[HN Gopher] The local news crisis is deepening America's divides
___________________________________________________________________
The local news crisis is deepening America's divides
Author : samizdis
Score : 235 points
Date : 2022-07-04 13:43 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| Linda703 wrote:
| bilsbie wrote:
| I think a local news publication could be done as a non profit
| with mostly volunteers. Kind of like an open source project.
|
| There are enough people that enjoy sharing what's going on and
| writing that it could be workable.
|
| Maybe someone here could set up a sort of franchise that makes it
| easier for local communities to get set up.
|
| (Idea for a ycombinator startup?)
| drorco wrote:
| To me it seems like this is the symptom of a dying industry, the
| newspaper industry. I can't think of many people who are willing
| to pay for newspapers or news websites, let alone watch their
| ads(!). Eventually these papers are for-profit businesses so it's
| either go bankrupt, or find a way to make money no matter what.
| It seems that those who survived so far, are picking the latter,
| each to its own extent.
|
| Hopefully, there'd be a new, sensible way of earning money for
| decent free press, and this is just a limbo stage.
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| elzbardico wrote:
| I always admire the self-importance journalists assign to
| themselves. Most local news was and would ever be utter trash.
| Small town journalism could only survive by peddling to some
| powerful local group or a political enterprise. With all its
| problems, social media has proven over and over to be a far more
| useful tool for communities.
| teddyh wrote:
| Social media, _maybe_. Social (and other) _ad-driven_ media?
| Certainly not.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> With all its problems, social media has proven over and over
| to be a far more useful tool for communities.
|
| I just LOVE how you proclaim this, without first seeing (a) the
| cosequences of social media (good or bad) 30+ years from now,
| and (b) whatever disrupts current social media next.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I don't buy it.
|
| When you live in a small community, you get local news from your
| neighbors and friends, and Facebook if you have it (Facebook is
| essentially replacing the local news outlet in small towns, and
| that's worse than the problem stated in the article, but that's a
| different discussion). If it's important you'll hear about it. If
| it's unimportant you'll probably hear about it too.
|
| The same applies to national news. 90% of it is unimportant. If
| it is actually important, like the fact that your bread prices
| will go up due to a war in Ukraine, you'll hear about it.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Sure, but what about medium sized communities?
|
| The Bay Area has lots of local news outlets and even more local
| "boots on the ground" community blogs run by volunteers. I
| don't know if that's true around the rest of the country
| though.
| bilsbie wrote:
| A big issue is major corporations buying up lots of local news
| stations too.
|
| I found this video extremely eye opening. Worth a watch if you
| haven't seen it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q_hGKT5FI78
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I assume they do that because local news isn't profitable and
| is always on the risk of failing?
| xyst wrote:
| Nobody else to blame but the newspaper industry themselves.
| Failure to begin modernizing/digitizing their systems in the
| 1990s caused them to make very hasty decisions in the mid 2000s
| and 2010s (such as relying on advertising models created by
| Google/Facebook).
| mrkurt wrote:
| The local newspapers failed, yes. But that's normal. Had there
| been a healthy market for local news, they'd have been
| replaced.
|
| What actually happened is that the revenue available to local
| news got consolidated. Classifieds and local ads got rolled up
| by Craigslist/Google/Facebook. None of these companies have an
| interest in local news.
|
| There's not much of a fix for this. Until we come up with a
| better way to pay for local news, there's no choice the
| "newspaper industry" could have made to thrive. Fighting
| consolidation is a good idea, though, and might help a new
| model emerge.
| abathur wrote:
| Citation needed? How would digitizing their systems have saved
| the industry from all three of its primary revenue streams
| being hoovered up by free online classifieds, free debundled
| online news, and online advertising?
|
| If you're going to blame the industry, it seems weird to claim
| it's because of strategic mistakes made in the 2 decades after
| peak circulation and not the moment ad revenue became
| indispensable?
| jarjoura wrote:
| For me, the biggest problem is that news media is allowed to
| control the narrative by injecting bias into the coverage. We all
| know language choice has a strong power to manipulate and shift
| people's perspectives on what needs to be raw facts.
|
| Everything is a crisis, everything is a Watergate, everything is
| leading up to WW3.
|
| In a journalism course I took at university, the "hello world"
| assignment is to write an article without bias. They teach
| journalists that writing emotionally was considered amateur and
| unprofessional. This is basic stuff that all these hundreds of
| thousands of professionals know on day one.
|
| Yet, here we are, we're now in a world where the more bias you
| can inject into the news, the better the ratings, and the deeper
| the divide goes.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| In research on effects of local news, there is one really tricky
| part.
|
| We don't yet know what precisely the "local" benefit is. Many of
| the relevant studies investigate the effects of local newspapers
| closing (or opening, rarely). But they imply that there is
| something special about local reporting that can't be supplied by
| national news.
|
| The best answer comes from a ~10 year old study [1] that suggests
| there is a mutual reinforcing effect of local news, community
| embedding (i.e. social capital) and social engagement (i.e.
| volunteering etc.)
|
| I wish there was a better model of (1) what it is in particular
| in local news that is beneficial and (2) how it affects people
| (positively and negatively).
|
| [1] Rojas, H., Shah, D. V., & Friedland, L. A. (2011). A
| communicative approach to social capital. Journal of
| Communication, 61(4), 689-712.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| There are a number of studies showing what is beneficial
| specifically about local news:
|
| - "Academic studies suggest that a lack of local media coverage
| is associated with less informed voters, lower voter turnouts,
| and less engaged local politicians." [0]
|
| - "We examine how local newspaper closures affect public
| finance outcomes for local governments. Following a newspaper
| closure, municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis
| points, costing the municipality an additional $650 thousand
| per issue." [1]
|
| Without local news people don't vote as much, are less informed
| about the issues, and politicians have less oversight. Local
| news fills a very important role in society.
|
| [0] https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/public-finance-
| loc... [1]
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175555
| gruez wrote:
| > There are a number of studies showing what is beneficial
| specifically about local news:
|
| keyword here is "associated".
|
| Does lack of local media coverage cause "less informed
| voters, lower voter turnouts, and less engaged local
| politicians", or is it the reverse? It certainly seems
| plausible. If you don't care about politics at all, you're
| probably happy sitting at home watching daytime national TV
| rather than reading the local paper.
|
| The same applies to newspaper closures being associated with
| higher borrowing costs. Towns that are on a downward spiral
| would cause higher borrowing costs (who wants to borrow to a
| town with a dwindling tax base?) as well as causing local
| media establishments to shut down.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Isn't it simply based on experiencing reality? Local news is
| directly experienced, and when all news was within the sphere
| of experienced events, it was good. Modernity has stretched the
| sphere of news to events that are not directly experienced in
| reality and thus lead to here-say and bias to authority vs
| conviction of certainty through direct experience.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| That's one possibility. But you can always construct a
| scenario where the opposite holds.
|
| I.e. your local paper may cater to a part of the community
| whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-
| congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local
| polarization.
|
| In other words, access to local news may help some people
| realize how little they connection feel towards their
| neighbors.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Said another way, it seems clear that conflict between
| people has been becoming more extreme as a consequence of
| news shifting to a belief based system due to the lower
| probability that any news source heard is something that
| can be directly experienced.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > your local paper may cater to a part of the community
| whose perspective you don't share, or they may be self-
| congratulatory snobs, or they may otherwise aggravate local
| polarization
|
| It cannot possibly be worse than localized social media
| like Nextdoor.
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| >your local paper may cater to a part of the community
| whose perspective you don't share
|
| Local papers are usually both barely profitable and locally
| funded. Local businesses, similarly, are usually scraping
| by. A local paper that alienates a significant fraction of
| the community doesn't usually survive. Local reporting is
| usually straightforward and factual, therefore.
|
| That's the other reason local reporting is important,
| because it can't afford biases. It's where journalists
| learn to be impartial.
| jollybean wrote:
| I believe local news tends to be a more 'news' and a bit less
| 'narrative'.
|
| I also believe that the more local the news is, the more
| relatable.
|
| From Canada, I can get PBS/NPR Vermont, and the sheer
| quaintness of the local issues from Burlington Vt. I mean it
| feels like going back in time but in a good way. 'The New
| Playhouse' opened up, the 'Fireworks Display Will Be Here' etc.
| - it's the complete opposite of Cable news and Twitter, which
| is incendiary and ideological.
|
| National narrative news satisfied an ostensible intellectual
| aspect of our orientation, but I'm not sure it's useful in the
| magnitude we consume it.
| jarjoura wrote:
| There are so many mundane things that happen in local
| communities that I'm not sure you need research to show how
| invaluable it is to local readers. Yet, is noise to everyone
| else.
|
| I could think of a few, new businesses opening up, or worse,
| shutting down, or changes to government policies that affect
| residents. Maybe you're in a farming community and there's a
| big corporate buyout that's going to make your life more
| difficult, or something to celebrate. What about new parks
| opening up, or changes to traffic flow, or even, a new stop
| light being added at a dangerous intersection.
|
| These are all things people locally care about, and true, they
| probably wouldn't actively seek them out, but having it on the
| front page of their news source would definitely be interesting
| enough to read.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Wait, i thought "Nextdoor" etc were filling that niche with
| neighborhood vigilance and "my neighbor's sunflower is spying on
| me" posts. Also recall lots of words about how "filter bubbles"
| are bad and all forums must be acceptable to all society so that
| "badthink" doesn't grow.
|
| There's real, local and or interest focus forums still; I'm sure.
| Those enjoying them aren't gonna wanna talk about them much for
| fear they get ruined by strangers who "know whats best."
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _Those enjoying them aren 't gonna wanna talk about them much
| for fear they get ruined by strangers who "know whats best."_
|
| This is absolutely a thing. I have servers hosted on my local
| _tiny_ ISP that only permit my local ISP 's CIDR blocks as
| there is really no need for others to access them. It's
| literally for the local community. I might set up a VPN
| endpoint for people that travel some day.
| anewpersonality wrote:
| webdoodle wrote:
| It's called Operation Mockingbird, which is coordinated at the
| yearly Billionaire's Summer Camp, A.K.A. the Sun Valley
| Conference, in Ketchum Idaho. This conference is where all the
| heads of the media companies come to get there marching orders
| and to further consolidate the media industry (See Disney).
| Parasites like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Peter
| Theil, and many others attend this meeting.
|
| FYI - Ketchum Idaho is a small Ski resort community that sits in
| a very tight box canyon. 8 Bigs rigs could barricade the entire
| town, just by blocking a few bridges, or alternatively those
| points could be used by peaceful protestors to haze and voice
| there discontent to the very parasites that have destroyed this
| country and enslaved the minds of the masses. The weapons grade
| psychological warfare they conduct on us is being ignored by the
| politicians in Washington (both parties) because they also use
| those techniques to keep themselves in power.
|
| Now is the time to rise up against the lies and deceit. Please
| come join me in Sun Valley on July 6th, to shine some truth on
| the cretins that have buried us in disinformation and war
| propaganda.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Is there a point where Americans will give up on the Union or
| will it take a Yugoslavia war?
| bee_rider wrote:
| If part of the country tried to split off, who'd go fight to
| take it back? I'm happy my successful state sends money to some
| of the less successful ones, because I think every American
| deserves their share of the pot, but I'm not going to go die
| for the privilege of sending it.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Can't honestly say I know anyone outside of my parents who reads
| the newspaper. Sounds like the newspaper is dying, not local news
| that has shifted to be digital.
| [deleted]
| sbf501 wrote:
| Still need journalists though, even for digital.
| pgrote wrote:
| >local news that has shifted to be digital.
|
| Our local newspaper has a few actual journalists reporting on
| what is happening in government at city, county and state
| level. Just a few since all the layoffs. Sports is hanging on,
| but has been taken over by The Athletic.
|
| Real journalism concerning business, arts and suburb cities is
| gone. The only time it is legitimately covered is if it is
| being covered elsewhere by local TV stations.
|
| The newspaper website is a malignant entity infecting everyone
| with trackers and ads.
|
| They are attempting video, but it lacks the content and
| production of even a mildly successful youtube creator.
|
| I still subscribe to the digital product to help support the
| remaining journalists.
| Clubber wrote:
| >"This is a crisis for our democracy and our society," said
| Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and
| primary author of the report, in a statement.
|
| Why is everything a crisis now? The crying of wolf gets tiresome
| and it makes it easy to tune out, probably to the detriment of
| local newspapers.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| Why is the closure of local news considered spurred by the
| pandemic though??
|
| I personally stopped reading news outlets after the first Trump
| year. Every single news outlet was full of exactly the same Trump
| vitriol ( I lean left so, not strange ). And to make it worse, I
| am not even american in the US.
|
| Why read the exact same opEd in the local and the state news?? At
| least in my home country, since about 1 year after Trump I pretty
| much scaled from maybe 5 outlets to 2. Since covid times I read
| one left and one right ( I used to only read left ) and then
| subscribe to weekly papers that support investigative journalism.
| Honestly I feel local news shot themselves in the foot with Trump
| hysteria.
|
| Or maybe it was already in decline and Trump times just made it
| that much more evident.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Or maybe it was already in decline and Trump times just made
| it that much more evident._
|
| I think it's this one. Local news has been in a death spiral
| for 20 years at least, I distinctly remember adults in the late
| 90s and early 00s bemoaning the demise of all the local papers,
| with one left standing but also dying. During Trump times they
| latched onto reporting about national news instead of local in
| a desperate bid for relevancy, but obviously couldn't compete
| with national news.
| FerretFred wrote:
| It's the same in the UK, by and large. We have a small group of
| <strikeout>advertisement sellers</strikeout> news media companies
| that absorb local papers and churn out overly-similar content
| with different newspaper names on the front page. The online
| versions of these are sooooo bad - practically no actual written
| content with any depth, interspersed with video "articles" which
| incorporate more ads. Then try and find the actual news in among
| the clickbait links. Want better access? "Simply register and
| answer some suspiciously personal questions"...
|
| I tried to do some research recently: could I consult their
| archives? "Nothing older than a couple of years", so no.
| Photographers? "If you have photos or videos please upload them
| to us". Timely coverage of local issues? "You won't believe what
| British Seniors aged 55-plus are buying today!!"
