[HN Gopher] The chaotic collapse of CNN+
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The chaotic collapse of CNN+
Author : samizdis
Score : 137 points
Date : 2022-04-22 12:19 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| aluminussoma wrote:
| I am going to post an alternative take to the general sentiment
| that saw this coming from a mile away. I think it is awesome that
| an organization as old as TimeWarner was able to launch a bold
| new product. Yes, it may have failed, but they tried.
|
| Launching new products is insanely difficult, if not impossible,
| in large organizations - even in the most esteemed tech
| companies. And yet that is how many companies die, because they
| cannot overcome the internal inertia to launch something new.
| motohagiography wrote:
| What a rare and interesting view. Most products fail anyway,
| yes, so that this one originates from a huge conglomerate
| doesn't do much to change the odds. I'm bearish on legacy media
| and CNN in particular for other reasons, but other examples
| would be how Yamaha, Sony, Nintendo, have all launched fresh
| products that grew from within a legacy org structure. Nice to
| have my own schadenfreude broken by a thoughtful insight.
|
| I'd wonder whether the natural evolution of a succesful large
| org ends as a ventures group.
| billfor wrote:
| Not sure how it could even pass the financial planning stage.
| More people watch Food Network than CNN on any given night, yet
| they expected people to pay for more CNN?
| ecshafer wrote:
| This whole thing just makes no sense from a business perspective.
| Who would want this? Who would pay money for this? It just seems
| like it's an idea that some executive got, and no one was willing
| to tell them that it sounds like a horrible idea until it went
| too far and it collapsed. Did they do any marketing research or
| even a gut check? This seems pretty normal for the type of
| companies that just hire McKinssey for strategy and neglect and
| sanity checks.
|
| The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not exactly
| a prime streaming demographic. But who would want to pay for the
| news monthly for a streaming service? Newspapers have enough
| trouble getting people to pay a bit for text. CNN needs to
| compete with other streaming services, and all of the free
| streams out there and podcasts (which are typically higher
| quality than CNN ).
|
| It's all baffling.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not
| exactly a prime streaming demographic. But who would want to
| pay for the news monthly for a streaming service? Newspapers
| have enough trouble getting people to pay a bit for text. CNN
| needs to compete with other streaming services, and all of the
| free streams out there and podcasts (which are typically higher
| quality than CNN ).
|
| > It's all baffling.
|
| Not really. If they thought cable is in long-term (perhaps
| terminal) decline, they've really only have two choices: let
| the business wind down or try to pivot into something that's
| perceived as not dying. Starting a streaming service seems like
| an attempt at the latter. A lot of newspapers (especially ones
| owned by private equity) are doing the former.
| jmull wrote:
| I would guess that was the narrative: that a streaming service
| with a new tone would appeal outside their existing
| demographic.
|
| Not that I buy it, but that had to be the idea: not to reach
| CNN viewers, but new viewers.
| grendelt wrote:
| > Who would want this? Who would pay money for this?
|
| Who?! Why, all those countless streaming service customers, of
| course! I mean, have you seen how much Netflix and all these
| others are bringing in?! Surely if we launch some sort of
| streaming service they'll throw that money at us too! Right?
| Right?
| ollien wrote:
| There was someone I saw on Twitter (which I can't find now)
| who kept a tally of all the sites that asked them to
| subscribe when they visited them. The total amount they'd
| need to spend to subscribe to everything they saw was
| something crazy like $350/mo.
| digsy wrote:
| I paid for it.
|
| I figured I would get CNN light for $3 a month vs Sling for $30
| (which I only use for CNN now).
|
| >The average age of CNN watchers is over 60 years old, not
| exactly a prime streaming demographic.
|
| Isnt it? Every 60 year old I know has some kind of streaming
| device and social media accounts.
| tatrajim wrote:
| I wish there were a channel that highlighted, in revolving
| fashion, subtitled news broadcasts from major media outlets
| around the world. Having lived in South Korea for many years and
| finally learning passable Korean, I was amazed at the quality and
| depth of reporting on the evening (8 p.m.) news there,
| essentially 50 minutes of in-depth coverage of topical issues,
| with no commercial breaks. The sheer amount of quality reporting
| on the economy, politics, and global events puts the US thin
| gruel efforts at journalism to shame. Doubtless there are other
| examples around the globe of excellent news coverage, and it
| would be a wake-up call to Americans to see how mediocre our own
| fare is.
| perardi wrote:
| This is a wild collapse...but probably still not as big of a flop
| as Quibi.
|
| Or at least, they seemed to have burned through slightly less
| money, and may be able to renegotiate some of the contracts to
| get the talent onto the main CNN service. And it's not a totally
| bonkers idea to try to move the CNN brand into streaming as cable
| becomes less and less dominant...whereas Quibi was just madness,
| through and through.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22/21528404/quibi-shut-down...
| smm11 wrote:
| Chaotic collapse?
|
| I'd call it doing business.
| Cyphase wrote:
| "The chaotic collapse of Convolutional Neural Networks? Hmm,
| what's this about? And what's a CNN+? Wait... oooohh."
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This sort of confirms my suspicion that the major news
| corporations in the United States are not really in business to
| make money, any more than state-funded news outlets in China or
| Russia are. Their purpose is to control the narrative being fed
| to the general population, in the Orwellian sense. Think about it
| for a moment - even if unprofitable, would they be allowed to go
| out of business? Some other entity would step in and buy them up,
| solely so they could use them to promote their own business/state
| propaganda agenda.
|
| See Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post as a leading example. Does
| Bezos care at all if the Washington Post turns a profit or not,
| as long as they can be counted on to spin their news coverage in
| the direction Bezos prefers, and not cover stories like the
| nature of AWS contracts with various federal agencies, etc.?
|
| Most people are aware of this dynamic at some level and very few
| would now actually shell out their own money to be fed more of
| this state-corporate propaganda, which is why a paid subscription
| service like CNN+ rapidly went belly-up.
|
| Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring
| anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates
| and their affiliates (i.e. Youtube/Google directs all news
| inquiry searches to these 'legitimate outlets' like CNN, FOX,
| MSNBC, blocking any access to a wide variety of independent shows
| being run by non-affiliated news & opinion content generators,
| regardless of their popularity).
| lazyier wrote:
| > This sort of confirms my suspicion that the major news
| corporations in the United States are not really in business to
| make money, any more than state-funded news outlets in China or
| Russia are.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/interlocking-directorat...
|
| When big-time investors, ultra wealthy or large institutions,
| purchase corporate stock it often isn't done as any sort of
| "long term retirement investment" like small time individual
| investors do.
|
| They purchase the stock because they want control over that
| company for some purpose. Usually it is tied into other
| investments they own.
|
| So one company pay purchase another in order to intentionally
| run it into the ground. They can leverage it, liquidate it,
| eliminate competition, etc. Like what is suspected motivation
| the parent company of Bass Pro purchasing Cabela.
|
| In the case of major media corporations like CNN the value
| these companies represent isn't necessary the operational
| revenue they receive from advertisements or subscriptions.
| These companies may be attractive because of the influence they
| have over the American public.
|
| So that would help to explain why CNN did weird things like
| fire people criticizing the government's position in the lead
| up to the Iraq wars. It could be that CNN ownership had some
| stake in other companies that had the potential to profit
| significantly from the war.
