Lately, it’s become obvious that just about every “official news source”—even tech sites—are in it only for the clicks. Journalists have been ignorant and biased for a long time, of course—see Michael Crichton’s hilarious explanation of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect or Ben Rhodes’ description of the vaunted White House Press Corp as literally knowing nothing—but they, or their editors, no longer seem to care if their stories are even remotely correct. It’s not that the advertising is necessarily bad, it’s that the attached content has no value and, in fact, is most often ludicrously wrong.
All this occurred to me while I was reading one of the Macalope’s frequent take downs of tech pundits’ prognostications. Why, I wondered, do they keep making the same obviously wrong predictions? (“The iPhone X is a failure” is their latest trope even after Apple’s last quarter’s results proved that to be nonsense.) Why would they continue to embarrass themselves with predictions that any sane person knows are silly?
Then I realized that they don’t care about the truth or reasonableness of what they’re writing. It’s all about making some outrageous claim that will infuriate Apple fans (or give sustenance to Apple haters) encouraging then to click through in order to capture their eyeballs. If it were just Apple news we could shrug and take comfort in its fueling a never ending flow of Macalope humor but if you look closely, you’ll find that it’s all like that.
If you look at almost any news site, you’ll see an incendiary headline fronting a story that doesn’t make much sense. Either it’s obviously wrong or it doesn’t say anything at all. Once you’ve clicked through, their job is done and there’s no sense wasting effort on the story itself.
So what to do? One solution is to look for news in blogs, especially non-monetized blogs. There are a couple of problems with that. Sure, those of us who blog have our biases too but at least they’re ours and we’re mostly up front about them. More importantly, we’re not getting paid to push them. If you look at a variety of blogs, you’ll have a reasonable chance of getting a balanced viewpoint. More worrisome, is the fact that most blogs—not even Irreal—can afford a cadre of reporters to gather the news so they have to rely on the traditional news sources. But, as suggested by Crichton’s quote, there are always folks who are experts in the particulars of any given story and if you read a reasonable selection of blogs you’ll get their viewpoint.
That’s not ideal, of course. We’d like to be able to read a single paper or site and get reliable news. Sadly, such papers and sites no longer exist.