I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.
I haven't watched the news in 5 years. I started watching it again since Bondi (I live nearby), and while I'm surprised at the variation in reporting styles (political bias?) between Australian channels, my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
I've found it very helpful to watch the live briefings, Q&As, etc with politicians, but the news cycle here is so short (hourly) that a few minutes later you get to hear a "recap" by the news reporter that glosses over most of the important and interesting points (at best) or actively removes key nuance and outright changes the message delivered by the original person (at worst).
I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
Presumably this was what "journalism" was originally supposed to be.
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveye
Much of it is merely factual statements conveyed by over-the-top body language and vocal intonation which paint a clear "this is bad" or "this is good" language. Often the language is biased as well, but the modern newscasters are "telling you how to feel" via the tone of voice in the same way that a friend is "telling you how to feel" when he recounts his horrible day that the office. Via body language and tone of voice he prompts you to respond sympathetically to him, and the newscaster does much the same.
I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters, the idea that research/journalism is hot-swappable with fact-checking.
Sometimes in conversation Israel or tariffs or whatever comes and I'm always like... idk? What do I, have a PHD? I know enough to know they're complex issues and the worst thing i could do is have a strong opinion
And then they scoff, and say, "so you just 'trust the experts,' then?"
I don't have the time to become expert in global affairs, history, climate science... all the fields implicated by the big hot-button issues. The next best thing is defer to someone knowledgeable and objective (given you can find such a person), IMO.
> I think the greatest crime social media has committed is convincing everyone their opinion matters
So much this! Social media has also allowed people to reinforce their own opinions and spread them by connecting with others who think the same way. Back when we mainly interacted in real social communities, fringe ideas couldn't get traction because there wasn't enough reinforcement.
Neither of those are topics that are particularly complex, though.
And I realize that I'm taking the bait, but it's worth noting that the flip-side of the oversimplification of complex topics in modern news media is the affordance of notions of complexity to issues that are fairly cut-and-dry, when applying known and well-accepted standards to them. Solving housing issues in the US? Complex, though news media would have you believe that the answer is simply, "Build more." Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? Simple, though biased experts spend enormous amounts of energy spinning extant circumstances that are readily accounted for in most definitions of genocide. Tariffs? Very well understood. Ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Apparently a bit more difficult than flooding the country with weapons and finger-wagging at Vladimir Putin until he stops being bad.
Note also that this isn't predicated on the existence or non-existence of social media as an influential force. It's simply a matter of whether or not the corporate and political interests that steer public discourse find it useful to complicate or simplify a news story.
I have found that, often, there is only so much information to convey. They keep talking because that is their job, but you've already been told all there is to know. The rest is speculation, rumor, and prattle.
That's especially true for evolving emergencies like Bondi. In my opinion, you might as well wait until tomorrow, or next week, and get all of the information at once. Unless, of course, you're involved, but that's extremely rare.
I watch news (and everything else) on YouTube at 2x speed to keep the information density high enough to be worthwhile. Once you get used to it, regular media becomes less tolerable because everyone is talking too slow.
Where possible you want everyone to be well informed on the way in, at least about the current situation and the obvious proposals. This gives people time to digest the information and maybe even suggest their own proposals.
Then there's two types of meetings.
* Leadership communication meetings (quick review to make sure everyone understands how important the data they already knew about is / cement context).
* Brainstorming meetings (figure out a plan / pathfinding)
The 2x speed will only keep your brain preoccupied enough not to notice the relevant information is missing or made very shallow... getting the same slop in half the time won't solve the problem.
>my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
This is the key. I think they (entertainers cosplaying as journalists) do it on purpose. For example, from time to time I do attempt to watch some "news" on TV with my partner.
A typical interaction may be:
- TV - "..the president vetoed a bill to lower taxes...here is what this politician thinks: 'I think he only cares to gain support of the extremists he secretly supports', and here is what another politician thinks 'it was a bad bill'"
- me to my partner - "did I miss it? have they said what the bill was about? What were the exact things that were questionable?"
- her - "nope"
- TV - "... The president says he will be submitting a similar bill minus the parts he disagreed with, and now a house burned down in..."
- me - "WTF was that?"
