Imagine trying to properly attribute that quote around 1925. You remember you heard it or read it somewhere, but you're not entirely sure where you heard it and the only option is to dig through years of multiple papers hoping to find the right one.
And even if you pulled off that headache inducing task, you have no real way of knowing if the source you found did the same work to properly attribute the quote. It's really easy to see how it'd be misattributed/altered over time, and reminds me how great grep truly is.
William Safire had a column "On Language" in The New York Times for many years which, as I recall, would sometimes get into the etymology of words (which dictionaries like the OED often document to some degree) and phrases--and maybe quotations. I think some of the research was what we would now call crowdsourcing.
Of course, the flip side of this for many people is that if something isn't on the Web it doesn't really exist.
> if something isn't on the Web it doesn't really exist.
Speaking of etymologies, while I'd guess that phrase itself has been reinvented many times, I think the first time I heard it was in 2000, from Tim Berners-Lee.
It was the one time I was meeting with him, and he'd just pulled a third person into the meeting, and I'd probably just mentioned to them that a document was under patent embargo.
TBL laughingly asked the other, something like, "What's that, [someone?] just said, 'If it's not on the Web, it doesn't exist.'?"
You would get a book similar to the "Oxford Dictionary of Quotations". I'm not sure which specific book existed back then with that content, but books that handled these types of very specific deep dives into a subject were very common.
Read some very old stories and you might get a flavor for how life worked back then - people didn't just throw their hands up and give up, there were usable options to find this stuff out - the reference section of your local library was very important.
The types of books don't exist much these days for obvious reasons.
Imagine trying to properly attribute that quote in 1000 BC. English hasn’t yet been invented. You’re stranded; a time traveler with one pointless mandate from an internet poster’s imagination. How do you subsist?
It’s interesting that older variants of the quotation sound less like platitudes.
“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news.” -1918
“There are but two classes of people in the world—those who have done something and want their names kept out of the paper, and those who haven’t done anything worth printing and want their names put in.“ -1894
> “Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news.” -1918
I like this version, it's not so much a definition of news as (arguably slightly immoral, arguably not) business advice. If someone wants something published, get them to pay you to publish it, even if you would prefer to publish it for free over it going unpublished.
"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
-- John Swinton, ~1880
Cited (anonymously) in Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, 1909
Might be helpful to change the title here to reflect that this is an article about the origins of this quote, not about whether the quote is true. I think a lot of people are entering the comments thinking this is a debate about the quote itself.
I'd guess that every reader knows that. Unsurprisingly, there is a much more lively debate that laypeople can weigh in on re the validity of the quote, as opposed to discussing the origin, so that's what gets more comments
News as a term is rather abstract and can be interpreted in infinite ways. I mean, if you want literal translation you can easily find it in dictionaries. If anything, I feel like post is quite sensationalist.
From my personal experience, I don't find general news helpful at all (doom and gloom happening on other side of the world most of the time), you usually want to find various specialized news sites that focus on specific areas.
Also, one thing I noticed quite often is that you rarely get to comment or see other people's comments on many news sites. I am quite thankful sites like Ars Technica and HN exist because you can usually find some extra info related to the original article from those comments.
>you can usually find some extra info related to the original article from those comments
The real values of being lazy to a fault, reading the comments that come floating above with an experience.
These relatively small and fractured communities are what contains most of the uncluttered sources of outside information, organically getting reprinted for judgement by it's observers once more.
"News" sites are once more the old 1999 closed boxes asking for coin to enter.
> From my personal experience, I don't find general news helpful at all
The issue here is that's not actually news. Something happening - because LOTS of things happen - is not news. Content focused on "increasing engagement" (to increase ad views) is not news.
News has relevance. News has importance. News' priority is to inform and clarify.
All too often, most news is not news (at best it's current events). It doesn't help that parroting press releases and narratives that force feed "conventional wisdom" is passed off as journalism.
Collectively, we need to stop giving credit where credit is not due. A barking pet is not a cat.
Sure, the abnormal has been normalized. But that doesn't make it right.
If the political situation in, say, Nepal is reported on in The Economist that's certainly relevant and important to--not only the residents of Nepal and perhaps nearby countries--but those who do business with or travel to the country. However, many people in the West and elsewhere would perhaps be forgiven for giving the article a cursory skim or skipping it entirely because it's not relevant or important to them.
