[HN Gopher] UN report finds UN reports are not widely read
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UN report finds UN reports are not widely read
Author : anjneymidha
Score : 201 points
Date : 2025-08-03 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| clort wrote:
| tbh this is to be expected? I don't read UN reports, I expect
| reporters to read them and distill the information. I don't read
| research papers, I expect journalists to read them and present
| something reasonable to a layman. I don't read the minutae of the
| laws being passed, I expect lawyers and politicians to debate the
| finer points.
|
| So perhaps my expectations are not being met? Unfortunately I
| don't have time to pay attention to everything.
| sunaookami wrote:
| I don't think they mean that citizens don't read the reports
| (which is to be expected) but politicians?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Politicians don't even read the bills they sign.
| pstuart wrote:
| In many cases they don't even _write_ the bills they vote
| on.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| This is kind of like saying you don't read every line of
| code for the product you ship
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, more like don't actually do your code reviews.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| They read the parts they care about very closely, and get
| a high level overview of the parts they don't - or rely
| on relationships that the parts they don't care about
| will be filled in reasonably.
| t-3 wrote:
| The actual situation is that the politicians are paid by
| outsiders who write the bills which the politician then
| submits. It's like outsourcing to North Koreans but
| getting paid by them as well as your actual employer.
| monkeyelite wrote:
| I think what you're missing is that a politician is a
| face for an organization with staff who do things like
| write bills.
|
| That's literally the function of politicians - to
| personify a group.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Depends on the country. In many (vast majority of?)
| countries bills are individually passed, i.e. a few pages
| of text at a time. I imagine in those countries, a
| substantial fraction of the members in the assembly do read
| the bill before voting, even if they vote according to the
| party line.
| t-3 wrote:
| TFA suggests that the vast majority of UN reports are being
| downloaded less than 5000 times, and even assuming 1:1
| download:read ratio, journalists and reporters are unlikely to
| be reading them and passing along the contents to you. Whether
| or not this is a problem is another matter; I took a quick skim
| through the first few pages of report listings in the UN
| digital library (https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Report
| s&ln=en&p=&f=&...), and most seem to be very meta internal UN
| stuff.
| roughly wrote:
| The point of a report is to provide a structured process and
| background for a set of technical or policy recommendations.
| It'd be perfectly normal for a report drafted by the efforts
| of 50 people to have an audience of 2-3 major decision makers
| - the point is the process for generating the
| recommendations. Further, it'd also be quite normal for a
| report on a specific topic to be used as an input to another
| process which generates its own outputs, meaning there's
| little reason for people not involved in the latter process
| to read the original report unless they're deeply
| interrogating the findings of the consolidated report.
| watwut wrote:
| I would not expect journalists to regularly download them and
| read them without specific reason. I would expect them to be
| read when someone is actually dealing with the issue at hands
| and needs the details from an authority.
|
| Like, if something like "Report of the Secretary-General on
| the staff of the United Nations Secretariat" has 5000
| readers, it is 4995 more then I would expect. That is a real
| report I just pulled from their database. I did not bothered
| to read it.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| I also wonder if this is an issue. At my work we will usually
| have some kind of artifact of notes, decisions, and action
| items after a meeting. While people will rarely go back and
| read the artifact, they exist as a form of documentation that
| can be helpful in a pinch. "Why didn't we do x again?" "What
| are the issues we need to look into?" All important details
| worth keeping a record of. That said, I don't really know what
| a UN report is supposed to be.
| esseph wrote:
| You expect journalists to translate research papers for you?
|
| Damn.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Clearly referring to research not in their field / not
| relevant for their work.
|
| As an example, Quanta Magazine is regularly on the front page
| of HN doing just this.
| xandrius wrote:
| You expect the average person even to be able to read a
| research paper?
|
| Damn.
| ars wrote:
| UN reports aren't useful for journalists because they are
| basically popularity contests between countries. The
| information in the report mostly just reflects the interests of
| the country preparing it, or who has a majority seat on the
| particular group it's being prepared for.
|
| They are not like research studies where truth is the
| objective.
