ShootMeDead
1 HN recommender · recommended in 14 months, 2018–2024
1:39 · 1.8M views · Apr 2, 2018
A short compilation showing many local news anchors across different stations reading the same scripted statement verbatim. It is presented as evidence of centralized message control in local media.
Used as an example in threads about media consolidation and distrust of news, though many commenters cite it critically or only as a talking point.
15 comments from Hacker News
This article does a good job of drawing parallels between the book and reality in a short amount of time. I feel like the article is just scratching the surface though. > Television was transforming the news into a rapid and proliferating series of images, a form of entertainment that prized ‘the unreal’ and the ‘more or less totally irrelevant’. You can contest facts, he said, but not images. Noam Chomsky has some excellent work in this area. It can be very very dry reading, but very informative. Check out manufacturing consent [LINK] In the same vein and much more entertaining is this video that compares local news channels: this video
This was great thanks... Also there's this [1], which just boggles my mind. I can't make sense of this level of centralized message control and dissemination. It's straight out of 1984. It's hard to believe "the media" (whoever "they" are) has an agenda... it's tinfoil hat stuff.. Usually I write it off as emergent behavior of collective groups of humans trying to make $$$ from clicks, standard selfish behavior + time, leading to a race towards the bottom that looks like this. But watching those clip segments it's pretty clear there's a story/narrative being pitched by someone with the leverage to do so. Is this propaganda? What is propaganda? How can I recognize it? Is everything propaganda? Is "the media" captured and is now just a tool of whatever "system" is controlling things. This is the kind of stuff Jean Baudrillard was writing about. Sometimes we get journalism other times we get whatever that this stuff is. I don't have a problem with journalists sticking to the facts, SBF hasn't been charged, so lets not lynch him just yet. But hopefully he's being investigated (they usually don't announce when they are investigating someone, as it puts them on notice). Overall I think this is a direct result the 1996 Telecommunications Act which eliminated the rules on the number of radio stations a company could own (which also was one of the most lobbied bills in history). In hindsight this was a big mistake, and set things up for the kind of centralized messaging we see. There
> The way you change a corporation is by not patronizing it until it changes. Unless it's a monopoly or companies colluding, which is prevented by enforcement of regulation, not any goodness on behalf of corporations. And unless it's a conglomorate, in which case, "just switch the channel" can sound kind of hollow. E.g. this video In theory, we could change companies by abstaining, if they magically knew why you don't patronize them, and took that into acount. In practice we now have fewer consumer OS than in the 90s, the return of walled gardens, and people who avoid them don't affect anything, the walled gardens care less about what people want, than what the walled gardens want. > The problem with governments is that they don't work that way, so the opinion of anyone not in the majority is invalid. So why are their any laws, at all, protecting minorities, why are things like access to disabled regulated, why is not legal to just lynch a person "most people don't like", and so on? How long has Comcast been the worst thing since soaked bread, how is that possible, how have they not either changed or gone the way of the dodo? And why does Facebook keep regressing its UI even though anyone who cares hates it, "as long as most people don't mind"? How's YouTube shitting all over creators working out? Captured audiences and network effects wherever you look. For companies, "If the majority does that with you then the corporation changes" is apparently good enough, with governments y
And there's the rub. What is "quality investigative reporting" in an objective sense, when most of the MSM outlets are owned by oligarchs, or simply "toe the line"? In theory I would gladly support the theory of "quality investigative reporting", but the reality is a propagandist machine where opinion pieces replaces actual unbiased, adjective-free objective news. Some examples of "oligarch news": [LINK] this video As a former developer who worked closely on Thomson Reuters News feed (in the 00's), I've seen how there is almost zero fact checking for the information that appears on news feeds. Instead, news outlets trust the 'upstream' feeds and then quote the reports verbatim. To be fair, there are those who are really awesome at doing research and releasing information that are part of the MSM. Unfortunately, there are plenty others who are not affiliated with MSM news outlets and hence aren't regarded as "reporters" per-se. These latter ones are regularly attacked via "fact checking" websites as a way to discredit them. An article on the latter is here: [LINK] In short, there's a bunch of information out there and without each and every news report clearly citing original sources, then MSM or not, it must be regarded as suspect. So for "quality investigative reporting", the actual reports must rigorously cite objective sources.
Main problem with brexit was bubble. Even now, after so many years, you're saying that it's manipulation, simply because you don't personally know people who wanted it to happen. Who exist, I assure you. > What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country. > And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth. source: [LINK] ------- This being said, guarding my gps history like it's treasure does absolutely zilch to stop political manipulation, when you have stuff like corporate control over mainstream media and PR firms. See NYT's coverage of FTX, for a contemporary example. Or, well... this video