Pretty much - per the article - everything NOT being "news'ed." Don't let presentation and confidence fool ya. Most of "the news" isn't.
Either you understand the intent and purpose of that system or you don't.
The question isn't "what's important and relevant?" The question is: is this nonsense being presented as important and relevant actually so? Passively accepting and defaulting to "yes" is The Biggest mistake you can make.
"In a democracy, news is the information that people need to participate meaningfully in the growth and success of their democracy. Everything else is pandering and propaganda."
At its best, advertising does not undermine democracy.
Some frame it as informational, but advertisers don't just announce items with their kits of pros and cons. They make a story which manipulates your feelings into buying their stuff.
According to the Cambridge dictionary, propaganda is:
> information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions
Its examples are indeed only about political propaganda, but the definition fits like a glove for ads: they want to influence people's opinions such that they buy their stuff!
So I'm confident and happy to say no words were destroyed in the writing of this post!
Is the joke that the news would rather report on the bicycle accident in this case and not the collapse of civilization?
I can barely tell what you're going for here, I feel like you couldn't have picked two worse examples. Road deaths are an everyday occurrence that we've all just accepted as normal so those barely make the news, and bicycles get even less attention than cars. And the "collapse of civilization" is the kind of thing people are shouting about literally every day and it's always an exaggeration and pure opinion.
The article is investigating the history of the quote, something that is clear both while visiting their website or by looking at the source URL. All their articles are titled with the quote they are investigating.
In this instance, we can replace "Proper" with "My preferred" and as a result have improved fidelity as there is sufficient information in the article and the URL to adjudicate.
I’m not speaking of preferences, but of what you’re taught to do in professsional journalism/editing programs.
Headlines are read before article bodies / before other meta-information like URLs. Often — especially when a headline is a link embedded elsewhere, but also when a headline is one among many on a multi-article layout — only the headline is read (because the reader decides they’re not interested and moves on.)
In the inverted-pyramid style of news-article structure — which is so commonplace that people intuitionally expect even non-news writing to also conform to it — a reader is supposed to be able to stop at any point in reading and have received all the important info; and an editor is supposed to be able to cut any article from the bottom up for space reasons without damaging the article’s meaning.
Thus, readers expect a headline to be a most-condensed summary for an article; something they can read without reading anything else, and still come away informed.
This leads to guidance for writers of headlines, even in non-news traditions: write the headline such that a reader can read a headline, decide they now know enough, and stop reading/move onto something else, without doing so having resulted in the reader being misled.
An article whose headline is a quotation, but which does not quote the quotation, is misleading to those readers who read nothing else. This is, from the headline-writer’s perspective, bad praxis.
That might be a good argument if this was a news website. It's not a news site though, it's a website that investigates sayings. The saying is the title of the essay. You can feel however you want about quotations in the headlines of news articles, but it's irrelevant here.
While you can argue the person who posted it here should have included quotes, the author posted it on their site where anyone visiting would not find it misleading.
Although magazine and newspaper feature writing is not necessarily inverted pyramid.
Something resembling inverted pyramid is often a good style for news because a reader can stop at any point. But historically it was at least as much for editors as readers because it meant that in layout the could cut an article--especially wire service copy--at pretty much any arbitrary point.
And as for headlines it varies. A magazine like The Economist for example, in their print edition, often goes for cleverness in headlines (although they also have a dek that summarizes the article in a more straightforward way).
I'd argue all those (except elections) are at least potentially advertising. It's not just from public interest that these things would get promoted. A space launch is a great example, look at the history of the space program, it's largely an advertising campaign.
Re elections, the real results are something that in many places lots of people will not want shared, and this is an important function of the press.