|
| As far as I'm concerned they can crash and burn, and maybe groups
| of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local newspapers,
| albeit online only.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> groups of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local
| newspapers_
|
| Social media is the killer, because in a perfect world it would
| serve precisely this purpose. But instead of replicating the
| means of production for each locality, you share one globally -
| which also helps concerned readers from different geographies
| pool their resources. A fine vision, and its true, but we see
| now how severe the downside is: the dissociation of reader from
| event is the wiggle room in which professional rhetoricians can
| form new and exciting memetic viruses. And virtually no-one has
| the psychic immune system to wade through it on a daily basis
| and not get infected with _something_. These viruses are
| designed to serve a narrow aim, and the side-effects are
| ignored, and this is what leads to the meltdown we have now.
|
| Of course, a simple behavior change can help: pay attention to
| news in proportion to its physical proximity to you! The knee-
| jerk reaction to see a national or global trend when anything
| bad happens is bad for the soul. We should be open to seeing
| trends, of course, but only slightly. At least a little bit of
| stubborn resistance to inferring a trend from two anecdotes is
| good for the soul, I think.
| [deleted]
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| My local news site has byline titles including 'Multimedia
| Reporter' and 'SEO Journalist'.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Who watches or reads local news? I haven't watched for years.
| Close to two decades. My guess is specific demographics. It's
| selection bias.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| How do you figure out what's going on around you then? Word of
| mouth (online or otherwise)?
| windowsrookie wrote:
| For me word of mouth I suppose. If I don't hear about it from
| somebody else, it probably wasn't worth knowing.
|
| I think all this "news" people read/watch is mostly useless
| filler. I don't miss any of it.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I use local newspaper articles online and Reddit, but I
| mostly _don 't_ figure out what's going on around me. :D
| seereadhack wrote:
| Axios is expanding into local news coverage. This is their PR and
| wow the bullet point approach sometimes really just doesn't do it
| for me.
|
| For a more involved take of the underlying topic, consider _News
| for the Rich, White, and Blue_ by Nikki Usher.
| http://cup.columbia.edu/book/news-for-the-rich-white-and-blu...
|
| I don't agree with all of Usher's takeaways but there's a lot of
| good stuff in there. And as to the headline - yeah, sure, the
| "local news crisis" is partly causative in the polarization sure
| but lazy and biased coverage can compound all sorts of nasty
| dynamics.
|
| While I'm here, Mark Lamont-Hill and Todd Brewster's _Seen and
| Unseen_ would be my pick for a recent media read. Lots of great
| history, recent and less so, as well as analysis:
| https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Seen-and-Unseen/Marc-...
| pqdbr wrote:
| If, like me, you read "Axios" as that js library, and PR as
| Pull Request, you too, my friend, need to take a break.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I don't know what the "solution" is, but it was really obvious
| when my "local" paper turned into a repeater for CNN. It used to
| be pretty poor, but it was never this bad. I don't subscribe it
| to him particularly, but this Trump-Era literally broke a lot of
| people's brains, it has a downstream effect.
| whatever1 wrote:
| It unpleasant to watch journalists who were screaming every day
| that the guy is tearing apart almost every US institution and
| irrecoverably destroys this country, with the ultimate goal of
| him staying in power.
|
| The journalists have seen these stories from other failed
| states, and they cannot unsee the similarities. And they were
| right. Just take a look at the proceedings of the Jan 6th
| committee. If it was not a dozen of people in the correct roles
| (mostly Republicans), on Jan 6th, he could had indeed achieved
| his goal.
|
| It is us who were closing our eyes for 4 years, reassuring
| ourselves that his presidency was a normal presidency.
|
| Nothing was normal.
| irrational wrote:
| I feel like, in some ways, Nextdoor has stepped into this void.
| I've even noticed that the local city government uses Nextdoor to
| try to get messages out. However, most of the content on Nextdoor
| is a dumpster fire: what were those police sirens for? What was
| that loud noise? Look at this ring doorbell video of this person
| that was trying my doorknob at 3am! Our car was stolen at 5am!
| These homeless camps are really driving down our property values!
| I saw coyotes walking down the street! These fireworks are
| upsetting Snookums!
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| >Look at this ring doorbell video of this person that was
| trying my doorknob at 3am! Our car was stolen at 5am!
|
| Both of those seem relevant to me if they're in my neighborhood
| or nearby. Crime is low where I live but when it happens, it
| tends to happen in sprees when one person or a small group of
| people get away with one thing and suddenly decide they can get
| away with it repeatedly. If there's a pattern of activity going
| on, I'd like to know about.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yeah, we used nextdoor to get back some stuff taken from our
| car. Apparently they walked across our small city and
| took/left stuff as they went along.
| havblue wrote:
| Nextdoor posts about crime almost always contain a reaction
| that normalizes it in one horrific way or another. Like if
| people complain about their car being broken into, someone
| always says that they should just leave their doors unlocked.
|
| If someone complains about their political signs being stolen
| it results in someone condemning the content of their stolen
| sign or complaints like, "yeah but signs on (opposite side of
| issue) get stolen all the time and you don't see us complaining
| about it!" So even on the local level it turns into neighbor
| versus neighbor easily despite careful moderation.
| parkingrift wrote:
| Attempted entry at 3am, grand theft auto, homeless camps, and
| coyotes? These are your examples of NextDoor toxicity?
|
| These are downright useful things to know. I've seen comical
| behavior on NextDoor. If it was just people warming me about
| coyotes I'd still have the app installed.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I can't imagine having the level of paranoia as Nextdoor
| posters, that shit would break me.
|
| On the other hand ,I find myself not doing certain things I'd
| like to do, like evening walks around the neighborhood because
| some shut in might call the cops on me.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| I don't understand why whose types of nextdoor posts are a
| dumpster fire? Those seem like exactly the kind of things
| people actually care about. If I hear a car crash down the
| street I'm gonna go take a look.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Well for one thing, all of the things GP mentioned are fear-
| based posts. Furthermore, they attract the worst types of
| responses, which then sucks in empathetic posters who
| unwittingly respond to trolls and leads pretty directly to
| arguments. At least that's what I've witnessed the few times
| I've logged in to check on things of local interest.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I agree those examples are bad. I usually see something like
| "weird car I don't recognize is in the neighborhood!!!!", And
| ofc the explanation cant be something simple, like visiting
| friends or family, someone checking out homes for sale,
| someone got a new car, etc. It's obviously a cunning criminal
| staking out the place in broad daylight.
| b3nji wrote:
| rr808 wrote:
| Its worth subscribing to (yes Paying!) a local newspaper or two
| if you can find any that are decent. Especially local politicians
| really need some journalists to investigate and report on what
| they're up to.
| jollybean wrote:
| My bet is that this education ratio issue has existed since the
| dawn of time.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Among the interesting developments is the growing set of non-
| profit newsrooms.
|
| There are the venerable institutions of PBS and NPR in the US,
| broadcasting on television and radio respectively, as well as
| increasingly online through video and podcasts.
|
| ProPublica is probably the best known of the recent arrivals,
| providing investigative journalism at a national level.
|
| I'd submitted a couple of items on Chicago's public radio
| station, WBEZ, acquiring one of the city's two remaining daily
| print papers, the _Sun Times_.
|
| https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/1/18/22890454/chicago-sun-...
|
| The other, the _Tribune_ , was acquired by the vampire-capital
| firm Alden Capital somewhat over a year ago and has been emitting
| coronal mass ejections of reporters, columnists, and staff,
| since, though many curiously remain on the paper's masthead...).
|
| WBEZ didn't pay for the acquisition, _it was paid to take over
| the paper_. Which might tell you something of the market for
| print news media presently.
|
| Another notable example is the _Baltimore Banner_ , which
| officially launched two weeks ago on June 14. It's another non-
| profit, is looking to expand to 70 journalists. It is online-
| only.
|
| https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-banner-offic...
|
| But both the _Sun Times_ and the _Banner_ are _big-city papers_.
| They 're _not_ papers reaching into small towns and rural areas,
| in which the news desert truly exists.
|
| I see two possible paths forward. One is for news-as-public-good,
| in which jouranlism is publicly (and preferably locally)
| supported. Another is a return to the partisan press of the past,
| notably the 19th and early 20th centuries. Given the dominance of
| right-wing talk radio, Fox, OANN, Breitbart, and similar
| organisations, it seems at least one political party is already
| largely there.
| tootie wrote:
| I work in non-profit media and it's really tough. Getting funds
| from membership is an uphill battle. Executive comp is much
| lower than private media, but at the same time it's
| relentlessly criticized for being too high because the numbers
| are disclosed. The Baltimore Banner exists based on the
| personal largesse of one person who tried and failed to buy the
| Baltimore Sun so it's going to have a hard time maintaining
| impartiality or surviving in a competitive market.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Largely agreed, known, and understood. See also my reply
| here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981720
| jeffbee wrote:
| We also enjoy a local not-for-profit news organization called
| _Cityside_ which covers Oakland and Berkeley, which together is
| a city about the same size as Baltimore. "Local reporters" who
| are on the staff of the SF Chronicle and Bay Area News Group,
| the local legacy newspaper organizations, are always whining on
| Twitter about how locals don't support news any more, but the
| existence of these successful, award-winning nonprofit news
| outlets shows that people will support good reporting, but they
| won't support more of the same thing the big newspapers have
| been doing for decades.
| carapace wrote:
| In SF there was briefly something called The Bay Citizen that
| was funded by Warren Hellman.
|
| > The Bay Citizen was a non-profit news organization covering
| the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded as the Bay Area
| News Project in January 2010 with money provided by Warren
| Hellman's Hellman Family Foundation. On May 26, 2010 the
| organization launched the website, baycitizen.org.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bay_Citizen
|
| But he passed away and it merged with the Center for
| Investigative Reporting.
|
| > The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit
| news organization based in Emeryville, California.[1] It was
| founded in 1977 as the nation's first nonprofit investigative
| journalism organization, and has since grown into a multi-
| platform newsroom, with investigations published on the
| Reveal website, public radio show and podcast, video pieces
| and documentaries and social media platforms, reaching over a
| million people weekly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Investigative_Repor.
| ..
| jeffbee wrote:
| I really think that anything started by a bazillionaire as
| an instant nonprofit enterprise is bound to fail. It goes
| for Warren Hellman and Mitch Kapor and the rest of them.
| Those that start with an immediately sustainable business
| model, like Cityside, seem to persist.
| ilamont wrote:
| In my city, the local chamber of commerce put together a plan
| for a nonprofit local news website, something that is truly
| needed for the reasons cited in TFA. However, while the virtual
| masthead proclaims "Independent. Accurate. Unbiased." the board
| of directors is made up mostly of wealthy property developers
| and people connected with the local real estate industry.
| There's no way they won't put their thumbs on the scale when it
| comes to vetting the chief editor, providing coverage of
| community meetings around development, and endorsing candidates
| for mayor and city council.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You have the same problem with commercial newspapers, though.
| The L.A. Times is nothing more than a 100-year-long real
| estate pump and dump. Almost every newspaper in America
| relies on car dealer ads, and will therefore never say
| anything even slightly negative about cars. Cars and real
| estate have had their thumbs and the rest of their hand on
| the scale for a long time.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Look especially to the Harrison Gray Otis and Harry
| Chandler eras.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times#Otis_era
|
| Or other papers / publishers --- William Randolph Hearst (
| _Citizen Kane_ wasn 't just whistling Dixie), or Robert
| McCormick and the _Chicago Tribune_.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| The Baltimore Banner's first few stories have been absolutely
| amazing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Non-profits are funded by people (possibly lots of people with
| a little money, but far more usually a couple of people with a
| lot of money) who have interests, or by foundations that are
| funded directly and completely by government. They are not
| news-as-public-good.
|
| Non-profit doesn't mean "benevolent charity."
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This is true, though the point is more that news organisation
| _don 't seem to be possible to run as for-profit entities_ in
| the long run.
|
| I'm well aware of issues with not-for-profit / NGO
| organisation and charity:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31493135
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28044444
|
| And specifically addressing information / publishing:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27802315
| ezekiel11 wrote:
| mpclark wrote:
| The explanation is really, really easy though. Nearly all the
| advertising has gone away. There's no money in the business
| past chum boxes now. And the same is happening to the trade
| press and specialist magazines and all the other good media
| things we used to have. Not all progress is forward progress.
| ezekiel11 wrote:
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Is hyper-local news necessary anymore? If you think about the
| role that newspapers filled it was to distribute information
| broadly. We have many more ways of doing that now. Granted they
| aren't as fully developed as newspapers eventually became but we
| seem to be on track to build these new institutions. I think
| we're simply in a transitional phase where the old medium is
| dying and being replaced by a new one that is growing into its
| role.
| ck2 wrote:
| Media doesn't make the divide. Ideology makes the divide.
|
| People don't drive around urban in massive trucks rolling coal
| and/or own a dozen guns because of their news source, their news
| source is because of what their "world view" is.
| padseeker wrote:
| I totally agree with this, and I don't know why you are getting
| so many downvotes. When Fox news called Arizona for Biden, many
| of their viewers were mad and there were anti fox news protests
| because their typical audience was mad they weren't being told
| what they wanted to hear.
|
| In a capitalist nation where supply and demand is everything,
| some people treat the news and facts and information like a
| product, and when people hear things they don't like they'll
| find someone else to give them stories they want to hear like
| Trump won massively and this election was stolen.
| xbar wrote:
| Not everyone can be right. Without the media to tell people
| that they are right, how else will they know?
|
| The reinforcement and advertising loops are real and effective
| at creating and expanding the divide.
|
| Perhaps you don't recall a time before there was such a thing
| as Fox News. Back when the hardest new choice was: Dan Rather,
| Peter Jennings, or Tom Brokaw?
