> when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.
Trying to be impartial, trying to understand all the points of view, is a noble effort. It's impossible to do, but the process of trying is how you can achieve the best version of truth. Seems like I agree with you here.
And that's what the best newspapers do.
I need people to be making an honest effort to understand all the perspectives and distilling them down for me.
If nobody is doing that, then it makes my job (the job of understanding everyones' perspectives) a lot harder, because it's an exercise in multi-player adversarial thinking.
You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course.
And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university and therefore share points of view with people who went to university is the same thing as William Randolph Hearst wholly inventing a story about Spain attacking a US ship to convince the public to start a war.
And what we have today, with social media & search monopolies sucking all economic surplus completely out of journalism, plus foreign-run and profit-run influence farms, plus algorithmic custom-tailoring of propaganda, is undoubtedly the worst we have ever seen.
I'd like to know whether there's any objective way to measure how truth-seeking journalism actually is. Otherwise it just turns into people declaring, purely subjectively, that one outlet is "biased" and another is "impartial" or "truth-seeking".
Ultimately, every editorial decision — what to publish, which story to highlight, what angle to frame it from — is a value judgment. And value judgments aren't matters of objective truth.
This is a correlation, so it doesn't prove a causative association, and it's only across a very tiny subset of the entire knowledge set.
While I understand that my second point might sound like a cop-out, just consider how the survey findings may have been different, if the respondents had been asked about issues more relevant to social justice narratives, e.g. the prevalence of deadly police shootings of unarmed people of color.
Actual annual figure in recent years: roughly 10 depending on dataset and year.
Median estimates among progressive respondents in several surveys: hundreds or even thousands.
Another example:
Surveys show large fractions of progressive populations believe global poverty has worsened, when the long-term trend has been a substantial decline
From my point of view journalism is or was about calling attention to points of reference that we can all agree that we are affected by in a similar way. The way you are framing this is more about agreeing with each other. IMHO that's not what journalism is about.
It doesn't work because other businesses are creaming off the classifieds. Businesses like Tinder, Ebay, and Craigslist.
Newspaper management has been trying to do something about it for decades. I don't know if there's anything to be done. Somehow they have to get people to pay for the high cost items, like newsgathering, that they've never really paid for in the past. As far as I can see only the NYT has had any success in this area, and it always feels like a holding action.
I feel like I'm in a psy op reading this comments section.
As if we aren't very clearly in a completely different place now compared to even 10 years ago, when it comes to the veracity of information people are exposed to on a moment-to-moment basis. As if we aren't all fed an AI-manipulated, algorithmically tailored personal selection of wholecloth lies by the media mechanisms that replaced some biased ones.
So what? Soon all legacy media will die or be subsumed into different organizations save for NYT who will be the only outlet left with the gumption to have a VTuber as EIC in 7 years?
But the negatives are spiraling out of control. Pollution and energy and the amplification of structural social problems like wealth stratification, authoritarianism, media manipulation...
With great power comes great responsibility, and we're living in an era in which our culture has shifted dramatically towards accepting immoral, short-sighted, and reckless behaviour.
I doubt you'd need to build and hype your own, just find a popular already-existing one with auto-update where the devs automatically try to solve user-generated tickets and hijack a device machine.
The current administration has been talking about a 51st state and Mark Carney made a speech at Davos about a rupture in the World Order and the "Middle Powers" standing up for themselves.
Suddenly YCombinator no longer invests in Canadian startups.
Maybe it is "just corporate governance," maybe not.
> Suddenly YCombinator no longer invests in Canadian startups.
There's nothing stopping a Canadian from starting (or redomiciling) their startup in the Cayman Islands. That's basically the Cayman Islands' raison d'être ever since the war on terror and the crack down on international anonymous banking.
I find it strange that there's no mention of information asymmetry or monopolistic economic control in this whole essay. It seems like the highest-probability risk to me.
Yes asymmetry in economic power is a big thing but information as a form of power seems like the most defining theme of today? Seems like that's why Musk bought Twitter?
They are actively hostile to their customers. Author's experience is just the Proton experience. It was so when they were tiny, it is the same now
Ultimately you have to trust the company that offers you E2E encryption. I don't know why anyone would trust this company given the way they interact with people.
> when time comes to vote on policies, having read everyone, you may consider their point of view a bit more.
Trying to be impartial, trying to understand all the points of view, is a noble effort. It's impossible to do, but the process of trying is how you can achieve the best version of truth. Seems like I agree with you here.
And that's what the best newspapers do.
I need people to be making an honest effort to understand all the perspectives and distilling them down for me.
If nobody is doing that, then it makes my job (the job of understanding everyones' perspectives) a lot harder, because it's an exercise in multi-player adversarial thinking.
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