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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

It's not surprising that Trump rails against the mainstream media when it's becoming increasingly obvious that the news is written to rile people up and get clicks. The news is like professional wrestling - there are heroes, villains, story arcs, winners, losers, and the more you understand a topic the more you realize the press gets it completely wrong. But maybe it's always been this way, and I wasn't as aware before.

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It's also ironic considering Trump rode to the presidency on a steady stream of strongly-delivered sweeping factless emotional appeals delivered as barely-coherent narratives.

Interesting perspective, but I don't think it makes sense to take sides politically in this argument.

All media is sadly going this way, the argument could also be made that link bait titles are partly responsible for Trump's popularity. ALL media is sadly going this way. If you think Fox or Drudge or whatever are above these sad tactics, look closer.

I'd like to ask the bigger question of, how do we fight/protect agains this?

The problem is that journalism is unprofitable. They have to fight dirty just to survive.

This is why I take a nuanced view of so-called Net Neutrality. In such a world, how does anyone monetize? Well we have seen: through sleazy tracking and sly tricks to capture personal data. Personally I liked it the old way: you paid cash money upfront and then you got the product in your hand and the transaction was closed.

Agreed. I would rather have silence than constant trickery and scammy sales everywhere I turn.

Not everything is intended to be profitable. That's not to say that journalism can't be profitable, but my take is the current state is giving up on journalism in order to be profitable.

"Is Everything Wrestling?"

> With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/magazine/is-everything-wr...

There's a yuuuge difference between having valid criticism of the news and just dismissing it because it's "fake news". Let's not validate infantile 140-character rantings now.

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