The Bullshit

https://walterkirn.substack.com/p/the-bullshit

by hoffmannesque • 5 years ago

271 194 5 years ago

walterkirn.substack.com

smoldesu• 5 years ago

I'll try not to be an ass, but it's hard to not count any of the time I spend reading this as "bullshit time," as he might put it.

OneLeggedCat2• 5 years ago

He recognizes exactly that in the last several sentences.

lordnacho2• 5 years ago

I feel a bit privileged, and in a dangerous way, because feeling like you're special can be an illusion that is easily shattered.

Here's what I mean. If I was born earlier, like say a baby boomer, I'd have less education in critical thinking, but I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced. They'd acknowledge other viewpoints and think properly about how to fit in their own perspectives.

If I was a gen Z kid, it was and is all a blur. Just loads of crap mixed in with everything. Chaos, no particular authority is obvious. More time spent in education but also more noise. Fewer cultural lighthouses since everyone is watching different things (both news and wider culture) and able to stay within whatever they already believe.

When I grew up I had a leg in each era. I still think some papers are better than others. But I also see the cacophony of crap for what it is.

Boomers have ended up in this world too and it's horrifying. My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US. They come up with crazy things from time to time, like they're missing a critical thinking inoculation.

rcurry2• 5 years ago

Writing off an entire generation of people as lacking critical thinking skills seems a bit short-sighted.

epgui2• 5 years ago

No generation in History thus far has demonstrated general possession of this skill.

lordnacho2• 5 years ago

I'm not writing off entire generations, these are just generalities. It's a bit sad to have to caveat everything one says with "but of course there are still people who know how to think", because it's fairly obvious that certain unsaid things are the case.

OneLeggedCat2• 5 years ago

If that's short-sighted, then it is only because that should also be applied to every generation. Most people of every generation in the world still believe in magic, which excuses any need to fully develop critical thinking skills.

tomp• 5 years ago

My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US.

Democracy is like science. If you don’t constantly doubt at least a little bit and check the outcome continuously, but instead just trust blindly, you’re doing it wrong.

rootusrootus3• 5 years ago

If you don’t constantly doubt at least a little bit

Pretty sure we've gone quite a lot farther than a little bit.

verygoodname2• 5 years ago

Ah, yes... the "if I put everything in doubt, even the most painfully obvious things, it makes me seem smart" crowd.

Here's the thing, though: if one is basing their "doubts" on random brainfarts or propaganda pieces they saw on youtube or facebook and decided to trust blindly, they're probably also doing it wrong.

Skepticism that is not accompanied by critical thinking, actual knowledge, intellectual honesty and a dash of humility is useless or worse.

TL;DR: Epistemology is hard, but "just doubt everything" is not it, chief.

jhanschoo• 5 years ago

I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced.

Is this really true? Or is it an illusion due to you being the target audience of the MSM then? For example, there are no lack of claims and incidents of media bias for the pre-naughts in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...

edoceo• 5 years ago

TLDR: modern news media is the bullshit and a time-suck.

Some neat anecdotes in there tho.

tboyd472• 5 years ago

This was a rare gem of well-measured prose here. I laughed out loud a couple of times and had to go back and read it over again. Thanks.

denton-scratch6• 5 years ago

"Well-measured"? It's a rant. I don't entirely disagree with it, but "well-measured" isn't a term that I'd have chosen.

tboyd472• 5 years ago

By "well-measured," I meant it's not long and rambly like most written material produced and consumed on HN. It covers a lot of different (though related) subjects in a short package and it was fun to read.

tomnipotent6• 5 years ago

but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages.

I have a better idea. The news has always been shit.

There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market.

It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs have adapted to fill in all those remaining hours. Consolidation hasn't helped, but I can look at any news clipping from the early 20th century and see the same level of bullshit I see today.

brundolf2• 5 years ago

As with any field in a capitalist society, good things can only really come from those who care more about what they're working on than about any associated profit-motive.

I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks.

And of course some people like this still exist, but:

Anecdotally, it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity or civic duty and towards cynical profit-motive. You can see it in everything from hospitals, to universities, to technical companies like Boeing.

I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge. I don't know if centralization/acquisition is to blame, or stock market pressures, or private equity, or some cultural phenomenon. But it feels like we're only careening further down this path with each passing year.

tomnipotent6• 5 years ago

They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important

They operated the same way they do now, and worked on whatever their bosses told them to work on. It's just romantic to think they were unburdened by our mortal contrivances and somehow had the wherewithal to pick out "important" stories.

TeMPOraL2• 5 years ago

it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity

It starts with the meaning of "professional". I know of two opposite ones:

1. "Professional" as in doing high quality work, no corner cutting, having respect for the problem and the customer.

2. "Professional" as in putting business first, with the implication that any possible corner will be cut, any possible sacrifice on quality will be made, if it makes the business more money.

