Comment by PsychopompPoet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PsychopompPoet | Hacker News Reader

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson

"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists." Norman Mailer

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." George Bernard Shaw

"In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has." Mark Twain

"I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets." Napoleon

"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." Oscar Wilde

"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word journalist." Soren Kierkegaard

''Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.'' Oscar Wilde

It's so ironic to use quotation in this case.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

> "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson

To be fair news papers are much different now than they were then. A history of newspapers in America will show you journalistic credibility was hard to come by early on.

I get that newspapers and the journalistic profession used to be different, and in many ways better, than they are now. Still, doesn't it strike you as interesting that brilliant, thoughtful people living at at the same time as those "better" newspapers made criticisms similar to those being made today? Thinking too poorly of the present and too well of the past is a common error. Or, on a related not, "There's nothing new under the sun."

He said they were pretty bad in the early days, not that they were better.

Hmm, I certainly thought he was implying that things used to be better. The fact that "journalistic credibility was hard to come by" was surely a good thing, no? It means readers are applying more stringent standards to what they read. As opposed to now, when (supposed) journalistic credibility is easier to come by, but worth much less. . . .

Quite the contrary, I believe, and I'm sure your original parent comment was making the opposite point of what you think.

As far as I remember from grade school, newspapers in the US started doing legitimate work around the time of "muckrakers," early investigative journalists. It seems we've returned to the days of yellow journalism, when sensationalist articles were written just to push up circulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker

Interesting. Thanks. And I had always thought of 'muckraker' as a derogatory term, though it seems it must have started out, at least, as an approbatory term for the positive development of muckraking out of yellow journalism(?).

What is the point of this post? To say that journalism is a worthless endeavour? It would be just as easy to go cherry pick some quotes that say just the opposite without providing a substantial argument.

News is not the same thing as journalism. Journalism is worthwhile when it is the news, not when it covers it.

The post doesn't make such a distinction.

Information is power. A nexus point for distributing and legitimizing information arguably involves more moral hazard that just about anything else.

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