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Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

I think the explanation about why certain things get more news is in the word "news". News is just that, new. New, interesting, unique, different, something to be talked about.

An accepted truth like "climate change is real" isn't really that new today. Page 10: "Another professor agrees with the professor from last week who talked about this topic, read more on page 56." A protest turned riot about climate change is news. Crackpot theories are also new and news worthy.

The entire premise that the news is impartial and should cover issues statistically equally is utterly at odds with the core principle of what the news actually is.

The news is not information and never has been. It's telling stories about the world.

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Most climate change news is always the same "eat your veggies" style reporting. We need x,y,z and we have time until current date + 30 years [0]. There is also the opposite. "Wind power and grid expansion permits have started piling up for the third year in a row". Not exactly exciting. There is also the yearly CO2 tax article and people always respond "I hate taxes". Usually the only exciting times are when the government decides to change things up.

[0] worst cases keep getting worse but the amount of work stays the same, if you tell people we have 12 years left to reach the old temperature goal they'll just give up and call you a doomsayer

> Crackpot theories are also new and news worthy.

Only when the crackpots have wealthy benefactors.

>The news is not information and never has been.

Assuming that's true then perhaps we need more journalism & less news.

Journalism here being performance of those duties implied by the 1st Amendment's Freedom Of The Press clause.

No one was ever going to win a Pulitzer for "yet another climate scientists agrees with widely accepted consensus." I do believe journalistic standards have fallen in recent times, but their job has always been to update us on new and surprising developments, not provide all the information a person would ever need. Climate change, just as an example, is a complicated process and the science behind it can not be accurately conveyed in a 30 second snippet by a layman. A responsible citizen should be able and willing to go out and acquire the background information they need to make an informed opinion, and in this day and age that information is probably only a few clicks away.

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