What I see in journalism today is a classic shift from leadership to management. From substance to imitation. There are a lot of things that were meaningful once upon a time that now are mostly ridiculous imitations. For example, wearing an expensive suit, or a fancy watch, or having a big desk. Those used to be symbols of strength and power - now most people my age see that as nothing but douchebage-ness. The same goes for a lot of what's happening in news. All the holograms and "exclusive" and that other nonsense that is so terribly fake you can't help but cringe when watching cable news.
There was a time when flashing "BREAKING" in big bold letters and exclusive interviews indicated the most important things happening in the news. Now it means nothing. CNN was flashing "BREAKING" on the screens two weeks after the Malaysian airliner went down, preceding a discussion about whether or not it could have been a black hole that consumed it (that literally happened). Conversations between two parties are so canned that correspondents are even using the exact same wording as passed down by the party lines. Cable news is nothing but theater now, and to people who haven't grown up watching the news it seems very weird an disengenuous.
Focusing on externalities such as why someone became famous (a bathtub full of cereal?) lets the old guard not care about up-and-coming forms of journalism, dismissing its legitimacy. The legitimacy doesn't come from the content, but in how serious and domineering one can look when delivering the news. It's BS professionalism.
It is interesting to see the "established news media" try to tear down the youtube media by using their stupid stunts against them. The Daily Show has been doing that same thing against the news media for years, and like Hank Green said they've lost all legitimacy to anyone under 40.
It's pretty obvious to me that most of the people in the news business will say whatever their paid to say, or in some cases what they think will sell more books.
Do you remember the effort put into explaining to people that when the Large Hadron Collider was turned on, it wasn't going create a black hole that would swallow the entire planet?
This is the audience CNN has to entertain. You know... morons.
I'm hoping that always on video news falls apart with the cable bundles. CBS is hoping it won't (they've launched a 24 hour internet news channel), but I wonder if that is a good sign.
Computing parallel: 24-hour news is like busy-waiting, but what people really want is a signal when something actually happens. The biggest reason the news has lost its legitimacy is that 24-hour news means that a lot of news must be invented, overemphasized, or endlessly re-hashed in order to fill time. This makes it harder to convince people that what you're talking about really is news.
I've ended up getting most of my political news from the Charlie Rose show on public television. The vast majority of episodes are about non-newsy things, like culture, business, and philanthropy. Every once in awhile, something important is actually happening, and there are a couple episodes about it before moving on. It has only made the whole idea of always-on news seem even more ludicrous to me.
I agree with you about the news, but disagree about the suits.
Most people still think a nice suit looks nice, and are automatically think the guy who looks like he cares about how he looks is more capable or responsible than the hippy in a hoodie.
Where this may be an exception is in tech but even then it's hardly universal. Edgar the Line Programmer and his buddies might dress like slobs because it signals they are not constrained by fuddy duddy old school managers like Mr. Rheinhard in the Matrix who was born before asynchronous IO was invented, but if you look at the people who really hold the power and money in tech, they are all wearing suits or at least looking very sharp if not actually donning a full three piece suit. There are reasons for this.
Think of it in light of yesterday's HN discussion of minimalism in possessions. If you were only going to leave yourself with a few feet of closet space, what would you keep. The suit and your dress shirts, of course, and then maybe a sports coat and your sport shirts and then maybe a khaki. Now you can go anywhere. You can't say the same thing about a wardrobe consisting of t-shirts and shorts.
Those two don't go to meetings where they need to leave an impression on someone.
When the CEO of my company (who wears jeans day to day) goes to a meeting with a new client, we wears a suit and tie so that the first five second impression the client gets is 'he isn't taking this seriously'.
That's why this way of thinking is very much not outdated - its a quick and effective way to show commitment to something, even if in meetings going forward people are much more casual..
So when you see Zuck speaking to an audience, is your thought more likely to be "Wow, this man is powerful, we need to take him seriously!" or is it, "Aw shucks there's Zuck, I can't believe he made a billion dollars"?
It depends on the person. I am still in college and if you go to the business school, the students in there will say that a suit represents power. If you go to the CIS building it is the opposite. I have seen it, even though I do not think that a suit represents power, a lot of people still do.
"Millenials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with each other or talking about issues that matter to them from perspectives they can identify with."
I'm really tired of reading stuff like this, the idea that the president doesn't use snapchat to communicate with voters and that is why millennials don't care. Communication is not the problem. I have no problem picking up the white house message, be it through the NYT, CNN, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, RedditAMA, Funny Or Die, The Daily Show, or anywhere else he has shown up the past couple years. The issue is that it increasingly feels like there is nothing that can be done to influence the situation. That's not just from a personal perspective - it feels like the president has a really hard time getting things done as well.
