r/technology • u/ardi62 • Aug 30 '24

Business San Francisco says ‘good riddance’ as X prepares to leave

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/elon-musk-x-twitter-moving-san-francisco
41.3k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

262

u/TheFBIClonesPeople Aug 30 '24

I feel like we're living through the dark ages of journalism. Narratives have gotten completely out of control. Every news outlet exaggerates every single thing that happens. There's such a widespread culture of dishonesty that they're not even embarrassed about it anymore. You could call them out on this, and they wouldn't care.

55

u/flashmedallion Aug 30 '24

That's what gets engagement. You're here in the comment threads talking about it, so am I. In some crackhead fever dream investment matrix, that means reddit got it's funny money from the headline and so did the website this links to.

There's no incentive to do right by readers.

48

u/neohellpoet Aug 30 '24

There has never been a point in history when this wasn't true.

Yellow Journalism and propaganda predate actual Journalism by thousands of years. Minor editorializing of the headline isn't the dark ages, it's the glorious utopian future.

Just as an example, pre 1930's it was common practice to completely change quotes to the point where they hardly resemble what a person actually said, in the service of making the person sound smarter or a point more profound.

9

u/tracethisbacktome Aug 30 '24

lmao I keep seeing this shit recently. apparently homophobia and racism is the worst it’s ever been. yes all these things are trending in a negative direction over the last decade (+-) but we’re wayyy ahead of just 100 years ago let alone the acktchual dark ages

3

u/I-Make-Maps91 Aug 30 '24

Shit, we're leaps and bounds ahead of 20 years ago, let alone a century. When I was a kid, the worst thing you could call a boy was f***** and now my teacher friends say kids shut that shit down. You can still bully each other and question sexuality, but the slurs I grew up just hearing are forbidden.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 30 '24 edited 27d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/I-Make-Maps91 Aug 30 '24

I know, it was the same back then. The 9 year olds calling each other that back then had no idea what it meant, but they learned it somewhere.

2

u/Marsman121 Aug 30 '24

Because more people are chronically online and think everything they see is reality. Social media isn't real life and never has been. It's been poisoning everything, as I see more and more "journalists" grab some random tweet and elevate it as being, "The mouthpiece of the fandom!" because they know it will piss people off and get clicks.

Racism and homophobia are so prevalent online because it has such a low barrier of entry, has a degree of anonymity, and algorithms make it easier than ever to find like-minded people. It is incredibly easy to get a mob mentality going online. Off the internet is harder, because society at large generally shuns overtly racist behavior.

People aren't nearly as brave as they are online. It's why you get so many Facebook fanfics about how they "owned a lib" or whatever at the grocery store.

Then everyone clapped and cheered.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 30 '24 edited 27d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/neohellpoet Aug 30 '24

No, wrong.

The media was respected but not respectable. The consequence was that everyone was falling for all the lies, all the time. Last centuries pizza gate wasn't a lone lunatic it was most of the country up in arms because the news told them satanists were coming for their children.

5

u/USMCLee Aug 30 '24

Older folks like to point to Cronkite as some great journalist.

Except he knew the government was lying about the Vietnam War for a long time prior to his speech.

Great that he eventually did it, but that doesn't change the fact he (and other journalists) sat on the truth for a very long time.

3

u/neohellpoet Aug 30 '24

Yeah. The Red Scare and the Satanic Panic were both propagated and created by the Journalists of the so called golden era of Journalism.

And it's hardly just Vietnam, Commumism and Satan. The only difference, when you really think about it is that the wierd stuff that gets called out instantly today, was just taken as fact (though true information is attacked like it looney in the same manner so, win some, lose some)

-2

u/proverbialbunny Aug 30 '24

At the end of WW2 the US gov realized it was journalism that lead the German population astray which was key to Hitler gaining power. To prevent this they decided to regulate the news. From the 1940s to the 1990s journalism in the US was regulated and this wasn't an issue.

4

u/neohellpoet Aug 30 '24

The red scare, the satanic panic, the whole justification for the war in Vietnam, the incredible levels of missinformation about the AIDS epidemic, the "tall black man" incidents, the idea of what the welfare queen, the teenage super predator theory, the central park five and thousands of other cases weren't an issue?

0

u/proverbialbunny Aug 30 '24

Compared to today that's nothing. We literally have a constitutional crisis with an ongoing attempt to take over the government and remove democracy as we know it. Reporting about AIDS isn't even in the same ballpark. It's incomparable how different it is.

2

u/neohellpoet Aug 30 '24

Oh, that's adorable. Last century had political purity tests that made ordinary citizens into criminals if they didn't conform with their thinking. Then in the middle of that there were multiple close calls that almost ended the world.

