is that true believers in government run healthcare are deaf to them, succumbing to the same malady as you and others here lament regarding opponents who may or may not be opposed on solid merits, namely only subscribing to media outlets that tell you what you want to hear.
1. I'm a fan of civil liberties, so any system that gives the people with the guns and cages (government) more information to use against me (or you). Or Eliot Spitzer who in fact was hoisted by legislation he championed as being necessary to combat terror. Problem is... scope creep. It was such a "useful tool" that its use was expanded to fraud investigations when it was previously promised to us civil liberties "nuts" that such would "nevar happen". So, yes you could still make universal government-funded healthcare that collects no information about the consumers, but no one would ever do it on grounds of thwarting fraud and hypochondriacs. And in order to make the calls about whether a given citizen is worthy of continued medical care. Oh, and because our new J. Edgars want more complete dossiers on everyone so they can use the fact that you (potentially a legislator) have AIDS and your family doesn't know it to keep you from voting against certain expenditures, or to ensure you confirm certain nominees. Not that any of this could evar happen here in the land of the free. Oh, wait. Hoover would drool over the current "toolbox" much less what he'd have with the current and politically possible plans for government funded healthcare.
2. efficiency and % of GDP. proponents direct us to look at other socialized systems that consume less % of GDP, and this is good, but do you really think congress are going to pass anything that increases efficiency in the "booming healthcare industry"? That would necessarily mean decreasing the number of jobs in that industry, and healthcare is the only industry that has consistently grown through the current depression. Thus, anything that congress is politically able to do will impoverish us with people doing make work, like medical data entry and such, one of the chief drivers of unnecessary expense in the current system which makes it unaffordable for average people now.
3. all that really needs to be done is to remove industry protectionist measures like state restrictions on competition from out of state insurers and barriers to market entry for new insurance companies. shortly, as mentioned above, too many people are eating off the healthcare industry in a parasitic manner. Maybe trying something like this guy has for non-emergency care should be on the table...
http://jayparkinsonmd.com/
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
The importance of a piece of news is not a function of your perception, or anyone. It is important or it is not.
If you truly believe that there is an objective criteria for determining what information is or is not important, then you are a fool.
You can't measure the importance of news by their (apparent) immediate impact on your life or your impression of how important and impervious your country is to external events originating from a seemingly unimportant (and perhaps backward-looking) place in the world... like Afghanistan in 1991.
Yes, you can.
Turn the clock to 1994 for another example... being aware of the Rwandan Genocide over following the O.J. Simpson shitfest would seem to have been a very important news to watch and be aware off, even for someone living in a little cow town in the middle of nowhere. Not because it might have a direct impact, but at least showing you have something resembling a moral compass.
Thank you for giving an example to prove my point. The OJS trial and its coverage, as irritating as it was, provided a tremendous amount of insight into the American judicial system and the way that it interacts with politics. The trial was over before it started because race hustlers threatened to incite riots unless it was moved to a depressed urban community where a jury could be loaded with a bunch of morons who would judge the case based on emotional, race hustler arguments about police conspiracies to take a rich black man down. What you view as unimportant information is actually incredibly important, especially to those with a moral compass.
Gross violation of human rights, international news, science news, global and regional politics, global/regional/even local historic events, those are important news.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
The idea that you need to have someone decide which news are important or not is stupid.
Not true! There is vastly more information produced in the universe than can be processed by any individual. Somebody will filter the information that a person receives. The question is: Who will do the filtering? Will it be an arrogant editor in the legacy media? The producers of Google's algorithms? An individual empowered by good software to do his or her own news sifting?
I am never very sympathetic to this argument that "media decentralization is bringing about the apocalypse." The New York Times can't print all the important news every day. Indeed, elite media outlets go out of their way to censor news that they feel is inconvenient for the elites -- see Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent." Furthermore, there are dangers inherent in just the opposite, media consolidation. I don't want Rupert Murdoch (or whoever) determining programming on every channel I get.