I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
> I sometimes wonder if they are playing a sort of game, how many minutes of "content" can be made while conveying the least amount of information possible.
Exactly my impression. I tell people there is no real news in the United States, only gossip style reporting of information one can do nothing about and has nothing to do with them. If the reporting it political, it's in 4th grade language and a second grade mentality. News in the United States is talking to children.
It’s not even a game. There just isn’t that much news to report on 24/7. And even when an event does happen, the early reports are often wrong. People crave an update when there is no update to give.
We are not given any factual and material information on business activities in the nation, which is what the nation is actually doing. Who (as in companies) are gaining, are losing, and how is this economic conflict manifesting for their consumers and employees? None of that reporting is performed, the population is too shallow minded to even understand the discussion. Where are the local economics news that graduates to county, state and region with actionable numbers and not pointless no-ground reporting like "the stock market has trading volume of x trillions" <- useless information.
We get sports and entertainment news, which is not news, not really, not at all.
Part of the challenge is unless you know what the "news reporter's" role is (are they just reporting what they see/have heard vs. analysis/opinion and what their relevant expertise is; I'd suggest good news providers have clear divides and provide this information (though with biases), those that don't likely have some agenda), you get a mix of voices/views without a clear understanding of the facts. A different challenge is constraints of the various content formats/audiences (which are really only obvious when the same journalist does the same story in different formats).
I'll also add that paradoxically, bias is not really the problem here, but rather the problem is bias-disguised as objectivity. There's truly nothing wrong with a commentator who states "I have a particular view on this issue. Here are some of the things which inform my view. Here are the strengths of my view, here are the weaknesses, and here are what some of my opponents argue."
What we didn't know back in the 1990s was how little this sort of presentation (that you describe) was engaging. Everyone could sort of tell, which is why producers shied away from it, but with the rise of algorithms and internet slop it can be measured very precisely. And the measurements show that it's damn near close to zero, on whatever scale it is that they use.
Intelligent people are boring. They're worried about problem-solving. Problems like on the tests back in school that used to make my head hurt, problems I'd get the red X on and have to repeat 3rd grade over because of. Unintelligent people are exciting. They're in conflict. They're fighting, or going to find a fight somewhere, and if you watch long enough they might even get into that fight right then and there (Bill O'Reilly used to do that on air, after all).
IMO "just reporting what they see" is a solution at all. I tried looking at messages through that angle, and too often there is very important context that you need, or the message's content does not make sense, or becomes something different.
For example, we have plenty of "journalism" that reports exactly what some entity says. That just makes them a PR channel. If they added context that politician's or company's message's content's meaning would turn on its head and would be exposed as a lie.
Similarly, a lot of news would greatly benefit from larger context that just is not there, and that the vast majority of "consumers" of the news are simply not aware of, through no fault of their own.
"Just report what you see" IMHO is part of the problem, not the solution. It's trying to "solve" the reporting problem by removing most of the role of journalists because they are seen as unreliable, for good reasons, but I don't think that works at all. It is similar to trying to solve all problems by adding ever more rules for everything, to remove the uncertainty and unreliability of individual decisions.
This is just like at work, where the capital owners and bosses would love to replace all those pesky annoying opinionated humans with something more controllable and predictable. If the intelligence can be moved from the people into the process, the latter become replaceable and much cheaper, and the company gets much more control. But it is not just the owner class that does not like having to rely on and to deal with other humans.
I think the direction of development of the role of journalists has actually gone way too far in exactly the direction of them using less and less of their own brains, and having less influence and ability, for most messages, the very few deeper pieces notwithstanding.
Although, none of that will do anything as long as the news source owner structure is the way it is, with a few billionaires controlling most of the big news sources.
Only doing "just reporting what they see" is a problem as well (and even AP (https://apnews.com/) does analysis, and their more on the "just reporting what they see" side than most news providers), but opinions being presented as facts is far more common (at least from the mainstream AU media, I don't know what the situation is elsewhere), hence trying to clearly demarcate the two is better than being unclear about what you are presenting. You need facts and analysis, and them labelled as such.