|
| > Probably the only way to fix it over the long run is to bring
| anti-trust efforts to bear on the corporate media conglomerates
| and their affiliates
|
| Well that then brings up the second problem and third problems.
|
| Second problem:
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp
|
| I worked in an extremely "captured" industries in the past. For
| example, voting machines.
|
| These corporations were regulated to such an extent that it was
| impossible for any new corporation to be created to compete
| with them.
|
| In effect the 3 or 4 major corporations providing voting
| machines were the only voting machine companies that could ever
| possibly exist. It simply wasn't financially feasible for
| anybody else to make voting machines and be profitable.
|
| The multi-years-long certification process, close governmental
| relationships, the constant lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits
| made any sort of major investment in the area financial
| suicide.
|
| Because they are so regulated they are effectively above the
| law. The government can't afford to see them go out of
| business. It's cheaper and easier to keep them profitable then
| it would be to go back and change all the voting machine
| regulations in order to allow real competition.
|
| And because of that these companies have real influence and
| power. It is bizarre and counter intuitive, but it's also how
| it works out in real life.
|
| I experienced this first-hand. And I know that the same
| problems exist in other highly regulated industries such as
| pharmaceuticals.
|
| This is why all the generic companies are now owned by all the
| name brand companies. The government changed the rules in the
| 2000's to make creating new generic companies infeasible
| financially. This then allowed all the bigger pharma companies
| to buy up all the smaller ones.
|
| Which means that the laws and relationships that these
| companies have with the Federal government to constrain them
| actually end up increasing their power and influence.
|
| There is a lot more to it then I mentioned here, but some
| visual reinforcement of how this ends up working is:
|
| https://www.geke.us/VennDiagrams.html
|
| > conglomerates and their affiliates
|
| Conglomerates exist because of anti-trust and anti-monopoly
| laws. They don't make sense otherwise.
|
| Conglomerates are corporations that have positions in many
| different industries. So a conglomerate may own a media
| business, a defense contractor business, a factory in china
| that produces children's toys, and 30% of a shipping company.
| Or whatever.
|
| The point is that they own a lot of positions in lots of
| different industries. This way they can still grow as
| corporations and get bigger and bigger without running into
| monopoly or anti-trust problems.
|
| In effect they are a hack around regulatory restrictions.
|
| And they are not nearly as popular as they used to be.
|
| During the 60's and 70's people just assumed that conglomerates
| would take over the entire world. That they had a special sort
| of modern corporate governance that was ultra-efficient and
| simply out competed every other form of business in existence.
|
| They would go around and use their vast asset resources to
| leverage loans to buy up and often liquidate smaller companies
| and roll that money into new acquisitions. etc etc.
|
| People would defend this behavior as it is just a way to
| increase the efficiency of the market by eliminating all these
| poorly performing and older smaller firms.
|
| The reality was that they were playing accounting games and
| engaging in borderline fraud. It was effectively a hack around
| crappy regulations that many politicians and bureaucrats in the
| government happily conspired with in exchange for huge amounts
| of personal wealth and political funding.
|
| This whole system failed and conglomerates are very
| unfashionable nowadays.
|
| But before they did they managed to wipe out most of the
| industry in the mid-west, among other things.
| clarge1120 wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. It's quite informative. The venn-
| diagram website is worth the price of admission alone.
|
| Question, if a conglomerate owns both a major corporate news
| company and a major federal defense company doesn't that
| represent a conflict of interest since the news giant can
| effectively promote information, such as a war in Iraq or
| Ukraine, that encourages federal defense spending that, then,
| directly benefits the the defense company?
| [deleted]
| postalrat wrote:
| You think it's just the major news corps and not social media?
| [deleted]
| cowmix wrote:
| For someone that (in theory) doesn't care about turning a
| profit, he really loves to put content behind a pay-wall.
| brewdad wrote:
| There may be a paywall but it's one of the cheapest paywalls
| of any daily newspaper in the US. There are constant,
| renewable deals for WaPo subscriptions such that anyone
| paying more than $4 a month is grossly overpaying.
|
| In contrast the two daily newspapers closest to me charge $10
| a month and $4 a _week_ for online access.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Most people will not pay anything for news that can also be
| consumed elsewhere, so it does play against the narrative
| of propaganda over profit.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| The only time people have ever paid for news before the
| Internet are newspapers and trade periodicals. When radio and
| TV were invented, people weren't paying for news from those
| outlets. There was some notion of public service regarding TV
| and radio broadcasting that kept things more "civil" for a
| while, but tended to erode over time.
|
| So you could break up the media conglomerates, but it isn't
| going to make people pay directly for news and unless you want
| government-funded news, that would be the only thing that could
| prevent the advertiser hold over news, which is responsible for
| the dynamic of today more than anything else.
|
| The majority of people don't want pure news or information as a
| whole though, because most people aren't rich. The life of non-
| rich people is more stressful and people in that class will
| always tend to seek things with narratives and emotional
| resonance over critical-thinking-skill-needing information when
| they aren't working or otherwise trying to survive.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I dont think this is up for debate at this point. The pandemic
| made this crystal clear.
| Mongo_Mak wrote:
| CNN went from being the premier news gathering/dispensing agency
| to their present state of a news reporting agency by making the
| decision to replace their own field reporters with information
| given them by other agencies.
|
| My take, anyway.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Reminds me vaguely of some of the collapses the existing media
| giants experienced when first dipping their toes into the
| Internet in the mid to late 90s, thinking it was a new medium
| they could just flow info.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| Reminds me of Meg Whitman and Quibi.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| I wonder if Chris Wallace feels like a clown after his fox bridge
| burning.
| dr_ wrote:
| I enjoy Alison Romans content on YouTube, was always disappointed
| that the Times' canned her. Her recipes and techniques are great,
| and IDGAF attitude was refreshing. She seemed like she could at
| some point carry on with what Bourdain was doing, but with her
| own flair (and tbh she's a real cook). It seemed like she was
| transitioning to CNN+ so I may have subscribed for that reason
| alone. But I guess it will be back to YouTube (for now)!
| olivermarks wrote:
| CNN's arc has been interesting to say the least. Widely lampooned
| as 'Chicken Noodle News' when it launched in 1980 as a
| lightweight 24 hour cable channel in the style of the broadsheet
| 'USA Today' newspaper it gradually became more and more top heavy
| with pompous oped bloviators, pretentious 'situation room' shows.
|
| A minor part of inexpensive cable packages in 1980 alongside MTV,
| it somehow became very expensive to buy despite running endless
| ads. CNN's current Neilsen numbers are abysmal, it's hard to
| imagine why they thought people would pay even more for 'plus'
| content, especially given their predominantly retirement age+
| demographic. Meanwhile Joe Rogan is averaging 11m views per
| podcast with Tucker Carlsen and his script writers a very distant
| second at around 3.2m. (CNN got .8m fpr their most viewed
| primetime show Q3 2021)
| adamrezich wrote:
| don't forget that until recently, CNN used to be shown nonstop
| in airports, not just domestically but internationally as well.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Podcasts + YouTube have made legacy media close to irrelevant
| now . Even someone like Lex Fridman brings in bigger numbers
| than cable tv.