Yes, news publications have lots of facts like your examples they think people will want to read, but the core of news (as opposed to books or magazines) and the idea that the press gets a special place on society is definitely aligned with the quote
I'd actually further suspect that the quote rubs many people the wrong way now because of the whole "misinformation" thing where they actually want their "news" source to be a propaganda organ of their political alignment, rather than an actual unbiased reporter of facts
> I'd actually further suspect that the quote rubs many people the wrong way now because of the whole "misinformation" thing where they actually want their "news" source to be a propaganda organ of their political alignment, rather than an actual unbiased reporter of facts
I don't think I agree. In a divided society, it is very easy to find establishment players who will object to a propaganda headline being printed. News framed to suite either a Conservative or Liberal perspective will make the other side angry, regardless of its truth value.
"I made someone angry that I printed this" doesn't really imply, "it's good that I printed it." Making people angry is incredibly easy to do, especially in a polarized society, and optimizing for outrage and the thinking that outrage makes news more "legitimate" is arguably one of the reasons we're in a polarized society.
----
Aside: other commenters have already mentioned, but just quick reminder again that this article is not about whether the quote is true, it's trying to investigate its origins.
Oh, the irresponsibility of journalists with respect to the Shuttle runs far deeper than that. They largely acted as cheerleaders for a program that made very little sense. They largely didn't ask the hard questions about whether the Shuttle was worth doing at all (spoiler: it wasn't.)
The entire Shuttle program was worth it just for Hubble, in my opinion. It's hard to understate the effects on cosmology that piece of kit has had. Truly a Plato's Cave moment.
If it were up to me, I'd launch seven Hubble replacements named after each of the astronauts lost in Columbia.
Hubble could have been done without the Shuttle, and for a small fraction of the > $200B cost of the entire Shuttle program. This is true even if multiple Hubbles would have had to have been launched in lieu of repair missions (and making a series of them would have accrued considerable economic benefit from economies of scale and experience.)
Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.
The question was being asked early. It came into public focus even before the Challenger loss, as the shuttle program struggled to come remotely close to promised flight rates (which of course it never did). The cover story of the November 1985 issue of Discover magazine had this cover blurb:
"The shuttle is a superb technological achievement, and it's flown by brave, immensely competent men and women...
The article was pointing out that going with cheaper expendable launchers would have been a much, MUCH better idea. And so it proved.
(This article is one of the reasons I wrote "largely" in the comment above.)
At any point after this article came out, cheerleading was irresponsible.
Journalists might be forgiven for not predicting how uneconomic the Shuttle would be to operate, at least before this became painfully obvious a few years in. Even the critics on Capitol Hill like Mondale and Proxmire missed that; they focused more on development cost. But the Shuttle would have been a failure even if the development cost was zero.
> Question is, could it reasonably have been guessed at the early stages that it wasn't. Decades of hindsight gives you, pfdietz, a very privileged position.
And it was known as early as the 1960s that expendable launch vehicles could be reduced in cost by as much as a factor of 10 by adopting a minimum cost rather than maximum performance design methodology.
>Investigative journalism on NASA ignoring problems prior to the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have prevented both disasters.
I think this suffers from hindsight bias. For every catastrophic o-ring or foam shedding there are hundreds or thousands of other low-probability events that people were “sure” would cause problems but never did.
The difficulty isn’t in identifying possible issues as much as assigning each a credible risk.
the country launching it is advertising their result, their adversaries definitely would like to cancel it, making it newsworthy.
example: Russian propaganda around Sputnik, seen from the US side.
> Breakthrough in physics
> Discovery of a unique occurrence of artifact in history
the way the media treats these arguments resemble much more clickbait than news. see: nuclear fusion or the coverage on Musk's bs about anything remotely science related, but there are times when this can actually be news, even though it can be more often closely affiliated to advertising to attract tourists.
For example the real archeological breakthrough discovery presented in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" barely made the news. In this particular case, many archeologists would prefer it never happened.
But mostly is reporting the progress of something that's been slowly going on for decades.
> Election results
there are definitely many people who would like to not see them published, every time an election is held.
edit: anyway, that's not what the linked article is about, the poster simply tried to track the origin of the quote.
Granted this isn't even a well-thought-out essay, it is someone trying to research a quote. I don't see that as click-bait.
To counter your point: do you refer to "Popular Science" as news? or "Scientific American"? Scientific reporting isn't "news" in the context of the OPs query. The implications or context would be though (like how much it cost from a budget and if it was worth it).