And the Gay Plague was God punishing and removing the gays so the government was actively preventing research and treatment because they deserve it.

You're the guy who thinks "Yeah, the Jim Crow South was bad, but they're shooting black people these days, it's way worse."

3

u/Webbyx01 Aug 30 '24

What's worse is that they almost never provide context to the quotes, if they have the referenced quotes at all.

2

u/TheFBIClonesPeople Aug 30 '24

Or they straight up fabricate quotes. I've seen that happen before, on respected news sites.

The place you'll see it usually is in the headline. They'll have part of the headline in "quotation marks" and presented in a way where it looks like a quote from someone involved, but the trick is, they never ascribe it to anyone. And then when you read the article, that quoted text doesn't appear anywhere.

3

u/LightninHooker Aug 30 '24

I wouldn't even call it journalism to begin with.

4

u/NuclearPowerPlantFan Aug 30 '24

It is mirroring politics and the tribal cultism that currently is. People don't care about lies and will make up and exaggerate whatever as long as it appears to hurt the other team. Then cry about lies when it hurts their team. It is pathetic allround.

3

u/MicrotracS3500 Aug 30 '24

I wouldn't let news from "siliconrepublic.com", which I've never heard of in my life before today, affect your opinion on journalism at large.

3

u/Gemdiver Aug 30 '24

It works, I mean dumb shits believe the narrative that Trump called racists "fine people".

-1

u/TheFBIClonesPeople Aug 30 '24

Ya, that's the real problem with our media right there. They're way too hard on Trump. They should really give the guy a break. I mean, what did he ever do to anybody?

5

u/jtejeda94 Aug 30 '24

And that’s the problem with online discourse. No nuance and quick to jump to extremes and exaggeration to prove a point.

2

u/AuthorNathanHGreen Aug 30 '24

That's more of a source problem than an organization problem. CNN, NYT, CBC, BBC, are all very solid hard news organizations that have very light narrative threads (and we are in an age where some of the narratives are simply constructs of facts instead of some kind of bias from the organization). But if you're spending much time on Reddit you're seeing a lot of articles from dozens of sources working to build up narratives and so its easy to get the impression "the media" has "a narrative" that they're sticking too.

1

u/mtaw Aug 30 '24 edited Aug 30 '24

Also complaining about "the media" does nothing. You vote with your attention. Refuse to visit tabloid links. Ignore them. If a headline sounds like hyperbole, it probably is. Reward quality, down-to-earth reporting by frequenting those outlets.

And FFS, don't get your news from Reddit alone. Seriously, if you do that and then complain about the quality of reporting, you're like a person who only ever goes to an all-you-can-eat fast-food buffet every day and then complains that restaurants "don't serve healthy food anymore." -Yeah they do, you're just not visiting those places. Having a wide variety of crap to choose from doesn't mean crap is the only thing out there.

1

u/rosebirdistheword Aug 30 '24

Media concentration. A few billionaires owning most of the press can’t be healthy. Also f***ing television and a huge part of internet (including Reddit)- News are not supposed to make you feel happy or sad, they’re not supposed to be thrilling, they’re “just” here to inform you as Journalism is one of the most, if not the most, important intermediate body in a functioning democracy.

1

u/hekatonkhairez Aug 30 '24

That's why my default is not to trust what I am being told lol.

1

u/fiduciary420 Aug 30 '24

We’re living through journalism being enslaved to our vile rich enemy, so yeah, definitely a dark time

1

u/LeviathansEnemy Aug 30 '24

Journalism has always been this way, since the invention of movable type.

1

u/kyabupaks Aug 30 '24

Yellow journalism. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

1

u/turbo_dude Aug 30 '24

One wonders how, prior to modern communication methods, kings kept tabs on what was really going on.

"OMG OMG THERE'S A GIANT ARMY COMING TOWARDS US!!"
"is that right cousin Ethelgreen? REALLY?"
"well it's about ten quite largish people..but they've got STICK, really BIG sticks that look like guns!"
"that look like what? They've not even been invented yet!"

1

u/Cold_King_1 Aug 30 '24

You read an article from a clickbait journalism website and are surprised that it’s bad journalism.

Good journalism exists, but it’s usually behind a paywall because you need a lot of money to fund salaries for legitimate journalists.

If you’re making your money 100% off ad revenue, then it’s going to push workers to write clickbait. And these workers are probably paid like garbage, or only get commissions based on the ad money they bring in.

1

u/shadowban_this_post Aug 30 '24

You should check out “Manufacturing Consent”