| toyg wrote:
| The making of CNN was Desert Storm. They covered it better than
| anyone else. There and then they hooked the 30-40 demographic
| of the time and exploded. They've lived off that reputation for
| decades at this point.
| protomyth wrote:
| CNN had reporters hanging out a hotel window reporting live,
| and then basically did the absolute funniest con at the door
| while one of the reporters hid in the bathroom. I remember
| watching it at my friends during the first night of the
| bombing. They were the only network with any clue. As a 20ish
| year old those were reporters I could respect.
| olivermarks wrote:
| @toyg so true, they were 'young', fresh and growing in
| credibility in that era compared to the crusty old network
| free terrestrial TV news anchor shows. They sold shock and
| awe really well for the MiC. https://youtu.be/oPNHYi0x2Mk
| Lammy wrote:
| > They sold shock and awe really well for the MiC.
|
| Like that time they interviewed Osama bin Laden right
| before the 1998 Embassy bombings to make sure the public
| knew who he was:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orawG7vt68o
| matwood wrote:
| > They covered it better than anyone else.
|
| Doesn't CNN still have more reporters world wide than any
| other US based news org? I imagine the BBC has the most when
| comparing news orgs around the world.
|
| I think this is why CNN still gives better _news_ coverage
| than other stations, but the opinion shows drown a lot of
| that out.
| davidf18 wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _CNN+ streaming service is shutting down a month after
| launching_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111276 -
| April 2022 (316 comments)
| a4isms wrote:
| If I read the article right, with a merger in the offing, they
| realized that the entire project was likely to be cancelled
| before launch when the reconstituted executive team performed a
| thorough review of every line of business.
|
| It's quite common for ventures like this to be put on hold while
| a review is conducted, and even if the venture is sound, such
| things often wind up dying because of infighting over the review
| or loss of momentum. The article suggests that the team,
| anticipating this outcome, rushed the launch to make it more
| difficult to cancel the service.
|
| As it happened, the launch fizzled. But if I'm reading it right,
| the service was doomed from the moment the merger was finalized.
| Perhaps if the launch was a surprise success, it might have
| survived the merger.
|
| So perhaps the rushed launch was a "Hail Mary," and while it
| seems embarrassing, it's no more embarrassing than launching a
| Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of an American football game
| and seeing it picked off and run back for a touchdown.
|
| Such things are of no real consequence, because the game was
| already lost.
| Traster wrote:
| It's not only that, Jeff Zucker, who ran CNN was forced out in
| February, so the big executive sponsor of this project
| disappeared. That's quite likely to have had a big impact too.
| cmckn wrote:
| I got the impression that Zucker was advocating for the
| streaming service in part to pad his own resume and gain a
| tactical position at the merged company.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Sure, but the main contributing factor remains that nobody used
| it. And the widespread schadenfreude I suspect is mostly due to
| how blatantly obvious it should have been that nobody would pay
| for CNN+.
| scrozart wrote:
| Of course nobody used it; it was marketed poorly, and funding
| for marketing was cut early on, as indicated in the article.
|
| I have no idea if the service would have succeeded under
| different circumstances, but as OP stated, this was the
| rushed pet project of outgoing executives during a merger.
| Any outcome other than DOA was highly unlikely.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| I've just read that live CNN wasn't even available on CNN+.
| That's idiotic. I can't get CNN without a full fledged cable
| subscription, but if this was cheap and offered a CNN
| livestream I'd think about it, but not even offering the live
| feed is just absurd.
| james_pm wrote:
| The only reason CNN still exists is because it's bundled
| with cable and everyone gets (and pays for) CNN on a basic
| cable tier. The brutal truth? Almost nobody watches CNN
| unless something very significant happens. On the flip
| side, almost everybody with cable pays for CNN.
| rsync wrote:
| To be fair, if I need to test dns I always nslookup
| cnn.com ... just muscle memory for 35 years ...
|
| ... and I am in a much more desirable demo ...
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Or, it really was that bad and flopped so hard out of the gate
| that it was better to cut the losses.
| a4isms wrote:
| I was speaking to why they rushed the launch. CNN+ being
| intrinsically bad as a service and/or a terrible fit for
| their built-in market can also be true, and the two reinforce
| each other:
|
| This is 100% unadulterated speculation on my part, but if the
| executives still in charge of CNN+ thought it had problems,
| they'd be doubly fearful of the axe coming down when the
| business was reviewed, so they may have been motivated to get
| it launched whether they were ready to launch or not.
|
| If they had no fear of a business review and possible
| cancellation, they might have decided to delay the launch and
| try to fix the content/market problems.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| Good riddance, CNN is horrible and deserves to fail. CNN's false
| equivalency, "both sides" reporting a la CrossFire has done
| untold damage to our country and greatly contributed to political
| polarization. I want objective news--not something that's just
| giving air time to lobbyists from two different political
| factions to give their spin. CNN always hired laughably awful
| people like John Bolton Andrew Cuomo. Jeff Zucker really
| destroyed credible news programming and hurt America.
| elicash wrote:
| One thing that I haven't seen discussed is that the average age
| of a CNN viewer is 64. Building a streaming service around an
| elderly audience seems like it'd be tricky. That doesn't mean
| that it is impossible -- Fox News has done it reasonably well
| with Fox Nation and Fox News viewers have an average age of 68
| (just like MSNBC).
|
| But was this programming built for their elderly audience, or was
| it supposed to be an attempt at picking up a new, younger
| audience? Who was this for?
|
| You watch a program like CBS Sunday Morning and it's clear they
| know who their audience is. Each week, they feature who passed
| away. They feature anniversaries of things like the Godfather and
| other stuff that their audience will like to reminisce about. A
| comedian talking about aging gracefully. Etc. But I don't think
| CNN did any of that with CNN+.
|
| (Source for age claims:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/24/msnbc-rashid... )
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| This is kind of crazy. I always think of CNN (at least in its
| recent form), MSNBC, and Fox as the most unhinged,
| sensationalist, rabidly partisan of the mainstream networks. I
| didn't realize they also had quite old audiences--I wonder if
| this is just a coincidence or if there's some generational or
| age-related reason?
|
| EDIT: To all the people saying that younger people get their
| "unhinged" through social media and other platforms, that makes
| a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > at least in its recent form
|
| Well that's part of the problem, there is an older generation
| that probably still thinks of CNN as the sober, trustworthy
| cable news network.
| rayiner wrote:
| Fox isn't surprising--old people have always been the core
| demographic for Limbaugh, etc.
|
| CNN's turn, I think, is all about Trump. Old democrats like
| my dad are the exact audience for unhinged 24/7 anti-Trump
| content like CNN has become. These are the folks who built
| "our institutions" and have the deepest faith in them.
| Trump's disregard for those institutions drives them nuts,
| much more so than any policy.
|
| Younger democrats, I think, are more cynical about
| everything. They might hate Trump because of his stances on
| immigration or policing, but not necessarily any more than
| they hate any other Republican who has the same views. And
| it's not going to get them to watch an anti-Trump rant on
| loop.
|
| I suspect that's why CNN's ratings have collapsed since Trump
| left office. The non-Trump left wing stuff isn't compelling
| to my dad. He thinks parents should decide what kids learn in
| schools, the police should be fully funded, we should
| thoroughly vet afghan refugees, etc. CNN also lost the Trump-
| hating institutionalist conservatives they had picked up. My
| wife was obsessed with Trump-gate while it was happening, but
| she's been reading National Review since high school and
| isn't going to tune in to hear why government spending isn't
| what's causing inflation.