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >Not everyone can be right. Without the media to tell people
| that they are right, how else will they know?
|
| Not every media corporation can be right.
| BrainVirus wrote:
| anovikov wrote:
| Not very relevant to the topic but maybe not all is lost for the
| print media.
|
| I have switched away from online news to the print ones in the
| last few months because:
|
| - this way i can avoid popups, jumping pieces of content
| intentionally distracting me so i pay attention to ads
|
| - ads are not as stupid there (i don't live in the U.S. and i see
| US-centric ads which are totally, completely out of relevance to
| my demographic - from "senior living homes" to private jet
| flights - with every kind of crazy shit in between but nothing i
| ever buy or can think of buying)
|
| - content itself is a lot better edited, not clickbait-y (because
| you can't fucking click on paper!) and overall seems to be
| written by actually literate people, not some peasants that seem
| to write online news pieces recently
|
| All in all, it dawns at me that at least for now, the Internet
| has been a failure. It failed to deliver any positive life
| changes we've been promised 25 years ago, and brought about many
| negative ones. There are only two online resources relevant to me
| that seem to make any positive value: Tinder and Upwork. Even of
| them, Upwork seems to be a detriment to developed nations
| (including U.S. that created it), serving mostly as a vehicle of
| scams for fraudsters from the poor ones.
|
| Buying tickets online? It killed the airline industry. I can't
| fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i
| can't afford. This is directly because of Internet facilitating
| price comparison, and people "optimising" airlines by price alone
| down to the drain.
|
| Trading stocks online? Only brought about day traders - one more
| form of gambling. I'd be more than happy to go to the bank and
| buy a paper mutual fund certificate, and lock it up in my safe.
|
| News online brought "targeting" and "optimisation" through search
| bubbles and as a result, a society destroyed by political
| divisions.
|
| Taxis online? Only a benefit in poor countries or in terribly
| terribly overregulated ones in rich countries (think NYC). They
| killed livelihoods of millions of people and killed quality of
| service elsewhere.
|
| The list goes on. Internet seems to be more than just a failure -
| it is a pure evil. It confronted us with ourselves (as opposed to
| some polished, educated, even if overly rigid, central authority
| that served as an interface before), and we turned out to be
| monsters we had no idea we were.
|
| And because this thing has no way out of it, i am terrified at
| the realisation that only thing that can save us may be some form
| of communism, where the State will simply ban or mandate so many
| things it will not be a market economy anymore.
|
| Including, most probably, a ban on free speech. I can't see a way
| for free speech to work in a world of search bubbles and online
| anonymity. Craziest conspiracy theories will inevitably replace
| reality for a vast majority of people - who vote - this way.
|
| And democracy without free speech is a joke.
| gruez wrote:
| >I have switched away from online news to the print ones in the
| last few months because:
|
| >- content itself is a lot better edited, not clickbait-y
| (because you can't fucking click on paper!) and overall seems
| to be written by actually literate people, not some peasants
| that seem to write online news pieces recently
|
| clickbait might not be a thing, but attention grabbing
| headlines to get you to read/buy the paper is still a thing.
| Besides, most (all?) major news publications have an online
| presence, and they're they're probably sharing
| stories/headlines between the print/online formats so I doubt
| there would be any difference in quality.
|
| >There are only two online resources relevant to me that seem
| to make any positive value: Tinder and Upwork.
|
| Not wikipedia, google maps, or e-commerce? It seems like many
| of the things that the internet provides have been so integral
| to your life that you've forgotten about them.
|
| >Buying tickets online? It killed the airline industry. I can't
| fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private jet, which i
| can't afford. This is directly because of Internet facilitating
| price comparison, and people "optimising" airlines by price
| alone down to the drain.
|
| 1. Google flights provides legroom in addition to prices.
| you're free to compare on price and comfort here.
|
| 2. I'm not sure how the alternative (not having comparison
| shopping) is any better. Are you just hoping that the
| benevolent airlines would always put customer comfort above
| profits?
|
| >Trading stocks online? Only brought about day traders - one
| more form of gambling. I'd be more than happy to go to the bank
| and buy a paper mutual fund certificate, and lock it up in my
| safe.
|
| Disagree. Now I can buy ETFs with management fees in the single
| basis points (eg. 0.03% for VTI) with zero trading fees. In the
| past I'd either have to contend with mutual funds with
| exorbitant management fees (1-2%), or pay $50-$100 per trade.
| anovikov wrote:
| >Not wikipedia, google maps, or e-commerce?
|
| Google maps yes. You got me on that. Wikipedia, well, sort
| of, yes... it had a good beginning but is losing
| trustworthiness as it's being exploited more and more, it's
| surely a good source of info, still. e-commerce - i bought
| stuff online maybe 3-4x in my life (rare items that are never
| stocked in shops). Food delivery apps are a particularly
| notorious kind of evil, killing good businesses first.
|
| Flights - it's not just the legroom. Because people started
| picking on the price, airlines had to get rid of business
| class or make it very flexible in size (meaning - use crappy
| "transformer" seats that can switch back to economy when
| needed). Or just simply leave middle seat empty and call it
| business. When price wasn't the only variable people chose
| tickets by, airlines could be a lot more comfortable with
| their costs and tried to sell premium product first - which
| is natural for every other normal business, premium product
| by definition brings higher margins. It's not just what i
| choose, it's what other people choose. Here in EU, we simply
| don't have any decent business class anywhere anymore.
|
| Stocks - ETFs were a thing before internet and they don't
| require it. Vanguard exists since 1975 and it's fee structure
| didn't change since.
| skissane wrote:
| > I can't fly comfortably anymore unless i get that private
| jet, which i can't afford.
|
| Huh? Pick a decent airline, and long haul international
| business class is pretty comfortable. First, I hear, is even
| better. Expensive, but a heckuva lot less so than a private
| jet.
| acd wrote:
| Younger generations need to pay for news. Local news is important
| for democracy since local news feeds alerts national news.
|
| Ad networks by providing news for free is destroying democracy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| How does one incentivize this? Because younger generations
| ain't gonna do it for charity reasons; they don't have surplus
| income to donate to charity.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Bring back pay per newspaper vending machines? They were
| awful and broken all the time before, and now they're just
| free. If it's cheap entertainment, I'd rather pay for that
| than iTunes movies.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If people were willing to pay for them, why would they have
| been made free in the first place?
| ironmagma wrote:
| Probably because it's cheaper to give them away than to
| keep repairing haphazardly designed vending machines.
| Maybe they should just make them like the snack vending
| machines.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Based on the fact that newspaper businesses had many,
| many decades to come up with a better machine, I would
| assume the cost of developing this machine is not worth
| it.
| ironmagma wrote:
| That's sort of ex-post-facto reasoning though. By that
| logic, there's nothing that could save the newspapers,
| because they had decades to do it and they didn't.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is not the reasoning.
|
| The reasoning is for decades, newspapers sold many papers
| and made a decent amount of money, compared to today.
|
| Therefore, the incentive to create better machines that
| allow them to sell more and prevent theft was higher then
| than today, and yet they did not.
|
| Either the technology did not exist back then, or more
| likely, it simply was not worth the cost of better
| machines for the additional revenue.
|
| Therefore, if it was not worth it back when newspapers
| were in high demand, why would it be worth developing
| today at a fraction of the demand?
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > How does one incentivize this?
|
| "Local influencers" needs to become a thing, if it isn't
| already. That's the answer to the local news problem. If you
| want to know how to become a successful influencer just ask
| the popular kids at a school. Yes quality of content matters,
| but there's a mystical charisma component at the center of
| it.
|
| Once local influencers have been established in an area then
| quality can gradually take on more of a role. Those who
| provide sensationalistic news will get their crowd, but some
| (hopefully those with citations, less sensationalism, and
| less bias) will eventually gain the status of "trustworthy".
| And over time some will gain enough popularity to start
| looking more like a normal business again, with local
| sponsorships and the whole thing.
|
| This may seem a bit depressing at first but it's completely
| normal. As publication relies less and less on expensive
| machinery and elaborate organizations it will naturally
| gravitate toward individuals. Conglomerates like Sinclair
| only exist to pick on the carcasses of dead mediums.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _" Local influencers" needs to become a thing, if it
| isn't already. That's the answer to the local news problem_
|
| If that's the answer, then I hope the whole industry curls
| up and dies now. If you want me to pay a single cent for
| trash like that, you'd have to stick a gun in my face.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I'm just being a realist, and I'm not suggesting people
| will pay. I realize "influencer" is a trigger word, but
| not all of them are Tik Tok dancers and vapid teens. I
| lump people like YouTubers in here. They've learned how
| to make money from sponsorships, and maybe that sort of
| thing can happen at a local level too. And hopefully with
| written media of some sort (written, not printed... so
| blogs).
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| Paying for twitter screenshots?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem is, many of our generation _can 't afford_ to pay
| for local news that we barely have the time and the mental
| energy to consume after working 10 or more hours and then
| commuting. No, cutting our Netflix and switching it to some
| local paper won't work either, because we don't need to engage
| our brains with some random Netflix stuff.
|
| In contrast, pensioners have more than enough free time to read
| the news and vote - as evidenced by just about every voter
| turnout statistic.
|
| Want to fix politics? Make it possible for young people to
| actually engage with democracy again.
| [deleted]
| tgv wrote:
| > In contrast, pensioners have more than enough free time to
| read the news and vote
|
| Not with that attitude. I'm reading a newspaper since I was
| 14. If they don't make time to read a newspaper, they're just
| not interested. Don't try to sugarcoat it with some pointless
| victimization.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| How many hours did you have to work to afford a place to
| live, back then? Did that change somehow?
|
| If so, how can that affect the time left to entertain
| oneself and read about the news? Also, how was the news
| back then? Was it all about making marketing profile and
| click-baiting?
| meatsauce wrote:
| You think politics is going to change the affordability?
|
| When have they ever done such a thing?
|
| Historically, politicians have moved that needle in only
| one direction.
|
| As if some magic politician is going to suddenly give you
| other people's money to pay rent?
|
| Get a good job.
|
| If you can't get a good job, then get some real
| marketable skills.
|
| If you still can't get a job, then start a business.
| meatsauce wrote:
| We already have enough youthful political activists that are
| 100% disconnected from the real world.
|
| Why would we want the youngest, least experienced, most
| ideological, and frequently petulant to elect leaders?
|
| More youth voters won't fix a thing. It will, in fact, make
| things a lot worse.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Instead we should elect geriatrics, who can barely speak up
| half the time, or look like they're about to collapse from
| good old American heart disease any minute.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Worse for whom?
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Sometimes I walk by the TV while my mother is watching the
| local news. It seems to always just be reporting about
| thefts/gunshots downtown, then some new product available,
| followed by 15 minutes of weather and sports. I don't find much
| value in any of that information.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Not local really but I bit the bullet on NY Times, WSJ,
| Bloomberg
|
| I miiight do LA Times (doubt)
|
| Paywall circumvention doesnt work well/at all on mobile
|
| I agree that ad bombing eyeball news is very low quality in
| comparison to subscription news. Its a night and day
| difference. Its distressing that nobody else I know can really
| see or access these articles, being pulled by every clickbait
| version of an event
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Do you live in NY or DC? Otherwise this is pretty much the
| opposite of supporting local news.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Yes the opposite of local but congruent with paying at all
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >Younger generations need to pay for news.
|
| Add it to the list of things that younger generations are
| somehow required to purchase.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-are-killing-list...
| juanani wrote:
| djfobbz wrote:
| Yet no mention of Operation Mockingbird!
| irrational wrote:
| The what?
| georgia_peach wrote:
| Are the towns busted because they no longer have propagandists?
| Or, did the propagandists move on after the towns had already
| been bled dry, & were no longer worth the effort?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
|
| I'm old and from the city. The newspaper has always been a
| puppet of hospitals, real estate brokerages, & car dealerships.
| Part of how these companies get away with murder is by putting
| the entirety of local media, print & broadcast, in their back
| pockets.
|
| Unless you're paying something in the ballpark of Bloomberg
| terminal prices, you're the product.
| rayiner wrote:
| The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330
| million people is toxic. We're one country but we don't share a
| single set of values. Even the notion of "blue America" and "red
| America" is misleading. What would be unremarkable in San
| Francisco would raise eyebrows in Baltimore.
|
| I noticed this acutely living in Atlanta for the better part of a
| decade. Politics was not a big deal when I lived there. Atlanta
| was "blue" and the rest of the state was "red" but politics was
| forward looking and productive. The mayor when I was there,
| Shirley Franklin, was truly put the city above partisanship. A
| Democrat, she endorsed Mary Norwood, an independent, in 2017,
| because the Democratic candidate was a protege of a mayor she
| believed to have been corrupt: https://www.wabe.org/former-
| atlanta-mayor-shirley-franklin-e.... She waved aside criticism
| suggesting that she (a Black woman) should have endorsed the
| Black Democratic candidate instead of Norwood, a white woman.
|
| Then in 2018 all hell broke loose when Georgia's governor's race
| became the subject of national attention. The state became a
| battleground in a proxy war between New York and Mississippi.
| Racialist rhetoric reached a fever pitch in the New York Times
| and Washington Post (but notably, the Atlanta Journal
| Constitution was far more prudent). They made Georgia out to be
| an unreformed Confederate backwater, instead of a state that's
| the destination for huge numbers of Black residents leaving
| California, Illinois, and New York, attracted by plentiful jobs,
| low taxes, and an excellent public university system. The
| national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the people
| in it to the rest of the country.
| dopylitty wrote:
| > They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate
| backwater
|
| They wouldn't be wrong. For example in April 2021 a black woman
| from Md was drummed out of a wealthy town in GA for the crime
| of being black and an educator[0]. This is the kind of thing
| that happens all the time in the south and west.
|
| 0. https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-
| schools-p...
| overboard2 wrote:
| >Cecelia Lewis was asked to apply for a Georgia school
| district's first-ever administrator job devoted to diversity,
| equity and inclusion.
|
| They disagreed with her politics.
| halostatue wrote:
| She _had_ no politics that they knew of. They disagreed
| with willful misrepresentations of politics that she had
| never expressed, and felt that they could get away with it
| because of race politics in Georgia.
|
| And they did.
| Ferrotin wrote:
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Being willing to be part of a DEI office is politics,
| just like choosing to be a commissar rather than an
| artillery officer is politics. It's deeply unfortunate
| that Ms Lewis was unaware of that but it's going to
| become clear over the next decade or two of backlash that
| DEI is a loser, politically. People are going to either
| attack it or dissociate from it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Are you saying that being asked to apply for a job is a
| political act?
