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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Way back in the 90s, I had a hacked satellite dish. This meant that I could get local channels from across the USA. My roommate used this for a school assignment. He looked at how much time local news spent on each topic, categorized by city. Here is what he found:

- All newscasts featured crime more than anything else ("if it bleeds it leads").

- All newscasts had a local feel-good story.

- All newscasts had weather (although East Coast and Midwest stations spent more time on it).

- All newscasts had a local sports update

But what was most interesting was what they spend the rest of their time on:

- In New York, it was mostly financial news.

- In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.

- In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news

- In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.

That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

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Those last ones reflect the dominant employment sector in each city, right? That seems like what you'd want to see given a lot of viewers will be involved in that kind of news or want updates on it?

Not exactly. It's the dominant outlier. Entertainment is not the largest sector in LA, but it's the most unique. Finance isn't the largest sector in NYC, but again the most unique.

Tech in SF may actually be the biggest sector, since tech is so big and prevalent, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.

> That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

I feel like the right lesson to take from this is that all data sources are coming from a certain perspective and motives, and so you can choose what you want to care about.

Perhaps you don't care about any of that, which is a fine and normal choice. But "this source is biased so I won't consume it" leads, really, to consuming nothing (EDIT: if you go too deep down this route). I think that consuming varying grains of salt is helpful in the general case.

("This source is biased in a specific way that makes me disregard this person's credibility on topics I care about" is a subtly different argument that is valid of course)

I was fortunate enough to grow up without cable television. Any clip I see from Fox/CNN is usually a bunch of inauthentic, ignorant talking heads that I wouldn’t even trust to tell me the weather.

I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.

We have ample evidence that getting your news from the talking heads on cable news tends to lead to a really warped view of the world. But I'm not at all sure that getting it from TikTok will end up better.

>That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

I dropped off social media for similar reasons. I didn’t want the outrage of others and hype algorithms dictating what I’d spend time thinking about or reacting to. I wanted to be in control more.

Yes, it's filtered, but to a substantial degree it's because that's what the audience wants. If they make money on ads and that revenue depends on eyeball time, then they will want to maximize eyeball time. An exception would be a news org that was funded differently. However that bias while different, would still be present because you only have so many hours in a day and thus can only present things of interest.

What someone “wants” is a complicated question.

People “want” all sorts of conflicting and even mutually exclusive things.

It would be just as true to say people “want” in-depth, factual understanding of things that are relevant to their lives.

The real optimization function is what you say later on: eyeball time.

Eyeball time, as anyone with a social media account can tell you, is hardly related to what a person comprehensively wants though.

Yes, people have ideas of what they would do, read and listen to in ideal form. That's what they tell themselves they would want. Reality or practice tells us what they idealize isn't realized by those people. They actually seek something different --often what they are presented in the news, in food, etc. Sometimes there are things that shift behavior (like physician tells them they need to change dietary customs or their psychologist suggests getting out of an echo chamber)

I'm taking issue with the suggestion that people's actions to pursue Option B means they don't actually want Option A.

This is not true.

They actually want Option A and they also actually want Option B.

Picking Option B does not imply the desire for Option A is false or illegitimate, it implies that people hold many authentic yet contradictory desires simultaneously and make tradeoffs (often regrettable ones) between them.

If you create a system that gets people to pick Option B consistently, you have not revealed the insincerity of their desire for Option A. You have built a system that compels people to act against their own legitimate desires for their own lives. In a media/social media context, this compulsion is often consciously designed in the audience.

So news reports on crime, positive stories, weather, sports, and the dominant industry in the local area.

>is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

As opposed to what? They report on what they think the people that are watching or could watch want to hear about.

This is the same as any business that sells what customers will buy.

Cherry picking is when you select examples that are not representative of the whole to win an argument.

How is the news doing this?

> - In New York, it was mostly financial news.

> - In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.

> - In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news

> - In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.

Crazy how well this coincides with the type of billboards you expect to see everywhere in these cities.

the issue is that this is what people want to watch and so it is even worse for algo feeds.

if you “manage”/editorialize your algorithm to remove these, you’ll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn’t.

> - All newscasts had weather (although East Coast and Midwest stations spent more time on it).

I mean, duh. Los Angeles has 263 sunny days in a year. Mentioning weather there is only worthwhile when it's not the assumed kind. Actual rain, if and when it happens, causes traffic jams.

> the news is very cherry picked

Interesting. So who is cherrypicking all the "Israel hostages" nonsense flooding my news feeds?

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