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Comment by evan_ | Hacker News Reader

> I am seriously interested in a study that quantified the number of NPR news analysis stories that contain explicit commentary on race in 2020. I bet it is over 80% meanwhile the black share of the population is around 12%. Seems to me it would make sense to have the number of stories more proportional to that.

What is the connection in your thinking between the proportion of stories that analyze race and the percent of black people in the US?

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Almost all NPR stories that analyse race concern "black or brown" people. Why do you think that a disproportionate amount of content should be generated focusing on one issue? If my premise is correct, that more than 12% of NPR content contains racial analysis, I don't feel that the burden is on me to explain why I think this is an unjustified proportion. There are other interesting things to talk about in the world and time is limited. That's why. Why should one issue pre-empt others day in and day out?

Why does the news spend so much time on sports coverage? Only like 0.0001% of the population play sports professionally.

They do a lot more political coverage, and the number of professional politicians is probably similar.

Well sports news is entertainment. There are specialised sports reporters and sports segments. Sports fans don't usually burn down city blocks when their team loses. Maybe identity politics outrage news is also serving a market demand. However it should be clear if the news is not proactive and tethered to underlying reality, i.e. if police are not actually racist as portrayed by CNN then the net social effect of such fake news is clearly negative. I don't think there is a such thing as fake sports news. There is clearly fake business news. When the media promotes ideas like ubiquitous AI and self driving cars it leads to malinvestment.

Thinking it is an unjustified proportion seems exceedingly racist on your part. The equivalency between proportion of attention paid to harmed groups and size of the group, especially for groups as large as ~12%, is inherently quite an extreme racist stance to take.

I’m sure you wouldn’t agree, but that’s exactly the problem. As long as we’ve got people acting like NPR’s current amount of coverage including racial angles is somehow “unjustified” then we clearly need to terraform more and more racial angle of content into the discussion to educate that racist ignorance out of existence.

The same is true for sexism and poverty as well.

In a world where resources including time are scarce there is something to be gained from allocating time toward beneficial activities. I got to stop interacting with this thread now to practice what I preach.

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