This is largely correct. All major news outlets are information distribution platforms to reach particular demographic segments. The principal customer is not the reader but the advertiser or interest that controls the publication. It isn't necessary to be an advertiser in the traditional sense to control the news. Mostly, control is exercised by hiring the right people who are ideologically aligned with the target readership. Only management needs to receive marching orders and truly understand who they really work for. It's more accurate to think of newspapers as political party organs. This is their original function and remains so. They signal to their readership the acceptable bounds of opinion, beliefs, and facts. Even publishing the results of an election is an attempt to control discourse and to dominate the minds of the population. Gumshoe investigators aside, corporate journalists are mostly discourse police and propagandists. They are some of the lowest forms of human life. If you know one, the only reasonable feelings are contempt and pity, never admiration. Science journals are completely co-opted by interest groups and cannot be taken at face value. The only true news is sports scores.
> Even publishing the results of an election is an attempt to control discourse and to dominate the minds of the population
and
> The only true news is sports scores.
I fail to see the difference between these two examples. Both report on an actual outcome. Same with things like stock price movement, etc.
If your point is that choosing what to report on is a means to control discourse, then I would assert that even reporting on sports scores falls in that category.
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that election results report on accurate outcomes. Most people in the world don't believe that at all. Taking the past two US presidential elections, most people thought either 2016 or 2020 was fraudulent. Election results are information wars like campaigns. The fight is over control of the narrative and the power legitimated by the accepted narrative. Hence the exceptional brouhaha over questioning the legitimacy of elections. Such talk must be brutally suppressed by the victor, if able. If the winner is not able to suppress challenges to its legitimacy then you have a real problem of how to justify your authority. Even explicit autocracies hold elections for this purpose.
Maybe you missed the extremely effective Russiagate psyop or that a majority of half the electorate believes Biden's election was fraudulent. Combined it looks like 50-60% believe EITHER one OR the other was fraudulent. (OK, you're right if you include children in the set, but then we have a significant part of our population believing in Santa Claus.) A headline from the days after the election only substantiates my argument. The narrative war was far from over in Nov 2016.
I hope I don't have to convince you that Trump voters have little confidence in 2020 results. Here are a couple of reminders that Clinton voters felt similarly after 2016.
The difference is that election coverage includes tons of bias, including "calling" it for regions or states before final results are in, sometimes incorrectly, and with bias towards the preferences of whoever owns the channel/publication. This style of coverage is full of conversation and discourse and all it takes it recalling the night Trump won in 2015 where every single news channel except Fox was expressing disappointment and shock and surprise.
The above poster was making a different and stronger claim: that publishing even the results of an election is a form of control and not truly “News.”
As others have pointed out, this doesn’t hold water. Publishing the result of some fact that people care to know about is arguably even the purest form of “news”: election results, sports scores, stock prices, etc
Scores are ambiguous ("where exactly did the ball land?"), controversial and contentious, resulting in endless video replays and accusations of biased refs.
Where do the sports without ambiguous, controversial and contentious scores hire their bias-free referees?
No, you're right. What started as a small, humourous concession to the possibility of straight up news falls apart on analysis. But its failure supports my main point pretty well. If sports scores are contentious claims aspiring to the status of fact, then what of wars and elections? The only "fact" is that they are published in newspapers.
Just because someone doesn’t believe something doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Just because some don’t believe something doesn’t mean it should count as news.
The whole "journalist is bad" thing has really evolved over time.
It used to be just whackjobs with tinfoil hats on ham radio in the desert.
Then it became a meme. But it was still a joke.
In the last few years it seems to have been weaponized, and there are now dozens, if not hundreds, of people on HN who actually believe this; if for no other reason than they've seen it written on the internet so many times. Often, like the person above, the idea is spouted with irrationally hyperbolic levels of venom and hatred.
It feels like yet another coordinated attack on the fundamentals of Western society, just like the "all elections are rigged!" crowd that, at its root turns out to be funded by governments and organizations that profit from chaos, and hope to benefit from the elimination of democracy.
The continuing attacks on journalism and journalists erode our society. If you don't understand that, then you must have slept through your civics classes.
Anyone who thinks that journalists are "some of the lowest forms of human life" just sounds unhinged, and unable to think or understand how the world works. The real world, not the imaginary dystopia of the people on the internet barking at one another.
I can't help but think that this person works on behalf of one of those groups that is trying to destroy democracy. Whether they know it, or not.
