Fair enough. But equally, it’s a poor basis for deciding that this whole sorry mess shows that the market decided anything about Gothamist, be that the public appetite for local news (biased or unbiased) or the effect of unionisation on company viability.
The biggest question this story raises is whether the market is capable of providing local news at all, as Kimstu says. But as long as “petulant dilettante billionaire” is in the mix as a contributing factor to the sites’ closure, it’s hard to draw clear inferences. What will be interesting is what happens next. Will some other person/org invest in trying to pick up Gothamist’s audience, with a profit motive? Will some alternative, non profit-seeking source appear? Would they lean right, left or strive for balance, and to what extent would that affect their chances of success?
If nothing happens, that does raise interesting questions about where people get their information from, what happens if they don’t have sources of local information, and whether that’s a sufficient problem that government should try to step in.
You are free to start your own local news media outlet(s). You’re free to pool your funds with other like-minded individuals/investors in order to provide media coverage of the local events of your choice. What you can’t do is force a private party to fund your favorite business, especially when they chose/refuse to do so.
Is there a serious proposition being out forth that people in NYC don’t have access to local news stories? Did the NYT go out of business? Did the local radio and TV stations shut down? I think the NYT is still in business, because I get it every Sunday and I live in CA. And sometimes I even get s little pissed at having to wade through all the worthless (to me) local stuff.
That’s a rather unusually pro-ignorance stance for a regular on the SDMB. It also doesn’t seem to jibe with your own decision to open this thread with a link to a news article in… the Guardian. Not only a recognized left-wing paper, but a British one at that. :eek:
So maybe you were just deferring to the liberal sensibilities of the rest of us in your choice of cite when starting this discussion? If so, very nice of you and all, but I gotta ask: Where else would you have gone to find this information, which you apparently considered newsworthy enough to want to tell us all about it, free from contamination by the dreaded “liberal slant”?
Because AFAICT from looking around the online news sites, all the media outlets generally considered conservative-leaning that covered this story, such as Fox News and the Washington Examiner, based their reporting of the events on earlier stories in the very mainstream media outlets that you decry as “liberal”, such as the New York Times. :dubious:
So Bricker, ISTM that your much-vaunted brave new world of ideological “choice” in news coverage largely boils down to canny repackaging and ideological marketing of the same old mainstream news. The boast that people can now do without the old “draught-horse” mainstream news coverage that you decry as “liberal”, because they’ve got lots of shiny new choice in news media, ignores the fact that most of the “conservative” news media are still piggybacking on the traditional mainstream news media for much of their actual content.
They appropriate the reportage of facts dug up by the newsrooms at institutions like the NY Times and the Washington Post, doll it up with some extra pro-business attitude and omission of inconvenient details, and feed it to gullible conservative readers/viewers as “free from liberal bias”.
What, exactly, do you consider “absurd and hysterical” about statements like the following?
You may dislike the conclusions that the journalist draws about such facts, or the journalist’s possible motivations for covering the issue in the first place. But ISTM, as a Doper, that the public is not better off having no news coverage of such facts at all.
If all you’ve got is “Ignorance is preferable to information presented in a way I don’t like”, then by ordinary Straight Dope standards, you ain’t got much.
Apparently the issue is that they don’t have as much access as they used to, and that some of the shrinkage in news coverage is impacting issues that residents would benefit from being informed about. Remember, “local” in a region like the metro NYC area covers quite a lot of ground.
Okay, I’ll grant you that the bit about reportage on the best BLT in the city is perhaps not a major journalistic necessity, though maybe if I liked BLTs more I’d feel differently about it. But ISTM that all those other issues are pretty significant matters for local residents. And no, I doubt that the “Region” section of a major daily like the NYT is covering them to anything like the extent that local journalism outlets used to.
Every news outlet has some bias, but I assume you’re asking what I consider to be “negligble” bias, in which the bias is small enough that I don’t regard the source as compromised?
NPR comes to mind, as does WSJ and BBC. For each of these, I refer to the news pages, not the opinion or editorial pages.
I’m confused all I was saying is that seems to me some people who post on the sdmb wouldn’t mind returning back to gilded age industry in practices and regulations
I didn’t say anything about political parties or anything
I know my smackdowns targeting illogic must seem indefatigable to you, but I’d actually rather pick and choose the times I have to stop discussing The Main Theme and veer off into a side discussion of why my cite is just being hand-waved away, because the responding poster just knows that the newsroom in question has only two pictures of Che Guevera and are thus insufficiently woke for serious political reliability.
