Media Criticism Thread

[P___X]

I’m seeing more and more articles that tease you with an interesting headline, then do everything they can to avoid telling you that which they teased—the point of the article.

Here’s an example. The headline?

Miami Dolphins predicted to sign former first round QB as Tua Tagovailoa insurance

When you start reading the story, as I did, you find that you don’t get to the pertinent information—the name of the proposed backup QB—until one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven paragraphs in. 🤨 Everything preceding that paragraph is background info to set up the eventual “payoff”, the name of the quarterback.

Note, too, that that eleventh paragraph is the second to last one in the story.

This of course is the reversal of standard journalism, where you reveal the substance of the story in the first paragraph—or the second if a little setup is necessary. Everything else that follows in succeeding paragraphs is elaboration on the topic.

The purpose of this backwards reporting, naturally, is to keep you on the page longer, thus inflating its statistics for engagement and, oh yeah, making sure you have to scroll past more ads.

The article in question is from The Sporting News, but I’m also seeing this practice on second tier political news sites as well.

See for yourself.

Miami Dolphins predicted to sign former first round QB as Tua Tagovailoa insurance | Sporting News

The Dolphins inked their starting QB to a massive extension this offseason, but they may bring in a former NFL starter in case Tua Tagovailoa can’t stay healthy.

www.sportingnews.com

I see a positive feedback loop here. Remember when you could browse the internet without ad blockers? Now we'll have to read the news using AI summarizers and it's just gonna get worse and worse.

And for establishment news on Drumpf-Zwei, you'll need a desanitizer.

 

[SouprMatt]

I’m seeing more and more articles that tease you with an interesting headline, then do everything they can to avoid telling you that which they teased—the point of the article.

Here’s an example. The headline?

Miami Dolphins predicted to sign former first round QB as Tua Tagovailoa insurance

When you start reading the story, as I did, you find that you don’t get to the pertinent information—the name of the proposed backup QB—until one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven paragraphs in. 🤨 Everything preceding that paragraph is background info to set up the eventual “payoff”, the name of the quarterback.

Note, too, that that eleventh paragraph is the second to last one in the story.

This of course is the reversal of standard journalism, where you reveal the substance of the story in the first paragraph—or the second if a little setup is necessary. Everything else that follows in succeeding paragraphs is elaboration on the topic.

The purpose of this backwards reporting, naturally, is to keep you on the page longer, thus inflating its statistics for engagement and, oh yeah, making sure you have to scroll past more ads.

The article in question is from The Sporting News, but I’m also seeing this practice on second tier political news sites as well.

See for yourself.

Miami Dolphins predicted to sign former first round QB as Tua Tagovailoa insurance | Sporting News

The Dolphins inked their starting QB to a massive extension this offseason, but they may bring in a former NFL starter in case Tua Tagovailoa can’t stay healthy.

www.sportingnews.com

I’ll keep this in mind next time I write a long post 😉

 

[Thomas Veil]

I’m reminded of “The Front Page”, in which editor Walter Burns chides his reporter Hildy Johnson for not mentioning the name of the man being put to death by hanging until the second paragraph. Burns is irate and wants it in the first paragraph because he says his lip-moving readers never make it further than that.

(He also wants something added about the body twisting slowly in the wind. Sounds like MAGA stuff there.😄 )

 

[Jay Mysteri0]

Don't forget also the trend now of slideshow 'stories'.

With so many sites being purchased, gutted, then turned into aggregation farms, one favorite article is the ".... list of best things ever". And all it is is 10 - 15 pictures with a little content, hoping you click on each one individually inflating page views.

I was a big fan of Gawker media until they caught Thiel's wrath & were bankrupted by Hulk Hogan. The site was a lot of fun, so much that trolls far & wide tried to make it their home & got laughed at. It took an asshole funded by a billionaire ( sound familiar? ) to tank it all, and now it's just a boring click farm shell of what 3 sites they have left.

 

[lizkat]

Don't forget also the trend now of slideshow 'stories'.

With so many sites being purchased, gutted, then turned into aggregation farms, one favorite article is the ".... list of best things ever". And all it is is 10 - 15 pictures with a little content, hoping you click on each one individually inflating page views.

I was a big fan of Gawker media until they caught Thiel's wrath & were bankrupted by Hulk Hogan. The site was a lot of fun, so much that trolls far & wide tried to make it their home & got laughed at. It took an asshole funded by a billionaire ( sound familiar? ) to tank it all, and now it's just a boring click farm shell of what 3 sites they have left.

Par for the course for all these asset-stripping vulture capitalists.

