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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

Nonprofit news organizations are a thing and I've been incredibly positive about their future (full disclosure: I used to work for a nonprofit publication).

The nonprofit model encourages much more direct community engagement through conferences, festivals, and long-form interviews with local, state and national leaders.

A major hurdle that nonprofit and higher-quality news outlets face is that the major media players have dopamine-driven news down to a science, and it's a lot easier to consume a small and practically meaningless soundbyte than it is to sit and listen to a politician have a challenging discussion with an interviewer for an hour. The attention span of the average American isn't equipped for higher-level discourse as it's not nearly as exciting and rage-inducing as watching CNN/FOX/ABC/??? network.

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The most popular podcaster right now is Joe Rogan, who does 2-3 hour interviews. Doesn't the popularity of his content suggest that Americans are very interested in higher level discourse, but have long been denied it?

> Doesn't the popularity of his content suggest that Americans are very interested in higher level discourse, but have long been denied it?

This is probably true to degree, although Rogan specifically is a pretty polarizing example due to his proclivity for hosting guests that aren't always welcome elsewhere. It's hard to say how much of his popularity is due to his interview style versus his politics. I also expect that the demographic breakdown of podcast listeners aren't reflective of the country as a whole, it probably skews a bit younger.

Long-form interviews with political leaders aren't a new genre, I suspect they just don't get as much attention as the more soundbite-y forms of news, but I could be wrong.

Boring-ass long-form interviews with nonagenarians like Charlie Rose or the 60 Minutes gang don't get much attention because they are without substance. Rogan isn't necessarily trying to embarrass his guests, but neither is he desperate to support the status quo. So, occasionally, something true gets said. Like, once an hour. Still better than the nonagenarians.

Rogan seems like one of the most un-polarizing forces in media right now. He can support Bernie Sanders, a left wing position, and oppose trans rights, a right wing position. Almost everyone else is more pushed into either the left or right pole.

I don't think it's fair to say that he opposes trans rights. I saw him talk about recently transitioned people in MMA. I'm not a big follower of his, but I think his views are more nuanced than a blanket "he opposes trans rights like right wing people".

I don't listen to him now that his RSS feed is defunct, but ISTR Rogan supported every right of trans people except the right of trans women to compete in women's athletics without informing competitors of their gender status. This came out after multiple women MMA fighters were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.

This nuance is enough for certain trans activists to damn him completely, but that is hardly a universal judgment.

You've touched on a huge problem I see with the US political system. Everyone is bucketed into one of two buckets. Everyone in each bucket must have all of the beliefs of the other people in the bucket. If you are in one bucket, you support Trump, think border walls are a good thing, support blue lives matter are anti LGBT and are anti-abortion. If you are in the other bucket you take the opposite views on all of the those topics and more.

For me it shows that the tribalism has completely overtaken US politics. If everyone was making up their mind independently or even semi-independently the odds of everyone in the same bucket having the same beliefs would be close to 0.

I see tribalism taking over as an inevitable consequence of the electoral college voting system, and I'm always startled when people tout vague calls for 'unity' as something worth doing, rather than implementing ranked-choice ballets or similar and just solving the problem.

I'm not accusing you of that, btw. Just saying it for me.

One thing I really envy about parliamentary systems (like in Germany, the Netherlands, etc.) is having lots of parties, with all sorts of different takes on the issues. I do think Americans fall into the trap of thinking there are only 2 possible political philosophies, Liberal and Conservative.

Well yes, that's what "polarizing" means, that everything is pushed towards one of two groups, rather than being allowed to be anything in the middle. That's why it seems to me that Rogan is not polarizing, because his opinions don't strictly belong to one of the two groups.

The problem is classifying "trans rights" as left wing, while those have (almost) nothing to do with the left/right spectrum.

Another example, on that spectrum this time : Trump's anti-immigration stance is a very typical leftist position. If this sounds preposterous, see this :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen%27s_A...

I fully agree with you and this just proves the point. If everyone was thinking for themselves from first principles or even just using their memories they'd remember which side of the immigration debate they are supposed to be on. You don't even need to go back that far, up until Trump the right wing were very pro immigration because their industries rely on a steady flow of cheap and under-paid and exploitable labor. Exactly the thing the left are traditionally against.

Trump was a very odd presidential candidate. He basically was super-populist (fund Social Security/Medicare, get rid of immigration), and indeed seemed like he had no firm commitment to the Republican party. I actually hoped that he'd end up governing from the center (especially after the Dems took the house).

But then he got elected, and essentially governed as a standard trickle-down Republican, with a side order of conspiracy theories and showmanship.

Like, it's important to remember that Bernie Sanders was anti-immigration without stronger labour standards, and that many Trump/Sanders voters (in 2016) liked the other candidate more than those in their respective primaries.

The US just needs one set of people who'll actually do good things for the lower half of the populace, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

> Rogan specifically is a pretty polarizing

I'd flip this; Rogan isn't polarizing, so much as a section of society is intolerant of "the marketplace of ideas".

It's not Rogan who has to change, it's his critics.

Put simply, they don't trust fellow Americans to form their own opinions, so feel entitled to control their influences.

Ok, there are also some guests that might make false claims, or misrepresentations. Exposure and open discussion is the prescribed cure for this too.

As popular as Joe Rogan is, he seems to be a drop in the bucket of the news (infotainment) business.

Also, it's debatable that his podcast promotes higher-level discourse even if it's long in duration.

An ideal would be someone like Rogan but with a spine and some teeth, someone willing to stand up to his interviewees and bite them a bit when they say something outright wrong or fuzzy-headed. It would require the interviewer to, first, get acquainted with the idea that facts are more important than feelings, especially the feelings of the people being interviewed, second, learn the facts relevant to a given interview and have them on hand, and, third, develop a position on the topics relevant to the interview based on those facts and have the basic fortitude and honesty to defend that position. It's difficult, but it would draw in people put off by Rogan's style or lack thereof.

America needs another Dick Cavett for a younger generation in that regard (or multiple!). Less pandering, emotionally and intellectually intelligent, honest, but still relatable and still cognizant of his audience.

It definitely kicks the cynical view that people are only interested in bites that satiate a short attention span.

My town is blessed with an excellent nonprofit news organization: Berkeleyside and its spin-off, Oaklandside. Together they publish 1-2 articles each day, because that's how much news there is. There's really no reason to have the local dailies like the SF Chronicle, the only major-city newspaper to my knowledge to have been openly mocked in a famous movie, or the SJ Mercury News and the other papers of the Bay Area News Group, a Denver company that hasn't printed anything worth reading in the past decade.

Personally I find that Berkeleyside and Oaklandside are full of “personal interest” type stories that are interesting but usually aren’t too important. Some new restaurant opened, a new indie movie is showing. Whereas the SF Chronicle has recently become an excellent source for local coronavirus and wildfire news.

Interesting. I find the primary sources on wildfires, pandemics etc to be so easily accessed that I don't need the interpretations of local newspapers on those topics. What can they tell me that I can't find out by viewing up-to-the-minute satellite and air quality data? Nothing. And in particular I don't need editorial takes like the ones of the L.A. Times earlier this year, crowing about how sprawl protects them from the pandemic. How does that take seem this week? Better to just get stats from health officials' web sites.

On the other hand there's no ready alternative source for restaurant openings and closings. That's just about my favorite topic on Berkeleyside.

The SF Chronicle charts are just really well done. For example this page I find to be the most useful one for California-centric coronavirus information: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/coronavirus-map/

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