These points are valid, though I feel what's more dangerous than social media filters reinforcing existing beliefs is those sites and their algorithms putting such a high focus on speed rather than quality. Face it, doing a lot of careful research and producing a well written article does worse in a lot of cases than just kicking crap stories out the door as quickly as possible to show 'consistency' and ride hype trains. The technical setup meant to provide 'relevant' content seconds after something happens discourages anything more thoughtful by design.
Agreed. I think fast food vs eating healthy is a good comparison. The message in this type or article strikes me as sugesting better labeling for healthy food assuming that’s what people want while discounting the fact that fast food is cheap and easy and people buy it most often to satisfy a subjective feeling of hunger (while they have a ton of other stuff to focus on) rather than treating each meal as an objective assessment.
A lot of articles with suggestions posted here (HN) for making “things” better often focus on the mechanics of the thing and technical or procedural changes but a lot of the time ignore the reality of human behaviour and motivations. I think that relates to engineering/programming culture and focus on STEM with a lot less value placed on humanities which is then reflected in products and opinion pieces and people being frustrated that things can’t just be “fixed” through clever changes to objective mechanics and approach.
That’s drifting into other bigger topics but it’s a frustrating trend.
I wholeheartedly agree that focusing on lower level mechanics is the way to solutions and am at times frustrated by their dismissal in preference for some higher level debate across a seemingly arbitrary division. In my case health debate terms are basically down to gut flora and conditions that cause me to crave french fries. Well, I don't crave french fries anymore (or meat, and decreasingly dairy except the Super burritos :).
I've had this particular OP debate about journalism with a coworker, that maybe such a publication doesn't need mass appeal if the thought leaders would be willing to pay more for it. I throw money at thought leaders whenever I can, eg. "this album on Soundcloud is good, I'll send a dollar per track. CRAP it's 25 tracks..." and still send it all. (in retrospect, they must know people behave like this... or at least, I do now :). BUT... if it weren't authentic work, I wouldn't get that impulse, so it's not really a secret that can be exploited.
It's not the most popular thinking mode. Put the body into a healthy state, and it will crave healthy things. Like math class or starting strength training, you might just have to endure it for a little bit. But to myself, perhaps many, salad was iceberg lettuce and veganism was boca burgers. Couldn't be farther from the truth, in reality. There's even bigger money in some food industry sectors than green/vegan, I wonder who might have incentive to say being healthy is sooo expensive when the alternative is lots of their own products.
I'd very much like to find a news outlet that takes a STEM and systems oriented approach to news gathering, but as far as I'm aware no such thing exists. In my view the humanities oriented population has certainly failed to produce trustworthy news, or at least, failed to do so reliably over the long term. I attribute this to lack of systems designed to recognise that journalists have power, power corrupts and therefore journalists should expect themselves and others to become corrupted with time. News organisations seem to have little or nothing in the way of systems designed to keep them in check.
Fact checkers? No, never encountered any sign of them. And I would have done given that in the past I've been a go-to source for major news outlets on a technical topic.
References to primary sources? Journalists are by and large allergic to links, although I've noticed that the more modern the news source, the more linky they tend to be. When they use links they typically link only to their own coverage; presumably they value hits and ad views more than making it easy for people to double check their work.
Systematising how stories are selected and publishing that system? No.
Making it easy to follow a story and discover if previous stories were retracted? No. Stories are sometimes updated post publication to reflect that they were wrong, but such retractions are never publicised anywhere and short of manually polling previously visited URLs you can't find out that this has happened.
Unfortunately I believe that the lack of action taken to increase trust by the mainstream news outlets is deliberate. Journalism doesn't pay well, journalism thus attracts people for whom power is a part of the compensation package. Namely the power to influence the direction of society in ways more to their liking. I frequently encounter journalism in big league western outlets that is flatly misleading or fraudulent in ways that can only be deliberate. It has reached the point where I maintain a mental blacklist of topics, on which I automatically assume anything I read in the media is a lie designed to manipulate me (current number 1 position: anything Russia related, but there are others).
It's for this reason that I don't believe that existing mainstream media publications will ever be able to increase trust in themselves - being untrustworthy is literally a part of the job appeal. It will take a new generation of companies built along entirely different values, with different business models and which select their writers from different parts of the population (probably that means no 'professional' full time journalists, just lots of part time specialised writers).