The one that bought up a bunch of papers in Western New York State did the usual maneuvers of laying off copy editors and doing buyouts (and subbing in centralized news aggregators' contributions of stuff massaged off the wire services) but then went further. They closed the print factory where about a dozen of those papers were printed, and relocated the printing to New Jersey. Look at a map sometime LOL.

Yeah. They had to start putting the paper to bed six hours earlier to be able to get hard copy to home delivery customers, right? And that part of NYS is snow belt country. Those folks probably ain't seen a hardcopy newspaper since sometime last week. Meanwhile if there's a local murder or something, the subscribers to those papers get to read about it in Yahoo news first, probably. So the sub rates to those papers continue to drop...

 

[lizkat]

As many here may already know, Bezos was not the only major newspaper owner to drop a shoe in the newsroom and decline to endorse Harris. In a similar move seen as "anticipatory obedience" or at least an effort to hedge against retribution by Trump in a then-potential 2024 presidential win, the owner of the LA Times, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, did that too (and like Bezos, quashed an already drafted Harris endorsement). The fallout continues:

Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times

By Harry Litman

harrylitman.substack.com

Soon-Shiong’s most notorious action received national attention. The paper’s editorial department had drafted an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Soon-Shiong ordered them to spike it and make no endorsement in the election. (Soon-Shiong later implied he had just ordered up a factual analysis of both candidates’ policies, but that’s at best a distortion: he plainly blocked an already drafted Harris endorsement.) It is hard to imagine a more brutal, humiliating, and unprofessional treatment of a paper’s professional staff. Three members of the editorial page resigned in protest and 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.

There is more: Soon-Shiong went on Fox News after the election to talk about the paper’s editorial direction. He advocated “diverse perspectives” in the editorial pages and voices from across the political spectrum to avoid creating an "echo chamber." Most alarmingly, and escaping the notice of no one, he pandered to Fox and Trump by saying he wanted to make the Times more “fair and balanced.”

Soon-Shiong followed up by hiring a noted pro-Trump commentator, Scott Jennings, for some as yet ill-defined role of “balancing out” the views on the editorial page. Then most recently, during an interview on CNN in which he was asked about the Jennings hire, the normally mild-mannered Soon-Shiong went full Trump, labeling the CNN correspondent a "so-called reporter" before abruptly ending the interview.

Soon-Shiong’s argument for all these moves is to create “balance” on the editorial page, which still remains unstaffed and in chaos, and a neutral, “just the facts” approach to news. It sounds banal, but in fact, it is pernicious; and it goes to the heart of my reasons for leaving.

 

[SouprMatt]

As many here may already know, Bezos was not the only major newspaper owner to drop a shoe in the newsroom and decline to endorse Harris. In a similar move seen as "anticipatory obedience" or at least an effort to hedge against retribution by Trump in a then-potential 2024 presidential win, the owner of the LA Times, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, did that too (and like Bezos, quashed an already drafted Harris endorsement). The fallout continues:

Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times

By Harry Litman

harrylitman.substack.com

These days, it feels like 90% of the time, “I’m not political” or “I’m trying to keep it balanced” or “I’m a centrist” = MAGA supporter

 

[lizkat]

These days, it feels like 90% of the time, “I’m not political” or “I’m trying to keep it balanced” or “I’m a centrist” = MAGA supporter

Well a lot of the mainstream media sure seem to have checked their spines into cold storage, same as the godforsaken Congress.

 

[lizkat]

How great can this be for "nuance" when so many media outlets right now are demonstrating intent to suck up to Trump in their coverage of "news"

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/ai-startup-perplexity-adds-independent-la-times-its-publishers-program-2024-12-05/

AI search startup Perplexity said on Thursday it was adding more than a dozen new media partners, including the Los Angeles Times and The Independent, to its program where it shares a portion of ad revenue with the publishers.

In its first set of partners from regions including Japan, Spain and Latin America, Perplexity said companies such as Prisa Media and Newspicks will now be part of the publishers' program, joining existing partners like TIME, Der Spiegel and Fortune.

"With these new partners ... (Perplexity can) provide insights that resonate with users from different backgrounds and geographies. Their participation ensures that our responses to user queries remain comprehensive (and) nuanced," Perplexity said in a statement

The firm, backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and leading AI chipmaker Nvidia, launched the program in July and involves sharing ad revenue from interactions when a publisher's content is referenced.

We are what we eat, and that includes what we feed our minds... and nowadays, what we feed our info-gobbling AI trainees. They'll eat what's put in front of them and look who's getting ready to put a lot of it out there on consumers' plates, pre-digested as packages of EZ-search answers to all our kids' questions.

