News and Media

Table of Contents

Propaganda becomes ineffective the moment we become aware of it. - Joseph Goebbels

Consuming news

As a general society, we are not really great at nuance at scale. We are good at headlines. We are good at reacting off of the headlines.

It was a few years after the beginning of the Lebanese war, as I was attending the Wharton School, at the age of twenty-two, that I was hit with the idea of efficient markets – an idea that holds that there is no way to derive profits from traded securities since these instruments have automatically incorporated all the available information. Public information can therefore be useless, particularly to a businessman, since prices can already “include” all such information, and news shared with millions gives you no real advantage. Odds are that one or more of the hundreds of millions of other readers of such information will already have bought the security, thus pushing up the price. I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more per day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting). - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

“It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.”

G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and The Cross

“Journalism can within its own limits be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but it is not the nature of journalism to approach any relative degree of truth. Again, journalism is not to be blamed for this; no more than a cow is to be blamed for not being a horse. The difference is, and the reason one can respect or anyhow approve of the cow, that few cows can have the delusion or even the desire to be horses… The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism.”

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Wikipedia, in other words, isn’t raised up wholesale, like a barn; it’s assembled grain by grain, like a termite mound. The smallness of the grains, and of the workers carrying them, makes the project’s scale seem impossible. But it is exactly this incrementalism that puts immensity within reach.

“Accuracy, of course, can better be won by a committee armed with computers than by a single intelligence. But while accuracy binds the trust between reader and contributor, eccentricity and elegance and surprise are the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction. And they are not qualities we associate with committees.”

From the article: Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet

TODO

  1. Inside the Media’s Traffic Apocalypse https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/inside-the-medias-traffic-apocalypse.html
  2. Transparent Vice https://www.theverge.com/24094310/vice-media-layoffs-bankruptcy-shane-smith
  3. The media’s lab leak fiasco - https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-medias-lab-leak-fiasco

My plans in 2026

  1. Stop magazine subscriptions e.g. wired.com
  2. Leverage RSS feeds in a better way
  3. Try reading the free available magazines from the library subscription
  4. Get to the source of the articles like https://www.quantamagazine.org/ - which are actually free

Magazine aggregator options

  1. Library subscription
  2. https://www.magzter.com/
    1. How does this work?

Tags

  1. Over Three Decades, Tech Obliterated Media
  2. How the internet changed news, according to The Onion
  3. Consuming media - News algorithm are making news bad for eveyone
  4. Consuming media - RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
  5. When Americans Lost Faith in the News
  6. How NPR lost America’s Trust
  7. Stop Reading News

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