|
| Diplomats care about it, as a kind of quiet "game of thrones"
| as it were, no one else cares.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Similarly, even research papers are not downloaded that many
| times. Most are produced to be potentially read by the few
| hundred, at most few thousand people in specific subfield. In
| the end, depending on the quality of the paper, probably only
| zero to few hundred people end up reading a particular paper.
|
| I see no problem with this. When I write an email, typically I
| expect exactly one person to read it.
| michaeldoron wrote:
| The title reads like an Onion article
| Pinus wrote:
| Not quite the level of the 2012 IgNobel litterature price,
| which went to "The US Government General Accountability Office,
| for issuing a report about reports about reports that
| recommends the preparation of a report about the report about
| reports about reports."
| prmph wrote:
| Do you have a link to this report?
| cperciva wrote:
| https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-12-480r
| classichasclass wrote:
| That is absolutely impenetrable prose. An LLM couldn't
| make it any more obfuscated.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And, like most IgNobel winners, it's an important
| research about important problems.
| prmph wrote:
| I do not see anywhere in that report evidence of the deep
| semantic recursion you mentioned
| zahirbmirza wrote:
| Should I read this report?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I dunno, I imagine we already know the gist of the claims.
| browningstreet wrote:
| This sounds exactly like "work" today. Certainly matches my
| experience in big tech.
|
| It reminds me, tangentially, of something I did a while ago. I
| scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites from
| around the world. Many of them are UN affiliated to some degree.
|
| I tried to find 3 things: 1) what the non-profit does, 2) what
| the non-profit produces, 3) what the non-profit accomplished.
|
| My ability to glean these details, by scraping and double-
| checking manually, had a very very low hit rate.. at least via
| website content. Organizations are oblique and very little is
| clear/available. [The same problem exists for websites for places
| (restaurants, venues, athletic events, etc). By and large, they
| all hide their addresses.]
|
| I'm guessing these efforts and reports would produce a similar
| translucency if audited from outside.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| NGOs are primarily money laundering operations for political
| purposes.
|
| It's one of the primary mechanics for how capital controls the
| execution (or not) of policy.
|
| Very powerful tool.
| repeekad wrote:
| In San Francisco a friend ran an event for an LGBT policy
| non-profit, tons of private security yet no actual members of
| LGBT, only rich white hetero couples and the discussion was
| about finances and donations, nothing to do with LGBT policy
| impact, it was like pulling back a curtain...
| monkeyelite wrote:
| Donating to a charity is kind of like outsourcing thinking.
| There is a market for people who want to help the LGBT
| community. How do we do that? Idk this group says they know
| how
| lazide wrote:
| Or they want to feel/say they are helping the community
| while actually not risking getting their hands dirty.
| umeshunni wrote:
| There's a derisive term 'limousine liberals' that fits the
| bill here.
| buildmonkey wrote:
| Try https://www.charitynavigator.org , which tells you what
| percentage of donated money is directly spent on the cause
| versus administration, staffing, etc. Charities vary widely,
| and it's worth comparing charities in the same space, e.g.,
| healthcare, hunger relief, veterans, because different spaces
| have different overheads.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Not so much the problem.
|
| The bigger issue is a ton of foundations are just bribery
| enabling organizations. There's a reason pretty much every
| politician and rich person has one.
|
| Donate $10k and the foundation can pay for a lavish
| speaking engagement in the Bahamas. The foundation head can
| give a 10 minute $50000 talk about how poverty is bad and
| then they enjoy the open bar and conversations with rich
| and powerful people.
|
| Let's be frank, the average citizen isn't giving a dime to
| the George Clooney foundation for justice [1]. So you have
| to ask, why does such a foundation exist?
|
| [1] https://cfj.org/
| bootsmann wrote:
| NGO is an incredibly broad category of things. There are
| certainly many grifter organizations (same as there are grifter
| companies) but there are also orgs such as the AMF which do
| incredibly effective work.
| browningstreet wrote:
| A lot of what I was probing called themselves that.
|
| I'm not bagging on NGOs in particular. But it's also how a
| lot of them refer to themselves.
|
| This is more about the lack of clarity in messaging by orgs
| that ostensibly have a vested interest in making their
| progress known. At least as long as they're engaged in public
| outreach.