Absolutely true. Ok, everybody has decided to care; now what?
I do think a big part of the problem is that the answer to "what should we do" has been pushed way too far up the chain. "Caring" is measured by voting patterns in presidential and congressional elections. But that's way too far up the chain, it's already too late to have an impact at that level. Impact comes from affecting the processes that control who becomes politically influential, which controls who is nominated in those elections. This is where local and state governments and other politically active institutions (including businesses) come into play, but it's not at all clear and very hard to predict in exactly which ways. Voting in elections and arguing with your parents is not even close to enough, but going further isn't an obvious path, and nobody ever talks about how to do it. From a personal standpoint, I'm interested in this stuff, and I vote, but I also recognize that I have no influence and no idea what to do about it, which isn't exactly motivating!
Syriza (Greek election today) is an example of what can happen next but things have to be so very far gone before such a party can bubble to the surface. I think you're one more crisis away from it in America - and there's a very real risk that your leaders will divert attention towards blaming all of the problems on a minority group.
Find a pivot with a really long lever and jump on the end of it. The War on Terror is in full swing but we can defeat the war on drugs. You could get people to read this - or at least absorb the salient points, http://chasingthescream.com/.
> it feels like the president has a really hard time getting things done as well.
Yes and no.
He's the commander in chief and the top manager of the administration. Executive orders and simple orders. He could stop the drones. Basically any military unit. (As far as I know. Though probably while honoring the chain of command, so not directly. But disobeying a direct order is grounds for court martial, etc.)
But other than those, he could have done a lot more, on paper.
The question is do we know why he picked the people he did during his terms? Why he waited with the equal pay order? Why is he not pushing more on transparency?
And why is his team so incompetent that they botched the fucking healthcare.gov site? ACA was the big thing he pushed through Congress. And no one was keeping an eye on it?
This article shows the extent to which the President and his team are playing chess to these Youtubers' tic-tac-toe. By granting interview time to a group so clearly hungry to establish their legitimacy as "real" journalists, Obama ensured that they'd be in doe-eyed admiration of the President and the fact that they are interviewing him, and forget the principal reason that political journalism exists: to hold decisionmakers accountable to the public.
A journalist who treats the President like any other interview subject and asks tough questions, even if the President gives evasive answers, is serving the public more than a group who thinks to themselves "Holy shit, I just interviewed the President."
> the principal reason that political journalism exists: to hold decisionmakers accountable to the public
Green's point in this article is that traditional political journalism has made a mockery of this responsibility, and I for one agree with him.
We can't have Walter Cronkite anymore because political media has completely debauched itself. I'd rather have earnest if naive amateurs than however you want to describe what happens on Fox News and MSNBC. Maybe not exclusively, but at least as a counterbalance.
I don’t agree that the YouTube personalities, despite being given access, didn’t ask the President tough questions. During the interview with Obama, Hank Green (the author) asked the President about several things:
- the feasibility of the ideas he put forth in the SOTU
- the revolving door between industry and government
- his use and alleged overuse of drone strikes
- the long-term foreign policy strategy on North Korea
- the confusing marijuana policy in the US
I think these are all legitimate questions that the President should have to answer for. I think that there could have been follow-up questions asked, but the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth. Obama also took a long time in answering each question, which may have been because the complexity of the issues discussed demanded long answers, or just because he wanted to run the clock.
> the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth
Precisely the problem with giving valuable interviewing time to people like this.
They're so happy to show up that they "don't remember a lot of the interview," let alone press for it to be a real one. (Hank Green's words on MSNBC after the interview.)
The President has stock answers for every single one of those questions, btw.
I wonder how long until the cycle comes full circle, and Youtubers are co-opted as subtle spinmakers for political ends. I wonder if it's already happening or already happened.
I feel like that's actually a more terrifying prospect than the fact that the younger generation doesn't watch TV news. You can mock, bash, and discredit TV news with facts and "honesty", and that's exactly what happened. But if your trusted source of news and political ideas is visceral comedy and memetic entertainment trends, that's almost immune to rational debate, since anything and everything can be dismissed as a joke.
I can imagine a future where politicians are elected on the basis of a lulzy hashtag, and that scares me way more than what we have now.
#HopeandChange (By which I mean, social media and enthusiasm have already played a strong role in a presidential election)
I think it's easy to co-opt these single channel people, you just pick the ones you want to talk to.
Traditional media does this by trading softball treatment for access, if you are granting access on an individual basis you can make sure you get the treatment you want.
