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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

It feels good to say stuff like that but it's not really true. A look over Pulitzer Prize winners from previous years will show deeply researched investigative stories and have had a real impact on public awareness.

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The vast vast vast majority of content news media generates is not like that, its drama farming and reposts. The actual investigative journalism is a very small minority.

So the statement "corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value" is false.

I'm not defending the clickbait content a lot of outlets engage in but I'm concerned that if the "corporate media" disappeared tomorrow a lot of things would go uninvestigated. I'm also not sure that the number of stories published is a worthwhile metric either. Maybe one truly eye-opening investigative story is worth a hundred boring clickbait articles, I don't really see how you'd quantify it.

Ugh, can we stop interpreting everything so literally? People embellish and use hyperbole for effect. Whenever someone says "always" or "never" (or similar terms), they very rarely actually mean those absolute terms, because most things in the world have exceptions, and most people actually do know that.

If you're genuinely confused by this kind of usage, and actually believe that those absolute terms are used sincerely, then I don't know what to tell you... maybe try to understand culture and language usage better?

> So the statement "corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value" is false.

I'm pretty sure the original was hyperbole but more accurate statement would be "most of what corporate media produces have zero or negative value and is just facilitator for the clicks"

Would you be more satisfied with, "Only the tiniest fraction of corporate media's output has intellectual value?" People often make statements that make what is approximately true absolute, for simplicity of expression or for style: "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" "The oboe is an ill woodwind that nobody blows good."

I'd accept "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" or "Nobody can play the oboe!" as a kind of colloquial hyperbole that works in part because people know it's hyperbole and there's a shared sentiment ("we all would find being out in this weather or the difficulty of learning to play the oboe well relatable").

It's a poor contribution to a conversation about the value of media as business enterprise because it's really not clear what the hyperbole is or what the common relatable point is supposed to be. And it might even be subtly nihilistic or privileged ("who's to say I can't believe whatever the hell I want regardless of what them news people say, they're probably just pushing what they want to believe just I like I am anyway").

So "only some fraction of the corporate media's output has intellectual value" would be an improvement. Increased clarity often is.

And it could lead to actually useful understanding, which is that a LOT of things which have high rates of mediocre or even useless output still have value.

Well like I just said, I'm not convinced looking at it through overall number of worthy/unworthy stories published is a metric that makes a lot of sense.

But sure, that statement is an improvement because it at least makes clear that if you were to remove the corporate media tomorrow something of important value would be lost. Something the original statement definitely does not convey.

I am formally challenging the notion that if corporate media were to disappear, people would suddenly lose their will to report and investigate on serious affairs that make up the tiny fraction of valuable content. If anything, there is a likelihood that people would even feel more compelled to do so with the understanding that they cannot expect major news outlets to do the work for them. I do however champion the loss of the will to report on everything other than that in corporate media’s hypothetical absence.

We can even go as far as to say that corporate media likely will not disappear anyway, and if it were to, in 2022, it would just be repackaged in a different format with new corporate or neo-corporate entities in its place.

In conclusion, and irrespective of the hyperbolic rhetoric of “corporate media produces nothing of value” or the more analytically amicable, “only the tiniest fraction of corporate media produces value”, I hereby declare an end to all corporate media and it’s theoretical subsequent reiterations.

Your average individual would have investigated something regardless of the presence or absence of corporate media, mostly because these stories don't just immediately happen; they take months of work where the public obviously has no clue what is or isn't being looked into.

But your average individual also doesn't, and realistically won't, have the reach of corporate media. That's where their value lies: they are able to get stories out to millions of people and the recognition behind their name to give credibility to the reporting.

> But your average individual also doesn't, and realistically won't, have the reach of corporate media. That's where their value lies: they are able to get stories out to millions of people and the recognition behind their name to give credibility to the reporting.

The irony of this is that the reach of corporate media is effectively deadened due to the reason that we’re having this discussion at all: the same outlets bely their own influence by publishing worthless content. In a world without corporate (news) media, there are still other ways to get news out through the wire.

Credibility is a good point, but speaks to a larger discussion on whether credibility in the media is based off of reputation, legacy, acolytes, accolades, etc?

At the end of the day, if the fall of corporate media effectively obliterates peoples will to “speak truth to power”, as the journalists like to say, then society is in pitiful shape and those whose will would disappear along with the Post, the Times and the Tribune lack integrity.

Well, question is really who will pay investigative journalist ? Independently funded ones would be overall better option but that's not exactly easy sell ("I might or might not produce some content once in a while") and "getting the name for yourself" first is pretty much requirement for crowdfunding.

To consider financial incentives or any sort of funding is an affront to those affected by a serious matter that may warrant an investigation.

Yet people doing the investigation have to eat and if they are good at their jobs it's better that they do their job, full time, instead of having "investigative journalist" as a hobby in addition to their "normal" job

Your’re tiptoeing around the gravity of situations such as, “how some lawyers and doctors rigged a system to deny benefits to coal miners stricken with black lung disease, resulting in remedial legislative efforts.” [Pulitzer Prize winning investigation, 2014] I would hope that the people who are involved in uncovering actions like this don’t perceive their practice as a mere job or a hobby, relative to whether they’re paid for it.

In the scenario we’re discussing (a world without corporate media), people who truly care enough about events, plots and schemes that threaten the moral fiber, dignity, agency and safety of humanity will see to it that they’re uncovered. That is unless, all investigative journalists are frauds who are driven only by glory and gold.

What you’ve described would be “better”, sure. It would be “better” if it rained during a drought than if it didn’t. But what are people going to do in the meanwhile?

Is “corporate” media the only kind of media there is that can present the news either way?

I don't think the grandparent meant "nothing" literally. But I would agree that the vast majority of corporate media reporting is garbage. The Pulitzer Prize winners are unfortunately the rare exceptions to the norm.

You are referring to the other extreme in terms of types of writers. These investigative journalists compose a tiny percentage of the overall population of corporate media writers.

I just took a look at the Pulitzer Prize winners for investigative reporting[0] and I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further.

If anything, corporate "news" spam drowns out these deeply researched investigative stories because, as GP said, the market conditions favor drama farming clickbait over an "exposé of highly toxic hazards inside Florida’s only battery recycling plant" which, while clearly important and deeply researched, I have never heard of.

That said, most of these journalists are from "corporate media," so that it "produces nothing of intellectual value" is as you say incorrect.

[0]https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206

Whoa, you didn't hear about Roy Moore?

> I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further... I have never heard of

We get it, you are uninformed. It was in major newspapers, was on PBS Frontline, and was adapted for radio, and it won a Pulitzer. You haven't heard of it, that's on you.

Wow. This is kind of hurtful being that I consider myself informed about topics I'm interested in. For example YMTC's 232-layer NAND flash was something I heard about as soon as it broke. I don't have a newspaper subscription so it's hard to keep up with everything being that most news on the internet is the same rehashed for content years on end or meaningless celebrity trivia/drama.

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