Your reply was serious enough, and directed to my post, so I've decided to reply.
I'm new here, so I am not in on some of the local memes as of yet, but while I appreciate you taking what I said seriously I find your wording here to be phrased in such a way that I find off-putting. If this is simply an odd method of welcoming, then thank you and I apologize for suspicion. If otherwise, I would suggest in good faith that we simply assume we are both going to take each other seriously from the start, until or unless something comes up that would lead us to believe otherwise.
Yes, but with a few key differences. First, no advertising is allowed, so censoring due to economic pressure from advertisers is non-existent (well, that's an exaggeration. There would probably be some pressure via threatened lawsuits). If you see the documentary "The Corporation", and then try to imagine a similar scenario wherein solid reporting on Bovine Growth Hormone is suppressed, you will have a lot of problems doing so.
I'm not going to go reference a documentary that you have not seen in order to make a point when I am engaging you directly. I would appreciate if you could do me the same service. If you think there is a
business model and not an
ideological model for news agencies to be able to pay the bills in your scenatio, please respond and explain to me how this could be realistically envisioned in the world we have today.
Secondly, there is increased de-centralization, so I expect it to be harder to corrupt the system subtly via the placing, by well-funded entities with vested interests, of covert censors*. In an evironment like JREF, this concern is likely to be automatically treated with disbelief and scorn, but I certainly don't agree. Even if I were wrong, and there was 0 chance that big business, think tanks, intelligence agencies, and God knows who else might want to influence the news covertly, migrating to a structure that would make such a potential source of corruption more difficult can't hurt. If I take a vaccine for dengue fever, but never encounter a dengue fever pathogen, I will not regret my vaccination (unless there's mercury in it...)
Your vaccination allegory is a misdirection of information that was completely unnecessary. That is about the only response I could give to it in the context of what I'm talking about and I encourage you to refrain from using such metaphors unless you can more clearly state the relevance, as it comes close to a tautology of using one alleged conspiracy to support the evidence of another, which is a completely separate discussion from the one I believe we are having at the moment.
You are leaving out the most important aspect of dissemination of media, and that would be a distribution model. Quite literally, the method for allocating air time, bandwidth, radio frequencies, and so on. If your nebulous "big business" isn't going to be the conduit for distribution, what is? Whether you are willing to admit it or not, and we can address this along the way if you are up for it, but
everyone has a vested interest in
something. People are not going to work hard at presenting something they don't believe in or aren't getting paid very well to produce. From the examples of individuals in my previous post, Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones wouldn't produce what they do if it were not something they either believed in to a large degree and/or didn't produce for them a salary that provided them suitably. In both cases one could argue that both stipulations apply to them.
There is another key difference, which addresses one of the key irritants with "the media" that got me thinking of this proposal. And that is, that subscribers can "vote with their hands" by directing micro-payments towards the covering of any topic of their choosing. You can't do that now, except indirectly via an irate letter to the editor. As far as I can tell, such letter merely provide venting, and if they've ever sparked the birth of investigative reporting, well, that's news to me.
This is demonstrably false. This falls clearly into the realm of broadcasting media like the BBC in the UK
as well as many programs of those like Alex Jones, not to mention it is the bread and butter of affiliate advertising. I urge you to look up how UK radio broadcasting is distributed and the fees associated with it to the consumers. Jones would not produce what does not sell, and is most adamant in his self-advertising to focus on his productions that he feels are most relevant to current events and, as such, are going to most likely sell to his audience. Affiliate networking simply uses the method of throwing spaghetti on a wall and seeing what sticks, and then producing more of the same.
Perhaps the most striking example of this are the stunning pronouncements that emanated from madcowprod.com. They are either extremely significant, and Hopsicker deserves a medal, OR they are sheer fiction, and Hopsicker deserves to be vilified. The question arises "Which is it?" and the answer is "I don't know". In a science such as physics, multiple experiments by independent researchers is the norm for verification. In the case of Hopsicker's claims, there is neither verification (AFAIK) nor falsification, hence neither the "conspiracy theorist" nor the "debunker" should feel at all confident in passing judgement on Hopsicker's work.
