Why Doesn't Anyone Trust the Media? | Hacker News Reader

Why Doesn't Anyone Trust the Media?

harpers.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

When I read a post about science in the newspaper, it a lot of fun to guess what is the real event behind all the errors added by the press, the university press and some times even the researchers. Then comes anger.

I assume the same level of accuracy for other topics.

Corporate media have always been used to manipulate the masses but the internet exacerbated this by providing corporate media with additional information about the users and the ability to target people by demographics, political preferences, social class and more. This improved not only manipulation but also rage-baiting, click-baiting, targeted gaslighting, astroturfing, social division further amplifying the previously mentioned capabilities and more. There is a lot of money and power to be gained by manipulating the masses. Those perceptive enough to detect this will lose confidence in the corporate media and with time this lack of confidence will spread to other services as well.

Governments are not able or willing to fix this so the only winning move is not to play. Create block-lists for social media and corporate media sites. Return to smaller interest based platforms that have less than 20K users each. Avoid anything federated as it only takes one compromised platform to spoil the entire fleet. This will be very difficult for many as the dopamine addiction to social and corporate media will be challenging to break and people like belonging to a massive group. Many will instead invoke coping mechanisms and other excuses to continue their habits. I mention social media as corporate media often control, operate and/or manipulate the masses on said platforms. Some of the manipulators are on this site and will try to defend the big corporate and social media platforms. see if you can spot it...

"the media" indeed has a credibility crisis but I suspect the rise of alternative narratives about the world (social media) is the main factor behind rise of a sense of generalised distrust, which I'm sure we're all feeling right now.

What we call 'truth' is really just consensus (hence the importance of cancelling / de-platforming / downvoting etc - techniques to secure that consensus) and narrative violations from competing versions of truth which are able to persist is deeply disturbing. We're going to have to get used it - certainty is one of things 'the media' once provided to us but will never be able to do so again

I think the concentration of ownership in Murdoch and Bezos, and like, has not helped. C suite newspaper people have become more craven as the rewards rise. So we see pay-off to politicians for market access. That undermines trust from the top.

I think the emergence of infotainment paid stories eroded the "news is something somebody doesn't want you to read" side.

And I think the fusion of non journalist commentators and editorial meant we get slant and not as much facts.

The willingness of Bezos and Soon-Shiong (for example) to directly interfere definitely decreased trust. Reports are that WaPo lost 350k subscribers since Bezos' open editorial interference last year.

> What we call 'truth' is really just consensus

That is not what I call "truth". Consensus may (or may not) reflect truth, but it is not truth.

Because the mostly socialist activists posing as journalists keep lying to us.

What about the centrist and right-wing folks who also keep lying to us? And how about all the AI generated verbiage? The S/N ratio in life seems pretty low.

There are 3 Definitive Rules of Trust:

1) Trust is earned.

2) If it’s not earned, it’s not Trust (or trust). Full stop.

3) Once lost, regaining Trust takes 5x to 10x - sometimes perhaps even more - effort to earn it back.

No matter how you cut it, this ^^^ is how Trust works.

Based on what I’ve seen, The Media is not aware of these rules. It’s certainly not interested in #3. Instead, it does the worst thing possible, it blames its customers (i.e., the consumers of its content). Using gaslighting as a proxy for Trust is a rookie mistake.

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