And that's fine; cold impersonal anger can be a very powerful motivator if channeled properly. My question is what are WE going to do about it?
For me:
1/ support the Grauniad [0]: the gulf between the quality of their journalism and the rest of the market is gaping. I may not agree with all their views but the world is a better place with their investigative push
2/ let's leverage the HN community: one of the constant messages I've seen in my limited time on HN is how diverse and capable the community is. Surely we can do this and more if we set our heart to it?
It may not be the most popular view at the moment but I do believe "The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice". But this doesn't happen automatically; each of us need to push the pendulum, and a billion pushes can outweigh quite a bit of unfairness...
Well you could argue they would do better with more resources.
Anyway: the Guardian is just one paper. Support independent journalism, whether it's the NYT / WSJ / WaPo / FT / your favourite non-clickbait news platform.
I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of a local hacks-and-hackers (journalists and programmers) group...
How can one best support journalism, if its brokenness is systemic?
Consider a supermarket-checkout tabloid of the "UFO aliens tattooed my baby!" variety. It seems unlikely that any plausible level of resources will yield high-quality journalism. But perhaps the BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News pair is a counterargument.
Consider the NYT, with its view of the world as a competition between ideas, rather than between economic and political interests. More resources won't fix that.
Also apropos the NYT, for decades I wished for better coverage of the role of subculture group-think in governance failures. I excused that NYT's lack of it as resource limitations, and hoped for reallocation someday. Then Trump, and there was lots of coverage of group-think among his supporters, and still a dearth of it about its role among elite. Resource limitations weren't the bottleneck.
So yes, marginally better funding might yield marginally better journalism from the the Guardian / NYT / WSJ / WaPo / FT / etc. More reporters, fact checking, foreign bureaus, conferences, etc. But...
They still won't be tracking their failures, searching for root causes, and pursuing continuous process improvement. It won't change journalism's culture of obliviousness to decades of learning in other industries about how to organize processes for consistently high quality.
Is there any journalistic platform that has a plausibly modern process story, and just needs resources to flesh it out and grow? Regardless of focus - just, is anyone doing this well, who can be funded and assisted as an exemplar? Is there any journalism foundation attempting to encourage modern processes? Is there any dinky little local paper that's made a commitment to consistently record its failures in a google spreadsheet, and to follow up on what went wrong and how their process might be improved? That I could see funding.
Marginal non-transformative improvement is nice too. With society and history being chaotic, small deltas can have large consequences. But I find the current product quality demotivating without some prospect for transformative improvement.
For me:
1/ support the Grauniad [0]: the gulf between the quality of their journalism and the rest of the market is gaping. I may not agree with all their views but the world is a better place with their investigative push
2/ let's leverage the HN community: one of the constant messages I've seen in my limited time on HN is how diverse and capable the community is. Surely we can do this and more if we set our heart to it?
It may not be the most popular view at the moment but I do believe "The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice". But this doesn't happen automatically; each of us need to push the pendulum, and a billion pushes can outweigh quite a bit of unfairness...