The second meaning is what I've been seeing increasingly often over the years. It's a frequent sentiment in our industry - it's professional to keep applying subpar tooling and methods to a problem, because upskilling costs money short-term. It's professional to bloat your product and make your users pay an implicit tax, because it's saving fraction of those costs for the company.

I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge (...)

I sometimes wonder if the answer is: none of those, things have always been as shitty - it's you and me who are growing up and discovering the world for what it is (and/or growing more cynical in the process).

tlarkworthy• 5 years ago

My theory is its data driven decision making. It's messed up the corporation to be purely metrics driven. Everyone hunts the metrics and misses the qualitative reasons for anything. We distrust internal models now, and try to be purely empirical, which is a mistake. We are overly technology now, but the technology lacks nuance and long term reasoning.

savanaly• 5 years ago

They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many.

If you're going to water the statement down to that level, how does it not still apply today?

MisterBastahrd10• 5 years ago

Yes, but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists. Local journalism pays rates that make teachers look like kings, and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work a week. It's a job that requires passion, because there are far more of them who are making under minimum wage at an hourly rate than there are who are making six figures.

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Yes, but there are barely any of this type of journalist anymore, and barely any outlets for them to be published in.

What there are are a lot of connected people who went from elite schools to exclusive unpaid internships, jobs in prestige nonprofit PR departments, and consulting firms, then to national outlets at very high salaries. Their coworkers are ex-politicians and campaign flacks, and people who worked at massive hedge funds and investment banks, who decided that they preferred punditry and socializing to their jobs.

The people you're talking about are bloggers/substack people now, and are generally denigrated by mainstream outlets.

tomnipotent6• 5 years ago

but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists

So do accountants. And actuaries. And doctors. And programmers. And artists. And pretty much most every other profession. There's nothing special about clergy or journalists or doctors because they chose the career they did.

and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work

This is just more romanticism. I'd wager that the distribution of hours of journalists looks very similar to most professionals.

inreverse• 5 years ago

Do you have any (including speculative) ideas that could explain why our news is so bad, given that most journalists are passionate about their work?

User23• 5 years ago

In the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why he got into the printing business. It's been common knowledge for a very long time that the primary purpose of political reporting is to persuade and not to inform.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...

Karrot_Kream• 5 years ago

American journalism in the aftermath of WW2 had a brief moment where it became both a unifying idea (largely sharing and building shared cultural values) and was largely seen as high-integrity. This perception began collapsing around the start of the internet news age, and now has pretty much totally collapsed. But it's important to remember that the WW2 consensus around the press was just an artifact of its times and that Franklin is talking about the press from a very different lens. To him the "press" was more like the Federalist Papers or Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". If you want to see what journalism _used_ to be like in the US, read about Yellow Journalism [1], or just read some news from the 1800s industrial era in the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

roenxi2• 5 years ago

In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse!

And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.

tomnipotent6• 5 years ago

We have unrealistic expectations of news publishing. Modern TV and movies has made certain professions far more glamourous than they are (journalists, police, doctors) because it makes for good media. But most doctors are not ER doctors. Most journalists are not breaking news. Most police never fire their service weapon.

But to somehow think the moral distributions of people are superior from the average population, just because of career selection, is dubious at best. Something being protected by law doesn't somehow make its practice exalted.

teflodollar• 5 years ago

I always thought PBS and NPR were pretty good. What am I missing?

jollybean8• 5 years ago

Edit: I'm sorry for the lengthy post, but I felt giving rough examples was necessary to convey the point.

It's true that some unofficial quality voices are disrupting established narratives ... but I'm sorry to say this isn't the shift that matters, because 99% of the 'unofficial sources' are considerably worse than just 'bullshit' in the press.

The 'Giant Kraken Monster' of fake news is really shocking, and it's taking over some sectors. I couldn't quite fathom it until I saw it happen to someone in my own life.

While we argue about 'truth' here on HN, information is being submerged by nonsense on mainstreet.

It's not so much war between civil people arguing over the facts - it's more like Information World War Z of people hopped up on very bad, made up information.

I was at a relative's home a few days ago listening as a he was listening to his Facebook stream and it was very shocking.

I'm paraphrasing from memory, but:

"Tanks will Roll, Power Cut, the Great Reset and Trump will be re-instated by Coup on Aug 10 ..."

"I have a source, who cannot be named, because his life would be in danger, that Nanci Pelosi was in direct contact with the Chinese Communist Party on January 6 directing the assault on Capitol Hill"

"Those that stole the election, put them ballot boxes full of fake votes for Biden, they need to be executed for treason, the True Patriots Will Rise"

"It's masks now, folks, but this is the globalist master plan, it's just the first step. This is the reason the second amendment exists, folks"

"Big Pharma does NOT want you to know about natural cures, because, well, why do you think? You are the experiment folks. The Sheep out there doing what the government tells them - but the Lions, the True Patriots, know better."

"Q said:" - and then a bunch insane of statements from QAnon etc.

It's dizzyingly conspiratorial and it's really scary to watch people eat that up. My family member indicated that they don't believe most of it, but that's their primary news source and, it has affected them greatly.