>I wonder how long until the cycle comes full circle, and Youtubers are co-opted as subtle spinmakers for political ends. I can imagine a future where politicians are elected on the basis of a lulzy hashtag, and that scares me way more than what we have now.
This is how Barack Obama got elected in 2008 and 2012 #hopeandchange
I really don't get your point. If the TV media is biased (which it is), why would I watch that over someone like Hank Green who has so far given me no reason to distrust him?
Well, it's clear now that traditional journalism is dead and not coming back. TV and newspapers are biased as hell and the idiots on YouTube are, well, idiots.
But was it ever alive in the first place? Print journalism pretty much always included the Buzzfeed-style linkbait garbage: just look at any cover of any woman's magazine in the past 20 years. As for Rupert Murdoch, even though he's never won a Pulitzer Prize, he's a perfect fit for the legacy of Joseph Pulitzer and the politically-biased, sensationalist yellow journalism he made his fame and fortune from.
One of the most terrifying facts about 20th century America is the idea that three men--and the companies they were the face of--used to give all Americans all of their information about the greater world around them. They could try as hard as they could to be unbiased, but they would still have blind spots. And that's putting it charitably.
The reality we have to deal with today is that there is a cacophony of morons, partisan hacks, shills, and other unreliable narrators. But we have the benefit that, unlike the Walter Kronkites of old, they actually look as unreliable as they really are. Those of us who are interested in the truth can triangulate between them (and revel in the wealth of raw source material--smartphone videos turn every abusive police encounter into a potential Rodney King incident) and find the fact of the matter somewhere within, and those of us who are only interested in confirming their own biases can always find a way to do that anyway.
Fantastic. One of the most opaque administrations in history [1] can buy authenticity off-the-shelf, like a jar dime-store pomade, all because they've co-opted some YouTube stars into their fiction. He's right, the traditional media blew it when they, too, allowed themselves to be co-opted. But what we need is an adversarial press, not people starstruck by their own access. It's just as bad, if not worse.
Did you watch the interview? There were multiple hardball questions, including one with a critical premise regarding drone strikes and another about regulatory capture (which the president didn't give a real answer to, but oh well). No Snowden though. I also found the rest pretty interesting/informative due to the breadth of topics covered, although of course he's said it all a million times before.
I appreciate that some hardball questions were ultimately asked, but did you notice the part in this blog post where he mentioned that his own first instinct was to ask softer questions and it was actually the people from Google who pushed him to ask harder ones? A good journalist would need no such prodding.
As a Brit, I feel that the BBC is considered pretty legitimate as a respected news source, despite being old and decidedly non-hip. They normally seem to report impartial facts, which works for me (but seemingly not the likes of Fox/MSNBC).
We also have shows similar to the Daily Show (e.g. Have I got news for you) which come along and take the mickey out of the news as well, just to be on the safe side.
Within the subject matter they decide to report they are not terrible, but there are huge gaps in what they decide is worth reporting on.
As far as I'm concerned, their role is not simply to repeat endless interviews with the major political parties. They have a role to play in showing the public that other options exist. Lately they've given UKIP a ton of airtime with endless nonsense scandals like 'X says Y down the pub' and almost ignored the rise of the Greens.
Their wall to wall coverage during the 'phone hacking scandal' compared to ongoing total-surveillance by the NSA getting a token mention every now and then.
Today, they chose to describe Syriza as a 'radical left-wing party'. I don't think that choosing 'radical' in this context is an accident.
I could go on; some of my bugbears are more trivial than others; but I think they're definitely a 'mouthpiece of the establishment'.
Better than FOX? Sure; but that's not a high bar to meet.
Our electoral system is bad enough without major media outlets focusing almost all of their time on Red vs Blue.
BBC is publicly funded. It's as if PBS hadn't faced decades of Republican attacks and budget cuts. Republicans believe that the only form of television we should watch should be for the benefit of shareholders. Even so, PBS still manages to do some great journalism with shows like Frontline. But they don't have anywhere near the budget to create content as good as the BBC.
Agreed completely. The BBC certainly aren't without their faults, but at the end of the day they're the most impartial news service I've come across. I'm glad we have them!
I was pretty impressed by the article and just watched the youtube interview and came out less impressed than before I read the article. The questions were too soft - even CNN and other big news outlets ask tougher questions than these guys did. I understand they have to be themselves but if this is supposed to be the next outlet for news, it doesn't make me very hopeful.
I thought the authors questions were pretty good, slightly less impressed with the next two (although I would also identify with the first guy more, so maybe there's something to this whole thing).