Summarize the questions he's asked, please. I will say that comparing POV media presentation (news) to physics research (science) is an apples-to-oranges scenario, and as such falls short of making a point other than to claim that news is not independently verified and tested before being presented to the public. If that's the case, then the thousands of people employed as fact-checkers for various media outlets don't exist despite their claims to the contrary.
As an aside, this is the second time in your response to me that you have hard-sold the work of someone else as part of your response. You aren't just citing it to me, you are aassuming that this thing you have watched or read is something ubiquitous that I either should have already read / seen / heard of or something I should go view / listen to right now. I am encouraging you to take the ideas and insights you feel you have gained from these things and put them into words to me instead of requiring me to go view / listen to them. The reason I am encouraging this is because if you feel you cannot put across the ideas or insights in a compelling or cogent manner, then perhaps you should go back to researching the ideas and methodologies discussed in those productions until you feel that you sufficiently can do so. The producers of those things aren't here right now-- you are. If you are saying something you feel I am missing, then let me know what it is so that I don't repeat the mistake.
GreNME said:
The Associated Press, Reuters, BBC World News, National Public Radio-- they all do this stuff, and more than half of what you would read in your daily newspaper is likely to come from these sources.
Yes, but how good do they do it?
That is a subjective question. In my personal opinion, some do it better than others, but they all do it better than agencies who can't afford the resources to place reporters in parts of the world where they can cover things as close to the things taking place as possible.
Wherever you have centralization, you have the potential for censorship (again, in the broad sense I define below.) And, unfortunately, in a world where lies are plentiful and never-ending, can even "good" factual reporting, which involves quoting official sources, be trusted when the official sources are lying their tails off? This lying would be made much more obvious if new stories were placed in proper context with contradictory facts and quotes.
You are making assumptions that every case is a lie and that it is all censorship. You are further making an assumption that it is all centralized. If it were centralized, there would be more uniformity of messages when there is clearly not. Instead, what we have is a cacaphony of messages that all claim to have the best point of view and very few having the ability or forum through which to present any of it in a time frame that would allow for sufficient contextual presentation.
Fortunately, rather than just speaking to this subject abstractly, there is a partial, and fair, example of what I had in mind. I am speaking of therealnews.com, which is still being born, but will exist via subscription, and will give a more accurate picture of our world than what we have now. They will certainly not accomplish this by over reliance on news-wires, as you have mentioned.
Hard-sell number three. I am now keeping a tally. Subscription news services that are not presented through print media (meaning basically on the internet) have, on the whole, not been very successful for the companies producing them. Additionally, if such an agency presents enough news that its subscribers dislike, the chances are likely that subscribers will begin disappearing, which would lead the provider to adjust its content in order to retain as many subscribers as possible. This is not unlike a number of existing outlets today-- vested interests still exist and the buck still stops at accounts payable.
However, if they were to create their own news-wire service, why should that not eventually be a source for other media vehicles, should they indeed come to be trusted beyond Reuters, et. al.?
I don't know, why not? Reuters itself is exactly what you describe, except it doesn't just provide subscription to its news wire to consumers, it provides regular subscriptions for news agencies to reprint their material (which is the bulk of their revenue).
GreNME said:
The affiliate advertising network model, on the other hand, is one often espoused by the "alternative" news agencies and some AM radio. This model, not unlike the previously mentioned model, relies on a large number of independent sources producing content that are then collected as per the agency's reporting objectives, often heavily linking the source material to produce the mutually beneficial 'affiliate' revenue flow. Two very notorious examples of this would be Rush Limbaugh, who constantly self-references and references only preferential information sources, and Alex Jones' PrisonPlanet network, in which every single broadcast that is freely available lets the listener or viewer know that more information (though 'more' is typically synonymous with 'more of the same' in this case) is available if the viewer / listener goes to their website,
No, not what I had in mind. In it's pure form, advertising is forbidden completely, though practical constraints may dictate otherwise.