I'm sure you understand the point of the article because being on HN you are smarter than the average person, or are you mayyyybeee just trying to be click-baity yourself?
i first heard this as "journalism is what somebody doesn't want you to print, the rest is PR" which rings a bit truer.
somebody's success that they desperately want you to report on (like a shuttle launch or election win) can be news, but it's not actually journalism until you start reading beyond the press release and finding additional context.
It's truer because it's tautological. Either somebody wants you to print it or someone does not.
I suppose the middle case is "nobody cares one way or the other", and it's true that if nobody cares then it's not news. That is at least a definition rather than a tautology.
All of your examples are news by the quotes definition. Plenty of people don't want any of that printed. Much of it comes down to fights over zero-sum pies.
Successful launch of a shuttle? We're wasting money on space and the media is shilling for the industrial/military complex, as usual.
Breakthrough in physics? That discovery is just careerist researchers making shit up to get more grants.
Election results? The result is a complete fraud that steals my victory away from me and printing this only proves media's bias in favor of my opponent.
I think we've reduced the headline to something that is not useful. For instance, I don't want advertising to be printed. So, I guess advertising is news?
First, I just discovered Androids keyboards weird symbols mode. ¥°¢{×`÷|π|√∆}£][™®. Nice.
Second, I feel like you're making the mistake of saying if you object to anything then the thing you object to is news. The original statement is pretty short, but I take it to mean that you object to the content of the item and not the genesis of the item or the motive of the author itself. Of course, this distinction leads to all kinds of uncomfortable situations. For example, you might be against propaganda itself, but you might be very much for the position espoused by certain propaganda. I think the narrower content oriented aspect of being against something is what we're talking about. Because otherwise it gets a bit silly. You could argue that the westboro Church thinks that gay people are news, for example.
The point of my comment is to object to your characterization of things like a breakthrough in physics as "news" because there are people somewhere who find it objectionable for some reason. It is a semantically valid interpretation of the post title but incongruent with its spirit.
I had a different reading of those examples. Most of the headlines sound like press releases, the sort of thing people want to see published and can be regarded as a form of advertising for the research groups or organizations involved.
Providing evidence counter to the evidence presented by the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma.
Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere.
I feel like on some level this is a more round-about way of saying, "real news is politically useful." To me that seems like a fairly obvious reduction of the scope of news into a pure propaganda tool. It is true that a lot of even objective news is inherently political and has political implications, and it is true that which facts reporters choose to print and what context they choose to supply around those facts carries an editorial message regardless of whether the facts are true. What stories a reporter chooses to focus on is itself an editorial decision.
But the quote itself is an oversimplification of that more nuanced truth.
Some more specific objections:
---
> Providing evidence counter to the evidence presently the regime isn’t commentary - it is the necessary foundation to empower citizens to form opinions based on understanding more than the accepted dogma.
Commentary is a necessary foundation to empower citizens to form educated opinions and to combat dominant narratives. "Commentary" is not a dirty word, it is a legitimate thing that gets built on top of news reporting and on top of neutrally presented factual information.
Separating reporting from commentary does not delegitimize commentary and it shouldn't be treated as an attempt to delegitimize commentary. Commentary is important, and forcing it to masquerade as news reduces the scope of how we can use it.
And of course there isn't a binary distinction between commentary and reporting (see my first paragraph), but that doesn't mean there's no distinction at all or that different pieces don't stray more towards commentary than others.
---
> Allowing one’s audience to stew in a one-sided, vacuous environment devoid of the tools of analysis is the goal of regime-controlled media everywhere.
The US is a country that is fairly evenly divided between (at least) two very different viewpoints about how the world works, and each side is convinced that the other is stewing in "a one-sided, vacuous environment." I find this argument pretty unconvincing because it's difficult for me to think of many news stories nowadays that don't fit into this category. It doesn't really eliminate much; pretty much all reporting is something that somebody doesn't want printed, and most reporting can be characterized as "establishment propaganda" from people who want to dismiss it.
The hard part of reporting nowadays isn't writing headlines that will make people angry, it's writing headlines that won't be immediately interpreted as a direct political attack. And in pretty much all of those cases, you'll be able to find somebody that doesn't want that headline printed.