My family member is becoming an information zombie who is losing their grounding in reality, and cannot be reasoned with on these issues, even if they are quite rational otherwise. Once you start to believe cabals of the elite are killing children in basements in blood-lust ceremonies, that mysterious Q controls things behind the scenes, that vaccines i.e. life-saving medicines are invented as a tool of control, and that of course all of the 'main stream media outlets' are all lying, then what?

Watching them listen - it's like a form of information hypnotism - it's as though they're in a mystical / religious trance. If someone already has a reason to actually 'want to believe', and they don't care, and they just 'let go of rationality' ... then they fall into the trap. I think it's the same kind of programming that cults use.

It's really a sight to behold, and the experience of how the information is communicated, the anger, the tone of voice, etc..

The MSM has a problem with bias that could stand to be corrected, and it's have more quality 'outside' voices, but even some of the better sources often falter. Matt Taibi, probably in the same vein of the author of this piece about 'BS', usually has some great things to say but I feel even he is jumping the shark a bit trying to get attention to his Substack with overzealous headlines.

In order to put this into relative context, here is some polling data from Pew [1][2] which shows a material minority of Americans are susceptible to even the more over the top conspiratorial information (i.e. QAnon), for less egregious but nevertheless still completely false information, I believe the number is much higher, reaching up to 30% for those who believe that the election was fraudulent [3].

[1] https://www.journalism.org/2020/09/16/most-americans-who-hav...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/16/5-facts-abo...

[3] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/559402-one-third-of-am...

coldtea5• 5 years ago

news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse!

Were they? News co-ops has historically been quite good.

Chris204810• 5 years ago

but all the alternatives people tried were much worse

where alternatives tried? or just quickly squashed?

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

The 24-7 news is more of a misnomer. Most networks switch to infomercials past midnight or so. Its not like there are reproters the hq 24-7. .

colordrops• 5 years ago

Absolutely. Time was just as guilty of misinformation, exclusion, blackouts, appeal to vague authorities, and maintaining the Overton window for the establishment. Yeah, sure, it had a much more professional sheen and you had to pay attention to notice, but it was still shit.

bsanr2• 5 years ago

My father refused to read Time for decades - decades - because they'd manipulated their cover photo of OJ Simpson to make him look darker-skinned than he actually is. It was, I'm told, A Thing, along with All-American restaurant Denny's having to pay out millions in damages over racial discrimination (Wells Fargo having to do the same 20 years later does much for my suspicion that the 2010s are something of an echo of the 90s). This is what is on my personal radar; I'm sure someone with other priorities can name similar, fact-based grievances with other institutions that ostensibly design their products for general American consumption.

For news, in many cases, the issue isn't so much the veracity of what's being reported, but... what's being reported. You only have so many pages and only so much reader mental bandwidth.

barrkel• 5 years ago

Yes. But it, and other mass media like it, generated unifying narratives, narratives that weren't hermetically sealed from conflicting narratives.

That meant you could talk to your relatives at Christmas and perhaps have different ideas about the same facts, rather than completely different sets of facts.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

But that isn't true with the examples the author proposes. It has degraded a lot, although we forgot about changes in media. Nobody knew in yesterdays world which articles were read and which were not. Newspapers were bought as a whole. Today analytics show us that the most bullshit articles generate the most clicks, either out of rage or affirmation. Content is seriously drifting that way because for any business that is a sensible choice. But for quality this is misinterpreting data. A case were less data leads to better results. Rare, but a misinterpretation can be more damaging than remaining inconclusive.

Online news is compared to its paper versions, many outlets still have significant differences here. Of course there was a lot of bullshit too, but today almost everything is bullshit. We even built bullshit-thrones for those that produce the most.

Abishek_Muthian• 5 years ago

The author starts by comparing the news from newspaper/magazine to modern online news to call it shit and I agree.

In spite of being a business I feel printed newspapers at large struck to a code of ethics and used that "freedom of the press" judiciously.

In India Newspapers played a crucial role in organizing against colonial rule, Many freedom fighters were themselves a publishers/editos of such newspapers. At the later part of the freedom struggle such newspapers came under heavy attack, editors jailed and unspoken horrors imposed upon them.

Even today printed news papers which survived from those era does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.

But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.

snarkyturtle• 5 years ago

Dude needs an editor. If mainstream news is bullshit, at least it's readable bullshit.

MisterBastahrd10• 5 years ago

These recent substack articles which have been posted to HN are interesting. Not because the people who write the articles are intelligent and serious thinkers, because if they are, they definitely aren't showing it via their prose.

They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap their hand or even ask for some sort of coherence.

bobmaxup• 5 years ago

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

MisterBastahrd10• 5 years ago

Essayist is a more concise way to describe someone who engages in long-form verbal diarrhea. It takes neither moral courage nor intellectual valor to declare oneself above the fray without describing your method for being so.

peytn• 5 years ago

Wow, this guy must have something to say with haters like these.

