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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago the Daily Mail ran an article about a visualization I made. They obeyed my CC license, so I have no complaint as serious as Yau's. But the article was just full of errors, including spelling my name wrong in three different ways. I wrote the article author and pointed out all the errors and he responded "No copy editing! It's a tight budget."

The Daily Mail truly doesn't give a shit. About quality, about copyright, about decency. It seems to be working for them.

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The free market in action, I suppose.

Yes! Why is this a problem?

The Daily Mail is SHIT. The majority of people LOVE to read about shit.

It's not my thing, so I don't read it.

That's what free market means.

We have a closed market, however. It's free for incumbent massive media organisations like DMG who only exist because Lord Rothmere and descendents have The Right Friends. You and me, however, can pucker up, pay, and play by the rules the free ones make.

Keynsian economics does not equate to "good and right" - it equates to Keynsian economics - and nepotism. So much nepotism.

I know Keynes is the default bogeyman in some circles of economic thinking, but I'm really struggling to see the link between established corporations having brands and governments running countercyclical policy...

Bearing in mind most newspapers' circulation is crashing and Buzzfeed got very big very quickly peddling similarly lowbrow content, I'm not even convinced the market power of print media is that high.

I'm guessing the nepotism argument goes as so:

Keynes gov't economic stimulus is created by the gov't, and people with good connections to the gov't are the recipients of this stimulus, causing nepotism to flourish. The stimulus is not distributed evenly to the economy and thus increases economic inequality.

The entire bank bailout & QE seems like a similar situation in the USA. Who got all the QE cash? The banks, not everyone.

Correct - today it's a congressman or mp, 100 years ago it was a lord or governor, before that, the aristocracy.

We still have an aristocracy, or plutarchy, in fact. I come from deep within the belly of the beast and know the people who know the people and you would not believe how bent it all is. Everuthing happens behind closed doors, we just see the punch and judy show after the event.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Keynesian economics, unless you've redefined the term to mean "everything I do not like in the world".

Because the same people who absorb this garbage have an influence on public policy. "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

Does free market mean abusing someone else to host your stuff for free? Good thing we have REFERER in the browsers!

think a bit harder

they still need to adhere to the rules of society (no stealing etc)

also, publication of stories in a newspaper has implication wider than the readership of that newspaper

and besides, any free market also needs rules in order to function properly

The alternative would be a government committee deciding on what should or shouldn't be printed/displayed on the internet, I suppose.

Another potential alternative: large trustworthy media outlets form a committee themselves, develop some review process for adding a stamp to the top of their sites that says something like "American Online Journalist" and thereby encourage good journalism in a way that's good for business without interference with the free market.

Then what? People, who are reading Daily Mail, will say 'oh nooo it doesn't have the stamp'? No, doubt you care about these things if you're reading it.

And you know what? It's fine. If we don't like some things and don't see them right, doesn't mean that everyone else should. Some people like tabloids and that's alright.

We can't force people to like The Right Thing.

I absolutely agree with you. My idea is that perhaps the worst thing about a site that claims to report news but doesn't do good journalism is just that it claims to report news. I don't think people would or should stop reading sites that don't have the stamp, I just think there are ways to allow for macro-organizations without suggesting that "the way we do it is the only way, except for complete government control."

At which point, you open the door to a media cartel that decides what is and isn't worthy to write about. At which point, your stamp becomes worse than useless, it becomes a sign of 'quality' to the misinformed while really being simply a way to say it's been 'approved' by the large media companies.

What would stop Daily Mail from stealing this stamp and slapping it on their site?

Trademark law. A more significant problem is that mainstream media publications often actively dislike each others' editorial stance, so the last thing they want to do is agree on a way of mutually endorsing each others' content. The UK, for example, has one right wing broadsheet, one left wing broadsheet that repeatedly attacks allegedly sloppy journalism at the right wing broadsheet and one notionally centrist broadsheet (run by a media empire that makes a lot of money from tabloids). None of them are likely to be receptive to the idea of certifying each other as being more reliable than other news sources.

In most issues, between extremes there is, normally, a balanced approach.

The world doesn't run in binary variables.

The alternative is to pay teachers a higher salary in order to attract candidates who care enough to instill critical thought into their students.

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