News - The lack of

[Benny]

(Warning, some links contain adult content)

As most of you are aware by now I have over 2 hours of commuting a day to fill with entertainment of my choosing. I rotate between reading, watching 'stuff' and podcasts/music.
Relatively recently I've rediscovered Newswipe, and for thoses that haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend it.


On the back of another book I've read relatively recently it's got me to a point where I'm beginning to lost faith in humanity.

It's nothing that people don't already know, but am I the only person that is completely disgusted by the way the media manipulates and handles the entire world order. The culture of everyone needing to know everything is perpetuated by the unwashed populous but surely there is some moral obligation to realise that the masses are completely incapacitated by the power of the media and as such the output of any organistaion should be considerate.

The culture of fear that is permenanty encouraged (eggs, ash, salmonella, BSE, paedophiles, rapists, murder, guns, knives ad infinitum) is so hugely detrimental to society and does nothing but perpetuate the cycle.

Now the irony is in me, having watched something on TV, now feeling the need to vent based on what it's told me.

Surely the great unwashed should start somewhere. A news site that is 'news' not soundbites, flagrant incitement to rioting/panic...imagine that. Updates for things that impact just me.

Within one of the episodes is a piece about a school shooting and some advice from a psychiatrist type suggesting how to handle the news of that.....suffice to say the media outlets did the exact opposite...

Start your journey to enlightenment here

How the news reports things;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z4b_KMNpfs

[Tutonic]

Chris Morris saw it coming.

[delanvital]

Bookmarked this post for my 1 hour commute home...

[smilodon]

I share your sentiments. However I don't believe the media are into gaining some kind of  collective mind control over us. There into making profits. The print media cannot do this by bringing us the news as they have done in the past. We already know the news from the web, TV and radio. We get our news 'as it happens' with satellite links and 24 hour news channels. A paper cannot just reproduce yesterdays old news. So they have to tell us what the news means. No longer are they newspapers. They have become viewspapers.

Also reader loyalty has dropped to an all time low. Few people actually have a paper delivered, we get them direct from the newsagent. And while we may normally buy the same one each day, a single shocking front page story could cause a switch to another brand. So the papers fight each other to provide the most attention grabbing headline they can think of. Then they tell us what they think we want to hear. The Daily Mirror won't report something damning about the old Labour government as most of it's readers are Labour supporters. And they Sun won't tell us when the new government makes it's first major cock-up due it's readership being mostly Tory. Never insult or upset your customer. Tell them what they want to hear and they'll be back tomorrow for more confirmation that their own personal world view is the right one.

And in very similar way the 24 hour news channels are heading down that same road. What channel do you go to all the time for your news? Sky, BBC, Channel 4, ITN? Why that one particularly? Maybe because it tells you the state of the world in a way that appeals to you. It's done in a far more subtle way than they sledge hammer approach taken by the print media, but the principal stands. "Come to us and we'll tell it the way you want to hear it."

IMHO the reason this collapse of the traditional news providers is taking place is due to the rise of the Internet. Wikipedia, Google, Twitter etc etc allow the people in the news to tell us first hand what's going on. Want to know what pilots think about the Ash cloud and its risks? Go read one of the anonymous commercial pilots forums. Want to speak to a Bangkok protester about what they really think and want? Check their Twitter feeds and personal blogs. You don't need the traditional media any more. Gone are the days when the few spoke to the many. We're living in a world where the many can speak to the many.

Sadly though I fear far too few people will be willing to invest the time to go find their news. Maybe we're all too used to getting our information in a one hour dollop at 10pm every night or from the rag we read each day on the way to work. Staying informed is hard work and I'm probably just to damn lazy to take the time to find out what I need to know. And maybe I don't want to be told something that doesn't fit with my preconceived ideas about how the world should work. For the first time in history I have the ability to bypass the normal media completely and become an educated and informed person. Shame I'm probably too idle or too frightened to bother.

[Dingo]

Snip

Scarily I would have to agree with Smilo, although he doesn't go far enough into the psyche of "modern Britain". And Benny, the great unwashed are just that, a huge tranche of aimless people with aimless lives who celebrate an unending stream of "Celebrities" only famous for being "seen on TV".

Children aspire to be "famous" as though it was a career choice, and their parents have long forgone their parental responsibilities in an effort to embrace "Nu Labour's" vision of a fairer society for all, whilst happily allowing a Labour government to remain in power despite all of it's obvious failings.

Nobody wants an "evil B" for a boss but it is what everyone secretly craves, so they don't have to think for themselves or take any responsibility for their actions, and in that Labour have delivered all their wishes. We are now awash with a Country full of self proclaiming, media whores, whose ultimate goal is to be on the Jeremy Kyle show, not realising their "fifteen minutes of fame" has now become "fifteen minutes of shame".

Politics is no longer, by any definition, about belief systems, it's just another tawdry popularity contest where style over content will win every time........Mankind has become so shallow that it could drown itself in two inches (of water), but there is undoubtably an operation (for a price) that can make that three!!

[Benny]

I
 Staying informed is hard work and I'm probably just to damn lazy to take the time to find out what I need to know.  For the first time in history I have the ability to bypass the normal media completely and become an educated and informed person. Shame I'm probably too idle or too frightened to bother.

It raises one of the questions that was posed by the psychologist. Why do I need to know about the murder of 10 teenagers deep in the American mid west? I don't. Am I saying it's not tragic? Absolutely not, does it have any bearing on my life? No. All it succeeds in doing is instilling a culture of;

1. Fear that it could happen at any school at any time. (Newsreader "Just an ordinary boy, let's look at what made him go off the rails, he lost at monopoly and got cross, that was the first sign").
2. Copycat instances. Neo/matrix black coats and hero/pariah cultures.