LQexplanation• 5 years ago

A guy standing in the middle of busy road and screaming that pigeons are spying him, has probably a lot of haters and not much to say. Let's judge people by their creations, not by the hate.

rootusrootus3• 5 years ago

It's probably just because he spends most of his essay complaining only about left-wing media sins. Nobody said he had to be neutral, of course, but if you want to know who the haters are...

jollybean8• 5 years ago

Lack of editing doesn't make the output garbage, just a little more difficult to read, and sometimes with a little too much personal 'English' on the ball.

Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, Andrew Sullivan, The Dispatch are all fine Substack publications.

Their audiences are really small however, it's the total opposite of populist, I'm not sure how much influence they could possibly have.

mns• 5 years ago

I think it's more interesting how he's been already labeled as an amateur who's trying to make a name for himself, alt-right nut-job, covid conspiracy theorist, racist and so on, all in various comments on this page. Having grown up in a communist country, it's so disturbing, especially now, to see how whenever someone has a diverging opinion (someone could agree with you on 99 issues and have a different thought on the last one) he's done and needs to be labeled and treated like a pariah.

denton-scratch6• 5 years ago

So you think that in a non-"communist" country, it's unreasonable for people to express divergent opinions about stuff that's been published?

Where you have what passes for freedom of speech, the corrollary is that everyone has the freedom to oppose your views.

heydemo• 5 years ago

"The real news is my banned covid conspiracy fb page. Everything else serves the elites" yeah ok

mistermann9• 5 years ago

Is this from the article?

Jtsummers2• 5 years ago

It is not. I thought I'd missed something but GP is just making a snide remark.

sellyme7• 5 years ago

I'm assuming it's a satire in response to the following line, which claims that banned Facebook pages are "the anti-bullshit universe":

One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping.

I also like that the author explicitly refuses to provide any examples of these "anti-bullshit alternative media sources". Very common tactic amongst this ilk - complain about aggressive censorship and how George Orwell was specifically warning us about Twitter, all the while doing everything you can to avoid people seeing what was actually incurring bans.

I see it all the time in communities I run, people start trying to spin off alternative sites and talk about how <insert community here> impinges on free speech, and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.

It's insanely hard to get your content consistently removed from Twitter or Facebook, they do everything they can to avoid having to hire more moderators. It can happen, but then providing the examples will get everyone on your side immediately. Anyone who claims that they're being unfairly censored and yet refuses to show the content that actually got removed is trying to hide something.

MagicWishMonkey6• 5 years ago

The author doesn't spell it out but he mentions that the idiot story about Hunter Biden's laptop was totally real and not Russia using Giuliani like a stooge and he implies that if you don't think covid was leaked from a lab you're an idiot.

So yea, I don't doubt that this guy thinks facebook is being mean by not letting him spread conspiracy bullshit on their platform.

krona• 5 years ago

It's no longer a credible business model to simply report what you see to a wider audience. We have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every person on the planet with a smartphone for that. (See the fall of Kabul for the latest example.)

When people read the news they expect a lens upon the world that they agree with, that connects to everything else in a coherent narrative that confirms what it was they thought they knew. This fakeness (or 'bullshit') is a form of hypernormalization for the consumerist society.

skybrian• 5 years ago

This is a good, well-written rant, but rants are a form of bullshitting, aren't they?

vitiral3• 5 years ago

I think the author addresses that quite nicely in their signoff.

dibujante• 5 years ago

Uh-huh, because if something is bullshit then anything that disagrees with it is anti-bullshit. Fauci says masks are bad? That clearly self-serving bullshit entitles you to any reality you want. Don't think Covid is real? Well, some liberal elite once told you a false thing and they also believe Covid is real, so it's the bullshit. You're standing up to the bullshit. They only have to step in their own once to entitle you to spend your entire life head-over-heels in your own bullshit and it's fine because it's not THEIR cowpie.

civilized• 5 years ago

Quite a few people seem to think this way, sadly.

int_19h• 5 years ago

Given the choice of examples the author picked to illustrate their argument, it seems likely that they're one of those people.

smitty1e• 5 years ago

Manadatory Harry G. Frankfurt "On Bullshit" reference => https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...

It's a personal amusement of mine that the singnal-to-noise ratio on the internet is so terrible. Sorry, Tim Berners-Lee. The abysmal state of facts on the internet also seems a failure of capitalism of sorts: a low-distortion news channel doesn't seem an impossible business model, but here we are.

nicoffeine• 5 years ago

What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public. It didn’t hire ex-CIA directors, top FBI men, NSA brass, or other past and future sources to sit beside its anchors at spot-lit news-desks that blocked our view of their lower extremities. But it gave in.

Incredibly, this essay about bullshit is bullshit. Here's a snip of journalism from 1977:

"Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations."[1]

The long, well documented history of intelligence services mixing in with journalism is impossible to miss if you do any research at all.

The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines.