| mmaunder wrote:
| CNN and the other elder networks drive viewership by telling
| retirees what to be angry about, providing them with the
| illusion of being engaged with society. It gives them
| something to talk about next time they're leaning on the
| fence chatting to the neighbor. It's a far cry from what CNN
| was in the 90s. But that core audience is now in their 70s.
| mountainriver wrote:
| I think partisan and sensational is just a human thing. Those
| particular networks are definitely a generational thing
| brimble wrote:
| Generational. Younger generations get their unhinged "takes"
| from Twitter and podcasts.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Which is why they keep proposing "new" ideas that have
| already been tried innumerable times.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| I wonder which is worse being uninformed or misinformed. I
| feel like both are pretty bad, but somehow the misinformed
| seem worse because people are often unable to reject or
| form a new idea once they latch onto something.
| matwood wrote:
| What does informed mean here? People who watch no news
| often score better in current events than those that do.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-
| make...
| diogenescynic wrote:
| >People who watch no news often score better in current
| events than those that do.
|
| I was actually referring to exactly this.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| People who watch no news score better than those who
| watch _Fox News_ - people who watched literally any other
| source of news, including the Daily Show were more
| informed than the 'no news' people.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| The interesting thing about the data in the study is that
| people who identify as Republicans scored higher than
| people who identified as Democrats, while at the same
| time, people who watched Fox news scored lower.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Where is that data available? The study I found [1] does
| not provide a pivot by solely by ideology, only
| ideology+media source.
|
| [1] http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/
| zeruch wrote:
| misinformed is worse, if only because in many cases those
| who are misinformed WANT to be that way, and ergo don't
| care about facts or reality, just their normative
| preferences.
|
| uninformed is passively annoying, misinformed is
| aggressively annoying.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| The point of the news is to promote a narrative. They
| choose what to cover, and what to _not_ cover. There is
| no way to do news that is free from ideological bias. And
| in large, corporatized media, the ideological focus is
| often driven by a single person, or very few people.
|
| The purported Twain quote, "If you don't read the
| newspaper, you're uninformed; if you do, you're
| misinformed," applies here.
|
| People love to do comparisons to this or that news
| organization, "Fox News viewers are most likely to have a
| Beanie Baby collection," or "MSNBC viewers are most
| likely to believe that Elvis was an alien," or whatever.
| It doesn't mean much. They are all entertainment
| platforms that sell ads.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| I've found the best sources of news tend to be
| finance/business focused because the readership generally
| wants to know what actually happened so they can make
| business decisions and they can't make those decisions if
| the news is heavily biased one way or the other.
|
| There is still bias, of course - The Economist makes it
| clear they are pro-free market, for example - but they
| tend to give a decent overview of the most salient facts
| and they write for a global audience.
| brimble wrote:
| Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they swapped
| 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading
| classics and textbooks in political science, economics,
| and history. Even the days of the morning paper and
| evening TV news program were probably a bit much, as far
| as non-local news goes anyway, let alone today's constant
| torrent of news, between the horrible 24/7 news channels
| and the Internet.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Nearly everyone would be a better citizen if they
| swapped 95% of the time the spend on the news for reading
| classics and textbooks in political science, economics,
| and history.
|
| I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not with
| those proportions. Those things offer important
| perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington
| isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been
| abolished for more than a century. The past is the past
| and this is the present: there are some commonalities but
| also a lot of important differences.
|
| To be a "better citizen," you need pretty deep knowledge
| of current events. That takes a lot of time, because a
| lot is going on and it's often more informative to follow
| a story than just read a summary once it's over. Think of
| it this way: an investor will lose his shirt if he spends
| 95% of his time reading classic investment books and only
| 5% actually researching businesses. Being a citizen is
| similar.
|
| Also, one of the nice things about the news is it exposes
| you more to the rough edges and uncertainty of the
| present, rather than smoothing that over with theory and
| narratives (that can be thoroughly curve-fitted to the
| past, so as not to jar you with their wrongness).
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _George Washington isn 't running for president anymore
| and slavery has been abolished for more than a century.
| The past is the past and this is the present: there are
| some commonalities but also a lot of important
| differences._
|
| I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more
| impact today than people realize and without
| understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current
| events" gets you nowhere. The seeds for an event like
| 9/11 were planted almost 50 years earlier and without
| understanding that it's easy for people to get swept up
| in takes like "they hate us for our freedom".
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> George Washington isn't running for president anymore
| and slavery has been abolished for more than a century.
| The past is the past and this is the present: there are
| some commonalities but also a lot of important
| differences.
|
| > I think the policies from the 60s and 70s have way more
| impact today than people realize and without
| understanding that context, "deep knowledge of current
| events" gets you nowhere.
|
| I'm not arguing for an extreme opposite position (e.g.
| all current events, no history). If you thought I was,
| you misunderstood me. I'm just saying it's not being a
| "good citizen" to bury yourself in the past and neglect
| the present day.
|
| However, I will say understanding current events probably
| takes more effort, because history can be digested and
| presented more efficiently (e.g. for the Civil War: 4+
| years of 19th century newspapers vs. a 500 page history).
| javajosh wrote:
| A good point with a bad example. 9/11 _really was_
| plotted by Islamists who do actually hate us for our
| freedoms, since to them our freedom amounts to a
| rejection of God 's law, the soul of heresy, for which
| the punishment is death. There are no "civilians" in a
| holy war, since every man, woman and child of the
| heretical nation are living in defiance of God's law.
|
| Of course, this view is shared by every fanatic
| everywhere, of every faith, such that the jingo "They
| hate us for our freedom" applies to them, too.
| meowkit wrote:
| You're only proving the original posters point.
|
| The reality is that post world war 2 soviet containment
| is the most relevant starting point for explaining
| Islamic terrorism in the west. Yes, religious rhetoric
| was used by bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justify their
| actions, but they only took these actions because western
| powers (US, Soviets) were playing proxy war in the region
| for decades.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _9 /11 really was plotted by Islamists who do actually
| hate us for our freedoms, since to them our freedom
| amounts to a rejection of God's law, the soul of heresy,
| for which the punishment is death._
|
| Osama Bin Laden's own motivations for 9/11 had more to do
| with American imperialism in the Middle East and less to
| do with "rejection of God's Law". This isn't speculation,
| but from the horse's mouth. The "hate us for our freedom"
| was propaganda by Bush, and anyone who only looks at
| that, without studying the history of American
| imperialism in the middle east, starting from the coup of
| Iran, ends up in the backwards conclusion that Islam is a
| violent religion (or at least any more violent than any
| other Abrahamic religion).
|
| Please bear in mind that "rejection of God's law, the
| soul of heresy, for which the punishment is death" is
| also a major tenet in all Abrahamic religions. Secondly,
| there are plenty of Americans who are pining for nuclear
| war with Russia over Ukrainians; but somehow the blowback
| of nearly 50 years of foreign intervention by the CIA
| wouldn't be a motivation for anti-American sentiment in
| the middle east and instead "they just hate us for our
| freedom".
| javajosh wrote:
| They hate us for other reasons too. But I don't think you
| suicide yourself and kill civilians for geopolitical
| goals. You do it for God.
| nemothekid wrote:
| Not sure how to respond here. Are you implying that
| people don't kill civilians for geopolitical goals? Like
| how Putin is doing now? Or that suicide bombers are a
| religious thing? Kamikaze Fighters? The assassination of
| Alexander II?
|
| I'm not saying religion isn't a tool for executing these
| goals, but the orchestrators have always been acting
| under geopolitical goals.
| javajosh wrote:
| Your comment is a combination of strawmanning and
| shifting the goal posts, and doesn't deserve a serious
| response. It does merit a question.
|
| What motivates you to resist the simple truth that
| Islamists hate and wish to kill Westerners for breaking
| their holy law (the same behaviors we call "freedom"),
| admire martyrs who suicide themselves into civilians for
| this purpose? Do you think an Islamist would disagree
| with any of that? If so, why?