 

[P___X]

As many here may already know, Bezos was not the only major newspaper owner to drop a shoe in the newsroom and decline to endorse Harris. In a similar move seen as "anticipatory obedience" or at least an effort to hedge against retribution by Trump in a then-potential 2024 presidential win, the owner of the LA Times, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, did that too (and like Bezos, quashed an already drafted Harris endorsement). The fallout continues:

Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times

By Harry Litman

harrylitman.substack.com

I think society is an echo chamber because we exclude criminals from societal exchanges. I have a proposal. Let's add some convicted murderers to the OpEd section of these Mainstream News Sources to balance it all out.

(/s)

 

[lizkat]

I think society is an echo chamber because we exclude criminals from societal exchanges. I have a proposal. Let's add some convicted murderers to the OpEd section of these Mainstream News Sources to balance it all out.

(/s)

That won't be necessary since mainstream media outlets have long since juiced their clickbait potential by including social media posts from sociopaths, crooked pols, greedy CEOS caught w/ hand in till, etc. All that stuff gets included in the web crawl they license to AI developers.

So... ya want balance, it's all in there: tweets from neoNazis, emails from scam artists and swindling CEOs when their trials are reported, yada yada. And even AI's own hallucinations when journalists experimenting with chatbots run into something hilarious or grotesque and post it in their reporting. AI will scrape that up and process it during its ongoing training too. "We live in interesting times" ain't the half of it yet.

 

[P___X]

That won't be necessary since mainstream media outlets have long since juiced their clickbait potential by including social media posts from sociopaths, crooked pols, greedy CEOS caught w/ hand in till, etc. All that stuff gets included in the web crawl they license to AI developers.

So... ya want balance, it's all in there: tweets from neoNazis, emails from scam artists and swindling CEOs when their trials are reported, yada yada. And even AI's own hallucinations when journalists experimenting with chatbots run into something hilarious or grotesque and post it in their reporting. AI will scrape that up and process it during its ongoing training too. "We live in interesting times" ain't the half of it yet.

But. That. Is. NOT. Balanced. Enough!!!11!!!

We need convicted murderers chiming in on healthcare discussions, rapists on women's rights, pedos on child protection, financial criminals on the economy, and spies for foreign governments on national security and so on. That's the real balance.

 

[lizkat]

But. That. Is. NOT. Balanced. Enough!!!11!!!

We need convicted murderers chiming in on healthcare discussions, rapists on women's rights, pedos on child protection, financial criminals on the economy, and spies for foreign governments on national security and so on. That's the real balance.

Listen, with such a cultivated guy like David Sacks in charge of not only AI but crypto, everything gonna be just fine.

Time to haul out my favorite quote for this sorta thing, what with all these billionaires will be floating around the West Wing

"Graft's what they call it when who's doin' it don't know which fork to use..."​

-- southern newspaper writer turned governor's aide in All the King's Men​

​

 

[Jay Mysteri0]

Enshitification - It's a word I've been thinking a lot about since the election. I'll probably start many posts from now on with the word.

Why?

Billionaire Owner of LA Times Plans to Use an AI-Powered ‘Bias Meter’ on News

An algorithm could soon be dictating how readers should interpret the paper's own political coverage.

gizmodo.com

The billionaire owners of media companies are increasingly making their voices heard. Elon Musk is X’s top poster, and notably used the social media platform to help Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election. Jeff Bezos recently put a halt to the practice of presidential endorsements at the Washington Post, just in time to (again) help Trump. Now, amidst other drastic changes to its workforce and culture, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times has said that he wants to integrate an AI-powered “bias meter” into the paper’s coverage, in an apparent effort to make its reporting more politically neutral.

News of the bias meter was first spotted by blogger Oliver Darcy, who wrote Wednesday about the apparent plan. Soon-Shiong initially mentioned the bias meter on the podcast of pro-Trump CNN contributor (and recent LA Times editorial board member) Scott Jennings. The point of the meter would be so that “someone could understand, as a reader, that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he told Jennings. Soon-Shiong elaborated that readers would be able to “press a button and get both sides of that exact same story, based on that story, and then give comments.” Soon-Shiong has said he wants to have such a function at the paper by as early as January of 2025.

Little is known about how such a meter would actually work. However, Soon-Shiong’s apparent push for algorithmically enforced “neutrality” comes at a time when sources close to the paper claim the billionaire is increasingly showing his own lack of it. Indeed, Darcy’s article notes that Soon-Shiong has increasing “morphed into a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jennings fanboy” and that since “Trump’s victory in November, Soon-Shiong has turned to X to criticize the news media, praise Trump’s cabinet picks, and appeal to a MAGA audience.” Soon-Shiong also previously sought a role in the first Trump administration.