| lazide wrote:
| IMO, most of the heart string tugging problems that get a
| lot of donations are not actually tractable if we do things
| people will tolerate. So orgs optimize towards looking busy
| while not actually doing anything, because there really is
| nothing to actually do. But no one can admit it.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to compare the UN and NGOs. The UN is a
| platform for diplomacy between nations. Of course it's going to
| be process heavy and not make a lot of progress, as these
| nations have fundamentally misaligned incentives. An NGO that
| exists as the project of nepobabies is fundamentally different.
| jowea wrote:
| The UN is many things. I guess most reports are a product of
| the secretariat/bureaucracy and the independent agencies more
| than the UNGA and the UNSC which is where the diplomacy
| happens. Although as usual the journalists failed to cite the
| @#*&#@(! report so I could read it myself.
|
| Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from
| the big international NGOs? They're both large well-meaning
| bureaucratic organizations staffed by a wide variety of
| people, a lot of funding by governments, a decent amount of
| authority to do these reports but not a lot of authority to
| actually do things.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different
| from the big international NGOs?_
|
| It very much depends on the bureaucracy but there are quite
| a few UN agencies with actual authority far beyond what any
| NGO would have (with the exception of the International
| Committee of the Red Cross which is explicitly given
| authority by the Geneva Convention).
|
| For example the WHO is backed by other international
| treaties like the International Health Regulations (~196
| signatories) that give it various powers like declaring a
| public health emergency. Its executive board is full of
| Ministers of Health, Directors-General of national health
| services, and other high ranking public health officials
| that directly exercise their powers within their respective
| governments.
|
| There's also the International Court of Justice, IMF,
| International Atomic Energy Agency, ICAO (aviation), IMO
| (maritime), and ITU (telecom) with various powers ranging
| from allocating spectrum to handing out billions in bailout
| loans.
|
| The UN may not be able to enforce many of its rulings and
| decisions without a standing army but for the most part,
| many agencies do have a lot of authority backed by
| international law to actually do stuff beyond coordinating
| its member nations and few countries ever rock the boat.
| Out of the agencies I mentioned above the ICJ is really the
| only one that has the rare bit of trouble because
| noncompliance escalates to the Security Council where
| appeals die due to friendly vetoes.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Yes they seem very different. Firstly NGOs can do stuff.
| Groups like Doctors Without Borders come to mind. The UN
| doesn't do stuff because it's not meant to do stuff. It's
| where countries come to discuss things. Sometimes they do
| things, but only when all the important countries agree. I
| feel like people expect way too much from organizations
| like the UN, as if they're supposed to act like a world
| government.
| albumen wrote:
| I agree on the latter point, but I think it's unfair to
| say the UN doesn't "do stuff". A lot of the time they
| partner with govs to deliver the below, but they're
| frequently the provider of last resort too:
|
| UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees): delivers shelter,
| food, and protection to millions of refugees and
| internally displaced persons.
|
| * WFP (World Food Programme): feeds over 100 million
| people annually and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.
|
| * UNICEF: runs child vaccination and education programs
| across the Global South.
|
| * WHO (World Health Organization): leads responses to
| global health threats (like COVID-19, Ebola, and now mpox
| and cholera outbreaks).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Diplomacy is an art, not a science, and "doing something"
| isn't necessarily the goal.
|
| I've worked in government in varying capacities, and one
| thing that happens is that legislatures want reports. It's
| part of the governing process. The fact that it's being
| written and later has meaning and justifies inquiry which
| may not have happened otherwise.
|
| It's hard for people to understand because companies don't
| work that way - they have their own mercurial processes. I
| went to a conference awhile ago, and the AWS sales dude
| gave me a bunch of swag. Palo gave me a fancy water bottle,
| Oracle gave me a dancing wind up dude for my desk. The
| hotel gave me a pen.
|
| Does that make me buy AWS? No. It's a token that
| essentially buys attention and goodwill for a moment in
| time.
| pstuart wrote:
| Seems like a perfect task for AI to do first pass assessment
| and summaries (albeit with follow up reviews).
|
| If those reports go unread and thus not acted upon they are
| worthless. We obviously need the details to exist but we are in
| a battle for hearts and minds, and the more dumbed down the
| message, the likelier it is to be received.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Please ignore if my statements are ignorant.