I will now reference the tally I have of your hard-selling other material as my argument that this is
exactly what you had in mind, but were perhaps unaware of what already exists. Advertising doesn't necessarily entail selling soap or automobiles or dishwashers, it is just as often a self-referencing or affiliate-referencing mechanism to create a revenue flow. There is no example of this "pure form" you are talking about, because it doesn't exist. It is an imaginary creature that has no real-world equivalent.
At the end of the day, though, in a free society, you should be able to pick whatever filters and sources pleases you, and if you really believe that Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones are the cat's meow of objectivity, truth, and fairness, there's not much I can do about it. Any more than I can do much about people restricting themselves to these individuals right now.
You mean the free society that we exist in today? Because that is exactly the case in this day and age
despite claims to the contrary.
However, I think that gentle exposure to facts contradicting one's world view can eventually make one aware as to the limitations of whatever ideological (and non-ideological) blinders are being worn by whatever sources of news and commentary that one has put one's trust in. This is discussed somewhat in Faulty Towers of Belief: Part I. Demolishing the Iconic Psychological Barriers to 9/11 Truth. <link removed due to posting restrictions on new users> Though I wish the author hadn't used the word "demolish", and it's focus is 911, in point of fact it has relevance far beyond 911.
Hard-sell number four, but I'll give it only a half-sell since you used it in a relevant manner to the point you were making. I agree that exposure to a larger world than exists in our backyards or social circles is not only enlightening, but is edifying in a way that gives us a better position from which to make decisions that affect us directly in our own personal worlds. the problem is that there is no example of "gently" exposing people to this who have no desire to be exposed to it. For example, in a perfect world the learning of a different language than one's native tongue would simply be a matter of everyday life, and yet this isn't the case in places like the US. So, in the hope of being available to distribution to as wide a population as possible, most distributors make available their material in US English. Sure, there is programming you can get that is done in languages like Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and more, but those are far fewer and exposing people who don't speak those languages to them doesn't offer very much to them. I can attest, for example, that Spanish and Arabic programming offers points of view that are not only noticably different than what you see in most American media, but provide context outside of general American life in most respects so as to give much better pictures of some issues that are covered by their news services. This is something already available to the average American citizen, but good luck getting them to go through the trouble of learning a whole new language so that they can parse it.
There is a tough constraint to trying to overcome inherent biases, in that human beings are inherently subjective, and this is also true of ostensibly hyper-rational types. I don't want to get into this - it's too big a subject. Suffice it to say that my proposal is meant to ameliorate the current mess we have now, and can't totally overcome frailties of the human psyche that, in large part, may well derive from biological factors. Total solutions are the domain of complete idealists, and I am not a member of such a group. For more info, you might start your reading with the chapter in E.O. Wilson's "On Human Nature" dealing with religion.
I agree that "total" solutions are the realm of idealists, but I would add that "total" problems are generally the realm of such idealists as well. My entire point to you so far is that what you are attempting to propose is not something that doesn't already exist, and that in fact it exists within the realm that you claim to see a problem that needs addressing in the first place.
So, if alternatives developed enough, I would hope that numerous sources of news and commentary of the quality that I hope 'The REAL News' will manifest should eventually allow large numbers of citizens to inquisitively approach the real world beyond whatever ideological predispositions they may have.
There is no one "The REAL News" because there is no single over-arching "truth" that everyone can agree on. If "truth" were something that everyone could come to an agreement on, there would be far less conflict in the world in the first place. This is the number one problem I have with the use of "truth" in the first place, and why I personally view with suspicion those who attempt to frame something to me as an absolute truth.
GreNME said:
The problem with both over-arching models and pretty much any new model that may spring from it is that all of them attempt to remove the need for critical thinking from the equation by intending to supply what that model believes is what would be most pertinent information that would otherwise require critical thinking skills to get at in the first place.