| overboard2 wrote:
| >At first, the scope of the role gave Lewis pause. In her
| current district, these responsibilities were split among
| several people, and she'd never held a position dedicated
| to anything as specific as that before. But she had
| served on the District Equity Leadership Team in her
| Maryland county and felt prepared for this new challenge.
| She believed the job would allow her, as she put it, to
| analyze the district's "systemic and instructional
| practices" in order to better support "the whole child."
| Ferrotin wrote:
| _-david-_ wrote:
| She was drummed out of town because she was supporting DEI
| and CRT, not because she was black.
|
| Did you read the article?
|
| "This is not about the color of her skin. It's what she's
| going to bring into our district and what she's going to
| teach our children"
| hgsgm wrote:
| halostatue wrote:
| Your statement suggests that you did _not_ actually read
| the article.
|
| She was drummed out of town because white radical
| Republicans made up positions that the educator in question
| did not hold and had never hold (that you can pretend to
| talk about CRT with respect to primary or secondary school
| is indicative that you have bought into the propaganda; it
| is a post-graduate law school concept, unless you're a
| radical republican hell bent on fighting anything that does
| anything other than support a white supremacist distortion
| of history).
|
| The reality is that the moment someone in Georgia says
| "this is not about the colour of her skin", it's about the
| colour of her skin. Everything about what she was going to
| "bring into" the district was fabricated out of whole cloth
| and had nothing to do with either (a) anything the educator
| in question had said or (b) anything the educator in
| question had been hired for.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >She was drummed out of town because white radical
| Republicans made up positions that the educator in
| question did not hold and had never hold
|
| Assuming that is true, that may or may not have to do
| with race. Please provide proof race had anything to do
| with this.
|
| >that you can pretend to talk about CRT with respect to
| primary or secondary school is indicative that you have
| bought into the propaganda; it is a post-graduate law
| school concept, unless you're a radical republican hell
| bent on fighting anything that does anything other than
| support a white supremacist distortion of history).
|
| CRT is clearly being used as a generic term and not a
| college level idea. Maybe we should have two separate
| terms, but similar concepts are absolutely being taught.
|
| >The reality is that the moment someone in Georgia says
| "this is not about the colour of her skin", it's about
| the colour of her skin.
|
| You are clearly bias and assume the worst in people you
| disagree with.
|
| You are doing the very thing you accuse these Georgians
| of doing.
|
| >Everything about what she was going to "bring into" the
| district was fabricated out of whole cloth and had
| nothing to do with either (a) anything the educator in
| question had said or (b) anything the educator in
| question had been hired for.
|
| Maybe, but seeing how white people pushing this get
| yelled at and kicked out as well, assuming this has
| anything to do with race is nothing more than a theory.
|
| If we ever want to solve racial tension, we need to stop
| calling everybody a racist when they disagree on
| policies.
| halostatue wrote:
| If America ever wants to solve racial tension, it needs
| to stop pretending that racial problems are fixed.
| They're not, and all the data that matters says that very
| clearly (compare health outcomes, relative poverty,
| educational outcomes, incarceration rates, etc. across
| racial groups in America, and Black Americans are
| _consistently_ in the worst groups for each of those--
| this is indicative of _systemic_ problems that the
| racists in power don't want addressed).
|
| > CRT is clearly being used as a generic term and not a
| college level idea. Maybe we should have two separate
| terms, but similar concepts are absolutely being taught.
|
| This is utter bullshit on every level, and you should be
| ashamed of yourself for such intellectual dishonesty.
|
| There _are_ two different CRTs. There is the real thing
| (a graduate level law concept) and then there is whatever
| the Fox News Outrage Machine has created to argue
| against. What are they arguing against? Pretty much
| anything that indicates that America had a dependency on
| slave labour ( "involuntary relocation", anyone?). Pretty
| much anything that says that the Civil War was about
| keeping that slave labour. Pretty much anything that says
| that there was and _continues_ to be a white supremacy
| problem in America to the detriment of _all_ groups in
| America (see the recent decision in Wisconsin to drop a
| book about order 9066, Japanese-American internment, and
| Korematsu).
|
| Please, start thinking for yourself and stop repeating
| Fox News Outrage.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "The reality is that the moment someone in Georgia says
| "this is not about the colour of her skin", it's about
| the colour of her skin."
|
| Ironically, what you wrote is a very classical example of
| prejudice.
| halostatue wrote:
| No, what I wrote is experience. Just because I don't give
| you a detailed example of the history where I know what I
| wrote to be true does not make it less experiential.
|
| White racism in Georgia is deep and has decades of
| experience in cloaking itself in plausible deniability to
| confuse the weak-minded.
|
| Or have you never heard of Lee Atwater
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater)?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The same logic of experience drives police officers to
| draw their guns on 'suspicious' young black males. They
| are, after all, by far the most criminal demographic in
| the U.S., and most cops in racially mixed areas will have
| some bad prior experiences with them.
|
| Are they justified doing so, in your opinion? Or if not,
| where is the line where experience should stop counting?
| halostatue wrote:
| They are _not_ the most criminal demographic in the U.S.
|
| They are the most criminally _profiled_ demographic in
| the U.S.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Police-and-
| minoritie...
|
| There is absolutely no justification for the recent
| extrajudicial murder of an unarmed black motorist by cops
| who shot him 60 times.
|
| There is absolutely no justification for the murder of
| Tamir Rice.
|
| Black people in America are overpoliced. When presented
| with the same crime, Black people are _routinely_ charged
| more often, charged more _intensely_ (the number and
| severity of the charges are higher), and convicted more
| often.
|
| Your ignorance on this matter is showing.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Young black males are massively overrepresented when it
| comes to murder convictions.
|
| Are you suggesting that murders committed by other racial
| groups are routinely going unpunished, or that random
| blacks are framed for them instead of the real
| perpetrators?
|
| Because if neither, your thesis about profiling does not
| hold water. You cannot "profile" people as murderers.
| They either did that or not.
|
| I don't doubt that there _are_ some false convictions for
| murder even today, but either:
|
| a) blacks are really massively overrepresented among the
| murderers (and victims), or, if they are not,
|
| b) there is a nationwide conspiracy either not to
| investigate and punish non-black murderers, or to frame
| innocent blacks for them, that reaches the level
| necessary for massive manipulation of U.S. crime stats.
|
| B) would be an extraordinary claim that would need
| extraordinary evidence.
| 8note wrote:
| c) there is another correlation - poor people are more
| likely to be murderers and victims of murder, and there
| are other systems set up to push black people into
| poverty
| 88913527 wrote:
| It seems doubtful people are leaving California due to jobs,
| taxes, and public universities, but I would certainly believe
| it was due to cost of living. CA is the world's 5th largest
| economy, the universities are world-class, and most people are
| unwilling to give up their family, friends and life to
| establish something new simply to save a few percent on taxes.
| wrycoder wrote:
| The university system may still be world-class, but the
| public schools are definitely not. CA isn't a great place to
| live, if you are blue collar.
| nostrademons wrote:
| This is a big oversimplification the same way that the
| national news is a big oversimplification.
|
| Many of the nation's best public high schools [1] are in
| the Bay Area - Saratoga (#16), Gunn [Palo Alto] (#18),
| Lynbrook [San Jose] (#33), Paly [Palo Alto] (#34), Monta
| Vista [Cupertino] (#46), Lowell [SF] (#59), Los Altos
| (#85), Mission San Jose [San Jose] (#89), San Ramon (#96),
| Homestead [Sunnyvale] (#101), Cupertino (#105), Amador
| Valley [Pleasanton] (#112), Miramonte [Moraga] (#114),
| Mountain View (#121), Piedmont (#127), Foothill
| [Pleasanton] (#164), and this is just the top 170 out of
| 17,000 (1%). That's a huge portion of the region. SF &
| Oakland get a bad rep because a lot of their schools have
| legit problems and they're lottery assignment, so there's
| no way to avoid them other than going private. But outside
| of lower Manhattan, Silicon Valley probably has the
| greatest density of top-ranked public schools in the
| country, beating out even traditional powerhouses like
| suburban Boston and Westchester County NY.
|
| And yes, the region is a terrible place to live if you are
| blue collar, but that's because blue collar people can't
| afford to live in the region.
|
| [1] https://www.niche.com/k12/search/college-prep-public-
| high-sc...
| wrycoder wrote:
| Thank you for putting that together!
|
| I'm somewhat surprised that the highest rated were only
| #16 and #18.
|
| Virtually all of those are in elite districts. Gunn, I
| think, has a household income of $200K.
|
| Only a couple of miles away is the East Palo Alto high
| school (a charter school!), where only 12% are proficient
| in math and 52% in reading[0]. That's where the service
| workers live.
|
| Overall, California ranks poorly, around #44 [1], while
| the New England states are in the top ten, except for the
| ringer Maine at #16 [1]
|
| Blue collar can't afford to live on the coast, but they
| can elsewhere.
|
| [0] https://www.niche.com/k12/east-palo-alto-academy-
| east-palo-a...
|
| [1] https://scholaroo.com/state-education-rankings/
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's nationwide rankings, so #16 & #18 out of 17,000+ is
| pretty good.
|
| It's also worth looking at who's ahead of them. The
| listing includes charter & magnet schools which can
| select their student body. If you take them out, the only
| ones left are #3 (High Tech High School, Lincroft NJ), #4
| (Stuyvesant), and #9 (Bronx High). Those _also_ are
| magnet schools, which for some reason are not flagged as
| such in Niche 's database. Saratoga and Gunn are the #1
| and #2 general-admission high schools in the U.S, at
| least insofar as you can have $2M home prices and still
| be "general admission". #3 is Canyon Crest in San Diego.
| The next 3 are magnet schools in NYC, then there's
| University High in Irvine (#32), Lynbrook (#33), and Paly
| (#34). Take out magnet schools and _all_ of the 6 top
| general-admission public schools in the U.S. are in
| California.
|
| California uses housing policy as a weapon. It
| substitutes for border walls, charter schools, vouchers,
| militarized police, and a lot of other policies that the
| Right espouses but most of California finds abhorrent. If
| most social ills stem from being poor, one simple way to
| avoid them is to ensure that poor people cannot afford to
| live in your community.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That famous blue collar of Silicon Valley. If you're blue
| collar you couldn't afford to live in a mailbox in any of
| those towns. I don't know what you think has been
| oversimplified.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would put taxes in the cost of living column.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Taxes are only paid to the extent that you're making money.
| Cost of living hits you equally no matter how much you
| make. If you're making money, when it rises, you consider
| whether you'd rather be living in a different place for
| that price. If you're not making money, you leave (or the
| bailiffs drag you out.)
| drewcoo wrote:
| COL[1] doesn't really hit anyone directly. It's an
| abstraction based on some fictional "standard of living"
| and its costs in an area.
|
| That said, common knowledge is that it's cheaper to be
| rich than poor.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_living
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Does it not depend on how progressive / regressive the
| tax system is, and how much money the government is
| spending on things that do not benefit you?
| halostatue wrote:
| Offset by quality of life represented by the spending of
| the tax dollars.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Does quality of life, at least among the 50 U.S. states,
| really track the state taxation level?
| hgsgm wrote:
| If you are poor or go to public school, yes.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yes, possibly, but a typical HN commenter will probably
| be middle class and his/her decisions won't be based on
| the same concerns.
| abirch wrote:
| I actually have a coworker moving to California for their
| university system. Like taking his sophomore daughter and 4th
| grader and moving there.
| ta32103 wrote:
| xyzzyz wrote:
| But "most people" aren't leaving California, you need to look
| at the margin. A marginal mover might very well be swayed by
| high taxes to a significant degree. For example, when I was
| moving to the States, one major factor for choice of
| Washington over California was exactly state taxes. I also
| have friends who are planning their move out of California to
| Texas, and for them taxes also play a significant role in
| their choice. It's not only taxes that made them decide to
| move, but it's rarely only a single factor that makes people
| move.
| welshwelsh wrote:
| But taxes are trivial compared to cost of living.
|
| For example median rent in Austin is $1360 vs $4150 for San
| Francisco. Over 300% higher.
|
| On the other hand, how much higher are taxes in SF? Like
| 10% higher at most. Completely trivial.
|
| I get your point about marginal costs, but I think in
| general SF taxes contribute to making the city a more
| developed and attractive place to live and ultimately make
| people more, not less likely to move there. If the rent was
| the same nearly everyone would choose California over
| Texas.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| If you're a senior software engineer, moving from SF to
| Seattle will immediately increase your after tax income
| by $30k, even if you ignore difference in cost of living.
| This means effectively increasing your after tax income
| by 15%. That's a huge raise.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330
| million people is toxic.
|
| This. I read it somewhere a while ago that prior to information
| revolution of late 90s onwards news travelled very slowly.
| Which meant people consumed more news of happenings around
| 50KM-100KM radius of their living place. And this reduced
| exponentially with increased radius. I could totally related to
| this as when I was in school (late 80s, early 90s) I read
| physical news paper that carried mostly my district and state
| news. Once a week I would be exposed to national news and maybe
| once a month to international news.
|
| But now it's exactly reverse. I get minute by minute update on
| ongoings of Ukraine war which is half way across the world but
| have no clue about local politics. The net result being I get
| more enraged/impacted about happenings on which I have close to
| zero control but totally oblivious to things that I have
| control over such as reasons why there are so many broken roads
| in my vicinity.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>I get minute by minute update on ongoings of Ukraine war
|
| Worse than that, you get multiple often conflicting minute
| updates on on-goings <<insert current event of interest>>
| often filled with less and less facts and more sensationalism
| chasing maximum number of clicks, follows, thumb ups, likes,
| etc.
|
| This is true if it is random person, small organization, a
| non-profit, or a "trusted source" main stream media outlet
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| In the race to own digital media, we've effectively
| replaced subscription fees and stable advertising revenue
| with the crumbs of said clicks, follows, likes, etc. The
| internet adage that "if you're not paying for the product,
| you are the product" is apt here because outlets benefit
| more from being first than being right. This is a
| fundamental problem with digital journalism.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > Worse than that, you get multiple often conflicting
| minute updates on on-goings
|
| And, strangely enough, that multiplier is usually exactly
| 2.
|
| There should be serious scientific studies done as to why
| the magic American news constant is always 2. Then again,
| I'm sure people would claim those studies are biased and
| then complain about their funding.
| [deleted]
| nine_k wrote:
| I wonder if the fact that the local population has a murkier
| view of local events also has its beneficiaries.
|
| I remember stories about local corrupt politicians trying to
| silence local outlets of uncomfortable news. Now they likely
| don't even have to.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| Agree. With 330 million people I'm pretty sure you can find
| at least a few bad ones every. single. day.
|
| I'm glad we give them air time.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Exactly. Let's find a few adults behaving badly, and
| amplify it. Do we really need to hear about every shooting
| or robbery, day after day? Can't be good for our mental
| health. But apparently there is a market for it.
| jxramos wrote:
| Makes me think about those wise statements Elon Musk
| shared in the video of him at the Twitter All Hands zoom
| meeting. It was there that he contemplated the value of
| side stepping news outlets and avoiding their negative
| filters. He also questioned the reach of the negative
| social impact that receiving such negative news has on
| our wider society and the costs these news outlets place
| on us with their distorted focus.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I guarantee that corporate news is one of the top factors
| for Americans mental health crisis.
|
| Unfortunately, there's not many people willing to pay to
| advertise that fact.
|
| > apparently there is a market for it
|
| There are/were markets for many dangerous and
| exploitative things that are illegal and/or regulated.
|
| Allowing syndicated news-anchors to fuck with Americans
| en masse is more dangerous and more harmful than is
| properly acknowledged (at least, I haven't heard that
| view on the news since they last let Chomsky on).