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| Japan is even farther from Islamic culture than the
| United States but they didn't have a 9/11. Why? Because
| jingoism is subordinate to things that actually matter,
| like justifying or resenting 50 years of sometimes
| violent American involvement in the middle east. We
| shouldn't allow ourselves to be fooled by internally-
| targeted propaganda from other countries, in a way that's
| even more embarrassing than being fooled by our own
| propaganda.
| javajosh wrote:
| Your post is based on the hypothesis that more
| information is better. We've done the experiment, and
| it's false. People's perspectives are not deepened by
| more information, but made more shallow. In large part
| this is because the information they get is mostly second
| order, information about other people's reactions, or
| even reactions to reactions. This reaction information is
| used to preempt and override people's own reactions,
| often with something extreme, which drives engagement,
| which represents value for the corporation.
|
| The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our
| justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative
| lawyers who consider it their duty to use every
| rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has
| mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by
| attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't
| use those same techniques in our lives, or are even
| familiar with the techniques, and so we're left
| vulnerable to them.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Your post is based on the hypothesis that more
| information is better. We've done the experiment, and
| it's false.
|
| No, it's based on the hypothesis that sufficient _up-to-
| date_ information is required.
|
| > People's perspectives are not deepened by more
| information, but made more shallow. In large part this is
| because the information they get is mostly second order,
| information about other people's reactions, or even
| reactions to reactions. This reaction information is used
| to preempt and override people's own reactions, often
| with something extreme, which drives engagement, which
| represents value for the corporation.
|
| That's a twisted cartoon of the news. If that's how
| you've actually experienced it, you probably need to pick
| better sources or get better at separating the wheat from
| the chaff.
|
| > The modern "news" environment takes the worst of our
| justice system, the unethical, dishonest, manipulative
| lawyers who consider it their duty to use every
| rhetorical tool to achieve their goals, and has
| mainstreamed it. The news, and politics, are dominated by
| attorneys. But most of us aren't, and most of us don't
| use those same techniques in our lives, or are even
| familiar with the techniques, and so we're left
| vulnerable to them.
|
| That's another twisted cartoon, but I'll say one of the
| best ways to avoid being manipulated is to actually be
| familiar with the facts.
| javajosh wrote:
| It's actually kind of refreshing for someone to defend
| the news. But I don't think we are agreeing on what news
| is so it's not an argument that can really go anywhere. I
| mean if you want to define news as only the Good News and
| not the bad news then yes the news is good.
| 8note wrote:
| I recently learned that slavery was abolished in response
| to pearl harbour[0], which isn't quite a century away.
|
| The vestiges of the later slavery are still around too,
| well, I guess the slavery is too, but now you have to buy
| their labour from the government, and the government
| keeps ownership of the slave. Actually, I don't know how
| that goes for private prisons?
|
| But pressuring people to plea guilty to crime,
| perceptions of black people as violent criminals, the
| large US prison population, the police, etc. Those are
| legacies and continuations of practices from slavery.
|
| A but more reading on history puts today's problems in
| better context
|
| [0]: https://weeklysift.com/2014/03/31/slavery-lasted-
| until-pearl...
| brimble wrote:
| > I hear that said a lot, but I doubt it, at least not
| with those proportions. Those things offer important
| perspective, but to put it bluntly: George Washington
| isn't running for president anymore and slavery has been
| abolished for more than a century. The past is the past
| and this is the present: there are some commonalities but
| also a lot of important differences.
|
| Sure, but I doubt someone with a deep grounding in
| political science, economics, and history, but who'd
| never heard of either candidate, would need more than an
| hour or so on Google to decide between Trump and Biden,
| for instance. Our choices are, as voters, for better or
| worse, pretty limited.
|
| Frankly, I often make decisions about local candidates or
| ballot initiatives based on like 5 minutes of research. I
| doubt _any_ of those choices would change if I closely
| followed all those candidates and issues and spent 50x
| more time on them--what might change them is if I 'd read
| fewer, or different, books. (meanwhile, if I wanted to
| make any actual difference in the world, I'm aware that
| what I _ought_ to do is get involved with one of the big
| two political parties, at the local level)
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Sure, but I doubt someone with a deep grounding in
| political science, economics, and history, but who'd
| never heard of either candidate, would need more than an
| hour or so on Google to decide between Trump and Biden,
| for instance.
|
| That's a bad example, because Trump was such an oaf. A
| better recent example might have been choosing between
| McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential
| races.
|
| The bigger issue isn't so much picking candidates, but
| understanding current situation and problems, and having
| opinions about those things to inform your choices.
| brimble wrote:
| Haha, that's fair. I still think spending more than an
| hour or two on the news per week has _rapidly_
| diminishing returns, in terms of societal benefit, and
| most of that should be local news or _very_ focused, deep
| coverage, for maximum benefit.
|
| > A better recent example might have been choosing
| between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on
| presidential races.
|
| I'd love to see some blank-slate person try to judge them
| just by their own websites. God, those were _so_
| different.
| adamdusty wrote:
| What's wrong with being uninformed, especially when it
| comes to "news"?
| diogenescynic wrote:
| That's my point. The "news" is now Maddow or Hannity or
| Tucker or some other equally wrong talking head. I've
| stopped watching news altogether and noticed I don't feel
| like I've missed out on anything.
| layer8 wrote:
| If you never follow news (or haven't for a decade or
| longer), it's difficult to get a read on what is going on
| in the world or in your country, politically. That isn't
| necessarily wrong, but it means you don't really
| understand the environment you live in. Getting a better
| understanding is my main motivation for following the
| news. Mind you, I'm not in the US and for the most part
| don't follow US news outlets.
| adamdusty wrote:
| I don't watch or read news, and I feel pretty
| knowledgeable about my environment. I feel that if I
| actually engage in my community I am much more plugged in
| to my environment than if I try to read about it on the
| news.
| layer8 wrote:
| By "environment" I don't mean the local community, but
| the general social, political and economic mechanics on
| the nation scale and planet scale. I.e. how the human
| world you're living in works and evolves, which in turn
| has local repercussions.
| adamdusty wrote:
| > By "environment" I don't mean the local community
|
| Neither do I.
|
| If you think you're learning about social, political, and
| economic mechanics on a global scale from the news, then
| I implore you to keep consuming. I've never learned
| anything from the news that I couldn't have learned
| talking to someone else who watched it instead.
