Vox
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2017
6:03 · 1.7M views · Apr 17, 2017
A Vox Strikethrough video arguing that CNN models its political coverage on sports shows like First Take, pitting pundits against each other. It claims this favors drama over truth and degrades public understanding.
Cited as an example of how cable news turns politics into sports-style controversy, not recommended much as a watch.
3 comments from Hacker News
> What is the point of this statement? I think he means that it's not spying or infiltration when the data is already there for everyone to see. It's about influence on one area that will affect the whole human species, not just one country, and people (esp politicians) are still very misinformed about the issue. It's about informing everyone, just the opposite of spying. > am I participating honestly in the political process? You make it sound bad, but it's a much better proposition than what it is actually happening: People don't discuss politics, they fight it. It's not treated as a complex set of opinions that have to be reasoned over, but as a sport teams [0]. Furthermore, the way the voting system is designed, there won't be true parties in a specific position, but they're always reduced to two catch-all options with a very wide and overlapping set of opinions among their members, basically resulting in everybody be unsatisfied with the result [1]. And the point of the parent is that, since politics are broken, one can contribute to work around it from within. In fact parties evolve this way. The party of Obama was white supremacist related to KKK, and the party of Trump was Lincoln's which freed the slaves of the south. That sounds backwards, doesn't it? It's as if politics wasn't made of two opposing opinions, but of hundreds. (edit: snowwrestler above said it better, parties are not elected, are not part of the constitution and there's nothing inherently wrong or dis
Much of our news media is currently designed to be sports-like, so if your goal is to be informed then this strategy is very wise. To make news more sports-like news channels like CNN offer generous pay to people that are willing to spout controversial cartoonish opinions on national news as explained here: this video It is very questionable if these controversial opinions are representative of anything except an antagonistic "other" that is similar to who we want our opposing political side to be, so that we don't have to actually spend the effort to speak together and find common ground. Generous pay would probably not be necessary if anything else was the case. This way of avoiding civic discourse and not listen is in my opinion incredibly dangerous for our democracy, as the default state of a society is not a working democracy and you have to fight to keep it.
Well, yes, if you watch "news". [LINK] this video But there are real issues voted on. And even if there's no clear path forward, it's important to not go backward! > It's just "You are bad. No, YOU are bad" And? It's how ideas are criticized - ideally, by pointing out the errors in them. If someone uses ad hominem arguments, maybe try to find better people to listen to? (Economists, sociologists, policy scholars?) > And the electoral system doesn't allow anyone with new ideas to come up. Then don't spend time on those things, spend time on election reform, look at where those are, look at interesting things that matter and that help predict the world. [LINK] [LINK] So, the debate is what you make it to be.