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I agree with your remarks. Adding one aspect for thought:
|
| > We're one country but we don't share a single set of values.
|
| Problem is: from the perspective of _massification_ efforts, we
| 're all equal.
|
| The same principles that make Facebook addictive to a person in
| San Francisco also govern the psychology and neuro-chemistry of
| a kid in Miami.
|
| That holds not just to US citizens. Anywhere in the world it's
| like that.
| mbostleman wrote:
| >>We're one country but we don't share a single set of
| values.>>
|
| This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true - I
| think it's manufactured (I assume due to all mass communication
| being a large ad server that requires a quick and easy way to
| stimulate engagement - but that could be wrong too, I don't
| know). I believe, admittedly from anectodical experience, that
| we are remarkably together on values. Where we're apart is a)
| facts, and b) the tactical approach to getting our society as a
| whole to express those values (eg. trusting that if left alone
| the society will be "good" vs. trusting that codifying the
| "good" in law will genuinely reach the same end).
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| >>We're one country but we don't share a single set of
| values.
|
| > This is a popular sentiment, but I don't think it's true
|
| My personal experience is of a diverse USA. In the late 90s I
| toured the states, a gig in a different city each night then
| back to the tour bus and off to the next one by daybreak.
| Okay, not a great sampling of ordinary life because on the
| road you mostly meet audiences, people in bars, diner
| waitresses etc. But while I recall how the USA _looks_
| superficially similar (giant cars on giant roads and the same
| brand logos in every city) it 's not. I saw quite a range of
| poverty and wealth, segregation and integration, friendliness
| and aloofness, dense cities and wide open country. Much like
| travelling around Europe.
| mbostleman wrote:
| Maybe we're working off of different overloads for the word
| "values". While there is no doubt a great diversity of
| experience per all the things you mentioned, to me "values"
| is a very small set of first principles that maps closely
| (or is identical) to ethics. I believe there is little to
| no diversity in that regard.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's an easy thing to say if you reduce "values" to
| lowest common denominator ethical abstractions that are
| pretty much shared among all human beings.
|
| If you include e.g. "not wearing shoes in the house",
| "treating animals well", "Buddhist supremacy", or "proper
| lawn care" as values, however, things diverge quickly.
| m2fkxy wrote:
| Half of your examples pertain to habits rather than
| values.
| drewcoo wrote:
| I think the recent SCOTUS changes are all about core
| values, whether it's bodily autonomy, separation of
| church and state, indigenous rights, right of a suspect
| to know their rights, or the double-speak of states'
| rights when it comes to states limiting violent crime.
|
| At least some of that probably touches on your core
| values, however you state them.
|
| The partisan court has shown us how clearly the country
| is split along partisan lines. We are not the same.
|
| And I am neither of those two partisan factions.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I need to think about that. Maybe you're right. Not
| wishing to insult Americans with generalisations I'll
| just say I didn't get to know their _values_ at a deep
| level.
| hgsgm wrote:
| aeturnum wrote:
| One thing that makes this worse is the collapse of local
| information economies. Papers can no longer make money by
| acting as pay-to-post message boards for the communities they
| serve. Instead, the best way to make money is to convince
| people from outside your region to use your organization for
| their news needs. So now every paper writes news for a national
| audience and what determines the financial health of the paper
| is how effectively it can attract readers that aren't from its
| area.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Your analysis somewhat conspicuously omits the massive
| nationwide shift that was the ascendance of Trump and the far
| right over the time period you've noted. Is it reasonable to
| expect local news and politics to be insulated from such
| dramatic national shifts?
|
| I've lived in Atlanta for over two decades. What's happened in
| Atlanta politics tracks with what's happened nationwide. It is
| not strictly a function of media or a random, spontaneous
| racialization.
|
| Nor do I know anyone who feels we've been characterized as an
| "unreformed Confederate backwater". The idea that we've been so
| maligned is itself a media narrative. In fact, I live in an
| area that is staunchly conservative, majority white, and upper-
| middle class. The people I speak with abhor Trump and the style
| of politics he represents (which have been noted as favorable
| to your "unreformed Confederates"). This was visible in their
| repudiation of him in 2020, even while they voted GOP down
| balllot. It was visible again in the recent primary wherein the
| candidates Trump endorsed were largely shellacked.
|
| So, it's somehat ironic that you're bemoaning the media's role
| in mischaracterizing Georgia politics, when you seem to be a
| victim of the same, and repeating certain narratives.
|
| Likewise with your comment that black people are leaving blue
| states in droves to come to Atlanta, as if this is some recent
| phenomenon. That is simply a new right-wing media narrative
| that seeks to malign blue states and peel off support. But,
| black people have long sought Atlanta as a mecca, which has
| featured black political power for decades now and was even
| labeled an ascendant "Chocolate City" in a Parliament song of
| 1975.
|
| Perhaps there was some national media painting of Georgia.
| After all, narratives do sell. But your analysis here is
| somewhat superficial and features its own skewed media-driven
| narratives.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > the massive nationwide shift that was the ascendance of
| Trump and the far right over the time period you've noted.
|
| This never happened. What happened is that Democrats started
| to center the far-right in order to scare their constituents
| into voting, and Republicans stopped resisting Trump, who
| they were only against because he was an outsider to their
| patronage networks. The far-right haven't risen, the
| Democrats just spend all their time doing PR for them and
| trying to associate them with Trump to attract centrist
| Republican voters.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _This never happened. What happened is that Democrats
| started to center the far-right_
|
| That's a pretty remarkable statement. Trump _is_ the far
| right. Are you arguing there _hasn 't_ been a hard right
| shift in the GOP since Trump?
|
| BTW, your statement that Dems falsely centered the far
| right is actually true in the reverse. Republicans center
| folks they consider "far left", like AOC and "The Gang" as
| representative of some sort of scary communist takeover of
| Democrats. This is, of course, silly on its face. They have
| virtually no power to drive policy in the party. And, of
| course, they are not communists in any case.
|
| Add to that, Dems rejected even Bernie to nominate
| grandfatherly ol' Joe...the most moderate Dem around who,
| quaintly, still believes in bipartisanship.
|
| Other than Bernie and The Gang, the only "far left" I've
| seen is so-called "Antifa", which has no membership, but
| magically self-assembles and appears during election cycles
| to scare Republican voters to the polls before mysteriously
| dissolving again.
|
| Still, GOP ads feature ominous threats about the far left
| and communism.
|
| I get that things tend to appear mirrored from the other
| side, but there are facts. On 1/6, elements of the far
| right, to include actual militia members, did Trump's
| bidding. Their ongoing affinity for one another is no
| coincidence. He represents their interests and they clearly
| know it.
| treis wrote:
| >Trump is the far right
|
| The guy was a Democrat for most of his life.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _The guy was a Democrat for most of his life._
|
| Well, he's not now, is he?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Like the other commenter said, the current Republican
| framing of "it's not us that changed, it's liberals!" is
| revisionist nonsense. All of the previous most popular
| Republicans in the last 15 years, Bush Jr (president),
| Romney, McCain (presidential nominees) all despised Trump,
| the current direction of the far right usurping the party,
| and are/were basically voting Democrat now because they're
| scared of the far right's threat far more than centrist
| Obama/Biden positions. FFS, Republican cheerleader #1
| Tucker has been praising Russia:
| https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1497035201196617733
| yojo wrote:
| As a citizen of Portland, OR, I can verify that national news
| outlets heavily distort reality to draw eyeballs.
|
| I'm not sure local news is a whole lot better, but at least you
| can count on readers to call bullshit.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Yep. I've been in PDX for 22 years. Back during the BLM
| protests, my FOX-loving family back east would call me and
| see if I was OK whenever FOX ran some bullshit story about
| the city burning.
|
| Once you step outside Portland, it is terrifyingly red.
| Jefferson Secessionists are the scariest. I've been harassed
| in small towns outside PDX when I go camping and they see the
| PSU parking stickers on my car. Heck, I met a guy at a bar in
| Plush, Ore., who was telling me how he and his buddies made
| sure no black people ever set foot in his town. And this was
| in 2018.
|
| Also, KATU news is owned by Sinclair Media. Even OregonLive
| is dubious. Willamette Week, The Mercury, and OPB are
| reasonable, IMHO.
| tootie wrote:
| Maybe the biggest BLM protest in the country rallied almost
| daily at the park in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I'd take
| my kids to play there in the morning and you'd never know
| anything had happened the evening before.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yep. My elderly parents have listened to Rush religiously
| for decades now. Fox news is on constantly.
|
| They repeatedly contacted me in a panic wanting to arrange
| for a change of locks n my house, security cameras, etc.
| They honest to god thought BLM protestors were randomly
| invading homes in Portland because of these trash news
| outlets.
|
| And then the bigger national media outlets do their "both
| sides means we pretend bullshit is worth taking seriously"
| nonsense and make the lunatic positions seem less fringe.
|
| It's maddening that my own family is convinced they
| understand what is happening in front of my porch and
| downtown at protests I literally attended, better than I
| do. And it's all because of these news outlets selling a
| cravenly dishonest narrative that BLM protestors demanding
| police reform are actually some sort of race war against
| white people.
| louky wrote:
| Leaving the _extremely_ uhhh paisley /tie-died Oregon
| Country Fair and returning to WA on the backroads was wild.
| Stopped to get gas a says away and got out of the car
| wearing tie-dye, etc... Was immediately approached by two
| locals who got into the whole thing - hippies killing
| people, breaking into people's houses, raping and drugging
| kids. (This was before Trump, there was still the satanic
| baby abuse thing. Not that one, the one before!)
|
| As a disguise because I live in rural WA which is Red and
| dangerous I had a complete set of typical "rigging/logging"
| clothes which I do wear working in the woods. I was talking
| to them, changing my clothes to logger jeans, ripped
| stained hickory shirt suspenders, the lot. They were very
| confused
| twic wrote:
| If i was talking to a man at a petrol station and he took
| his trousers off, i would also be confused.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| I'm tired of people saying Chicago is like John Wick and Mad
| Max had a violence baby.
|
| Can't count how many times the people saying this live in
| rural areas that have, per capita, higher violent crime rates
| than Chicago.
|
| The city has its problems, as all American cities do, but it
| is a wonderful place with amazing people and a ton to offer.
| Except for the winters. Those are awful.
| hi5eyes wrote:
| yeah the general impression of chicago must be so
| inaccurate after today
| michaelchisari wrote:
| Once again, not relevant. Reposting:
|
| _First off, not Chicago. Highland Park is almost 20
| miles outside of the city. With a median household income
| of $100k and a violent crime rate 4x lower than the rest
| of Illinois and nationwide. Your comment is unnecessary._
|
| The only point to be made here is about the US having a
| unique problem with mass shooters. Which has nothing to
| do with Chicago's general crime rate.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| A while back I had some of my relatives ask me if we were
| doing OK with all the rapes happening in California. I had
| no clue what the hell they were talking about.
| drewcoo wrote:
| "Oh, that? We just turn the radio up and it doesn't
| bother us."
| alisonatwork wrote:
| This has happened to me numerous times based on
| prejudices people have about other countries or regions.
| But the funniest thing is that it even happens when you
| travel from one small town to the next small town, as has
| been parodied in comedies from The Simpsons to Corner
| Gas. I think it's a fairly basic fear to see places you
| don't visit often as threatening. For some reason it
| doesn't seem to be quelled by the easily verifiable fact
| that plenty of people live perfectly adequate lives in
| the other place.
| [deleted]
| the_only_law wrote:
| I feel like People experience or learn about a place once
| and that paints their view of it for years to come.
|
| Someone else in this thread mentioned the Simpsons and I
| can't help think about the episode where Homer was
| vehemently against going to New York, because he had been
| there in the 70s when it was at its worst.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The Chicago thing isn't from experience, it's from people
| who've never lived in Chicago repeating it over and over
| again.
|
| The victims of violence in Chicago are not the white
| people citing it on TV.
| robonerd wrote:
| The Chicago thing is because every summer the national
| media see fit to report on local crime news from Chicago
| every time they have an eyepopping number of homicides a
| week, which is most weeks. I've never lived in Chicago
| and I don't care about their crime, but the national
| media won't shut up about it.
| sbf501 wrote:
| I'm not from Chicago, but all I ever hear about is the
| murder rate being higher than most countries. It's like
| that is the only thing people do in Chicago: go out and
| murder each other.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| Because the US murder rate is so much higher than most
| countries. Chicago isn't in the top 10 for murders per
| capita in the US. It's not even top 20.
|
| Chicago is #28.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-
| s-ci...
|
| Granted it's way too high, but ask yourself why we don't
| take about Little Rock or Chattanooga or Richmond this
| way.
| treis wrote:
| I think it's going to be my life's work to get people to
| stop making these comparisons. The difference in the size
| of city limits makes them meaningless. Chicago is
| geographically huge and includes a large swath of
| suburbs. Other city limits are much smaller and include
| all of the bad areas without the suburbs to dilute the
| per capita numbers.
| sbf501 wrote:
| I'm asking myself, but I don't know why. Only have a
| theory Koch brothers something something fairness in
| reporting act something something...
| djbusby wrote:
| Oakland, CA has more violent crime than Chicago - and never
| gets national news coverage. Why?
| res0nat0r wrote:
| "Crime in Chicago" is a rightwing racist dog-whistle now,
| and so common that is a reliable standby they use now
| when wanting to fearmonger.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| swader999 wrote:
| Unfortunately this didn't age well.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| I sincerely hope you're not referring to the Highland
| Park active shooter.
|
| First off, not Chicago. Highland Park is almost 20 miles
| outside of the city.
|
| With a median household income of $100k and a violent
| crime rate 4x lower than the rest of Illinois and
| nationwide.
|
| Your comment is unnecessary.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I've visited Chicago a few times (not in winter, though),
| and I loved it. Maybe my favorite American big city. Great
| people, fascinating architecture, middle finger to TFG
| tower along the river. Also, I never got crimed.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Abolish the electoral college and people in NY will stop giving
| a shit about what happens in Georgia immediately.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This sounds like a great recipe for disintegration,
| Yugoslavia- or at best Spanish American empire - style.
|
| If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people in
| the flyover land think, why not declare independence?
|
| It is a small wonder that the US had, so far, only _one_
| secession and civil war crisis, and a testament to your
| resilient constitutional order.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Yeah, that right to bear arms against the tyranny of the
| state sure is working well . . .