Honestly this is a really boneheaded take. Ignorant people maybe don't realize that, historically, journalists were widely considered to be low status scribblers and political hacks. The hagiographic efforts of the profession notwithstanding, many people still see them that way (for good reasons). Got news for you, mate, the real world IS journalists barking at each other on the internet, defining discourse, eroding civic society. Folks like you will eventually see it, too, when the journalists say it's safe and acceptable to see it.
Considering that I spent 20 years of my life working as a journalist at news organizations large and small, I hope you'll allow that I might just know a little more about how journalism works than you do, mate.
That might explain why you are so touchy but it doesn't explain why you failed to disclose that salient fact in your silly argument. Maybe you have a false conscience and knew it would immediately discredit you? But those instincts combined with general ignorance is what makes good journalists, I'm sorry to say.
it doesn't explain why you failed to disclose that salient fact in your silly argument.
Am I obligated to disclose that I held a particular job years ago? I didn't know that was a requirement on HN. I see that you also haven't disclosed your resume and that your profile is blank. Is there a reason for that? Maybe you have a false conscience and knew it would immediately discredit you?
So far, all you've contributed to the discussion is hyperbole and name calling:
"Touchy... silly... general ignorance... boneheaded... ignorant... discourse police... propagandists... some of the lowest forms of human life... the only reasonable feelings are contempt and pity"
How is anyone supposed to take you seriously when you present no facts, no cogent argument, just attacks and vitriol?
I don't think there's any point in continuing this conversation any further. You are convinced of your position beyond the ability to reason and listen. I hope that some day you find peace within yourself and the ability to imagine that other human beings are not your enemy.
Certainly not a requirement for HN, but the fact is interesting and the fact you cleverly chose not to divulge it indicates motivated reasoning suggesting you wished your critique of my comment would appear more disinterested than it really was. 20 years at a job is the bulk of most people's professional lives, so it's really not irrelevant at all. It's true, I'm not a journalist. I probably should have put that in my bio. If I write anything attacking someone critical of programmers on HN, I'll be sure to disclose my bias. I will say, however, that being a journalist for only 20 years long ago very distinctly shaped your style of reasoning. You're really showing your stripes as a professional journalist by ignoring the meat of my argument to focus on the parts that offend you in particular. If you're being fair, you started it with the personal attack. My attack was on journalists, in general. You are mashing up comments I made about you with comments critical of a class of people doing a certain thing I think is pretty disgraceful. That's somewhat dishonest and the kind of thing I'm critical of journalists for doing habitually, as part of the job description.
Anyway, if something you did for 20 years was years ago, then you're not the target audience of my comment. I don't want to disturb your retirement. I also admit that journalism way back in the day when you practiced it had a certain editorial sobriety that masked much of the ideological bias. Some of that is a function of the post-WWII consensus being effectively dead now. That wasn't the case back when you trod the boards. It was also much more common then for newsrooms to include working class voices. There were also many more news organizations back then, before consolidation. Those days are gone. The mask is off. People see it.
You may not like my tone, but people waste a lot of time arguing over stuff that really doesn't make a bit of difference. Sometimes ridicule, satire, and sarcasm are more effective tools of conversion than more of the same tired whinging about well-meaning people. I don't think ALL "human beings" are my enemy, just some. Do you have no enemies? I doubt that very much.
Weather is hardly accurate news anymore. Witness the current cold snap in the US and the political hay made from it, not to mention the inaccurate "facts" and alarm used to frighten people and push them to support unrelated political projects. Hurricane coverage is another example. Hot and cold weather, etc...
Sports is hardly non-political if you wanna be that guy at Thanksgiving but there's a reason it's generally considered a "safe" topic for disagreement. I was making a joke but if you want to take it literally the scores themselves are actual facts that can be reported straight, and hence "news" in the sense most people use that word.
forget the politics, by the articles take (which I feel I miss agree with) sports scores are something I'm sure the NFL would like published, and can be seen as a form of advertising. Just kinda seems like it fits, you know?
Not just that many sports have their own backings and beliefs which tend to skew towards whats popular at the time but also some questionable stuff at times. Fun fact the lighting of the bonfire at the Olympics was first done by Nazi Germany
Tell that to the guy who attempted to alter the projected map of a hurricane with a Sharpie and pretended that it was the meteorologists who got it wrong.