This is more bullshit. The protest started on July 11th. Here are some headlines/bylines/opening paragraphs from that week:

(BBC 7/13) Cuba protests: Arrests after thousands rally against government: Dozens of people have been arrested in Cuba after thousands joined the biggest protests for decades against the island's Communist government, media and opposition sources say.[2]

(Reuters 7/11) Cuba sees biggest protests for decades as pandemic adds to woes -- Chanting "freedom" and calling for President Miguel Diaz-Canel to step down, thousands of Cubans joined street protests from Havana to Santiago on Sunday in the biggest anti-government demonstrations on the Communist-run island in decades.[3]

(WaPo 7/12) Cubans hold biggest anti-government protests in decades; Biden says U.S. stands with people -- Communist Cuba erupted in its largest-scale demonstrations in decades on Sunday as thousands of people chanting “freedom” and “yes, we can” took to the streets from Havana to Santiago de Cuba in a major new challenge to an authoritarian government struggling to cope with increasingly severe blackouts, food shortages and a spiking coronavirus outbreak.[4]

The only way you could arrive at the same conclusion is if you did not read any of the news from that week.

Take the author's advice, avoid bullshit. However, actual bullshit is usually essays like this, which are really opinion pieces that do not attempt to mention any facts at all. If your "alternative media" is nothing but opinion pieces that count other similarly prejudiced opinions as research, it's bullshit all the way down. Journalism has some bullshit mixed in, as does everything, but at least there's a chance you will walk away with some information.

[1] http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57813704

[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/street-protests-break...

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/11/cuba-protest...

A4ET8a8uTh02• 5 years ago

You do have an argument, but was it as blatant as it is now? I just saw Clapper today and no one, but weird people like me remember his lies to the American public. In 1977, you could easily miss it, because it was hidden.

Today it is in plain sight.

chrisco255• 5 years ago

To me that would just make the news like a casino slot machine that mixes some dopamine spiking wins in with some cutting losses. The most dangerous kind of bullshit, is bullshit mixed with factual, respectable reporting since it makes the bullshit all the more believable.

Jtsummers2• 5 years ago

If this article piqued your interest but you want something a bit more detailed, I'd recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Good book, a bit one-sided at times, but very interesting in its analysis of the implications of TV on culture. Much of what he describes in the latter chapters seems even more applicable in the age of Twitter and Snapchat.

scythe• 5 years ago

He retreads an old song we're all familiar with and like, but this guy obviously has a persecution complex:

The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom.

When someone writes about a variety of abstruse topics, I can only draw on my limited experience with a few of those to judge their reliability about the rest. In this case, I happen to read Google News sometimes. So I know he's talking nonsense. I was deluged with stories about Cubans protesting for freedom. Sure, there were a few mentions that they weren't happy with the slow vaccine rollout, but the overwhelming majority of articles trumpeted the neoliberal party line and crowed about the protest song Patria y Vida.

This kind of selective attention to what must feel like a personal insult accompanies that other signal of a persecution complex, the Poor Lost People Like Me trope

the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons.

What he fails to understand is that the cliquishness of "his" group and the "narrative" of the "mainstream" are really one and the same phenomenon. Humans naturally try to find, redefine and support a cause or movement, which apparently reflects some primal culture-forming instinct. The idea that this is an external phenomenon -- that some outside, manipulative force is making people arrange into mobs -- is paranoia talking. Humans are natural mob-formers.

The media will always seem to be pushing a narrative because it is made of human beings who feel powerful when they support a narrative. What is necessary is to see the world as it is while aware of this phenomenon, not to delude yourself into thinking you can outrun your own nature.

mnmmn123456• 5 years ago

Media was once so money intensive, that no privat endeavour could provide it, thus the public media was created - payed by the public in general with a fee/taxes. When the private TV/Radio came up, the question was if they could survive. Advertisment money is good money, which we came to know much later, when those streams of revenue past over to the big internet companies (mainly Google and Facebook) and they thrived. Today we still see the first generation of media being still around ("public"), the second "private" also struggling and we have a lot of private persons (eg. "YouTubers") making big money, today. There are huge shifts and ignoring that is probably because of the "if your job depends on it". So the encumbents bent and twist themselves, like CNN ("fake news") and claiming things like "freedom of the press is in decline". No!,... times change and we need to and are all adapting and shifting. Except for those still working in the "private" and "public" news sector. With it also it's characteristics change: You rather follow the person(journalist), who is an expert in his field and someone you like and trust, like "Tim Dodd, the everyday Astronaut" (reporting on SpaceX) and others with bigger reach and smaller, weirder and less weird, with more attack surface and less. Some of them get themselves into trouble and need to move to other platforms or vanish completely. I remember Anonymous being expelled from Facebook and moving over to the Russian VKontakte network around 2015. Some stuff seems to only surface on 4chan. Bans or defunding of channels/outlets do get noticed and discussed in those "alternative" communities, or on the original platform/community itself. There is no hiding, it's getting less and less, actually. The freedom of the press got actually... democratized.

irjustin• 5 years ago

Many things that used to be "the good old way" have changed. Every generation things the upcoming generation is headed for doom.