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am not an American, but it is my impression that most
| American gun owners, if they carry their gun at all, have
| mostly defense against common crime in mind, and that the
| loud minority screaming slogans about the tree of liberty
| watered by blood of patriots and scoundrels is pretty
| tiny, much like most loud minorities online.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > If a distant metropolis does not have to care what people
| in the flyover land think, why not declare independence?
|
| The distant metropolis is rich enough to pay a lot of taxes
| to support a long war. Flyoverland is definitionally low
| density meaning it has relatively few people. All they have
| to fight the war is some extremely stubborn people. That
| can be enough but an awful lot of people are going to die.
| There's a great deal of good on avoiding civil war.
| hgsgm wrote:
| wrycoder wrote:
| And that's why the founders set up the electoral college. We
| are a federal republic of states.
|
| The federal government was supposed to be small, because the
| founders understood the downside of a large federal
| government.
| [deleted]
| hgsgm wrote:
| kiba wrote:
| The founders think they understood the downside of a large
| federal government.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| But I don't like being a federation. Having 50 states each
| infighting, competing to race to the bottom and attract
| business from each other, like 50 tiny nations, it's not
| what I want.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Then set up a Constitutional Convention. People in NH
| view life differently than those in CA, and don't
| appreciate the idea of one way for everyone, as
| determined by the folk in the large blue cities.
| hgsgm wrote:
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "competing to race to the bottom"
|
| Looking at the US in the last 200 years, it has grown
| enormously rich, while many ossified systems in the world
| around it have collapsed. It seems that the competition
| you dislike does not turn individual Americans into
| paupers. An average American's living standard is so high
| that it is actually ecologically unsustainable.
| sangnoir wrote:
| This reeks of recency bias: 100 years ago, a british
| gentleman likely said the same about the superiority of
| the British Empire as proved by its lasting power - now
| it's a pale shadow of itself, with Brexit sealing its
| fate.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 200 years is a fairly long "recency".
|
| Also, the UK is still a nice place to live, probably
| nicer than it used to be at the height of the empire -
| just witness how many people are trying to move there,
| even ilegally. Large parts of the empire were money
| sinks, as was the huge navy needed to protect it.
| 8note wrote:
| That of course applies to the US too. Its current system
| of empire has its own money sinks
| pessimizer wrote:
| The US was excellent at not being in Europe during WWII,
| and really great at accumulating a massive negative
| balance of payments for 40 years after the juice from
| that ran out.
| sangnoir wrote:
| "Not having your factories being bombed" has huge
| economic upsides.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Having your factories bombed" is, ironically, a huge
| motivator too. At the end of the war, Germans had better
| and more modern industrial equipment than the British,
| mostly hidden in improvised underground factories. What
| really suffered was the civilian housing stock, but the
| average German industrial machine was less than 5 years
| old - to a surprise of the Allied occupation authorities.
|
| Both Germany and Japan rebuilt their industrial bases to
| become export juggernauts. And fairly quickly so.
| Experience with forced improvisation helped.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I'm assuming the Soviets packed it all up
| inglor_cz wrote:
| From the former DDR and territories that went to Poland,
| yes, they took quite a lot, but the German industrial
| heartland around the rivers Rhein and Ruhr is located in
| the West and it was divided between American and British
| sectors. No Soviets there.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| Well, that's the direction it's been going for 100 years,
| so you should be happy
| ABCLAW wrote:
| Well your government has reached the point that it cannot
| govern at the federal level or reasonably receive strong
| mandates to deal with issues. Faith in democratic
| institutions is tanking.
|
| This is what it looks like before the system breaks
| entirely. The buffers can't buffer anymore.
| hgsgm wrote:
| erentz wrote:
| > The federal government was supposed to be small, because
| the founders understood the downside of a large federal
| government.
|
| Those that want to return to this need to start advocating
| to abolish freedom of movement and permit states to
| implement residency requirements to access services. That
| way State A can go ahead an implement locally the "large
| federal government" services like Medicare or Social
| Security, while State Z can choose not to. At the moment
| our constitutional rights mean State Z residents can
| freeload by moving to State A. This kind of problem simply
| wasn't conceivable when the country was founded.
| wrycoder wrote:
| That's why the homeless go to San Francisco or Maine.
| Better services.
|
| The states are like incubators for different policies.
| The rest of us watch, and see what does work, and what
| doesn't work. For all I know, there are residency
| requirements for services in some places.
|
| One of the things the Constitution protects is freedom of
| movement.
|
| If a state wanted to implement something like Medicare
| for All, I think they could just do that.
|
| If you don't like the laws in your state - change them.
|
| If you live in California and you don't like the law in
| Alabama, what business of yours is that?
| erentz wrote:
| Supreme court determined a long time ago that a state
| cannot implement a residency requirement (e.g. 1 year
| minimum residency) before accessing that states benefits.
|
| > If a state wanted to implement something like Medicare
| for All, I think they could just do that.
|
| Yes. But for the problem explained. Also you can throw in
| issues such as states can't issue their own currencies or
| treasuries to finance things.
|
| Really the USA is not set up for this kind of
| "confederation". We are a federation of states that have
| very limited powers and very stupidly drawn borders. If
| we want what it sounds like you're after then we need
| more a European Union style set up. Not separate states.
| But entirely separate countries. Basically we should
| decide if we're a country called the USA and are all
| American's first, or if we're all Kentuckians, Texans,
| Washingtonians, first and American's second.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| This is sort of how it works in Canada; healthcare,
| disability, welfare and (some) pensions are all managed
| individually by each province. When you move, you have to
| jump through hoops to get access to those services in the
| new province. Still gets funded federally though and how
| money is transferred between provinces is huge point of
| contention.
| erentz wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is how it works for example in
| Australia too. You could conceive of this in the US just
| as easily, for example Medicaid (not Medicare) is a bit
| like that, run and jointly financed by the state and
| federal. But again that's "big government" to these
| states that want to reject healthcare.
|
| What I would bet too is if you go and poll people on
| whether they like their "big government" program or what
| to get rid of it, most people would rather keep it,
| Medicare is big government I don't see seniors wanting
| rid of it. Social Security is big government. The
| military, I don't see anyone in these "small government"
| states saying they want rid of that.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The founders were not that homogenous, and plenty of them
| wanted to recreate the British government for the new
| United States.
| smt88 wrote:
| Having a small federal government has no relationship with
| eliminating the Electoral College.
|
| The "land votes, not people" scheme of the US is a holdover
| from appeasing wealthy landowners and slavers. We need at
| least one branch of the federal government that is directly
| democratic.
|
| The way things are going, an increasingly small minority of
| extremists will make decisions at the federal level, as we
| are starting to see now.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The Electoral College is a triviality that we get hung up
| on because every loser blames it for their loss.
|
| The real undemocratic institution in the US is its most
| powerful, the US Senate. It should be directly
| democratic.
| hgsgm wrote:
| The electoral college is bad for the exact same reason
| the Senate is bad.
| wrycoder wrote:
| It is directly democratic. Two senators are elected by
| the voters of each state. (The Founders preferred that
| the two senators be elected by the legislatures of each
| state, but a constitutional amendment changed that.)
|
| We are not one big representative democracy. We are a
| federation of states. It was not intended that the
| federal government run everything - it was concerned
| primarily with defense and relations with other
| countries. Originally.
| 8note wrote:
| its the states that are bad in that.
|
| splitting out all the related citites into their own
| states would make a more appropriate federation
| hgsgm wrote:
| "Originally" doesn't matter anymore. The Founders wanted
| us to write a new constitution before 1820. They also
| didn't let women, blacks, and non-landlords vote.
|
| Do you know where the States come from? They aren't local
| cultures. They are a bunch of territory ruled by some
| aristocratic British dude.
|
| Most of the states that exist are due to undemocratic
| compromises with monarchs and slaveholders.
|
| Draw state boundaries around communities that want to be
| cohesive, and stop designing a nation around 18th Century
| concerns, and we can talk.
| smt88 wrote:
| Each seat in the Senate is directly democratic, but the
| Senate as a whole is not.
|
| The reason is that people in states with low populations
| have far more per-capita representation in the Senate
| than people in populous states.
|
| The Senate is so powerful that this means that most
| federal decisions are determined by the minority of the
| country.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _because every loser blames it for their loss_
|
| No Republican loser has blamed it for their loss because
| it hasn't hurt any of them in the modern era. When you
| get 6 million more votes than your opponent and still
| lose, that's a subversion of democracy.
|
| I don't see how that's any different than the Senate.
| With direct democracy, we would've had a more popular
| president with more popular policies for an additional 8
| of the last 22 years.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _The real undemocratic institution in the US is its
| most powerful, the US Senate. It should be directly
| democratic._
|
| I'm not qualified to vote on 95% of the stuff Congress
| has to deal with, so thanks for the offer, but no thanks.
| Direct democracy is a shitfest for anything much larger
| than a canton; representative democracy is much better
| for running large countries with a diverse set of serious
| matters to address.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > I'm not qualified to vote on 95% of the stuff Congress
| has to deal with
|
| But are they? We're constantly hearing how nobody reads
| the bills and nobody can be expected to really understand
| them.
| smt88 wrote:
| I think you misunderstood what they meant.
|
| The problem with the Senate is that tiny states like
| Wyoming have the same power as huge states like
| California.
|
| That means that people living in rural areas (or just
| small states) have far more power and representation in
| the Senate than people in urban areas.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Yeah because then the entire country will only have to care
| about what NY thinks
| dlp211 wrote:
| No. I don't even know how you get to this idea. First of
| all, there is only one national election, you still have
| your Representative and 2 Senators in addition to your
| State, County, and Local governments. Second of all, there
| are more Republicans in New York and California then in a
| significant amount of the middle states combined. The idea
| that NY or California has some singular voice that will be
| force upon you is just a ridiculous concept.
|
| The country clearly leans slightly center left as a whole,
| but we are trending hard right right now and that is a
| recipe for disaster and the electoral college is in large
| part to blame.
| wrycoder wrote:
| It's what I call the Democratic wobble.
|
| We've been trending left for fifty years. Maybe it's time
| to go the other way for awhile. And hand some power back
| to the states, where it belongs.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| i can understand not wanting power to be centralized in
| the hands of a faraway federal govt. but i dont
| understand the fetish of states rights. why not city
| rights or county rights. or heaven forbid maybe even
| individual rights
| hgsgm wrote:
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "We've been trending left for fifty years."
|
| Depends on the topic. Gun rights, for example, have gone
| decidedly to the right. Few people now remember that
| Ronald Reagan signed some significant gun control
| legislation without losing support of his voters.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Not really. In the late '50s, when I was a teenager, I
| lived in a rural area. I had my own rifle, and so did my
| friends. I also bought a 22 revolver and carried it
| around the country in the early '60s and never thought
| twice about doing that.
|
| In the '60s, high school students carried rifles on the
| NYC subway while going to target practice. Try doing that
| today.
|
| So, I'd say there has been a lot of pressure to move the
| window on gun regulation to more restrictive over the
| last fifty years. I don't think it's done any good at all
| relative to reducing crime committed with guns. Law
| abiding gun owners have always had low incidence of gun
| infractions compared to, say, the police.
|
| The real problem is not enforcing the gun laws we have
| had for years. Chicago is a prime example: very
| restrictive laws, but very few convictions for gun
| offenses, which are frequent. Why is that?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| With all respect, the late '50s and early '60s are a long
| time ago. I was thinking about more recent developments.
|
| As of today, there is almost half a billion of guns in
| civilian possession in the US, and the # of open carry
| and concealed carry jurisdictions has grown massively.
|
| I would say that the lowest point for gun rights US-wide
| was around the Columbine school shootings, and that the
| trend changed quite decisively since them. Legislation
| like that has no chance of passing today.
| wrycoder wrote:
| We were talking about "trending left in the last fifty
| years". 1972 was fifty years ago, so I was setting the
| stage by describing the situation in the preceding
| decade.
| [deleted]
| nine_k wrote:
| A few years ago my friends started call NYT "Pravda", saying
| that it's turned into the mouthpiece of the "party line".
|
| Grudgingly, I had eventually to agree.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| > The national media completely misrepresented Georgia and the
| people in it to the rest of the country.
|
| The national media _everywhere_ is full of shit. That 's the
| _norm._ It 's the norm, because it _works._
| selimthegrim wrote:
| > an excellent public university system
|
| Why don't you tell this to the several UGA math profs who quit
| recently (including an acquaintance of mine from high school)
| or the GA Tech faculty unhappy with state COVID policies
| dsugarman wrote:
| I've spent a ton of time in SF and Baltimore, wondering what
| specifically you had in mind? I think it's less socially
| acceptable to be right leaning in SF? Sure you would be looked
| at weird if you used a koozie or wore croakies in SF, or if you
| went up to people at a coffee shop to ask them to pitch their
| startup in Baltimore, but the differences feel cultural not
| political.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > They made Georgia out to be an unreformed Confederate
| backwater:
|
| Electing Marjorie Greene Taylor and the coverup attempt around
| this killing might have contributed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery
|
| Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in
| being unreformed Confederate backwaters.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _Although, I would not say rural areas of GA are special in
| being unreformed Confederate backwaters._
|
| Fucking true. People think hicks are unique to the South and
| are oblivious to the hordes of hicks living in eastern
| Oregon, eastern Washington, and northern California. In fact,
| they're even more extremist over in the west because they
| don't feel like they're represented at all.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Georgia elected Marjorie Greene Taylor and Raphael Warnock.
| States aren't red or blue; it is a divisive over
| simplification. To paraphrase that parent comment, What would
| be unremarkable in San Francisco would raise eyebrows in much
| of the rest of California.
| smt88 wrote:
| Georgia didn't elect Marjorie Taylor Greene. A tiny subset
| did. She received 230,000 votes in a rural district.
|
| Raphael Warnock won a statewide election with 2,280,000
| votes.
| feet wrote:
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I've pointed this out before but after the 2016 election
| after the Democrats lost their dangerous gamble to put the
| wife of a previous president in the Whitehouse. I looked at
| the hyper local results.
|
| Yeah there aren't red and blue states. There are states
| where either rural or city votes dominate. Both the tiny
| cities in Montana and the huge metro's in Texas vote blue.
| hgsgm wrote:
| kn0where wrote:
| To be more accurate, Georgia elected Warnock, and a
| particular congressional district within Georgia elected
| Magic The Gathering.