|
| I always wondered that whenever such reports or surveys come
| out why don't these organisations make the whole data and
| methodology public? Are they afraid that if they made it
| public, people will know how muddy these waters are?
| caseysoftware wrote:
| When they don't release the data and/or methodolgy, you have
| to treat the result the same: garbage.
|
| They could be completely making up data or demonstrating the
| gold standard example of pristine data collection and
| brilliant analysis but we'd never know.. and for some reason,
| they don't want to tell us.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> for some reason, they don 't want to tell us_
|
| It should be pretty clear why they don't want to show and
| tell.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I'm quite confident on why they don't want to share their
| data and/or methodology _but_ there could be legitimate
| reasons and I want to be open to those.
|
| Regardless, without that information, we can only
| evaluate them based on how rigorus they've been in the
| past:
|
| Are the researchers and organizations involved known for
| effective data collection and solid analysis?
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| If you're collecting data on human rights abuses, you get
| more high quality first hand reports if you protect your
| sources.
| vr46 wrote:
| Some of it is legitimately journalistic and protecting
| sources.
| dgfitz wrote:
| As a male breast cancer survivor, when I dug into the actuals
| of the Susan g komen foundation, I realized how much of a fraud
| the whole thing was.
|
| It's awful. Non-profits in the US are generally just awful.
| It's embarrassing.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Reading reports is hard work. If AI could turn them into videos
| instead I think they'd be easier to digest.
| kingstnap wrote:
| UN library has lot of stuff in it.
|
| https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en
|
| Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading
| wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot.
|
| Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically:
|
| > Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development
| Account : report of the Secretary-General
|
| > The present report has been prepared pursuant to General
| Assembly resolution 79/257, in which the Assembly requested the
| Secretary-General to submit a report on strengthening the
| effectiveness and impact of the Development Account at its
| eightieth session. The report details how the 10 implementing
| entities of the United Nations Secretariat have implemented
| Account-funded projects to support the capacity-development
| efforts of Member States, in particular in relation to selecting
| projects based on Member State needs; ensuring complementarity
| with the regular programme of technical cooperation; using a
| common framework for evaluating projects; conducting outreach to
| promote awareness of the Development Account and its funded
| projects; and leveraging additional resources to enhance the
| support delivered to Member States. It also presents further
| actions to promote the visibility of the Account and its results
| achieved and to strengthen coordination with the regular
| programme of technical cooperation to maximize synergies.
|
| It's frankly it's main use would probably be LLM training data.
| It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of
| documents translated professionally into multiple languages. But
| humans will struggle to have the attention to read through 16
| pages of the above.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of
| documents translated professionally into multiple languages.
|
| UN and EU documents have, unironically, been a significant
| resource in the development of translation software - they're a
| great source of parallel texts across broad sets of languages.
|
| Given their subject matter, they're not great for
| colloquialisms - good luck finding a UN report that uses the
| phrase "fucking bullshit", for example - but they're a great
| starting point.
| HSO wrote:
| Wide readerships are overrated though. The identity of the
| reader(s) and the credibility of the findings are much more
| important variables for influence than "big numbers", esp. today
|
| How many people actually read Marx, Einstein, Keynes etc vs how
| many read (or heard about!) their popularizers'popularizers?
| xyst wrote:
| Almost feels like an onion headline.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Well, I haven't read the report about this report either, but I
| have indirectly read about the information it provided.
|
| I feel like this is a non-issue since it's like the 'new' section
| on HN. Something that's important or and interesting gets picked
| up and spread (although only accessed once or twice) and is now a
| world-wide headline.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why should they be widely read? I'd think for reports like these,
| who reads them is more important than how many read them.
|
| Like almost everyone, I have zero involvement in UN activities,
| and zero influence over them. Why would I read their reports?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| They can overlap with other interests and hobbies. I don't
| browse UN reports directly, but I used to have access to a
| research service for work that would save and categorize
| relevant ones. Which actually makes me wonder if they are
| undercounting reads from other parties sharing the reports.