No, you are taking a very pessimistic viewpoint. It is not so cut-and-dried as this. By analogy, consider the case of a consumer and financial advisor. If the consumer seeks a financial advisor, they should find one that they both can trust (otherwise, why even bother with them, at all?) but also one that they can question, and, upon questioning, be provided with answers that make sense to them. It'd be nice to have such complete trust in a financial advisor - both as to their character and their competence - that the consumer feels that no questions ever need be asked.
No, I'm taking a very realistic viewpoint that is based on how things actually are. This is based in part from those I know who have at some point worked in the advertising field-- and now hate the field as a whole as it has soured them with its lowest-common-denominator mentality-- and in part from something you touch on with your analogy. Using your analogy, I am saying that one should only use a financial advisor that can demonstrably show results. The alternative is using any advisor who can sell you their services sufficiently. The current model of advertising is focused on presentation, or selling you services with their presentation. Financial advisory is a perfect example of this, what with the multitude of different kinds of financial advice advertising that one could find out there. I could provide for you a few relatively decent advertisements from some financial website that tends to have a good reputation, and based on the reputation of the site that advertisment might hold more wieght to you than some advertisement for the kind of 'advice' like that fellow I've seen on late-night television who claims his guide gives you all the information you need to have to get "free money" from government grants. However, I couldn't make an assumption that one would hold more weight to you than the other unless you have previously visited the financial site I mentioned first, because the only other option is for you to make your own decision based on the presentation of each advertisement. In such an example, I could tell you right now that the former would be more realistic and a better investment than the latter, but since you don't know me from Adam that still leaves you deciding solely on presentation.
Basically, without context you have to rely on the advertiser to convince you that what they are selling is worth it, and it is in their best interests to convince you as fully as possible in as short a time as possible. Such a scenario almost always precludes the opportunity to provide context, which is what will be most valuable to you as the target of the advertisement to posess, and frankly it's difficult to fit a whole lot of context within a 30-second commercial spot.
However, I think anybody who assumes that even a domain expert with an impeccable character cannot make mistakes is being rather foolish. To err is human, and that's just the way it is. And collections of humans, within organizations such as government and news agencies, are also prone to err.
Woah, woah. Who made such an assumption? I certainly didn't. Why this statement of redirection from anything I said in the first place?
So, nobody is claiming that critical thinking is be dispensed with.
Non sequitur. No one has argued as much. In fact, the only thing I said is that the models you present, in the forms that exist today, critical thinking takes a backseat to time slots and the widest possible distribution.
On the contrary, subscribers should be able to easily "vote with their feet", not just "vote with their hands". Whether they feel betrayed by a filtering agent, or whether they simply conclude that they are incompetent or biased (perhaps unconsciously), they can and should fire them and get another that they can trust.
Do you understand the ratings system as it exists today? What you describe is exactly the argument used to implement ratings systems like the Neilsens, what basically fuel the entertainment review genre, and pretty much dictate why radio companies pay premiums for certain frequencies over others, including different frequency bands (like FM/AM).
You are describing things that already exist, you are simply attempting to apply different verbiage to the names of these things and call it something new. I know and understand that this is totally not what you mean to do. It is not your intention in the least, from what I can tell of what you've written. That simply does not change the fact that it is still exactly what you are doing.
I have every indication that you are doing this inadvertently because you have not up to this point been given a full enough picture on how the different media outlets and news agencies operate, what goes into their operations, and what different models out there already exist in their various forms. The impression that I am getting from what you've written is that you strongly feel that
something needs to change, that you've seen some stuff out there that dovetails very nicely with some of the general ideas you have that
something needs to change, but that you have not yet been privy to the kind of information on how these different operations to work in order to give you a context from which to assemble a framework for the
something you feel needs changing in the first place. I get the feeling behind your proposal... I really do. What I am telling you is that the model you believe is something that offers change does not, in fact, offer change at all.
In a nutshell, it means somebody who will slant their presentation of the news so as to satisfy an agenda.
This describes everyone and no one. This describes an organizational flaw, not a type of person. If this phenomenon didn't exist, laws would be the same around the world and human beings would have little need for lawyers-- an idealistic and utopian concept (considering the etymology for the word "utopia" means "nowhere").