Personally, I find a good example of this is the different election broadcasts: the commercial TV broadcasters tend to have their staff take both the role of election analyst (i.e. result prediction) and commentator, whereas the ABC (one of the public broadcasters) has tended to have clear separation of roles (enough such that the election analyst who just retired has a cult following), with an election analyst who is giving detailed predictions and calls the election, political journalists providing context/analysis, polling experts covering what the polls missed/got right, and politicians from the major parties giving their opinions as well.
> I haven't watched the news in 5 years. ...my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
They're more concerned in being the first than being accurate.
Unless the event is something definitive like "celebrity died", it's much better to just check what happened a few days later when there are some actual facts and not just rushed speculation masquerading as facts.
I'd pay a modest subscription for a service that would give me the news, but just delayed by 24-72 hours, after all the "BREAKING NEWS" crap is just "news".
I used that book as a background example in a presentation I did you faculty on how to integrate new open resources into their classes. One guy in the back laughed really hard at that screen and everyone looked at him like he was a lunatic.
And that's the story of how I made a work best friend.
Seriously though, if you haven't read amusing ourselves to death you need to.
This is why I love listening to Joe Rogan, it’s hard for someone to keep to their coached media narrative for three and a half hours. I’m generally suspicious of people who tell me I shouldn’t listen directly to the words of people they dislike.
Though you are now buying into the Rogan worldview with his show, which is its own set of issues, namely he’s routinely proven that he’s unwilling to press people on real concrete issues or criticisms if it means he might be in even a small amount of hot water with whatever in group he’s catering to
Climate Town had a video a little while ago, "Joe Rogan Doesn't Understand Graphs", where Rogan talks about a Washington Post article and says things about it that are the exact opposite of what is written in the article:
Joe Rogan regularly has people on his show that he just lets lie to his face. The promotion of fake archaeology being the clearest/strangest example of this in recent times (many more examples from political guests).
> I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
I have found that some Youtube channels and videos (non-comprehensive examples below (I have hundreds of subscribed channels), mostly not politics, but these things inform politics since politics is making decisions about other things) can fill this gap nicely. This is not a perfect choice, since journalism integrity and standards do not apply, but I find that this can be mitigated by watching a wide variety (for example, in the field of economics, I regularly watch creators who espouse everything from very free-market capitalism all the way to full on communism). There are likely other forms of new media that operate at this level of depth, but I haven't found htem.
I started watching the full press releases and politicians interviews which are normally available on YouTube. It just changed how I view geopolitics. The media is extremely biased and absolutely does not report what people are actually saying. You really should never accept at face value what the news are reporting.
> I started watching the full press releases and politicians interviews which are normally available on YouTube.
Is this true for Australian politics? This is exactly what I'm looking for. Currently all my searching for recent events just results in summarised/paraphrased news reports with some footage, or shorts and clickbait.
>I'll always upvote a recommendation for Amusing Ourselves to Death. I haven't yet gone back to Understanding Media directly yet.
I love both books, but when you read Understanding Media you will see how blatantly Postman just restated McLuhan's basic thesis and pretended to tweak it to make it his own ("the medium is the metaphor" has the same meaning as "the medium is the message"). However, I found where Postman's book really excelled was in its presentation of the historical changes in literacy in the US. I knew we were a literate country once, but I didn't realize just how much we were.
Honestly, it boils down to capitalism / market pressure. Quality journalism is expensive, compared to the return in the form of the price people are willing to pay for that quality journalism. Clickbait is so profitable, it's like a powerful magnet pulling all news institutions, be they TV channels, newspapers, or whatever, towards that model.
LLMs can produce a literal terabyte of slop for cheaper than a month's wage for a journalist. I'm not hopeful.
I haven't watched the news in 5 years. I started watching it again since Bondi (I live nearby), and while I'm surprised at the variation in reporting styles (political bias?) between Australian channels, my overwhelming observation has been just how little key information is actually conveyed.
I've found it very helpful to watch the live briefings, Q&As, etc with politicians, but the news cycle here is so short (hourly) that a few minutes later you get to hear a "recap" by the news reporter that glosses over most of the important and interesting points (at best) or actively removes key nuance and outright changes the message delivered by the original person (at worst).
I feel there has to be something between "I heard about a thing 7th-hand" and "I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it.
Presumably this was what "journalism" was originally supposed to be.