https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship
Great writeup on how fraudulent modern journalism has become.
tl;dr: there's not enough money to pay for real reporting, so we get fabricated SJW grievances and cancel culture. It's cheaper to falsely claim someone used the word "retard" to get them cancelled than take on the NSA (actual example in the article!).
IMO simplest way to fix this is via defamation laws. But that won't fix the funding problem: either way there's going to be a lot less mainstream journalism.
@eiaine You make a good point.
Counter-argument: if journalism *in general* had more money, NYT's incentives would change as other journalists would have the resources to both criticize them, and present alternative stories.
@pete I wonder if journalism can morph into something like a private intelligence subscription. It won't be like it supposedly used to be, that mass media provides common knowledge (which can be useful in certain game theoretic scenarios), but rather supplying more/more accurate/earlier knowledge the more you are willing to pay. This sounds like useful for sovereign individuals who need to make decision based on good information in a world full of misinformation.
@pete This already exists in finance (Bloomberg etc.), I hope it becomes more mainstream (and possibly more affordable than a Bloomberg terminal 😅 ).
@sebx2a Probably the biggest challenge to the idea of private intelligence subscriptions is you are competing against actual professionals in the space with blogs/twitter accounts. We've both gamified showing off your expertise, and made it very easy for average people to publish.
The equivalent of writing a blog just didn't exist pre-internet. The closest I can think of is newsletters, and they require postage. Also, articles can't go viral w/ postage costs.
@pete Thanks for posting this, agreed.
@pete I don't think that's it though. NYT has tons of money (it's backed by Carlos Slim FFS), but hires journalists based on diversity or connections, so it's staffed with unqualified stupid people. The 1619 project was very well-funded, but no amount of money can squeeze good content out of idiots.