First it was TVs, then it was video games, now it's social media.

I understand the sentiment and know it's easy to think that that one time in the past was the best way. Hell I even think about those few years with that group of people were "the best", nostalgia.

But if we always look at the past and try to recreate it, then we'll not allow great things of the future to come.

There are legitimate ways the past was better, but that's usually rooted in a belief. So hold onto the belief, let go of the past? I do commend those who onto a belief and let go of the past. It's not always easy in a changing future.

wombatmobile2• 5 years ago

It's easy to test that proposition.

Wait 30 years and then consider whether 2021 is "the good old way".

I imagine it will be for most people, just like 1969 was "the good old way" for the author of TFA, and 1736 was for Ben Franklin.

It's not that the bullshit was better back then, or even that times have changed, for the better or for the worse. It's just that the way the human mind works, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

As time goes by, we still don't see things as they are. We see them as we were.

denton-scratch6• 5 years ago

It's true; my grandchildren will no doubt look back on this decade as "the good old days".

But your "wait 30 years" observation puts you in a different age bracket from me; I'll be dead and gone (or reborn as an ant or something).

visarga• 5 years ago

The past seemed better because we were younger and instead of our current state of the world we could imagine anything we wanted about the future.

jancsika• 5 years ago

It explains why I thought being conscious of the bullshit actually accomplished something.

For example, leading one to take a vaccine that vastly decreases the risk of dying from a wildly infectious variant of a coronavirus.

Who needs that, right HN!?!

* mock kicks the pavement *

* takes a drag from a cigarette *

* nods my head to Nickelback's "How You Remind Me" *

rexreed2• 5 years ago

Yes, of course there's bullshit everywhere. But what can you do with that knowledge exactly? Knowing that something is fallacious and full of BS doesn't give you some advantage. It makes it worse. Knowing that the system is full of lies and corrupt doesn't provide a means to get some good from that knowledge or take advantage of knowing the "truth". It's just depressing to know that the takers will always be taking, the fakers will always be faking, and those who know how to work the lies keep winning while those who know the truth of the BS just self-congratulate their own knowledge. Does the BS always win?

Say one knows for a "fact" who killed JFK or the origins of the pandemic, or one knows the actual mechanism by which startups are funded or big deals won (it's never the way it's portrayed to be). What does knowing the truth of any of those facts do other than provide one with some self-satisfaction of knowing? Is it better to live in self-deception and believe the simple lie versus know the hard truth? Does knowing the "actual truth" even provide that self-satisfaction given that the lies and untruths win out so much of the time? Confronting the lies never seems to provide the expected win that those who seem to possess the truth would expect.

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

tune out. it's not like being up to date about everything going on the world is necessary. follow only the news you care about, read only the people whose work you enjoy

rexreed2• 5 years ago

That's certainly the easy way. But that only applies to news and internet chatter and social media blather -- stuff that's fairly easy to tune out. I've already tuned those out. But the lies and BS are much more than just what the nattering neighbobs say on the Internets and the glowing chatter box. The lies exist everywhere if you look deeply to find the truth when what you expect doesn't match reality. It's much more difficult to tune that out.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 5 years ago

I could invoke Always Sunny in Philadelphia Frank's duper/dupee dichotomy or Carlin's rant ('it's all bullshit and its bad for ya'), but I won't. It is lazy.

Knowing something is bullshit helps. Knowing the system and understanding what the levers do is an advantage. This is also the reason there is so much bullshit. Advantage goes to those with accurate world model and ability to use it to their advantage.

All that said, I have no real answers to the posited questions as those probably have to be answered individually.

mistermann9• 5 years ago

You could start by learning some of what is possible from the masters: politicians, the media, and their writers.

mongol• 5 years ago

The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class. They’re not the ruling class — not quite — but often they’re married to it or share therapists or drink with it at Yale Bowl football games. They’re cozy, these tribal cousins. They cavort. They always have. What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public.

I think this is thought provoking. An at the same time harmless but also horrible example was to see Jen Psaki sing Happy Birthday for a Reuters journalist. Am I alone to think this reflects bad on journalism?

https://youtu.be/EFyFOQTs9DI

th33ngineer• 5 years ago

Is this Walter Kirn the author?

dredmorbius• 5 years ago

Appears to be, yes.

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

zug_zug• 5 years ago

In my opinion this is entirely unreadable. Not for what it has to say, but how it says it.

The word "bullshit" is a burden. It is a painful, unscientific term that chips away our objective neutrality every time we encounter it.

The author knows. The author is emotional. The author is trying to make US emotional. I don't want to be rashly emotional, I want to be neutral, cautious, objective, thoughtful, and deliberate. Every point I take from a piece I want to double-check the reasonableness and the implications of, to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.

But not if it requires wading through so much frustration.

_moof• 5 years ago

Go read "On Bullshit." You'll find it's actually a very straightforward concept.