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| > coverup attempt around this killing might have contributed.
| > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ahmaud_Arbery
|
| Did a quick search through the article, can't find a mention
| of any attempt to cover up the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, can
| you elaborate? Is there an ongoing investigation into this
| and is there some way we can help? It is insane that in 2022
| the authorities in America are still complicit in lynchings
| and that nobody does anything, it disgusts me. How long will
| this indiscriminate murder of BIPOC continue, why can't
| America do better? What is it about Americans that drive them
| to murder BIPOC?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The whole second paragraph describes how no arrests were
| made, and the only reason anyone was punished was because
| one of the murderers ordered his attorney to send the video
| of the murder to the news.
|
| >Former Brunswick District Attorney Jackie Johnson was
| indicted in September 2021 for "showing favor and
| affection" to Gregory (her former subordinate) during the
| investigation, and for obstructing law enforcement by
| directing that Travis not be arrested.[42][43] I
| wronglyprepaid wrote:
| I see, forgive my English, I guess because I'm not a
| native speaker I miss the nuances of how what you quoted
| at all matches the definition of cover up, thanks for
| explaining. I will listen and learn, and I hope Americans
| can listen and learn to not murder BIPOC and that BIPOC
| lives matter, but I guess with the poor schooling system
| there is no funding for this, and likely even if there
| was funding to teach children that BIPOC lives mattered
| the US supreme court will ban it.
| hgsgm wrote:
| halffaday wrote:
| There wasn't much of a coverup. The tastemakers happened to
| have some convenient video to work with and used the
| opportunity to fabricate a myth that a petty criminal was a
| hero. It's a testament to the power of media and gullible
| minds in great numbers.
| rayiner wrote:
| I've spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly
| non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me
| there than in NYC or DC.
|
| Majorie Taylor Greene was elected in 2021. She's a _reaction_
| to national media efforts that started with the governor's
| race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as "deplorables."
| People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they'll close
| ranks.
|
| As to Ahmed Aubury, it's an unfortunate fact that police
| fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it
| frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn't
| portraying the Uvalde police department's efforts to cover
| things up as an indictment of the whole community? Do you
| think it has nothing to do with the community being 80%
| Hispanic in addition to the police chief? If the community
| and shooter had been white, we would have been treated to
| story after story about how "mass shootings are a
| manifestation of white supremacy."
| tzs wrote:
| > She's a _reaction_ to national media efforts that started
| with the governor's race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia
| as "deplorables." People are tribal. When attacked from
| outside, they'll close ranks.
|
| Tribalism and reactions to attacks from outside _might_
| explain why she won the general election.
|
| But before she got to the general election she had to win
| the primary. That was Republican only and there were 8
| other candidates.
|
| I haven't been able to find biographies on all of them, but
| the 7 I did find seemed to be normal Republicans, several
| of which had held state elected or appointed offices in the
| past, rather than promoters of QAnon and various
| antisemitic, white supremacist, and 9/11 (and many other)
| false conspiracy theories.
|
| Getting to the runoff could be explained by all the
| reasonable candidates splitting the vote, but how to you
| explain her winning the runoff?
| rayiner wrote:
| When a community is attacked from the outside, they will
| put aside their internal disagreements and coalesce
| around someone who promises to "fight," as opposed to
| reasonable folks who take a conciliatory approach.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Maybe there is a Pied Piper strategy where influence is
| being used to promote the worst in ones enemies so
| they're easy to beat later on. Sometimes it can backfire
| though.
| bsder wrote:
| > She's a reaction to national media efforts that started
| with the governor's race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia
| as "deplorables."
|
| Citation needed.
|
| We're long past the "These are actually good people."
|
| Sorry. You need to face up to the fact that these people
| are true believers and that this is who they really are and
| that they are _evil people_.
|
| "He's not hurting the right people." "Better Russian than
| Democrat." etc.
|
| When you are recieving the pointy end of the stick, it
| doesn't matter to you whether the person on the other end
| believes in what they are doing or not.
| rayiner wrote:
| > When you are recieving the pointy end of the stick, it
| doesn't matter to you whether the person on the other end
| believes in what they are doing or not.
|
| Correct, but who is holding the pointy stick? Hint: it's
| not rural folks in Georgia. It's the folks that have Wall
| Street and Silicon Valley behind them.
| bsder wrote:
| Who the rural folks in Georgia keep voting for? In record
| numbers?
|
| You're kind of making my point.
|
| However, yes, these rural folks _ARE_ the ones standing
| in front of abortion clinics and assaulting people and
| shooting doctors. They _ARE_ the ones who drove up to
| Washinton, DC, to take part in an insurrection. etc. All
| at the behest of a really shitty conman from New York and
| his criminal cohort.
|
| I can go on if you would like?
|
| These rural people _ARE_ shoving the pointy end of the
| stick into people. Directly and individually as well as
| with their votes.
| claydolatry wrote:
| deanCommie wrote:
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This is the text version of this comic[1].
|
| [1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cart
| oon-Y...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > As to Ahmed Aubury, it's an unfortunate fact that police
| fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it
| frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn't
| portraying the Uvalde police department's efforts to cover
| things up as an indictment of the whole community?
|
| The difference is that in Ahmed Aubury's case, there was
| clear evidence of corruption along racial lines amongst
| local leaders, and which there is a long history of in the
| area Aubury was murdered in.
|
| Obviously, this was not the case in Uvalde and so it would
| not be portrayed as such.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Obviously, this was not the case in Uvalde and so it
| would not be portrayed as such.
|
| Jeffrey Epstein was obviously killed. What's obvious to
| one group of people is not obvious to others. There are a
| great many people to whom it is obvious that the median
| journalist is more like Taylor Lorenz than them and hates
| people like them and has no compunction about lying if it
| makes hurting them easier.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _She's a reaction to national media efforts..._
|
| This comment goes a long way to rationalize your initial
| assertion that "it's the media's fault".
|
| You're essentially saying that MTG's constituents voted for
| her out of their resentment over the media believing they
| were ignorant enough to vote for her.
|
| Could it be that they actually voted for her because they
| like her? How are you so sure that's not the case?
|
| > _an indictment of the whole community_
|
| Again, I actually live in GA and there was largely no such
| indictment of the overall community. That indictment was
| overwhelmingly reserved for the police department and the
| perpetrators. And, yes, there was some discussion around
| systems and conditions that produce such perpetrators and
| coverups.
|
| You seem to be picking up these threads that just don't
| exist here and forcing them into a frame of media blame. Of
| course, you must be getting these ideas from...the media.
|
| In other words, you're railing on about false media
| narratives and the entire basis for your claims seems to
| rest on false media narratives.
|
| > _story after story about how "mass shootings are a
| manifestation of white supremacy "_
|
| The only instances of this I've seen were in the cases that
| involved actual manifestos or other evidence directly
| espousing white supremacist beliefs.
|
| Do you have evidence to the contrary?
| justin66 wrote:
| As someone with family from the Dalton area, I would warn
| against trivializing the difference between Greene's
| district (NW corner of the state) and places where sane
| people tend to congregate in larger numbers. People I love
| have lived there, but it's exactly the kind of place where
| three out of four people would think voting for Marjorie
| Taylor Greene is a good idea.
|
| Marietta is a cultural Mecca, comparatively, not to mention
| Atlanta.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Marietta is a cultural Mecca,
|
| Whose culture?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| For someone who claims to have lived in Atlanta, you
| should be able to answer this one.
| rayiner wrote:
| Carpetbaggers?
|
| Seriously, though. I love Atlanta. But OP's implication
| that MGT's district lacks a "culture" is exactly the sort
| of rhetoric that got her elected. That sort of talk makes
| people mad and justifiably so.
| justin66 wrote:
| > But OP's implication that MGT's district lacks a
| "culture" is exactly the sort of rhetoric that got her
| elected. That sort of talk makes people mad and
| justifiably so.
|
| The notion that the people in that district did not have
| it in them to elect a right-wing conspiracy theorist
| prior to some sort of recent national culture war / media
| phenomenon is _entirely_ mistaken.
|
| edit: that's not to trivialize some of the other stuff
| that's going on nationally... I suspect the national
| culture warriors actually _do_ explain why MGT 's
| campaigns are funded as well as they are.
| rayiner wrote:
| Politics isn't about what people "have in them." It's
| about everyone pursing their perceived self interest.
|
| If you attack a group of people, they will consolidate
| ranks and fight back. And they will throw their weight
| behind leaders that they perceive as fighters. This is
| especially true of honor cultures like in the American
| south.
|
| I'm reminded about the speech George W. Bush gave after
| 9/11: https://georgewbush-
| whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/20.... I think
| liberals don't fully understand the genius of this
| speech. He wasn't just moralizing to Americans to tell
| them not to take out their anger on Muslims. He was
| giving Muslim Americans an opportunity to reaffirm their
| Muslim identity while giving them a vocabulary to talk
| about the ones who did evil in the name of Islam.
|
| Contrast this against the rhetoric the media in New York
| uses against people in the rural south anytime something
| bad happens there. They portray it as a confirmation of
| the bad things that New Yorkers already believed about
| southern culture.
| justin66 wrote:
| My initial objection was about the culture you
| experienced further south vs the culture in MTG's
| district, which always struck me as a pretty culturally
| unique place (in addition to being the carpet capital of
| the world). You riffed on the part of my comment that was
| a joke (re: Marietta and ATL).
|
| I disagree with you less than might have been obvious,
| particularly because I've had relatives make the move
| north and experience some discrimination.
| [deleted]
| RickJWagner wrote:
| Thank you for an excellent example of a national narrative that
| does not match the true local flavor.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| You are all one people!
|
| _No!_
|
| That's right--you are all either on Team Blue or Team Red!
|
| _Yes!_
|
| Amazing how widespread such dichotomies are.
| xnx wrote:
| > The nationalization of news and politics in a country of 330
| million people is toxic.
|
| The "nightly news" used to be a much more common experience
| that people shared: "Twenty-seven million to 29 million
| viewers, on average, tuned in every night to hear Walter
| Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Today, though, the viewership
| of evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC combined is
| smaller than CBS' when Cronkite sat in the anchor's chair."
|
| Today the most popular news channel is Republican propaganda. I
| don't use that term to be dramatic. I do not think there is a
| more accurate description.
| yongjik wrote:
| 330M is large, but not so large that national news stops making
| sense. Japan is roughly comparable - it has 126M people, and it
| was composed of competing (and sometimes warring) feudal lords
| until the Meiji Restoration (1868), a few years after the US
| civil war.
|
| Yet go to Japan and suggest that it's toxic for people in Tokyo
| to care about what's happening in Fukuoka, and people will look
| at you as if you've grown another head.
|
| I mean, what is a nation if not a group of people subscribing
| to the same central authority and sharing a rough idea of a
| society? On the face of it, saying that "nationalization of
| news and politics in a country is toxic" is so absurd that I'd
| like to see an argument _for_ supporting that, instead of using
| it as a starting point of an argument.
|
| If people in SF stop caring about what's happening in Atlanta
| (and vice versa), it won't bring peace. It will merely
| accelerate the disintegration of the USA as a single country.
| cheschire wrote:
| yeah but the population density of japan is 10x that of
| america, and the distance between atlanta and los angeles is
| well over 3x that of tokyo to fukuoka.
|
| I doubt GP was intending to speak strictly about population
| count itself.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It's not only the media but also the political campaign
| industry. Some inner city council person somewhere says they
| hate Jewish people and suddenly their opponent for city council
| has nationwide fundraising support. Same for some small town
| mayor saying they don't want "those people" in his town. Now
| there's money flooding in nationwide for his opponent in the
| election. In a country of 330 million, there's always a
| politician somewhere saying something reprehensible. Political
| parties and their fundraising wings love finding these
| incidents and then making money off of them.
| dangoor wrote:
| How did this whole article manage to avoid mentioning that Axios
| itself has local news?
| evtothedev wrote:
| I was wondering this same thing! And honestly, I've found
| Axios's approach to be kind of inspirational.
| evtothedev wrote:
| I keep thinking this is a ripe space for a startup. I could see
| it being, "Infrastructure for local news" or perhaps "Local news
| in a box."
