I don’t read newspapers, so I don’t have much data. Perhaps I notice the bad things more, because I do not have the good things to balance it with? (Kinda like if neither you nor your friends have a dog, so the typical moment when you notice a dog is when some stranger’s dog threatens you. So your model of a dog is that dogs attack strangers, and you miss all the nice moments when they play or relax, which is what their owners see.)
I was interviewed by a journalist twice in my life; both time the journalist wrote totally made up things unrelated to what I said; and I suspect that the story was already written long before they talked to me, they just wanted a name to attach to their fictional person.
Once I participated in a small peaceful protest (imagine a group of less than ten people standing on a street with banners for 30 minutes, then going home), and a TV commented on it while showing videos of looting (that happened a few months before, on the opposite side of the country, in a situation related neither to our cause nor our organization). When we called them by phone to complain, they just laughed at us, said that there were tiny letters saying that the videos were “illustrations” so it’s legally okay, and if we have any complaints we are supposed to address them to their well-paid legal department. (We didn’t do anything about it.)
A few years ago (I don’t remember when exactly) there were “scientific” articles approximately every month about how theory of relativity was experimentally debunked; people shared them on Hacker News and social networks. And always a few weeks later there was a blog post somewhere explaining now it was just a mistake in calculation, because someone forgot to use a proper relativistic equation somewhere. Of course, these blog posts were not shared so much. -- Later, I guess, this topic went out of fashion. (Perhaps because the newspapers switched to stronger clickbait?)
My very first blog post was a response to a popular journalist, basically just a long list of factual mistakes he made in a popular article. (And I mean factual mistakes in a very literal sense, like how many countries were members of a specific organization, what year the organization started, etc. That is, not something that could be explained by different people having a different political opinion.)
Uhm, Gamergate. A situation where a bunch of nerds complains about the way journalists report on their hobby, and the journalists decide to go nuclear on them: holding ranks, posting absurd fabrications, refusing to even mention the talking points of the other side, then doubling down repeatedly until the topic gets debated at UN.
Which reminds me of how journalists treated James Damore. The “original memo” that practically all newspapers referred to was actually heaving redacted (all links to scientific papers removed). They even changed font to random sizes to have it appear unhinged.
...all these things considered, why should I even read newspapers?
To actually read, probably not, but to buy or pay for subscriptions to them might be worth doing: it’s probably the best way to sustainably ensure the existence of journalism as an industry, which you might be incentivized to do if you think it’ll hurt society at large more than you, so you’re relatively better off, much like how you would pump raw sewage into the city’s water supply after securing your own independent sources of freshwater, or iocaine powder into the air vents after building up immunity.
The clear reason to pay for news is that you can buy higher quality news than what your social media shows you. But I did definitely carve out politically sensitive areas in my discussion for a reason.
> They even changed font to random sizes to have it appear unhinged
This caught my eye, but appears to be false: https://web.archive.org/web/20170805210606/https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320 Has some weird formatting, presumably from copying it in from a Google doc, and presumably also why it lost the figures and URLs. The formatting doesn’t look unhinged at all, just a bit awkward, though their summarizing the changes as removing “several” hyperlinks is terrible (it looks more like a couple dozen links in the original to me). Though, I would not have ever thought of Gizmodo as a being high tier journalism in the first place.
I used the oldest version available in the Wayback machine so presumably it was how it was published, but it does include an “update” note as if it’s undergone at least one revision. It’s not impossible that the wayback machine is missing the earliest version. I still think that “copy and paste into a janky content management system interface” is probably the cause of whatever bad formatting it had rather than outright malice, but it may have been worse then than we see now (they state that formatting was changed though it’s not clear when).
I don’t read newspapers, so I don’t have much data. Perhaps I notice the bad things more, because I do not have the good things to balance it with? (Kinda like if neither you nor your friends have a dog, so the typical moment when you notice a dog is when some stranger’s dog threatens you. So your model of a dog is that dogs attack strangers, and you miss all the nice moments when they play or relax, which is what their owners see.)
I was interviewed by a journalist twice in my life; both time the journalist wrote totally made up things unrelated to what I said; and I suspect that the story was already written long before they talked to me, they just wanted a name to attach to their fictional person.
Once I participated in a small peaceful protest (imagine a group of less than ten people standing on a street with banners for 30 minutes, then going home), and a TV commented on it while showing videos of looting (that happened a few months before, on the opposite side of the country, in a situation related neither to our cause nor our organization). When we called them by phone to complain, they just laughed at us, said that there were tiny letters saying that the videos were “illustrations” so it’s legally okay, and if we have any complaints we are supposed to address them to their well-paid legal department. (We didn’t do anything about it.)
A few years ago (I don’t remember when exactly) there were “scientific” articles approximately every month about how theory of relativity was experimentally debunked; people shared them on Hacker News and social networks. And always a few weeks later there was a blog post somewhere explaining now it was just a mistake in calculation, because someone forgot to use a proper relativistic equation somewhere. Of course, these blog posts were not shared so much. -- Later, I guess, this topic went out of fashion. (Perhaps because the newspapers switched to stronger clickbait?)
My very first blog post was a response to a popular journalist, basically just a long list of factual mistakes he made in a popular article. (And I mean factual mistakes in a very literal sense, like how many countries were members of a specific organization, what year the organization started, etc. That is, not something that could be explained by different people having a different political opinion.)
Uhm, Gamergate. A situation where a bunch of nerds complains about the way journalists report on their hobby, and the journalists decide to go nuclear on them: holding ranks, posting absurd fabrications, refusing to even mention the talking points of the other side, then doubling down repeatedly until the topic gets debated at UN.
Which reminds me of how journalists treated James Damore. The “original memo” that practically all newspapers referred to was actually heaving redacted (all links to scientific papers removed). They even changed font to random sizes to have it appear unhinged.
...all these things considered, why should I even read newspapers?
To actually read, probably not, but to buy or pay for subscriptions to them might be worth doing: it’s probably the best way to sustainably ensure the existence of journalism as an industry, which you might be incentivized to do if you think it’ll hurt society at large more than you, so you’re relatively better off, much like how you would pump raw sewage into the city’s water supply after securing your own independent sources of freshwater, or iocaine powder into the air vents after building up immunity.
The clear reason to pay for news is that you can buy higher quality news than what your social media shows you. But I did definitely carve out politically sensitive areas in my discussion for a reason.
> They even changed font to random sizes to have it appear unhinged
This caught my eye, but appears to be false: https://web.archive.org/web/20170805210606/https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320 Has some weird formatting, presumably from copying it in from a Google doc, and presumably also why it lost the figures and URLs. The formatting doesn’t look unhinged at all, just a bit awkward, though their summarizing the changes as removing “several” hyperlinks is terrible (it looks more like a couple dozen links in the original to me). Though, I would not have ever thought of Gizmodo as a being high tier journalism in the first place.
Weird. I think I remember seeing a different version. Not sure how that happened...
...maybe some of my ad-blocking programs interacted with the website’s CSS in a bad way?
Uhm, if that’s the case, I apologize for spreading misinformation.
.
Off topic, but Jesus, in the comment section: people [...] go to better schools [...] to increase their IQs [...] Not like anyone is born with a 170
I used the oldest version available in the Wayback machine so presumably it was how it was published, but it does include an “update” note as if it’s undergone at least one revision. It’s not impossible that the wayback machine is missing the earliest version. I still think that “copy and paste into a janky content management system interface” is probably the cause of whatever bad formatting it had rather than outright malice, but it may have been worse then than we see now (they state that formatting was changed though it’s not clear when).