And as a quality metric in general, it doesn't seem very useful or strongly correlated with quality. I can print some pretty nonsense, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Conservative establishments angry that it was published. I can also print some pretty nonsensical, one-sided unfactual reporting that I promise will make Liberals angry. That's trivial to do, on both sides of the isle. It's trivial to do outside of politics as well --- heck, I can come up with headlines that will make native developers and web developers respectively angry. But doing that doesn't mean that what I'm printing is more likely to be legitimate or newsworthy.
What's worse is that the reduction of "news" to be things that make my out-group angry encourages me to lean into that kind of editorializing; and it encourages me to phrase pretty straightforward announcements/discoveries/research-projects as if they are combative towards my out-groups, even it I have to do worse reporting to make that happen. I would argue that "news has to make people angry" is a big part of how we get incredibly angry, polarized societies in the first place.
Perhaps my expectations are too high; but when I read any significant news article, it is extremely tiring — because my work is just beginning.
My default belief is: “it doesn’t appear they they are not telling the truth”. And my next task is “now, what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?”
It is exceedingly rare that I (eventually) say: “wow; I couldn’t find any evidence of high-probability events that significantly alter the probability of their stated facts”.
Usually, after a few hours of digging around the seedy edges of … whatever they’re claiming to be describing — I find that, indeed, most of what they’re writing is either BS, or much more tenuously supported than they imply.
After a few rounds of this, any trust in the veracity of the media organ evaporates.
This shouldn’t be my job. Didn’t “journalism” used to include this heavy lifting?
> My default belief is: “it doesn’t appear they they are not telling the truth”. And my next task is “now, what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?”
This is part of the point of commentary. It's to provide additional context and to talk about the implications of the news article, and to talk about angles that the news article might be not be getting into or that might contradict the article's premise.
The downside of commentary is that it's more tightly tied to ideology, and having someone help interpret a news story provides more opportunity for them to phrase that story in a way that's politically advantageous to them. But that doesn't mean that commentary isn't important, it just means that it's something we need to be careful consuming, and that we need to be careful about getting multiple sides/angles to the story when we approach it.
> This shouldn’t be my job. Didn’t “journalism” used to include this heavy lifting?
This is part of the problem of phrasing journalism as purely a way to speak truth to power, upset the ruling class, disrupt the system, etc... You're describing a situation where you have a hard time trusting the news because you don't know up-front what its angle is or what facts/context it's omitting to further that angle. I would argue that's a direct consequence of a culture that delegitimizes boring/factual reporting that doesn't lean as far as possible into a political angle or ideological goal.
A couple comments down I saw a comment arguing that "a rocket launched" isn't news, and "is the rocket budget too high" is. But when every single story is starting from the perspective of "how is this information useful to the political end I want to achieve", then yeah, you need to spend more time filtering out the news and looking behind the scenes and figuring out what the angle is. It's not actually great for public discourse/education for every single news story about launching a rocket to be an argument for/against space funding.
That's part of why I think "news is what people don't want printed" isn't that great of a philosophy; because it encourages more articles to write from an angle and forces you to constantly ask "what significant counterpoints are they avoiding exposing?" or "do the facts actually imply what they say those facts imply?"
What you want in the situation you describe is basic reporting as a baseline that attempts to be as neutral, factual, and unemotional as possible (while acknowledging that all reporting is at least somewhat political in nature and that we can't completely remove that aspect of any story); and then you want extensive commentary from a diverse set of experts/reporters you can trust to help you interpret that news. But instead, this comment section has a number of people arguing that the more boring side of factual reporting that doesn't directly challenge a status quo is illegitimate. Well, when you get rid of that part of reporting, the only thing you have left then is the commentary, and it becomes incredibly difficult and time-consuming to find out what the facts behind the commentary are and whether the commentary is trustworthy.
The boring non-political reporting that doesn't immediately make anyone mad, or question the establishment, or snap readers out of their comfortable existence -- is all actually really important for building a shared set of facts about the world that we all agree on and can use to build healthy political commentary that does explicitly challenge norms and establishment narratives.
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.
Even printing the weather is subject to opinion. Good weather? You're promoting the fallacy that things are good. Bad weather? You're promoting the fallacy that things are bad. Neutral? You're wasting precious space for something as useless as news.