|
| For example, what would it take to have something like
| Berkleyside[1] for every small town in the country? Or what about
| something like Block Club[2]
|
| If anyone wants to spit ball ideas for this, I'd love to riff:
| https://calendly.com/evan-arnold/riff-on-local-news?month=20...
|
| [1]https://www.berkeleyside.org/ [2]https://blockclubchicago.org/
| enigmoid wrote:
| Patch [1] seems to be exactly what you're describing -- "local
| news in a box":
|
| > What is Patch? > > Patch is an innovative way to find out
| about, and participate in, what's going on near you.
|
| My Connecticut hometown had a Patch site. As other commenters
| have pointed out, apps don't address a dearth of local
| journalists (Patch appears to encourage community
| participation, which sounds good, but is not journalism),
| funding for local news (though I would expect it to reduce
| operating costs), etc.
|
| [1] https://patch.com/about
| evtothedev wrote:
| Oh, neat! Thanks for sharing this.
| adrianN wrote:
| Who pays for local news? You need to have actual journalists
| sitting in boring local council meetings and reading boring
| reports to generate "news" stories. That is not free. Local
| news competes for attention with national news, global news,
| and a billion types of non-news entertainment. Ad money is
| probably too thin to cover the expensive legwork needed for
| local coverage.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'd say to question those assumptions. Open source software
| exists but the congenital wisdom that engineers would never
| do work for free.
|
| You'd be surprised what people will volunteer for. Some
| people are already attending those things and perhaps they'd
| be willing to report back.
| adrianN wrote:
| It's a lot harder to get unbiased news if you solely rely
| on volunteers.
| goodpoint wrote:
| There is no such thing as "unbiased" and there is nothing
| wrong with biased news as long as the reader is aware of
| the bias.
| abirch wrote:
| Can you imagine getting your news from a version of
| Richard Stallman.
| adrianN wrote:
| I do in fact read his RSS feed from time to time...
| evtothedev wrote:
| I think there are a couple interesting angles on this.
|
| The two websites I linked above are donation based, and both
| are growing. I think this is a reasonably viable model for
| larger metropolitan neighborhoods and wealthier suburbs.
| Although frankly, I'd like to find a way to spread local news
| to all parts of the country.
|
| The second angle would be some sort of aggregation play
| around local desires (e.g. a riff on Ben Thompson and
| Aggregator Theory). Google/Facebook allow you to target ads
| by geography and interest, which obviously eviscerates a lot
| of local ad revenue. But could there be another way to bundle
| & slice interests plus content? For example, you do local,
| irl interest (cycling clubs? garden walks?). Or perhaps you
| do an emphasize on privacy + irl experience? I don't have a
| great idea here (yet?) - but I refuse to believe there isn't
| something.
| abathur wrote:
| One tendril of the problem is that online delivery enables
| organizations to track _engagement_ at a more granular
| level than "which articles generated lots of letters to
| the editor?"
|
| I suspect it takes a lot of integrity, stubbornness, or
| stupidity to continually plow resources into reporting out,
| writing, and editing eat-your-vegetables articles instead
| of reallocating those resources towards the content people
| engage with.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One answer to that is to go to a weekly format. I think the
| economics work out a lot better than for a daily.
|
| Around Tompkins County we still have the _Ithaca Journal_ but
| each edition seems a little thinner than the one before.
|
| There is a civic-minded weekly, _Tompkins Weekly_ which is
| mostly newspaper-length stories and makes it to public
| meetings, and also the weekly _Ithaca Times_ which covers
| serious issues, often with stories a bit longer than
| newspaper stories. There are also some publications focused
| on arts and entertainment.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| This has been tried a lot with very little to show for it.
|
| The problem is running a real newsroom that actually has the
| capabilities to do serious coverage is shockingly expensive.
|
| So you need a revenue model. Being local, it can't pursue scale
| like WaPo or Dotdash-Meredith, so programmatic isn't going to
| work for you with. National advertisers want more scale and
| more specific demographics than you're able to offer, and
| besides, why should they deal with you when they can target the
| same people on Facebook?
|
| So you're left with a few local advertisers, who may be willing
| to spend _some_ money, but the metro papers have tried that for
| the last decade and it 's not enough.
|
| Which leaves subscriptions.
|
| And here's the question: Newspapers were never actually in the
| political coverage business, they're in the _Information
| Business_ , and local politics and news are loss-leaders inside
| that. In the old days, their offering included sports, real
| estate, classifieds, jobs, shopping, movie times and various
| other near monopolies that are now scattered to the winds of
| the internet.
|
| So that leaves two questions:
|
| 1. What is a local information product that's good enough for a
| sizeable percentage of the community to pay for?
|
| 2. At what price point?
|
| 3. How big does that community need to be in order to make it
| work?
|
| Can this be done? Actually, I think there's a shot if the right
| person tried it in the right place. I have some ideas, but odds
| are long, and I don't think anyone without a deep grasp of both
| the local community they plan to serve and the business they're
| going into has a chance.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's expensive and _risky_. Telling truth to power invites
| power to fight back, and power has the means to fight.
|
| A major unrecognised role of publishers is in providing legal
| shield to authors and reporters. Though some publishers are
| ducking out on that responsibility, see Cory Doctorow's take,
| "Reasonable Agreement":
|
| https://doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agreement-
| ea8600a89ed...
|
| Alt (paywall / regwall / JS): https://scribe.rip/reasonable-
| agreement-ea8600a89ed7
| mola wrote:
| If you mean startup as in VC backed super growth oriented
| companies. Then this set of incentives is exactly what got us
| here. I don't see anyway local news framework make big money
| without devolving to the attention grabbing mindless beasts we
| have now.
| evtothedev wrote:
| But newspapers have always been in the business of grabbing
| attention. Tim Wu has written about this extensively.[1] The
| issue for me is that in the past, this generated a lot of
| positive by-products (i.e. local news reporting on corrupt
| politicians resulting in them being kicked out of office;
| local news reporting on polluted water supply resulting in it
| being cleaned, etc.). With Google/Facebook news, and a focus
| on national stories, you loose this side benefit.
|
| [1] https://bookshop.org/books/the-attention-merchants-the-
| epic-...
| dekken_ wrote:
| Is it even "local news" when it's owned by some corporation like
| Sinclair?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| The article is about local newspapers, not TV stations
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| We're allowed to have knowledge outside of the specific thing
| being discussed in an article.
|
| Also, if two local newspapers close every week, then where
| else will people turn if not to their local Sinclair station?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if two local newspapers close every week, then where
| else will people turn if not to their local Sinclair
| station?_
|
| This is a questionable substitution. Local TV news is
| heavily watched by 55+ Americans, with over a third of 18
| to 34-year olds having never watched it [1].
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/742221/frequency-
| of-watc...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Could you link a screenshot as Statista are paywalling /
| registration-walling that content?
|
| Thanks.
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| I can't share a screenshot of the statistics due to
| copyright restrictions, but I can confirm that what user
| JumpCrisscross said (about the statistics) is true.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Fair use / fair dealing.
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| Almost never applies to 100% of a work.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You're being both specious and incorrect.
|
| The test is fourfold.
|
| This thread is boring.
|
| Clearly, you won't ask as requested. Thats' sufficient to
| know.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Pretty sure "local news-ness" and ownership are separate
| qualities.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Are they though? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/
| media/sinclair-n...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Pretty sure they're not.
|
| https://yewtu.be/watch?v=xwA4k0E51Oo
| rglover wrote:
| They're not. I worked in a local news station's news room
| (and grew up working in them alongside my dad). I would pull
| stories off an Associated Press feed [1], copy the scripts
| verbatim, and throw them into the rundown. It's one gigantic
| feed trough. People deny it because they want to feel like
| they're in control, but they're not. They're cattle.
|
| [1] https://www.ap.org/media-solutions/enps/
| karaterobot wrote:
| People want gossip, blood, and vitriol. We created platforms
| where you can get a stream of it any time, day or night. The best
| (worst) of it, aggregated from around the world. People were free
| to choose, and chose that instead of waiting for the paper to
| arrive in the morning. They could in theory have done both, but
| they clearly only wanted the one thing. So that's what we have
| now. I don't understand this ritual where we blame corporations
| for giving us what we tell them we want.
| tsol wrote:
| >I don't understand this ritual where we blame corporations for
| giving us what we tell them we want.
|
| It's hard to convince people to take responsibility when they
| cherish their freedom more than anything. We emphasize freedom
| so much that consequences are a barricade to us
| zackmorris wrote:
| It's tempting to blame journalism for the ideological divide
| we're seeing in the US. But the very best headlines are the ones
| with a 50/50 split of public opinion (the most controversial).
| This is also where politicians gain the strongest foothold to
| push their agendas (wedge issues).
|
| Unfortunately, under capitalism there is tremendous pressure on
| investigative journalism to make rent. Which tends to push
| stories towards the divisive and cynical end of the spectrum. And
| politicians towards negative campaigning and mud slinging.
|
| I feel that Ronald Reagan abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in the
| 80s and Newt Gingrich legitimizing alternative facts and the
| glorification of ignorance in the 90s are what put us on this
| alternate timeline we find ourselves on today. We could add in
| the selection of GW Bush over Al Gore by the Supreme Court in the
| 2000s, which solidified moneyed/authoritarian interests and
| corruption over democracy for at least the next 2 decades, but
| looking like 3 now.
|
| Local news is one detail in this. But really I think the divide
| is about the transfer of power from the previous generation to
| young people. We're witnessing a fourth turning and even a
| flipping of the parties around certain issues, which is why
| they're acting crazier and crazier in their denial. Looking at
| popular news channels and public officials, I can't help but
| wonder where the adults are.
| parkingrift wrote:
| Not sure I agree. I live in New York City and my family is
| scattered in suburban towns all over the south. They constantly
| ask me about the "violence in NYC" and whether it's safe.
|
| The important issue here isn't whether NYC is safe or violent.
| The issue is why are they reading about NYC? That's the question
| we should be asking.
|
| Why and where is my mother finding out about a random act of
| subway violence? Social media. Why is this content being pushed
| to her? Why do social media companies get to decide the type of
| content you see and also skirt publisher laws?
|
| The problem isn't a lack of local news. The problem is the
| nationalization of local news and algorithm driven 24/7 fear
| mongering on social media.
|
| Take a 30 day break from social media and the news and the world
| feels safer. Gee, I wonder why. Did the world change?
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| They are subject to an intense propaganda campaign. NYC is
| viewed as democratic, and so the propaganda attacks it by
| amplifying any problem or just fabricating them.
|
| You can see the top stories your parents are exposed to on FB,
| https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en
|
| The top ones are often propaganda outlets who feed them the
| lies.
| dmix wrote:
| > Why do social media companies get to decide the type of
| content you see and also skirt publisher laws?
|
| There should be laws telling media companies what to publish?
| So people don't read FUDy articles that people always seem to
| seek out and demand? And these laws exist for other mediums?
|
| When I was a kid our nightly news broadcast was full of crime
| and moral-panics news clips, people eat that stuff up always. I
| doubt it was much different in terms of gossip and social
| conversations.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Of much greater importance--why would media from NYC become
| absolutely obsessed with a trivial event in, say, Ferguson,
| Missouri? Why not concern themselves with the incredible
| violence of places like...NYC? Why not look deep into the
| actual statistics around violence, rather than amplifying
| particular incidents from irrelevant places? Bad faith
| question, of course. They do it because they have to travel far
| and wide to find things that match the narrative. Outside their
| window, in the streets which their own politicians control, the
| narrative is a little different.
|
| To answer your own question for the sake of contrast, it's not
| strange that provincials would know about the events in NYC. It
| is a large, important city.
| [deleted]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Not a word about why media antitrust is important... even though
| the article casually mentions that " _Newspapers continue to be
| consolidated by hedge funds and private investment firms that
| believe they can wring more profits from the papers through
| synergies as the industry declines._ "
|
| > "Axios is owned by Axios Media, whose investors include Glade
| Brook Capital Partners, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Greycroft, and
| NBC News. NBC doubles up as Axios' media partner."
|
| https://marketrealist.com/p/who-owns-axios/
|
| Not only that, people employed by today's media conglomerates are
| increasingly drawn from the 'wealthy liberal coastal elite'
| sector and are typically filtered through an unpaid internship
| process before getting hired, leading to non-representative
| 'journalists', which is probably doing as much damage (i.e
| pushing the populist perception of news media as a symbol of out-
| of-touch elitism) as the corporate consolidation is.
|
| Another side effect of this trend is the death of investigative
| journalism, which generally upsets the state and corporate power
| centers who are increasingly joined at the hip. For example, the
| last Washington Post investigative series of note was "Top Secret
| America" from about a decade ago, and now that Jeff Bezos owns
| the paper and AWS is actively seeking CIA and NSA contracts,
| forget about anything else like that.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Investigative, independent, long form, good journalism still
| exists, you have to pay for it though and it isn't as popular
| as mainstream.
| jarjoura wrote:
| I used to be an avid Economist reader, but even they are
| increasingly moving away from long form non opinionated
| journalism towards more bite-sized, clearly biased takes on
| the world.
|
| They have made it know they clearly believe Brexit was a
| mistake and now they have made a point to go "see I told you
| so" more often than not.
| [deleted]
| woodruffw wrote:
| For New Yorkers: Hell Gate[1] is a new group, focusing on local
| news and intrigue. I don't believe they're accepting money yet,
| but they've done some excellent local investigating.
|
| [1]: https://www.hellgatenyc.com/
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| The source material makes a weak case for the causation (rather
| than simply correlation) claimed in the title.
|
| Here's a link to the actual report, for some reason it's buried 3
| or 4 levels deep from the article:
| https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/research/state-...
|
| Notice the headline (clickbait?) topic is not the primary theme
| of the report. The report is primarily about the state of the
| newspaper business. In the key findings, "news deserts" causing a
| divide is only mentioned in one of the last points.
|
| I'm not trying to disagree necessarily, but they need to provide
| better support for the tie-in.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Agreed, this article provides clear evidence that the industry
| is declining but no evidence of it being linked to a growing
| divide. I'm sad, but not surprised, to see so few comments
| engaging with the contents of the article itself.
| [deleted]
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