:dubious: So much for preferring no news at all to news with a “liberal slant”, then?
Your link is to the Wall Street Journal (founded 1889), one of the archetypal “draught horses” of traditional mainstream news media. That’s not one of the “shiny new tractors” of conservative media that you claim have made the “draught horse” model obsolete.
Sure, the WSJ editorial page is well known for being quite conservative, but its news reporting is standard mainstream news. So that’s not actually an example in favor of your “shiny new tractors” theory.
(As for whether this particular WSJ article repackages any coverage from earlier news stories, it’s behind a paywall so not visible to me.)
Because I don’t disagree with you that there may be aspects of that article that you happen to find absurd and hysterical. But as I noted, that doesn’t prevent the article from containing quite a lot of objective factual information.
My point is that you seem to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater when you declare that your dislike of the article’s tone outweighs the value of the article’s facts.
And if your conservative sensibilities are so easily offended by that Gothamist article that you believe it would be preferable to remain entirely ignorant of its subject, I really don’t understand how you can stand to read the Guardian. Regularly, no less. :dubious: You’re a professed “liberal-media” abstainer sneaking down to the street corner in the dark of the evening to get that desperately craved hit of Limey lefty journalism.
I don’t prefer news with a liberal slant, but I do prefer to not miss news that conservative outlets minimize or omit.
Go outside. Look up at the sky. Find the tiny dot that is Saturn.
That’s how far you are away from my analogy, which (while it used fraught horses as an example) was not intended to focus on longevity, but rather on a particular model of security in a world in which consumers were a captive audience. The Wall Street Journal has never fallen prey to that maladaptive approach.
No. The WSJ is not “standard mainstream news,” and your inability to discern the difference probably means there’s very little to discuss.
Previously, you were saying you thought “news with a liberal slant” was literally worse than no news at all:
Bricker, I personally don’t care whether or not you believe that biased information is worse than no information, but for purposes of having a coherent debate it would be helpful if you could make up your mind on that point.
The problem with your analogy is that it’s just plain wrong:
No, it is in fact not true that US consumers had less choice in news coverage back when draught horses were widespread. There were far more independent local papers in those days than there are now, and most major cities had multiple dailies with a variety of editorial politics.
What we have currently, as I said, is a rapidly shrinking pool of actual reportage generated by journalists’ time-consuming legwork and research—most of which is still supplied by the newsrooms of the surviving major mainstream news organizations—along with a proliferation of sites mostly repackaging and editorializing parts of this reportage to suit their consumers’ ideological tastes.
That doesn’t represent genuine “choice” in news coverage, any more than a proliferation of junk-food brands selling variously flavored and packaged mashups of the same monocrop varieties of corn and soybeans represents genuine “choice” in agriculture. Trying to argue that it does is beating a very fraught horse indeed.
My mind is made up, but it’s made up on two different points, which you have sort of mooshed together into one and then become confused.
I regard biased news as worse than no news, yes. But I also prefer to read biased news rather than no news. How can these things both be true?
Because I recognize that wishing doesn’t make things vanish.
I prefer a world with no biased news sources. I prefer a world in which there is no news as opposed to one that has biased news sources spreading disinformation. But since this is not the world in which we live, I prefer to remain abreast of what news sources are reporting from all sides.
Having twice failed to comprehend what my analogy is, I am unpersuaded by your confident declaration.
The implication being that “journalists’ time-consuming legwork and research,” produces trustworthy material, when the journalists in question are raging liberals who regard it as their mission to help make the world a better place by virtue of the choices they make in reporting.
Well, yeah, I guess you would see it that way.
I don’t.
You have to repeat it more than twice before it magically becomes true.
Why would you even wish for this in the first place? What’s your rationale for thinking that complete ignorance is preferable to knowledge accompanied by bias?
I can see how somebody who’s rather naive about news coverage might sincerely wish that news sources were all perfectly unbiased, which people with a little more experience recognize is not really humanly possible.
But I can’t see why anyone who considers information a public good in general would ever sincerely favor total absence of information over abundant information “contaminated” by various sorts of bias. And you certainly haven’t provided any rationale in support of this bizarre and unDoperlike position.
Why, though? If you sincerely think that zero information is preferable to biased information, you could almost certainly succeed in obtaining that more desirable epistemic status for yourself.
There are plenty of people who manage to attain complete or almost complete ignorance of events in the world around them, by refusing to consume or pay attention to any sources of news coverage whatsoever. You yourself, Bricker, could become one of those fortunate ones! (Of course, it would mean you’d have to give up reading the SDMB, but, you know, omelettes, eggs.)