Also, not everything in life is science, and emotions can be useful messengers. Ignore them at your peril.

croo• 5 years ago

Part of the excellent article was about how death puts a lot of things into new perspective. Like how useless it often is to take every point from a piece and double check the reasonableness and the implications of or to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.

every• 5 years ago

https://www.npr.org/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/

vitiral3• 5 years ago

The worst thing is when things start getting sensored and you get the creeping feeling that the sensored content is the only true content. Then you just go back in your hole, try not to read the news, and cry a lot.

1634347773432• 5 years ago

So I'd guess that your sensored content is probably a take like "masks are bad" or "covid is a hoax". And the reason I'd guess that, is because the word you're looking for is "censored". Is that right?

vitiral3• 5 years ago

Censored is the word. I think opinions or information should never be censored since for many people, myself included, it creates a psychological response to trust the censored content more.

I'm not saying the censored content is actually more trustworthy. Science is (should be?) A process of accepting all theories backed by evidence, experimentation and the failure of competing theories. If you censor scientific papers and evidence because they are politically inconvenient it effectively dismantles one of the few effective tools we have for a shared understanding.

a_puppy• 5 years ago

This essay has a grain of truth, but then he stretches it way too far.

The grain of truth is that mainstream news doesn't live up to the standards they like to claim they do. The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs.

Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants. The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right, so if one's worldview contradicts the literal basic facts, then that person is wrong. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs, but no worse than blogs either; so if an opinion piece makes a valid argument, that's just as valid as an argument made by any other source.

fulafel• 5 years ago

Also people often forget that journalists are people who are paid to interpret facts, form a story, and present it so the audience doesn't have to do this intellectual work.

cpu_qwerty3• 5 years ago

The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right, so if one's worldview contradicts the literal basic facts, then that person is wrong.

Without clarity as to what constitutes literal basic facts vs facts that are distorted, this is just more plain bullshit.

timkam• 5 years ago

I disagree. We can't argue with formal precision here (unfortunately) but we should be permitted to try analyzing, anyway. Roughly speaking, the "objective" observations made in traditional mainstream news outlets tend to be correct, but the more an article strays from those objective observations (and becomes opinion, value judgement), the more contestable the inferences that the writers draw from these objective observations becomes (and the more divisive the article tends to become, in particular in the US).

coldtea5• 5 years ago

This essay has a grain of truth, but then he stretches it way too far.

Does it? If anything it's quite tame. The truth is worse, and has been for a long time.

Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants

The post never makes that claim.

The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right

You'd be surprised, and seldom when it matters most.

At best they'll offer some retraction of their errors afterthey're caught with their pants down, and when it's too little, too late (as with the WMDs or the Contra affair).

Nowadays, that they don't even have to do that (e.g. Steele dossier), since their errors are lost in the barrage of new BS news anyway, and the public, bombarded by all that, has developed the memory and attention span of a proverbial goldfish.

narrator2• 5 years ago

I think one of my favorite cases of bullshit was the 2 years spent investigating Trump for Russian collusion, and nothing happened despite "Anonymous sources say..." stories every week in the New York Times. The hilarious thing about watching this is is the seemingly coordinated narrative everywhere with everyone using the same phrase like they all are just repeating "the truth" from some central source where they write the teleprompter scripts.

"The walls are closing in"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ab6uxg908

That's what the bullshit is. The almost identical media headlines and catch phrases everywhere. The 100s of identical bot tweets.

Now I just read Telegram channels and I see the enormous anti-lockdown protests taking place worldwide. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people in France right now protesting vaccine passports across the country and nobody has heard about it because of a hermetically sealed mainstream media blackout.

I come to Hacker News when I want to see what the propagandized classes who read whatever "news" app came with their phone are believing. Everyone here is pretty smart, you're just in Plato's cave looking at the shadows on the walls. The bottom line is, if you see that all your news sources are repeating each other, it may be time to diversify your news sources.

mjburgess• 5 years ago

A friend showed me one of these telegram videos, it was from Ukraine in 2014.

6tZAfJuXT2LL• 5 years ago

hermetically sealed mainstream media blackout.

I've seen this reported numerous times by "mainstream media", here's a recent one:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/protesters-france-denou...

rcxdude• 5 years ago

"The mainstream media aren't reporting this" is basically always false. It just makes the story more enticing to contrarians (who don't read the mainstream media anyway and aren't likely to check).

IIAOPSW• 5 years ago

The bottom line is, if you see that all your news sources are repeating each other, it may be time to diversify your news sources.

If one news source reports "this is a sphere", and another reports "this is a sphere", and yet a third reports "this is a sphere", then you better go find and listen to the crackpot insisting it's a cube. Otherwise it's a sure sign you're in a bias bubble. There is no underlying truth about the shape of the thing, so any similarity in reports must have come from the reporters being hacks and bullshitters. Why yes, I am very smart and a free thinker. Let me tell you how you must be in Plato's cave for accepting the sphere-narrative instead of my preferred cube-narrative. I wonder why I am perceived as arrogant and tedious?

narrator2• 5 years ago

Yes your argument is brilliant!! Let me use your reasoning for a second:

My post was the equivalent of "this is a sphere." Your reply is the equivalent of "this is a circle.". Thus, you are wrong. Why? Because math.