| layer8 wrote:
| Ah, so you actually do follow the news! I wasn't
| particular about the medium.
| Lendal wrote:
| The benefit of living in a non-democracy is that you
| don't need to be informed. You can spend all your time on
| making money and spending money, and that's your life. No
| worries.
|
| But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some of
| your time being informed about things so you know how to
| vote. Think of it as a democracy tax. If you didn't live
| in a democracy, you wouldn't have this tax on your time.
| Freedom isn't free, eh?
|
| Of course, this democracy tax is totally voluntary.
| You're only obligated by your own morality. You may
| choose to opt out of democracy entirely. Not voting or
| being informed is your choice, if you wish to live your
| life off the backs of others. No one will make you feel
| guilty about it at all. Right? ;)
| SllX wrote:
| > But if you live in a democracy, you have to spend some
| of your time being informed about things so you know how
| to vote.
|
| I don't think you fairly addressed his question at all in
| this comment, and the reason lies right in that vague
| word: "things".
|
| People who live anywhere will always take an interest in
| information which directly affects them, or that they can
| profit off of, or which might cause them to incur losses.
| Generally there are multiple means of attaining this
| information and the "news" in the mass media sense is
| just one of them. I don't for example pay close attention
| to all legal news, so when I need legal advice which
| tends to be situational in nature I hire people who do
| rather than proceeding on my own partially-informed
| opinions from what I gleaned out of a newspaper which
| probably missed important details and which is usually
| written from a biased perspective. This is true for any
| number of domains I don't specialize in (almost all of
| them), and in seeking counsel I gain information along
| the way that can shape my future actions.
|
| So lets come back to that word, "things", which things
| should people be informed of that you get from the news
| media but are unlikely to receive from anywhere else?
| u2077 wrote:
| I agree, very rarely do I actually need to know so-called
| "news" when you turn off the TV, the sky is no longer
| falling and the world is (mostly) fine.
|
| Everyone has a bias and skews stories, also, creating
| fear probably increases viewership. If the media always
| said everything is fine, less people would watch IMO.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Most news is local. If it doesn't impact YOU, then it's
| always fine, the world is fine. I'm sure that if you are
| in Ukraine, turning off the TV doesn't mean that the
| world is fine when you look outside and see bombs falling
| on the building next door.
|
| I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about
| how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between
| this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip
| news because those suffering aren't your family.
|
| In a less extreme example, if a big project came into
| your neighborhood to destroy all the houses on your
| street to build a highway, I'm sure that suddenly this
| news would make you want to get involved politically to
| advocate against the destruction of it. But when that
| happened in the other neighborhood and you didn't care to
| even write an email to your local politician to oppose it
| because you didn't know about it, other families
| suffered.
|
| It's a fine line.. I've seen my parents watch news 3
| times a day (lunch, dinner, and late-evening news) and it
| was definitely not healthy and did not make them better
| citizen either. I don't have a perfect answer.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| > there's a fine line between this and being privileged
| to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering
| aren't your family.
|
| Watching the news is not helping these people.
| u2077 wrote:
| > there's a fine line between this and being privileged
| to be able to afford to skip news because those suffering
| aren't your family.
|
| Hence why I said _most_. I definitely agree that being
| exposed to outside events can be important for
| sympathizing with those affected (and possible helping
| them), but at the same time, one does not need to be
| aware of _everything_ going on in the world.
| brimble wrote:
| > I understand the sentiment, and I'm also careful about
| how much news I consume, but there's a fine line between
| this and being privileged to be able to afford to skip
| news because those suffering aren't your family.
|
| I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with
| events on the other side of the world (or the other side
| of your country) if you're not also able and willing to
| do something about it. I dunno about applying the
| "privilege" label to that--in fact, the fewer resources
| you have, the less point there is in it.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > I don't think there's any obligation to keep up with
| events on the other side of the world
|
| Things that happen across the world affect us here too.
| Maybe your friends have family in Ukraine or are from
| there. I have students who are Ukrainian. Currently
| Ukrainians are leaving their homeland as refugees and
| resettling all around the world. They could be moving in
| down the street and will be your neighbors! Knowing
| what's happening around the world allows one to be
| empathetic to the situations of others.
| brimble wrote:
| How much time does one need to spend on distant news to
| know enough of it for that purpose, though? If you've got
| a whole lot of refugees heading to your city, local news
| will cover it. Otherwise, knowing the basics seems like
| plenty to me, _unless_ you 're just interested in it for
| entertainment's sake.
| [deleted]
| philistine wrote:
| I feel that is so privileged of you to say that. You have
| a duty to know what is happening on the other side of the
| world when you're American, because the federal
| politicians you elect decide policy affecting the whole
| globe, and have done so unopposed by any equal force for
| over 30 years.
|
| Being an American is like being a Roman citizen; you have
| to run the whole empire.
| blindmute wrote:
| >You have a duty to know what is happening on the other
| side of the world when you're American, because the
| federal politicians you elect decide policy affecting the
| whole globe
|
| Nope, not my duty. My duty is to elect politicians who
| enact policy affecting me. If a politician enriches my
| country at the expense of another, it is my duty to vote
| for him, for the sake of myself and my family. No one is
| a citizen of the world.
| brimble wrote:
| How _much time_ do you need to do that, though? Is
| keeping up with all the minutia, checking in on how
| Ukraine 's doing every single day (even multiple times),
| really helping anyone? I _do_ keep up with the news, and
| especially international news, but I 'm under no illusion
| that it's a valuable use of time. Past very low-levels of
| engagement, it's a hobby, or a pastime. Like knitting or
| watching soap operas.
|
| Again, I think that end would _also_ be better served if
| a high proportion of news media consumption were shifted
| to citizenship-relevant books (and maybe very high-
| quality, low-frequency periodicals), probably starting
| with textbooks and classics in political science,
| history, and economics (I doubt anyone who 's mined those
| well already, needs any help picking their next high-
| value read).
| Lammy wrote:
| It's interesting how you choose "highway" and not
| "railway" even though the eminent domain would be the
| same.
| temp8964 wrote:
| It's just different age groups get unhinged on different
| platforms. LoL. Even though TVs are for older audiences, they
| do use unhinged content from platforms for younger people.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Network TV in general is consumed mostly by older people.
|
| I don't think I know a single person under 50 that routinely
| sits down to watch TV.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I imagine many millennials and younger realize they don't get
| much benefit out of watching the news, especially as other
| media channels (Facebook, Twitter trending, Reddit r/popular)
| can get them actual breaking news when it happens. If people
| do want to see more traditional news, having an news app
| instead of watching it gives them the freedom to read the
| news when they have the time for it.
| delecti wrote:
| > CNN [...], MSNBC, and Fox as [...] of the mainstream
| networks
|
| What other mainstream news networks are there? Are you
| including non-cable news? Because the only other cable
| network I can even think of is OAN, which is much less
| mainstream. I'm not arguing whether any of those are/aren't
| partisan, just that I don't know what you're comparing them
| to.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You know the demographic of a TV show by its advertising. Even
| in the 1970s, I noticed that the evening news ads were always
| for headache remedies and other medical nostrums. It's the same
| today.
