proximitysauce

In addition to partisanship and sensationalism, access journalism has dramatically lowered the quality of what gets reported:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_journalism

It's also worth referencing Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent which lays out the playbook for propaganda posing as journalism:

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

It's much more rare though and it's almost entirely absent when looking at political coverage. Two journalists I can think of off the top of my head who have acted with outstanding integrity in recent years are Ronan Farrow and Julie K. Brown (broke the Weinstein and Epstein stories respectively). Part of what makes their journalism so strong is that they had to fight the entire industry to get their stories out.

Political coverage is a nightmare though. Just yesterday George Stephanopoulos was caught on camera acting in an extremely partisan manner [1]. This happens on both sides of the isle regularly at this point (the White House itself is hardly faultless). It's only ratcheted up since 2016 where it seems the press took it up themselves to "save" us, where the definition of save seems to be: push their own political opinions.

1. https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1220758756071497728

Even with Farrow's access and background he barely got the story out.

> And a large part of Ronan's story was to try how this worked. It wasn't that the people who knew (to varying degree) did not want to out him. They just feared for their livelihood, and sometimes more.

Correct, but my statement was about media trustworthiness. It doesn't really matter if people are keeping quite because they want to or because there's some super powerful individual that's coercing them to keep quiet, the result for the audience is the same. Why believe outlets that are covering up for the most heinous corruption and crimes imaginable? The media has a well earned reputation problem.

Also, I'm not sure why you want to make this a partisan argument. It's not, there's plenty of corruption to go around. I deliberately chose non-political examples of corruption.

Sure:

* Harvey Weinstein was covered up by many in the media as detailed in Ronan Farrow's Pulitzer Prize winning piece in The New Yorker [1]

* ABC killed a story about Jeffery Epstein in 2015 in part to retain access to the royal family. Epstein continued to sex traffic children for 3 years after this report would have aired [2]

* The BBC covered up for Jimmy Savile's pedophila (and other horrors I won't reprint here) for decades. The head of the BBC during that time left right before the scandal came to light to become the current CEO of The New York Times [3]

There are many other examples but these are recent and well documented.

1. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-ove...

2. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abc-news-amy-robach-jeffrey-e...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/jimmy-...

When the media and establishment are repeatedly caught misleading the public, the result is the proliferation of conspiracy theories and a culture of distrust. Alex Jones isn't the answer, but neither is he the main problem. The problem is corruption in the mainstream media. That's far more pressing than grassroots videos that while probably incorrect at least challenge people to question what they're told.

I think there's a general and growing distrust of media that feeds into people like Alex Jones' popularity. I don't know how many of those people take him 100% seriously vs how many are just happy listening to an outsider that's taking shots at known corruption.

A true commitment to diversity would see them putting poor people on the board. A rich person of a different color, gender or sexual orientation is still a rich person. I don’t see this making any kind of material impact on company behavior.

An anonymous account is not the same thing as a bot. As acrimonious as the current state of politics is, I wouldn't blame anyone for using a pseudonym online to voice their opinion.

Regardless of why the author thinks they're sad, it's a mistake to project the mental and emotional state of someone based on some facets gleaned from checking out their social media profiles. It's actually kind of creepy to focus on this individual especially since they're a teenager and aren't given a chance to rebut.

There's nothing bot like about this person's post. It's actually kind of a nice tale of civic re-engagement. It does make me more interested in hearing what Yang has to say because it seems honest and like a statement from someone who hasn't been doing political activism for years.

That's a lot of narrative overlaid on the data. The author even says this about Democratic politician accounts:

> All of them had bot activity of some kind. Given enough time to collect the data, bot networks would eventually appear for all of them.

I think the analysis could be very interesting but they're injecting too much personal spin on the motivations of everyone involved. Why is the teenager who follows the Yang bots and MAGA bots "sad"? Is there a corollary teenager following Democrat bots? Are they sad too?

I think it would be interesting to study bots and how they intersect with media and politics in a less biased manner.

Forth would be great too. I think there's value in learning a stack based language. That being said I suspect LISP is more practical.

I really feel like they should teach LISP in elementary school. It has extremely simple rules to get started and helps people intuitively understand programming concepts. Maybe an updated The Little Schemer style curriculum:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0...

I mean this in the most respectful way possible, but have you considered your own antagonism against Reddit is not healthy for the community? Throughout the years I've seen you talk down about Reddit and the people there quite a bit. I get that they're "rougher" than the ideal Rust citizen but they're also real people and members of the community. It's probably best not to judge one of the largest sites on the internet if for no other reason than it breeds hostility.