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aragilar 5 hours ago

Part of the challenge is unless you know what the "news reporter's" role is (are they just reporting what they see/have heard vs. analysis/opinion and what their relevant expertise is; I'd suggest good news providers have clear divides and provide this information (though with biases), those that don't likely have some agenda), you get a mix of voices/views without a clear understanding of the facts. A different challenge is constraints of the various content formats/audiences (which are really only obvious when the same journalist does the same story in different formats).

nosianu 4 hours ago | parent [-]

IMO "just reporting what they see" is a solution at all. I tried looking at messages through that angle, and too often there is very important context that you need, or the message's content does not make sense, or becomes something different.

For example, we have plenty of "journalism" that reports exactly what some entity says. That just makes them a PR channel. If they added context that politician's or company's message's content's meaning would turn on its head and would be exposed as a lie.

Similarly, a lot of news would greatly benefit from larger context that just is not there, and that the vast majority of "consumers" of the news are simply not aware of, through no fault of their own.

"Just report what you see" IMHO is part of the problem, not the solution. It's trying to "solve" the reporting problem by removing most of the role of journalists because they are seen as unreliable, for good reasons, but I don't think that works at all. It is similar to trying to solve all problems by adding ever more rules for everything, to remove the uncertainty and unreliability of individual decisions.

This is just like at work, where the capital owners and bosses would love to replace all those pesky annoying opinionated humans with something more controllable and predictable. If the intelligence can be moved from the people into the process, the latter become replaceable and much cheaper, and the company gets much more control. But it is not just the owner class that does not like having to rely on and to deal with other humans.

I think the direction of development of the role of journalists has actually gone way too far in exactly the direction of them using less and less of their own brains, and having less influence and ability, for most messages, the very few deeper pieces notwithstanding.

Although, none of that will do anything as long as the news source owner structure is the way it is, with a few billionaires controlling most of the big news sources.

aragilar 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Only doing "just reporting what they see" is a problem as well (and even AP (https://apnews.com/) does analysis, and their more on the "just reporting what they see" side than most news providers), but opinions being presented as facts is far more common (at least from the mainstream AU media, I don't know what the situation is elsewhere), hence trying to clearly demarcate the two is better than being unclear about what you are presenting. You need facts and analysis, and them labelled as such.

Personally, I find a good example of this is the different election broadcasts: the commercial TV broadcasters tend to have their staff take both the role of election analyst (i.e. result prediction) and commentator, whereas the ABC (one of the public broadcasters) has tended to have clear separation of roles (enough such that the election analyst who just retired has a cult following), with an election analyst who is giving detailed predictions and calls the election, political journalists providing context/analysis, polling experts covering what the polls missed/got right, and politicians from the major parties giving their opinions as well.