The thought I came away with was that it was probably actually a pretty easy interview for him, not because they threw him softballs, but because there's a genuine lack of political sophistication and knowledge from the interviewers, and by extension their audiences.
I think Obama realised it too by the end, and did a reasonable job of not coming off too patronising - except for the movie bit. He could have emphasised that all of their viewers have a voice, but it only counts if they use it.
To me the questions the interviewers planned up front seem reasonably solid - what's missing is anything after Obama's responses. The interviewers don't ask follow-up questions, ask about things the answer omitted, or challenge anything that was in the answer - they just move on to the next question.
Of course it would be a mistake for us to fetishize combative interviews or to say the interviewer must always disagree with the politician regardless of what they say. But if this type of interview is the future of journalism, the interviewers need to get better at asking probing questions on the fly, not just scripted questions they've had months to come up with.
Seriously, the ability for the interviewers to say "Okay, now actually answer the question I asked you" would be helpful. This is an absolutely infuriating pattern - question is asked, answer is given that doesn't even attempt to address the question, interviewer moves on.
I sympathize with both sides. It does frustrate me as well, but if the interviewers did that, people would stop agreeing to do interviews with them. It effectively prevents the interviewee from controlling the narrative, which is the only reason to agree to an interview in the first place.
I don't sympathize with the media at all. If they all stopped trading softball treatment for access, they wouldn't need to trade softball treatment for access anymore. They raced to the bottom and we all lost.
I dunno... if there is one group of folks who I believe will have a reason for choosing what they link or don't link with some care, it's folks who make some money blogging. I'd assume there is a reason before assuming the guy is stupid, but I could be wrong.
If only there was a website, maybe one that even sponsored this event, where you could go and type in some words like "president" and "interview" and "youtubers," and they'd just... hand you the video you were looking for.
I hate these sorts of "outreach to young people" PR events. They not only reveal how totally out of touch and insincere politicians are with respect to youth issues, but also how scatter-brained and incoherent young people are. Seriously, trying to follow the thought process of this "article" while being beaten in the face with rich media was physically painful.
i dislike the PR event, but this article is not scatterbrained. it's casting the negative reactions to their interviews as a battle for legitimacy in news media, and it's focusing heavily on the generational shift. he makes some pretty valid points about how younger people respond to mainstream news. whether it's accurate that youtubers will become the new legitimacy is hard to say, and the blogger has a obvious bias on that, but i found a lot of this resonating with me
Here is a clip [0] from the press briefing when the “I’m just curious, was ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ or ‘David After Dentist’ not available?” Quote happened. The full video (queued to the same point as the first clip) can be found here [1] (there are a couple other comments made not in the first clip).
I'm reminded of a series by Greg Bear, "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children", where the central premise is that there's a sudden and major evolutionary change in newborn humans. One of the traits of the newly-evolved humans is that they have a pervasive and tight-knit social structure. The books try to describe what might happen as the young people grow up and there's a power struggle between the "old" humanity and the "new" humanity.
Comments like rayiner's in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943501) are a perfect example. What he finds "scatterbrained" is something that works just fine for a lot of young people. They've grown up in a media-rich, active world, and they're making it their own. Their brains probably work a little bit differently from older brains.
I think the article was really well-written and made a cogent argument. I think that the facts of political engagement from youth support its argument. Whether and to what extent old politics is able to co-opt young media remains to be seen -- Obama's campaign certainly did it pretty successfully only to further disenchant a lot of young people with the political process.
But eventually their generation will become the dominant political force in this country, and if old media continues to approach politics the way it does now, it's going to die when that happens.
This article paints traditional media with too broad a brush. There's plenty of junk on TV, but plenty in the blogosphere, too. And I really love my weekly copy of the Economist, and doubt anything of its quality, depth, or rigor could be published by someone without their budget or credibility.
So there's space for both larger "legacy" operations as well as smaller independent writers and thinkers, publishing their thoughts.
The main thing is that access to distribution no longer guarantees credibility: just because you're on TV, doesn't mean you have something important/meaningful/honest/worthwhile to say. So it's up to each individual to assess the credibility of their sources; ironically, a major "critical thinking" skill taught in traditional university education, something distinctly out of favor here on HN.
So it's up to each individual to assess the credibility of their sources; ironically, a major "critical thinking" skill taught in traditional university education, something distinctly out of favor here on HN.
It's only ironic if you believe those skills are effectively taught and learned in those classes. Do you?