In what world are you living dude? There are hundreds of articles critizing Elon Musk every fucking week. Same as there are hundreds of articles criticising crypto every week. There are hundreds of articles about "online extremism" every week. In the NYT, The Atlantic, WaPo, etc. They are all cheered on here, in Twitter, etc. If anything, anthing "pro-Musk" is the minority today.
But that doesn't even matter, because the REAL, the IMPORTANT stuff is not commented on. Such as the authoritarian creep in the West, the progression to cashless society and 24/7 surveillance. I'm not going to list every point all but you get the idea.
Deeply rethink things, and check if you can find the blind spots.
Didn't know earthquakes don't want news printed... Had to type it because it sounded funny in my head.
About news, we just lost that, there is a reason most of human history is full of dictatorships where the peasants/plebs/... get the fantasy version of what's happening, X declared himself king through violence and treachery? Well god put him there of course. etc.
Some can say we had a nice period where newspapers cared about their reputation and you could just pay 50 cents to buy today's paper and know what was happening that day, is this true? probably not, why not? well this assumes everyone working in the press is some sort of angel devoid of greed, fear, etc. which is not the case, people are people: personaly if I had a news paper agency, and saw that some news could be dangerous, I don't think I'll stop it from being printed, but again I think tomorrow I'll wake up early and workout, and I think that I'll continue learning and working hard to build something, will I do it? well I think so, statistically will I do it? No, I'm human, we are failible, etc.
Today on the other hand it's a total shitshow, the news today is just comedy to anyone who's not totally gullible, why? the internet happened, natural selection killed those who stuck to the truth and promoted those who went with clickbait, natural selection also killed those who ran out of money and promoted those who accepted investments from X and Y... For example, did you know the Gates foundation (not a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist by the way you can verify this yourself) basically owns Kurzgesagt? Most research papers Kurzgesagt uses are published by subsidiaries of the Gates foundation and they donated to them many times so they basically own them, what if I was Kurzgesagt and I was married and had kids and I had a choice between accepting free money from a well respected foundation who does good research as far as I know, and my channel failing and my wife and kids suffering the consequences, would I refuse the money? of course not do you think I'm stupid?
Whose fault is that? well it's the system's fault, the internet is just more stimulating, and as humans, we don't give a shit about the news, we used to watch it to feel empathy, sadness, happiness, etc. now you can feel a diluted version of most feelings by visiting a porn website, a gore website, a social media website, etc. We didn't care about the Israel - Palestine conflict, which is basically an Apartheid, and we didn't care about bombing a country for oil and killing a million people, why would we start caring now about the elections, politicians being corrupt, etc... ?
If we can improve the system, aka build a protocol for the news, we can have something better, but how do you build a protocol for the news, Bitcoin was a protocol for cryptocurrencies, it needed people to spend computing power to get coins, how will a news protocol work? something that can't be controlled by X or Y, can't be faked, closest stories to reality get the most attention, etc.. is something like this even possible? who knows...
While I admire the journalistic pieces that display integrity I think those are far too often the exception. Instead news media like all media is just after attention, and that doesn't so neatly align with this quote. The New York Times, the pinnacle of American newsrooms, is ultimately just competing with Netflix as an entertainment platform.
Theres also writing what its target audience wants to hear, much like how political parties work. Principle always loses when money and power are involved.
The sentiment expressed by this quote is why First Amendment auditors do such a valuable public service.
There would be no need for the First Amendment's protection of speech if the things that we said never offended anyone, never made anyone uncomfortable, never was targeted for suppression. There would be no need for its protection of the press if the press were always welcome to report on matters of public interest. There would be no need for its protection of religion if no one ever experienced interference with their religious beliefs or practices. There would be no need for its protection of the right of assembly if protestors never experienced attempts to quash their activities.
The First Amendment exists precisely because there is speech that others would prefer we not say, there are religious activities that others would prefer we not practice, and there are matters of public interest that others would prefer journalists not report on.
And even if you pulled off that headache inducing task, you have no real way of knowing if the source you found did the same work to properly attribute the quote. It's really easy to see how it'd be misattributed/altered over time, and reminds me how great grep truly is.