| ajross wrote:
| FWIW: Fox Nation is much smaller in scope. It's basically a
| bunch of opinion shows (barely more than podcasts, honestly)
| designed to feed into a cyclic link sharing ecosystem that
| already exists and is somewhat starved for "legitimate"
| content. Basically these are links that people who are being
| fed Breitbart and InfoWars stories click on, because they're
| "serious news" they can't otherwise get on the internet.
|
| (Also, IIRC most of their revenue is still advertising from
| freely distributed content, not subscriber fees.)
|
| CNN+ was instead trying to do all this from the ground up,
| while competing with a _much_ more robust existing ecosystem.
| Centrists and lefties already have Slate and Vox and Politico
| and of course all the existing "print" media sites to fill
| their "legitimate" news needs. What was CNN going to give them
| that they didn't already have?
| Vaslo wrote:
| Vox, Politico, and definitely slate are not centrist
| krona wrote:
| Maybe this partly explains why some of the CNN+ YouTube clips
| were getting orders of magnitude more views than the channel
| itself.
| barbacoa wrote:
| YouTube artificially promotes CNN content. I suspect their
| content on YouTube would have similar number of views to CNN+
| otherwise.
| [deleted]
| crate_barre wrote:
| It's the median, not the average. And I think for CNN the
| median is definitely lower than that, but for FoxNews it's
| about right.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The 64 year olds used to say TV rots your brain, apparently
| it's true!
| bena wrote:
| Of course they want a new, younger audience.
|
| Because in order to be 64, you first have to be 63. It's not
| like you wake up one day and say, "Well, looks like I have to
| watch news all the time". These habits accrue over time.
|
| Especially as you get older and you get more involved and have
| less to do.
| brewdad wrote:
| I'm a solid middle generation GenX. I rarely watch cable news
| anymore. When I was younger and had actual cable, I'd channel
| surf and often end up on one of the news stations if nothing
| else was on. I still have access to the same channels through
| YoutubeTV but it's far less conducive to channel surfing, so
| now if there's nothing on I want to watch, I turn off the TV
| or pop over to Netflix or whatever.
|
| The old habits are pretty much gone.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I pull up a few news sites twice a day and read a few
| articles, but I don't watch anything and I rarely listen to
| anything either. The written articles are usually more
| informative and contain less partisan stupidity. I can't do
| podcasts, because I'll inevitably tune them out, hear
| something important to the presentation, and then spend my
| afternoon rewinding. Also, the need to be sensationalist is
| vastly stronger for podcast creators than it is for major
| media orgs whose networks have cable contracts.
| bena wrote:
| Regardless of what you do, you're not only a sample size of
| one, but it doesn't mean they're not going to try.
|
| The person I responded to was musing that CNN was doing
| this to try and crack into a younger audience. And it's
| like: no shit. They want to either find ways to integrate
| into more youthful demographics or get more youthful
| demographics to integrate them into their habits.
|
| Joe Camel wasn't made to appeal to adult smokers.
| hdesh wrote:
| Great analysis, thanks. A question is: Do the younger audience
| rely on streaming platforms/news channels to get their news?
| Anecdotally, everyone I know in the young age group relies on
| social-media or web-based portals for their news.
| brimble wrote:
| "Elder Millennial" checking in. Since moving out on my own
| (quite a while ago, at this point) I've never had cable at
| all. Nor have any of my friends, who span from about my age
| down to the oldest edge of Gen Z. Nearly all my news is radio
| in the car (NPR--ugh, but at least sometimes they rebroadcast
| BBC News and that's decent) or from web sites. Practically
| all _video_ news I watch is either raw footage, or
| (similarly) C-SPAN. John Oliver on HBO Max if it 's late and
| I've had a few and I'm bored--that's about it for actual
| "news programs", if that even counts.
|
| [EDIT] I take back part of that--I think _one_ guy has cable.
| He 's into football. He's also the only right-winger in my
| circle. Maybe a coincidence? Wouldn't be surprised if a fair
| bit of his "vaccine hesitancy" (to put it in mild, friendly
| NPR terms) came from watching Fox News, now that I think
| about it.
| kansface wrote:
| Podcasts have completely replaced NPR for me. I'd highly
| recommend it.
| brimble wrote:
| Something about most podcasts make them _really_ hard to
| listen to, for me. Not sure why. Among all media I find
| them uniquely difficult to follow. My attention wanders
| and I end up missing most of it. Radio-news-style
| programs are fine, for some reason. All I can figure is
| it 's got something to do with the pace, and the way the
| hosts speak. I can even tune into weird religious talk
| programs on the radio, and mostly be OK, but podcasts as
| a medium just rarely work for me. Which bums me out,
| because I'm assured there are tons of good ones, but I
| just can't handle them. Similar formats _with video_ are
| fine (on e.g. Youtube).
| sephamorr wrote:
| I used to feel similarly about audio but have figured out
| the right settings for acceleration (1.2-1.4x) and
| silence trimming in pocketcasts to increase the
| informational content and keep it interesting - it works
| for me now. (that and finding the most interesting
| content for me)
| brimble wrote:
| I'll try that! Dan Carlin's works are some of the ones I
| find _easiest_ to follow, but still too difficult, so
| maybe I 'll try it on him first.
| weberer wrote:
| Fox News is pretty pro-vaccine. I just looked through their
| website and couldn't find any stories against vaccines
| themselves. Several stories saying they're safe and
| effective.
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/health/us-covid-19-vaccine-
| boosters-...
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/health/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-
| more-...
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-vaccination-kids-
| sev...
| Pxtl wrote:
| The only "news" I get from modern streaming is the Youtubes
| of Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight on
| HBO/Crave, I get the rest of my news from Twitter (where I
| follow various local journos and CBC).
|
| Which I know isn't ideal and I should _pay_ for a proper news
| source but the state of "print" journalism in Canada is
| really, really bad right now since all the non-government-run
| services are being bought up by ideological conservatives.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I secind late night shows to get news. They have a bias
| that is totally clear (and one I share, most of the time),
| are well curayed and researched (so _I_ don 't to have news
| all day) and are presented in a non-so-serious way (making
| digestion easier).
|
| In additiok to that we have dogital subscriptions to NYT,
| WP and physical ones for Wired and our local newspaper.
| Anytheing else is the non-subscription stuff from reliable
| news papers. I did reduce news consumption a lot so since
| the Ukraine war started.
|
| Oh, and not to forget: HN.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm not significantly "young" but I get most my "news" from
| links in telegram chats and places like this.
|
| If it's huge news, I'll hear about it (you can't avoid it)
| and if it is not huge news, why do I care?
| tyingq wrote:
| For me, it was as simple as _" I already have access to FREE news
| sources without commercials that are higher quality than CNN"_
|
| My Roku has channels like SkyNews and Al Jazeera where I can
| watch both live and pre-recorded stories at no charge. No
| commercials either. They of course, have their own bias problems,
| but since I know what those are, I can take any stories on
| affected topics with an appropriate grain of salt.
|
| I don't know why CNN thinks I would pay them when better is
| available free.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Sky News isn't the best, but Al Jazeera is top notch.
| gsibble wrote:
| I'm definitely not Al Jazeera's demographic, but even I find
| their reporting to be excellent.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Somehow the article fails to mention the weak subscriber numbers
| and lack of customer demand. Or full CNN's ratings, which would
| make a logical executive wonder how many people would pay for CNN
| when it can barely attract viewers for free.