I remember reading a blog post a long time ago by someone talking about his former college acquaintance. This guy would play video games at all hours and dabble in comedy, trying different schticks out. He was quite eccentric, yet shy. To give away the ending, his former college acquaintance is now Internet famous to the degree that he makes a healthy living out of being a more enlarged, extreme version of himself - 'The Angry Video Game Nerd'
Serious question. Who among here wouldn't want to be a known Youtube personality with a million subscribers? I do fantasize about this from time to time when watching .... (rspecs running).
I don't know how widespread this opinion is, but I certainly wouldn't want to be. If some work I'd created became immensely popular then that would be fine, but putting myself out there to relentless, intrusive scrutiny sounds hellish.
I think the article is shortsighted. I can't argue for the merits of cable news, but there are many media organizations that have been increasingly shut out by this administration.
All media organizations not just the cable news channels, but also the AP, New York Times, and others are being shut out of many events which they formerly had access to.
Instead the clear strategy of administration has been to limit media access and to control the narrative by launching material through there own channels. Channels such as there youtube channel "The White House" where you can find the interview Hank Green is referencing. I haven't watched the entire interview, but if it is being hosted and potentially produced by the White House I can't consider it objective. I don't think I can consider it journalism either, but at the same time I don't think I can consider a lot of what is on Fox News as journalism either.
There are a lot of other people who I like to see interview the President, but never will. One person that comes to mind would be Amy Goodman. She isn't as hip as the Youtubers, but she has spoken at my college and many others. She definitely holds a clear leftists standpoint, but I know her questions would be unrelenting and would lead to a much needed discourse about actions of this administration.
There was this one instance were Bill Clinton accidentally ended up being interview by her.
Anecdotally I watched the State of Union last week. Not on CNN or MSNBC, but on Whitehouse.gov. Not positive, but it looked like is was using Youtube livestreaming services. In that stream alongside each of the points there preprepared supporting graphics.
It's indicative that the entire article didn't wrestle with any real issues.
I don't think being a youtube star is any sure sign that they represent Millenials. All indications seem to suggest that w/regard to news, Vice does a better job of that (for what it's worth) - and Vice were as dismissive as every other outlet.
The reason why they don't care about whatever you think about the state of journalism is because it allows them to play you directly like a cheap fiddle, without the risk of any pesky journalists getting in the way.
QED.
The state of journalism may suck, but this airheaded attitude suggests it's merely trying to follow it's intended audience and failing.
People this shallow are not going to be reached with quality journalism, so please stop blaming others for your own shallowness and disinterest.
The "political process" isn't the media or the current crop of political parties, it's you. You switch off, it's 100% your problem.
Don't blame others for your own contribution to turning it into shallow entertainment.
Google will eventually screw Youtube up as they try to extract more money out of it, guaranteed. Young people don't know this but CNN had a good 15 year run where they were the young upstart and "authentic" and trusted. It always happens, no matter the idealism and vision, eventually the relentless Wall Street pressure for more profits wins out.
No matter what your thoughts on Middle Eastern politics, Rupert Murdoch is actually right this time - it's cringeworthy to think the president of the United States passed up a face-to-face meeting with the prime minister of Israel in favor of this. Whatever political party the next one's from, it'd be nice if they actually did their job.
So which one of these young whippersnappers asked about the kill lists? The crackdown on whistleblowers? The increasing number of civilian casualties in the Forever War? A foreign policy that leads to support of countries like Saudi Arabia? The incarceration rate? Militarization of police? The quest for total surveillance?
I only watched the first guy - the article author - and yes he asked about the drone program and the drug war, specifically how it targets and incarcerates minorities. I think he got the usual politically safe non-answers back, but don't try and claim they didn't ask.
"Are you at all worried that your administration is going to be seen as a time when drone strikes were a technology like... we see as over- or misused?" is not a question about kill lists, civilian casualties disguised in statistics as "military-age males", double tapping to also kill the people coming to rescue the first strike's victims or any serious issue related to UAV warfare.
Technology overuse and misuse is not the issue here. Killing people abroad is the issue.
There was a time when flashing "BREAKING" in big bold letters and exclusive interviews indicated the most important things happening in the news. Now it means nothing. CNN was flashing "BREAKING" on the screens two weeks after the Malaysian airliner went down, preceding a discussion about whether or not it could have been a black hole that consumed it (that literally happened). Conversations between two parties are so canned that correspondents are even using the exact same wording as passed down by the party lines. Cable news is nothing but theater now, and to people who haven't grown up watching the news it seems very weird an disengenuous.
Focusing on externalities such as why someone became famous (a bathtub full of cereal?) lets the old guard not care about up-and-coming forms of journalism, dismissing its legitimacy. The legitimacy doesn't come from the content, but in how serious and domineering one can look when delivering the news. It's BS professionalism.