So why don’t you? If ignorance is really preferable to knowledge affected by bias, why are you letting the existence of other people’s preference for such knowledge deter you from achieving the ignorance that you claim to genuinely prefer?
Well, if you don’t think that mainstream news media generates “trustworthy material”, then you would appear to be SOL for trustworthy sources of news reportage, since so many of the facts of major news stories ultimately are sourced from the work of mainstream media journalists.
Even your prized Wall Street Journal, despite your petulant denials, falls into the category of mainstream news media when it comes to actual news reportage: see below.
This isn’t me merely repeating some unsupported assertion. This is clear documentary evidence that according to the perspective of “liberal” mainstream news media themselves, the WSJ news reporting falls into the category of typical mainstream news.
Still, Bricker, I’m impressed with your determination in steadfastly refusing to acknowledge such evidence in support of a fact you don’t like. You clearly have made more progress toward attaining a pure state of deliberate ignorance than you thought!
That’s still not a logical argument. I agree that unbiased information (to the extent that a realistic approximation to such an ideal abstraction exists) would be better than biased information. But you’ve completely failed to explain in any coherent way why anybody should consider the entire absence of information rationally preferable to biased information.
Hell, even Trump tweets would be somewhat worth reading if we had no source of information about events in the nation and the world other than Trump tweets.
Your illogical jumble of pontification is further confused by your bizarre calibration of what you consider “liberal bias”:
So you recoil in horror from mainstream news organizations like NYT and WaPo as bias-tainted bastions of “raging liberals who regard it as their mission to help make the world a better place by virtue of the choices they make in reporting”, while you consider NPR, WSJ and BBC only “negligibly” biased? That is a bizarrely indiscriminate melange of sources, considering that, e.g., the Groseclose and Myer study mentioned in my earlier cite ranks ideological bias in mainstream media news reporting as follows:
As I noted before, on this scale the WSJ news reportage is actually far more liberal than most other mainstream news sources, including the NYT. And your “acceptable” NPR ranks almost exactly even with your disdained Washington Post.
Wow, nice desperation goalpost-shift there. To recap the discussion:
Then you offered up as a counterexample a story from the Wall Street Journal. Then I responded:
And now you’re backpedaling to claim that all you meant is that the WSJ, though it does in fact fall into the same overall category of mainstream news as, e.g., the NYT and WaPo and NPR and the BBC etc., doesn’t count as “merely mainstream news”, because you think it’s a particularly good kind of mainstream news. :rolleyes:
Feel free to try to restructure your unstable hodgepodge of self-contradiction about journalism and media bias into something approaching a coherent argument, if you want to. So far, all you’ve done is to give the impression that you have no real idea what you’re talking about.
Kinda like his characterization in the thread title is wrong, too. The writers weren’t at all saying “screw you, boss” they were saying “stop screwing us, boss”.
Y’know, you can argue about bias all you want (although do recall that it wasn’t the famously hostile right-wing news that broke the Harvey Weinstein story, and that supposedly “liberal” outlets were still incredibly harsh to Clinton during the election), but do they actually lie? Is their material actually not trustworthy? Because if the problem is selection bias, then that’s a separate problem from trustworthiness.
Your problem is: you read the words I write, then decide what you think I must be thinking based on your idea of what a person like me must think, and then try to fit the words to the picture.
Try reading the words and nothing else.
I would rather biased news sources end rather than continue existing, even if that means there is no other “local news source,” in business. The market will always supply some sources of information.
Perfect example!
Think about this one for a moment. If we had no other information except Trump tweets, would we really be better off? Probably not . . . but how would that ever actually happen? The real-world options are: we have Trump tweets plus more accurate sources, or we have more accurate sources alone.
So if I were to say, “I’m happy that Trump stopped Tweeting; I’d rather we had no tweets from a president than the inaccurate tweets Trump was issuing,” would you react in the same way? Of course not! You’d nod approvingly.
No backpedal. I am remaining in the same place. The only motion has been if the strawman of my position that appears in your mind.
But ISTM that all those other issues are pretty significant matters for local residents. And no, I doubt that the “Region” section of a major daily like the NYT is covering them to anything like the extent that local journalism outlets used to.
Your link is to the Wall Street Journal (founded 1889), one of the archetypal “draught horses” of traditional mainstream news media. That’s not one of the “shiny new tractors” of conservative media that you claim have made the “draught horse” model obsolete.