The effect of this system is the disappearance of a public culture, and with it of the feelings of "belonging," of "community," of "togetherness," whose loss we deplore in these pseudo-technical terms. The very idea of The Public (as opposed to "the population") is growing dim. The laymen no longer entertain a conception of general knowledge which the experts can assume or the children acquire. The logical end is for each man to talk to himself and hope he will understand.
This quote from Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment refers to specialism in science, but applies equally well here.
Your brain is not a computer.
By unbiased, I meant in terms of liberal vs conservative (the bias normally attributed to one news source or another). I consider the many techies on the site to be peers who's opinions are relevant but that doesn't mean we share the same views.
I'd say it can lead to ignorance of certain events. I get the vast majority of my news from my RSS feeds from sites that have stuff on them that I care about. I will occasionally miss out on really important things like celebrity gossip or some random white girl killed in some random place. But you know what? I am ok with that. Those things do not affect my life in any way and I could care less if I hear about them.
Two American news sources do just that:
NPR
News Hour With Jim Lehrer (PBS)
Other news sources which are held in high regard (and many say that these are better than the two listed above):
BBC World News
Naked News
One of the problems, though, is that the vast majority of people are complacent with regards to civic duties that they feel it's not worth it to get depressed by the news. After all, how can one person do anything about it?
If I'm logged on to Gmail, Google News doesn't show me sports, and shows me more international news - yay! If I'm not logged on, I get vanilla news.
If I'm reading BBC News on line, the front page is much terser, so I haven't bothered finding out if they let you customize. If there's a headline that makes entirely no sense and I just can't parse it, 90% of the time it's about cricket.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's getting at the problem. Political news is really only important if anything you do or say will make a difference somehow, at least in aggregate. Sadly, that is becoming less and less true. Back when one 40 hr/week income was enough to run a household, there was time to do more things and make more difference. These days, you're lucky if you have the time to write a letter on the weekend which will be duly read by an underpaid intern and maybe receive a form letter in return. Then every few years you get to choose between a boot to the head and a kick in the nuts. The closest you can get to a good situation is to ignore it and hope it goes away (alas, it won't).
In some sense it's a reverse of the tragedy of the commons. If most people took action, the action would matter. since most people don't participate, participation doesn't make a difference, so nobody individually has any incentive to participate. And so, news about it *IS* irrelevant.
I think the quote in the summary was taken out of context. Lee wasn't claiming that the general populace is becoming more ignorant - he was claiming that there is little incentive for individuals to do reporting on a local scale because most individuals are not simply interested in local matters but national and world news as well. It was a response to the interviewer, who asked how plausible it could be now or in the future for an individual with specialized local knowledge to start an online newspaper for profit. That's why I've tagged badsummary. The full excerpt in context:
James Turner: Do you think there would be a place for a model where I said, "I know more about Derry, New Hampshire than anybody else who can report about it. So I will just start a subscription site for anybody who wants to know about Derry"? Essentially, launch my own online newspaper by subscription and charge little enough that I'm making it up on volume. Could that work, or is that going to suffer from the same "getting the word out" problem that all the other disintermediation strategies seem to be hitting? Chris Lee: I don't know. I'd like to see it work. I guess I'm skeptical. I think one of the observations about how consumers are behaving in the past five years that has surprised me the most is, again, this lack of feeling responsible for knowing the news of their country and their local government of that day. I don't think it's just a technology question. I think if you asked people now versus the same age group 20 years ago, I think they'd be stunningly less informed now about boring news, and tremendously more knowledgeable about bits of news that really interest them. I'm not sure that's entirely bad. But the guy in Darien, Connecticut is going to be churning out a lot of news of the day. And if everybody'd rather dig into their little content niche for what they really care about, Mr. Darien's going to have trouble making money. I'm not sure that's entirely bad. But the guy in Darien, Connecticut is going to be churning out a lot of news of the day. And if everybody'd rather dig into their little content niche for what they really care about, Mr. Darien's going to have trouble making money.