|
| Who indeed matters; I'm sure for many of the reports, only
| several people in the world actually _need_ to read them. I
| used to occasionally do research for one person to read and it
| was a good use of my time /salary. If it'd shared it somewhere
| and no one downloaded it, it would still have been worth
| writing for that person. However, it would've looked pathetic
| sitting out there with no downloads, compared to being printed
| and walked over. :)
| elcritch wrote:
| Next headline: Most Read UN Report Is About UN Reports Not Being
| Read
|
| If only 1% of us on HN committed to this we could easily achieve
| this worthwhile goal! Though I personally think it sounds boring
| and won't. ;)
|
| In other news, I've begun increasingly viewing the UN as next to
| useless. It's a great idea and we should have it, but the amount
| of corruption and bureaucracy seems insane.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| This is an institutional reflection of the individual tendency to
| talk about problems rather than solving them. Or, an important
| variant, where the urge to help those in need is expressed as
| directing them to "appropriate resources", which are also
| services that direct those seeking help to other appropriate
| resources, ad infinitum. The net result is a whole army of people
| who's expressed goal is to help people but who's effect is to
| send needy people into a loop of endless communication. We'd all
| be better off if they all quit and helped out at a soup kitchen,
| volunteered to visit with house-bound elderly, or something
| similarly physical and real. (This is in part driven by an
| individual need to "scale". We praise this desire to "change the
| world", but we pay no heed to the cost when ONLY world-changing
| action is praised.)
| brightball wrote:
| There are a lot of other contributing factors too. If a
| potential reader pre-assumes bias from the report, they may
| just choose not to invest the time. It's the same way bad faith
| political discussions play out with people making assumptions
| about the stance of a person voting the opposite way.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| It must be said that as far as that goes, the UN is designed to
| be a place to talk about problems, to air grievances, and the
| idea of it as a universal problem-solver and half-assed world
| government isn't particularly a part of how it started.
| Unfortunately as we're seeing what the UN has become is a
| plodding bureaucracy that occasionally has good intentions, and
| rarely sees them through. Mostly the UN is a clearing house for
| NGO organization and directing aid, which isn't a terrible
| thing, although their history of corruption, abuse of locals,
| ineptitude, and so on doesn't inspire confidence.
|
| There's also the reality that the UN suffers from being an open
| forum, it means that the Qaddafi's of the world get to air
| their... unique perspectives as well. The rise of China and the
| decline of Russia has also created a pretty grim dynamic, but
| IMO the worst of the present state of affairs is the travesty
| of having countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's
| Council!
|
| All in all I don't think I have a better idea for a substitute,
| and any ideas I did have would probably just reflect my own
| beliefs and desires rather than some universal principle. All
| in all I feel like the state of the UN does at least mirror the
| state of the world pretty well though. The US is all over the
| place depending on administration, Western Europe just plods
| along, Russia is a butcher, China is extremely complex in both
| its internal and external dealings (I don't want to generalize
| and I'm no expert, obviously there's some problems there
| however), and the Middle Eastern countries like the Gulf States
| and Saudi Arabia use the limitless power of vast wealth to warp
| and twist everything they touch.
| deepsun wrote:
| > UN is designed to be a place to talk about problems
|
| Uhm, my understanding is that the main UN purpose is to
| prevent WW3. It was thansformed from the League of Nations
| that was created after The World War, but obviously failed on
| its mission with the WW2.
| p_ing wrote:
| Preventing WW3 usually starts by airing grievances so the
| collective body can talk about said problems and come to a
| peaceful, diplomatic solution.
| delusional wrote:
| Nope, the UN charter predictably was pretty concerned with
| war, but all the equality and progressivism is in there
| too. As the very first paragraph of the original 1945 UN
| charter reads:
|
| "WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save
| succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice
| in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
| to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the
| dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights
| of men and women and of nations large and small, and to
| establish conditions under which justice and respect for
| the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of
| international law can be maintained, and to promote social
| progress and better standards of life in larger freedom"
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'd argue that the ridiculous aspects are a feature. By
| having a bureaucratic process select Iran, you're removing
| the editorial element.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| As someone who's done a lot of volunteering at soup kitchens
| and such as well as things like public policy research, my take
| is exactly opposite.