Soon-Shiong recently fired a huge amount of staffers at the paper, laying off 115 people—in one of the single largest workforce reductions in the paper’s history. Other notable figures, like its editorials editor, have recently stepped down. All of the changes at the paper, combined with Darcy’s apparent rightward shift, have forced Times writers into a pessimistic corner. “The man who was supposed to be our savior has turned into what now feels like the biggest internal threat to the paper,” one anonymous staffer apparently told Darcy.

Another anonymously quoted employee made the situation at the West Coast’s largest paper sound grim: “We’ve gone through ups and downs,” they said. “But in previous times, there were always people who saw the upside. It is different now.”

While the idea of enforcing standards of neutrality in political reporting is a fine idea, the notion of using an algorithm to do it seems questionable at best. AI is still a developing technology and, as has been demonstrated time and time again, it is not a failsafe replacement for human judgment. It’s often just simply wrong. Algorithms can also be programmed to have their own biases, so unless Soon-Shiong’s bias meter is open-source and auditable, it will be of little value to readers.

Proving one modern consistency. There's nothing relatively good, that a billionaire can't completely fuck up.

 

[SouprMatt]

Enshitification - It's a word I've been thinking a lot about since the election. I'll probably start many posts from now on with the word.

Why?

Proving one modern consistency. There's nothing relatively good, that a billionaire can't completely fuck up.

The originator of the term is Cory Doctorow, and I follow him on Mastodon. His posts are often brilliant and thought-provoking. He also posts the content to his website if you don't want to follow his Fediverse account.

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)

72.8K Posts, 934 Following, 61.4K Followers · By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow@mamot.fr. Archived at pluralistic.net I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my...

mamot.fr

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.

pluralistic.net

 

[Jay Mysteri0]

The originator of the term is Cory Doctorow, and I follow him on Mastodon. His posts are often brilliant and thought-provoking. He also posts the content to his website if you don't want to follow his Fediverse account.

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)

72.8K Posts, 934 Following, 61.4K Followers · By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow@mamot.fr. Archived at pluralistic.net I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my...

mamot.fr

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.

pluralistic.net

Yeah, I've been aware of him.

It was another guy who brought the term back on my radar earlier in the year, by the name of Ed Zitron.

He's a critic of AI as a business & tech management that has crapped up so many things like Google, Instagram, & more.

 

[SouprMatt]

Yeah, I've been aware of him.

It was another guy who brought the term back on my radar earlier in the year, by the name of Ed Zitron.

He's a critic of AI as a business & tech management that has crapped up so many things like Google, Instagram, & more.

I will check him out. Now that we're talking about this, Molly White comes to mind as a Crypto/AI critic who runs the famous: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com

Molly White (@molly0xfff@mastodon.social)

1.29K Posts, 242 Following, 568 Followers · crypto researcher & critic, software engineer, wikipedian • @web3isgreat@indieweb.social creator • fellow @ Harvard Library Innovation Lab • writing https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/ she/her • 💗💜💙

mastodon.social

 

[P___X]

Yeah, I've been aware of him.

It was another guy who brought the term back on my radar earlier in the year, by the name of Ed Zitron.

He's a critic of AI as a business & tech management that has crapped up so many things like Google, Instagram, & more.

.

I will check him out. Now that we're talking about this, Molly White comes to mind as a Crypto/AI critic who runs the famous: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com

Molly White (@molly0xfff@mastodon.social)

1.29K Posts, 242 Following, 568 Followers · crypto researcher & critic, software engineer, wikipedian • @web3isgreat@indieweb.social creator • fellow @ Harvard Library Innovation Lab • writing https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/ she/her • 💗💜💙

mastodon.social

Crypto is a scam, but AI is here to stay. We already reached the dead internet: most of the content is now AI generated and thus lost meaning ("enshitified"). It doesn't mean that AI is bad. It means that people use it for shit. I thought Isaac Asimov was naive about the laws of robotics, but the guy was spot on about humanity. We really are the experts of how to use great technology to turn something good into utter shite.

 

[SouprMatt]

The NY Times confirms what we knew all along:

The Trump Show Is Returning. Will It Be Triumph, Tragedy or Farce?

TV has fixated on one person, as news, comedy material and dramatic subtext, since 2015. Can it do another four years?

www.nytimes.com

They have their TV critic talk about the coming “Trump show.” This is what the media wanted; this is why coverage was so slanted towards a creepy old man with authoritarian impulses. It was never about giving accurate information to their readers. It was to get 4 more years of the circus. Except they don’t seem to care about who gets hurt, and this is not an entertaining spectacle anymore (if it ever was).

 

[SouprMatt]

CNN compares Trump’s threatened takeover of Greenland, Canada, and Panama to…. The Louisiana Purchase?



Traditional media has been circling the drain for a while. The final flushes seem to be here.