"What you need to hear," was a fad that died out by the 1960s once Edgar R. Murrow, H. L. Menken, and a few of their peers faded out.
Good night, and good luck.
I read Slashdot, Lifehacker, The Atlantic, Sherdog (yeah, I like MMA) and take a look at the main topics of Google News (US and my country's, Brazil) through my iGoogle page. Anything beyond that, I don't care. I am ignorant of everything else only in the sense that I am ignorant of Soviet architecture: I am not supposed to know everything nor will I try to, so it is only natural to always be ignorant about something. 20 years ago I would be forced to read a whole newspaper daily just to find out these same things and would end up knowing more about things I don't care about? Bummer.
60 years ago, people got narrow biased news reports that were chosen by someone else. Today, people get narrow biased news reports that are chosen by them. I wold say that the situation has improved when it comes to exposure to different views. 60 years ago, if the town newspaper decided that they didn't like the mayor of the city two cities over, you were unlikely to meet a single person that didn't 'know' that he was a wife beating child molester, irrelevant of the facts. Today, you would have some people who 'know' this, some people who 'know' it isn't true, and a lot of people that just don't care about he mayor two cities over. When your standing around the water cooler at work, which time period is more likely to give you dissenting opinions?
The problem doesn't seem to be that people are getting biased inaccurate news. The 'problem' seems to be that people are now becoming aware that the news they get is biased, and are struggling with the idea of choosing the bias themselves instead of having it chosen for them.
What slant does the BBC have? I have never noticed any particularly strong slant in general. Wikipedia says that some people (mainly right wing) accuse the BBC of being left wing whereas others (mainly left wing) accuse BBC of being too right wing. It has no obvious external force biasing it.
Sure it makes us ignorant, but it don't for get: it does it with unprecedented speed and convenience.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In other words, idiots are solipsists. They roam through the world filtering out everything that impedes upon the image of reality that sits inside their head. It is their fundamental notion that the world is, indeed, nothing more than the physical representation of a supposed ideal, 'truth,' that got lodged in their brains somehow.
The best cure for Solipsism?
A quick peckerslap in the face from reality.
Force a solipsist to repair a piece of machinery that he has not built himself, and now he has to face a strong, unforgiving blow to his ego. Now he must stare uncertainty and even incompetence in the eye and admit, "I don't know."
Force a solipsist to say that, and that mental construct of reality gets shattered. Now they have to fess up to the fact that there is a reality out there, and it doesn't give a damn about what they think about it. This is why I think it is important to teach kids to fix things. Raise a person to learn about, and work on, systems that they did not create, and they are forced to evolve into an intelligent, critical, thinking creature.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Because people fear, they will miss something. I’ve seen such projects fail big time, more than once.
I recommend not trying to throw away money, by implementing it.
A better method is, to weigh (e.g. sort) by personal priorities. Never hide anything. Just put it a bit lower on the list.
But hell, the whole system is an epic fail anyway, with its total lack of even the acknowledgment of trust networks as a basic mechanism of human society.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
and people who don't want to know, will foe.
people who want to know, will personalize their news to avoid those who don't want to know, and favor those who do want to know
you know?
And you can't blame media companies for catering to the majority of their customers.
Sure you can. Journalism is about more than feeding the lowest common denominator. I understand the need to add some tabloid butter to your serving of journalism vegetables. And exposing more people to the world outside their little corner is good for the civic structure of our society, even if you do it as a side effect of them seeing the headlines while looking for your coverage of Paris Hilton's escapades.
But when all you put on the plate is a big pile of butter, you need to reassess whether you can really call it journalism anymore. And that's what's been happening in the news business. They've been cutting out the news because the news costs more to produce, and their income has been hurting lately. I understand it short-term, but long term they need to rediscover how to serve the sizable population of people who actually want real news. Real news, as in context, details, and the key behind-the-scenes information, not just some 30-second soundbyte from some spokeperson.