| elicash wrote:
| This was already mentioned in previous Axios articles. This
| article is NEW info.
| listenallyall wrote:
| That isn't true. The first block rehashes quotes from Feb
| 4th, Jeff Zucker's resignation, and Chris Licht taking over.
| Thats all very old news.
|
| And the previous article buried subscriber counts in
| paragraph 14, and never mentions CNN's ratings or viewership,
| or CNN+'s viewership per show.
|
| Instead, both this article and the previous one is an attempt
| to obfuscate the reality of awful viewership as just a victim
| of executive realignment:
|
| _It 's being shuttered due to a strategic misalignment
| between Discovery executives and CNN executives._
|
| and
|
| _The service was shut down because CNN and its new parent
| disagreed over whether the investment made sense long-term._
|
| But not, "CNN shut down the service when it became obvious
| virtually nobody was willing to pay a non-promotional price
| for the product."
| radiospiel wrote:
| ~~~"...Inside CNN, executives saw the launch as a success. As
| of Tuesday, CNN+ had roughly 150,000 subscribers...."~~~ ups,
| sorry. As the sibling states this is in the other CNN+ related
| article
| listenallyall wrote:
| Subscriber counts are the #1 most important metric for any
| streaming service. Did you see what happened to Netflix the
| other day? Axios buried CNN+ subscriber counts in paragraph
| 14 of the earlier article and doesn't mention them at all in
| this one. The entire series is an attempt to blame corporate
| mergers and lack of executive leadership rather than the fact
| that CNN has terrible viewership and brand equity. You need
| to learn to be a more critical news reader.
| gsibble wrote:
| Wanted to say spot on as well. Great comment.
| rvz wrote:
| Precisely spot on and succinct. Couldn't have put it better
| myself.
|
| You can clearly see what's going on when you read the
| viewing figures of other media and streaming services out
| there and figure out why they're starting to shut down and
| restructure in the first place. Instead with this article,
| they continue to dodge those metrics and blame it on
| something else, or even on something totally un-related.
|
| It is another form of deflection and denial to try to
| salvage anything useful to learn from this failure. Expect
| that there is nothing to learn from this since, it is the
| sequel to another repeated mainstream media product failure
| since Quibi and they haven't learned anything since that
| collective failure even in a global lockdown.
|
| It is quite silly to see any defence in any prospect of
| this service quite frankly.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| I actually was planning to get CNN+, but only after cancelling my
| basic cable subscription. CNN was one of the holes in the
| channels I occasionally watch but could not find good streaming
| options for
| diogenescynic wrote:
| CNN+ didn't even have CNN the cable channel, so it wouldn't
| have worked for what you were thinking of. It had totally
| different (worse) content...
| MBCook wrote:
| And that's what really confuses me. Why not just start with a
| simulcast and maybe some extra programming available. That
| would've been so much cheaper. Then grow that into what they
| wanted it to become.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Probably because of their contracts with cable companies.
| The cable companies weren't going to let their own channel
| compete against them.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| That was the dilemma that HBO used to deal with, but they
| have seem to found a way out of it..
| smallerfish wrote:
| > What's next: Discovery wants to build one scaled, subscription
| streaming app based around HBO Max's branding that includes a
| cheaper, ad-supported tier. It will eventually combine discovery+
| with the HBO Max app after initially offering them as a bundle.
| Much of the CNN+ programming will be reallocated to other
| platforms. Some features like CNN's "Interview Club" will likely
| live on CNN's free, ad-supported app. Other shows may be included
| in HBO Max.
|
| Makes sense, but it's astonishing how bad HBO Max's app continues
| to be, given its strategic importance. The catalog is generally
| excellent, but the UX and reliability of the app and platform are
| terrible. I wonder if the new executive team will lop of heads
| responsible for the current state of the product, or whether
| they're insulated enough that the dysfunction will continue.
| candyman wrote:
| I don't know who did it but someone killed CNN a long time ago
| when they started "reporting" on what was trending on Twitter. I
| remember the day many years ago and thinking "what the hell are
| they doing and why would someone sign off on that?" A single
| person on YouTube could just do this - no need for an
| organization like CNN. All such "news" sites are dead to me!
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| After the announcement that CNN+ was shutting down I went on
| their Twitter account (@CNNplus) to get a feel for what sort of
| content they produced.
|
| Maybe it's because I'm from a younger generation, but it all
| comes off as overproduced and inauthentic media-speak.
|
| It's obvious that their demographic is old people, since all of
| their media personalities are old people.
|
| Ben Stiller talking about making new friends in old-age thanks to
| Twitter. Discussing parenting tips with Anderson Cooper. A bunch
| of washed-up media personalities with nothing new or interesting
| to say.
|
| The refusal to pass the torch onto a younger generation while
| clinging to their positions of power becomes a generational
| plague. CNN is a walking corpse which will pass away with its
| audience.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > A Discovery executive referring to CNN+ as "CNN minus"
| particularly rubbed people the wrong way
|
| Sorry, that's pretty funny. It seems like everyone outside of CNN
| could see that CNN+ was doomed to fail, but the Kool Aid was
| flowing freely inside.
| bombcar wrote:
| It literally WAS CNN- - it didn't even carry CNN, because they
| didn't want to fight the cable war.
| gsibble wrote:
| All CNN basically produces is Kool Aid so I'm not surprised
| they were all drunk on their own stuff.
| padobson wrote:
| This seems like it would happen a lot at corporations that deal
| in propaganda. Once you abandon truth as a value, how do you
| stop the culture in your content creation from infecting your
| business decisions?
|
| I guess Fox News has figured it out. I'd be curious to see more
| examples of both success and failure.
| bredren wrote:
| I led a team that did very early work designing iPad apps for
| Discovery. We are talking iPad gen2.
|
| Back then the entire project was designed to appear like it
| was a serious look at investing in digital for the channel
| when the goal was actually to slow down the shift from linear
| cable subs to apps.
|
| It was bizarre then but today it looks like the bread and
| butter of traditional media company politics.
| krallja wrote:
| I've been trying to get people to pronounce it as "positive,"
| like a disease.
|
| "Yeah, I'm Disney positive. I was Apple positive, but got over
| it in February. Don't hardly know anyone with CNN positive."
| jmull wrote:
| > About 350 of the 700 people that work for CNN+ will be laid off
| with pay and benefits for the next 90 days. After that, any
| employee that doesn't find a new role with the network will be
| granted at least six months' severance.
|
| That sounds pretty good.
|
| At least the people who are most affected by the poor leadership
| and decision-making are getting a decent chance to land on their
| feet.
| [deleted]
| chasd00 wrote:
| 9 months of pay to find a new job? That's a little more than
| "decent chance" to me. That sounds more like 6 months PTO then
| 3 months of actual job searching.
| olyjohn wrote:
| What are you saying? That they should have given people less
| severance?
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I think what they are saying is the incentive structure
| makes it advantageous to not find a job. If they tell you
| "90 days of severance and if you don't find a job by then,
| here's an additional 6 months of severance", there's
| suddenly a huge incentive for you to not find a new job in
| the initial 90 days.
| isatty wrote:
| I don't think you understand the anxiety of having
| dependents on you and not having a job, even if you've a
| cushion for a fixed period of time.
| pnutjam wrote:
| so...?
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