Comment by raggi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raggi | Hacker News Reader

I think the US needs to regulate "news" vs. "entertainment news" and so on.

I remember speaking to some younger folks recently, and I mentioned journalistic integrity, and they didn't even believe the concept ever exists. I doubt they have ever consumed any significant amount of content produced by professional journalists operating under the stricture of formal editorials and fact checking, but it is still somewhat concerning that they don't even acknowledge its existence.

There's some things to be said in this space:

- Newspapers were never competently replaced, business model wise

- Web ads were never sufficiently constrained to not break web pages

- Ad blockers ultimately started to completely destroy any last chance that ad powered solutions could pay for professional journalism

- Entertainment journalism has a different business model, enabling it to be more readily available, and popular, than formal journalism

- I don't think anyone knows where to go from here

I really dislike the term "media" in these discussions, because it seems to lump "entertainment news" squarely in with formal journalism, and I do not think they're equivalent - moreover it's clear the difference is not well observed anymore, and that's extremely concerning.

Could it be that the younger folks are less inclined to acknowledge the existence of objective truth than older generations?

I could argue that it is orthogonal to integrity seeing as I believe integrity to be about intent and not result.

What cannot be argued however is that this viewpoint definitely casts a shadow on journalism as a profession, even the "serious" journalism.

What always struck me in Chomsky’s lectures are the constant barrage of examples of big, serious publications pushing agendas left and right.

I guess what I am trying to say is that serious is a low bar here, not that much higher than entertainment news.

> Could it be that the younger folks are less inclined to acknowledge the existence of objective truth than older generations?

Does anyone really question the existence of objective truth in general? Even those who claim they do, don’t actually act like they do-when it comes to non-controversial factual claims such as “1+1=2” or “Canada is north of the (mainland) United States” or “World War II happened”.

People only really question objective truth when it comes to issues connected to social/political/ideological/ethical/philosophical/etc controversies-on issues distant from those controversies, everyone accepts it in practice.

And I think a lot of people don’t make a careful distinction between the existence of objective truth and our ability to know it. Some people who question the existence of objective truth, what they are really trying to say, is our ability to (confidently) know what is objectively true has been significantly overrated-which is a claim far more worthy of intellectual respect than what they are literally claiming, especially if one restricts the scope of that claim to certain topics.

As a simple thought experiment on objective truth: if we are having a debate about objective truth and you say objective truth doesn't exist is it then acceptable for me to beat you to death with a crowbar?

If not then why?

There is an external reality independent of people's thoughts. We have spend so many centuries insulating people from it that they can believe all sorts of nonsense that would have killed them near instantly in previous ages.

A media select what news to report. Even if a news media reports only objective truths, they have been selected subjectively.

The media reports a subjectively chosen mixture of objective truths and objective falsehoods–always has, always will. That's got nothing to do with the question of whether objective truth itself exists or not.

> Could it be that the younger folks are less inclined to acknowledge the existence of objective truth than older generations?

I tried to ask this part in the conversation. It was their belief that no one producing media demonstrates any interest in trying to be objective. They expressed a belief that no individual or organization ever even attempts to do so, that agenda is ever present. This expression seemed to imply that they believe it is possible, but that no "they" can be trusted to attempt do so.

I know where to go: away from the internet and back to real life, observing what is around me with my own two eyes and drawing conclusions from that. If I find myself ignorant about a particular topic, I will go study it myself rather than rely on "the experts."

That's just a stop-gap solution. We have small bandwidth and can't be expected to figure out the truth on our own for every relevant topic.

That's why it's a travesty that there aren't journalistic outlets that can be reliably counted on to stick up for the truth when that truth happens to be contrary to their political leaning.

It must be nice to be an omnipath with unlimited time and resources.

There are almost no communities left in the world who do not at least use a manufactured mechanical device to create fire every day, and even the production, sale and distribution of those devices has some significant and politically relevant implications to our world.

I don't think the eyes only world exists anymore. You're absolutely free (I hope) to try to ignore the rest of it, but you'll interact with it regardless.

What regulations do you have in mind?

At minimum labelling entertainment news clearly as such, and applying some amount of industry standard requirements. There are many bodies working on this, but most ombusman organizations remain in-house. I suspect we can broaden that, such as the Press Complaints Commission.

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