It's important for our society to be educated. And it's important for the industry not to leave this niche unserved. It may require a consolidation in the industry to fewer players, so that they have greater funds over which to amortize the cost of true journalism. But I think there is money to be made there - people are willing to pay for quality (at least if it's not available for free, which is our current but likely unsustainable condiition).
At worst, you're missing out on half the argument because you don't care to acknowledge anything other than what you care to see.
I think your parent was excluding topics they found boring, not viewpoints opposing their own.
60 years ago most people did not even own a television, let alone even know about the existence of the internet.
60 years ago was $((2010 - 60)) = 1950. The ARPANET is from 1969.
Am I to blame for being unaware of what role Cyberdyne Systems will play 19 years from now? ;-)
nail meets hammer, etc.
Actually I'd say that was the other way around, people who already have blinders on want to avoid having uncomfortable facts shown to them. "personalised" news simply caters to this desire.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
(to paraphrase Lincoln).
Pournelle and Niven in OATH OF FEALTY mentioned an exec using a news filter which both used specified sources, as well as x% random sources. Of course, that was only 29 years ago... www.webscription.net//p-683-oath-of-fealty.aspx
My wife's mystified why I keep Faux News on the channel list of the Dishplayer, and why I buy REASON, but I do need a balanced news feed. Otherwise, I feel like just one of the sheeple.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
You can lead a jackass to water, but you can't make him think. People have chosen to be ignorant as long as there have been people.
Last I heard Al-Jazeera's coverage of most world news is repackaged BBC stuff.
perfect little drones to the government
Don't forget sheeple! If you're going to make a condescending statement pronouncing your superiority to consumers of a more popular product, you are now required to use the phrase "sheeple", and grow a goatee, by mandate of the "think for yourself, broseph! Act of 2007"
Judging from the audience for the highly personalized "news" network named Fox News, I'd say yes. Fox News tells a specific group of people exactly what they want to hear, not what needs to be known. It surprises me that they are still allowed to use the word "News" in their name.
Fox News do not use the word "News" to describe O'Reilly, Hannity, Cavuto, or anybody else you have heard of. For the most part, their news offering consists of a segment during Britt Hume's show, and the nameless, interchangeable blond women who deliver five minute news briefs at the top of the hour.
Just a quick late answer here...
On the subjects that interest me I try to see both sides, sometimes more. If not I would just be reading a "partisan" newspaper/website and get all my views from it. I'm trying to get more knowledge on the subjects that are of interest to me and ignore the rest. I cannot deal with all of it anyhow.
Now : can I influence what happens in Palestine, terrorism in the world, famine in Africa, floods in Indonesia ? Do you really think YOU have an influence on wall street, unemployment, fire, civil unrest and shootings on the highway ?
More importantly : does it make you happy or a better man to know about these things ?
So, my choice is to try to live happier and become "a better man" by not considering what does not make me better.
Wall Street news sure doesn't. Recession and unemployment news also sure doesn't. BTW I now consider them mosty as futile, unnecessary things.
(Look : Wall Street dropped 2 points. Do you even know what it means ? Is it in volume ? in value ? Is it really important to you that instead of trading 100 million shares they only traded 98 millions ? and why should I care ? Euronext should care, are they are paid on share tradings. I sure am not...)
So instead of lamenting myself in front of impeding doom and damnation of the working class on TV I tend my own garden and help my family, my friends, my neighbors and the strangers I can help.
And it makes me happy, in a more simple, less cosmopolite way.
I know I cannot solve global problem, but hey, if we all do something small localy it's better than if we all do nothing globally...
Please, next time CNN or Fox news makes you feel a better man do not hesitate to contact me.
To save you some time I'll tell you now when that can possibly happen : When you'll stop paying attention to all those alarmist, futile things and try to find what is really important to you...or you can keep on being a global sheep playing the damn rat race....
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker