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Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

There are two quite different possible complaints.

1. "I want good journalism but can't find it."

2. "The general public is being fed a diet of bad journalism."

To someone who's making complaint 1, it's very reasonable to reply "It's out there, you're just looking in the wrong places" (assuming that's true, which seems plausible).

To someone who's making complaint 2 -- which is how I read Tim Bray here -- that doesn't seem like such a helpful response. Telling Tim to look for better news won't do anything to raise the overall level of journalism.

(Of course a good response to complaint 2 may be "This is an insoluble problem; people will watch and read what they want to watch and read, and it turns out they don't want what you consider good journalism".)

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The second complaint seems to be complaining about Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap); historically, Sturgeon's law has been nearly as inviolable as conservation of angular momentum.

If anything, I suspect that mainstream journalism has never been orders of magnitude better than it is now. It's just that back in the day, we didn't have bloggers with photo essays showing us what we could be reading instead, so our standards were different.

I never consume or discuss things in the mainstream media. I got my news coverage of 9/11 entirely from the Onion. But distortions about this topic are far too damaging to our future to go unchallenged. Energy policy failure is the only credible existential threat to post-Malthusian society I can think of.

I disagree with your second point in one sense - overall, journalism might be worse than in years past. However, the problem is that the editorial standards for journalism have been relaxed because the news organizations need to publish news stories 24/7 on tv and the Internet to compete.

There are still great journalists doing excellent work. However, their contribution has less impact because of the overall signal-to-noise ratio and also because we don't have enough great journalists to fill up a 24-hour news day.

It's similar to expansion in professional sports leagues. It's wonderful that new markets may get teams but that waters down the quality of the overall product because adding more teams doesn't mean you're adding more great players.

If people are complaining about #2, it doesn't make any sense to give credit to people who produce good work but don't manage to get their work widely read.

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