If you want to argue like this, I'll be here all day. :).

Btw, when you have two opposing viewpoints you are supposed to use your reasoning skills to determine truth, not apriori decide what is true as if it's an abstract math problem and stick your fingers in your ears so you don't hear any disturbing contradictions.

Chris204810• 5 years ago

OP specifies repetition of phrasing, not just the facts themselves, implying some degree of "coaching"/collusion or a common source (i.e. non-independence).

then you better go find and listen to the crackpot insisting it's a cube

OP never implied this, this is a strawman intended to cheaply dismiss the point.

I wonder why I am perceived as arrogant and tedious?

^ followed by a personal attack..

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

I remember reading a biography of Aleister Crowley (the guy was boring), in which was put forward the theory that reading the news was a waste of time because:

1. It tended to be poorly written.

2. It was often false or at least incorrect.

3. If there was anything really important you will find out about it quickly enough.

My summary of the points may be off - I read this 30+ years ago.

Animats• 5 years ago

The trouble with news today is that the ratio of publicity and punditry to data collected in the field is too high.

Try to find out what's happening in Kabul right now. What have we got?

Vast amounts of commentary are available, all resting on a very narrow base of facts. There's a little bit of cell phone video leaking out. Large numbers of people at the airport, out on the tarmac, hanging around planes that aren't going anywhere. Aljazeera has a reporter embedded with the Taliban, and he got a tour of the presidential mansion, showing lots of guys with rifles exploring the place and having meetings.

On the PR side, we have statements from the US State Department that the US embassy has been evacuated, civilian flights out of Kabul have stopped, military flights are continuing, the US has a few thousand troops at the airport, and more troops are coming in. There's a Taliban Twitter feed.[1] "The situation in Kabul is normal".

So what do we really know.?

- General agreement that there was no substantial fighting in Kabul.

- General agreement that the US holds the airport and the Taliban holds most of the rest of the city.

That's about it for hard facts. Yet there's a huge volume of published bullshit on all major media of all persuasions.

[1] https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1427101139481268227

Joeri• 5 years ago

I don’t have to watch the coverage to also know they’re not going to talk about the wider context in any useful way. No real insight into why the taliban saw so little opposition, no discussion of how drug money underpins much of their power and what the geopolitical ramifications of that are, no reflection of why the major international governmental bodies are unwilling or unable to go to afghanistan and other places and protect human rights, and how we could reform the system of the world to actually be capable of protecting human rights. In short, all we’re going to get is a lot of poorly informed discussion of what is going on right there right now, which is probably the least important aspect of this whole situation for anyone not actually living there.

gampleman• 5 years ago

The media has been notoriously lying for quite some time. Whether actively (I recently heard a story of some news anchors paying off some guys with Kalashnikovs to start shooting when their live segment on TV came up because the armed strife they were reporting on wasn't quite real enough) or passively (swallowing someone else's propaganda as if it were a fact), there has been bullshit floating around the media for decades. I think back in the day it was in some ways harder to spot - your only other frame of reference was the observable reality around you. So for instance when (in my parents time in a communist country) the TV reported that the shoe factory was exceeding its planned output by 140%, but when you went to the shop there were no shoes in your size and a line around the block you could put two and two together. But many news stories evade such simple comparisons with daily reality. Today we have the internet where both alternative facts are available (i.e. people actually on the scene taking pictures) as well as alternative journalism piecing those facts together in a completely different way. Most clever people try to triangulate between these different viewpoints to arrive at some conclusion hopefully closer to reality...

The interesting question is what are the consequence of this? I think there is a rapidly shrinking pool of trust towards our institutions and corporations. I believe that a lot of the issues with the coronavirus (especially the vaccines) are directly attributable to this. If someone who has been blatantly lying to you for decades tells you "take this medication, it's safe, trust me" and keeps repeating it over and over again, I think one can sympathise with those who feel entirely suspicious about it.

unraveller• 5 years ago

Where do I pay to see the rest of the headline? These trickle and dime outfits have taken it to the point where I expect clickbait in one word or fewer.

kazinator• 5 years ago

One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping.

This is just ranting.

News isn't fundamentally that different from what it was, fifteen, thirty years ago. The difference is that its audiences are far less captive. Attention is scarce. In order to captivate Attention now, you have to "sell" it what it wants, and what a good chunk of Attention wants is to read bullshit that confirms the views of the bubble that it inhabits. You need tricks like clickbaity headlines and whatnot.

The unfettered alternatives that spew raw misinformation are not better, though.

Arguably, having to compete with all that for attention is what drags down news.

The news has always been controlled by someone. It has always had owners, and ran on advertising money.

In the pre-internet past, the news, in a manner of speaking, competed for attention with tabloids. But tabloids were obviously in a separate category. If someone started a sentence with "I read in the Enquirer that ...", you could laugh them off as a twit.

The Bullshit

Related Stories