If it happened in Surrey, fair enough, but whilst I'm interested in the world around me, I don't need to know what Nelson Mandela had for dinner, or indeed what Obama thinks of the medicare system. I have no American relatives or friends, if I did fair enough. How do you channel the news that people want to hear?

There used to be a website (that I posted here ages ago that had a wordmap on it based on the number of headlines and you could catergorise by country etc. I wish I could find it now.

edit, found it. http://newsmap.jp/

[delanvital]

Aye, you suggested that site to me a few years ago - I use it everyday for a quick glimpse of what is read a lot around the globe. Sadly, it can't be adjusted to "Denmark" or "Europe" fx. despite me encouraging the developer twice.

I can still see the validity in e.g. keeping up with what is happening politically in, say, the US or how the semi-civil war is going in Thailand. I think there is some point in this buzzword of being a global citizen and how nations, people and firms are connected today. Examples:

- I keep up with how the pounds is doing (fx. after Cameron's announcements today + a flea from risky currencies) to see what it costs to buy stuff overseas.
- I keep up with how the Euro (and Greece) is doing since that could impact Denmark severely, being a tiny nation, even though our currency isn't the euro, but just pegged to it.

I think there is a big difference between your two mentioned examples of irrelevant news. What Obama thinks of Medicare can have an influence on me, although minor, while I doubt what Mandela eats has an influence... I guess I have changed over the years and my scope on news isn't aimed at specific nations but rather the scope of potential influence? Chinese news can still matter, and Danish news can still be pointless.

[Benny]

So the future of news is to be able to subscribe to what you want. In essence, in the UK that was done by localised news after the main news, but it's still all crap.

Filtering the news site I posted for UK I get;

Iran nuclear - relevant
China welcomes Iran - getting tenuous
Miss USA Stripper - dear god
Miss USA strip show - kill me now
Suicide attack Kabul - tragic yes, care, no.
EU-Latin summit in Madrid....yawn
A ton of football pieces, interesting for me, but not really 'news'.

We live in a sensationalist world and I'm fed up with it.

[no peanuts]

I've refrained from watching the TV or reading newspapers for years now....ignorant I know

All the rubbish shown on TV and especially the news is way to depressing...why I would want to see negative news stories over and over again?

I say: stay away from the fools lantern!
and if you do have to watch TV, please try and argue with it. :narnar: Never take anything they say for granted without questioning it. :flirty:

[delanvital]

EU-Latin summit in Madrid....yawn

Well, you have news you ought to know but which is dull, versus stuff you don't need to know, but which is fun, tragic or sensational. Actual news, that really impact your life, is rarely fun or sensational... EU is something I have always wanted to be in the Danish news, regardless of it being yawn x 100, so that I can keep some connection with *** is going on, but the channels say that one one bothers to watch it. So, the news channels pick what basically keeps people watching, versus what they actually should be informed about. How do you go about dealing with commercially focused channels?

The regional news bit after national we also have here. Only semi-dead people watch it.

Edit: that link you have - remember that if filters on what is most popular, not what is most relevant. So if tons of UK papers cover the Miss USA, that site picks it up... so blame the sensationalist paper, not the aggregator ;-)

[Benny]

Quick!! Quick!! MMR will kill us all, stop protecting your babies with death injections. Murderers all of you!

*months later
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8695267.stm
Shhhhh.....never mind it was all a mistake, let's not make a big thing of it.

/hating news.

[T-Bag]

You need a formula. Things that are near you should be prioritised. Then something further away needs to overcome a relevance threshold to show up on the news. Old woman gets mugged on my doorstep, that's news. Old woman gets mugged 576 miles away, couldn't care less.
Iran starts a war with Israel I probably should know even though it's a long way away. Farmer Starts a land dispute with ramblers in Surrey, don't care.

Next you need to strip all the bloody opinions from news. Every story about Iran for instance is "The Evil regime in Iran has..." even if they've agreed to peace talks or had a puppy parade. State what they've done, maybe summarise the facts for people, but let them make up their own mind what's going on.

After that strip away the ability to forecast news. At one o'clock today the prime minister is expected to announce "XYZ". If they're telling the press then, why leak it, just go ahead and announce it, if they don't know it then it's not news.

After that stop hiding the news with the most serious ramifications but is slightly boring. This is an example of something SERIOUS! that I've not seen mentioned much. Surely such a fundamental erosion of human rights is news worthy?

That's my 2 cents anyway.

[RizZy]

very extremely not safe for work, lots of swearies!!!!! you have been warned - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U4Ha9HQvMo

[A Twig]

I have to say that's why I quite like the metro. The metro has only a couple of reporters. The rest of the staff are all sub-editors. The metro has an agreement with the News Agencies to be able to publish the wires pretty much as is. Quite often a lot of the articles are good old fashioned "Where What How Why When and Who" reporting.

It's compact, you haven't got some tosser like Richard Littlejohn spouting bigoted bile at you, and generally gets to the heart of the stories. Yes it does do some odd human interest pieces, but it's very easy to sift through, and the regionality of it by definition makes the content more relevant to the reader.

[Benny]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/24/charlie-brooker-norway-mass-killings?CMP=twt_iph    <---------strong agreement.

Outrage / Sigh / usual.

This world is a state, but the reporters and 'news' people are atrocious.