|
| Typical soup kitchen volunteering is pretty low impact. It's
| the first thing a lot of people think about when it comes to
| volunteering, and people like that they get to interact with
| the less fortunate. So they show up with their church group a
| few times, ladle some soup and that's about it. _Running_ a
| soup kitchen is different and higher impact.
|
| The things the UN is doing matter to millions of people. If you
| work with the UN food program, you're dealing with food by the
| truck load instead of by the spoonful.
| glitchc wrote:
| That's a great way of phrasing it, thank you. People have
| confused talking about the thing with doing something about the
| thing. It's an endemic in the liberal mindset. It's nice to
| have good ideas, but it needs to be followed through with
| actions. Otherwise the words simply amount to empty gestures.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is the report where they mention download
| numbers of UN reports, since Reuters buried the lede by not
| linking to it themselves:
|
| https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4086174
|
| I'm sure that they mention it in the report, and it is one of the
| UN80 reports, but I can't be sure that it's the one Reuters
| means, or that it's the only UN report on this issue.
| resource_waste wrote:
| My two strikes against the UN:
|
| >In international relations, no one really takes institutionalism
| seriously. Bilateral agreements and power are so monumentally
| more important that it overshadows posturing.
|
| >I once read the WHO recommendation on children watching TV. It
| said 1 minute of TV watching before the age of 1 was detrimental.
| There was no science, it was just a panel of experts.
|
| Anti-science + idealistic organization... what do I benefit from
| caring about the UN?
| fn-mote wrote:
| As far as I could determine, the issues in the second point do
| not exist.
|
| See the actual WHO report [1] from 2019. Page 8 contains the
| recommendations about "sedentary time" for infants. The box is
| literally tagged "Strong recommendations, very low quality
| evidence." The paragraphs at the bottom of the page contain a
| summary of the evidence from the literature.
|
| I don't see any basis for anti-science thinking in this
| article. It seems like you may have only seen/read the
| executive summary page viii.
|
| The UN's page of accomplishments [2] lists plenty of work that
| you don't have to be an optimist to find value in (e.g.,
| support for refugees, food aid, and vaccines).
|
| [1]:
| https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/978924155...
|
| [2]: https://www.un.org/en/essential-un/
| excalibur wrote:
| The Onion is now Reuters; Reuters is now The Onion.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I think (or at least I hope) this isn't true for all of them, but
| some of the report-producing agencies at the UN are absolutely
| terrible at their job. Their demographic projections, for
| example, are a complete joke, and no actual expert in the field
| has taken them seriously for a while.
|
| Opinions vary on whether this is because of ideological bias or
| just because a UN analyst job is a sinecure handed out for
| political favors rather than awarded on merit, but whatever the
| reason, you can't at all assume that coming from the UN is a
| guarantor of quality.
| lazide wrote:
| Has anyone thought the UN had anything to do with quality
| before?
| willguest wrote:
| > last year that the U.N. system supported 27,000 meetings
| involving 240 bodies, and the U.N. secretariat produced 1,100
| reports
|
| The bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding
| bureaucracy
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Honestly not sure why this is any sort of surprise. I _very_
| occasionally read UN reports for work. I very frequently see
| journalists covering those reports using the press release,
| clearly not having read anything else. And then I see low quality
| media reporting on the topic clearly having read only the third
| party reports. When journalists - whose job it is - don't read
| them, it's expecting a lot for anyone outside of the political
| /lobbying establishment to read them.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Yellow Journalism: Reading a tweet.
|
| Journalism: Reading the press release.
|
| Investigative Journalism: Reading the report.
| kenanblair wrote:
| beyond the title, what's this UN report about?
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Perfect Onion headline
| dotcoma wrote:
| Did they also find out WHY ?
| footnote43 wrote:
| https://www.un.org/un80-initiative/en/report-mandate-impleme...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/JVG8r
| XorNot wrote:
| Everyone coming in with a hot take on "lol reports" here should
| go look up what a military command _actually_ does during a war.
| Because some advances in live streaming aside...they read
| reports, and write more reports.
|
| In fact something your field commanders get to do is go and be
| shot at and then write reports about what happened. Radio
| operators keep notepads of things to send to back to base while
| in the field (usually meaning they're the last to sleep because
| they need to get the reports in).
|
| Writing stuff down is how knowledge is communicated in all
| disciplines.
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