Vicious Cycles: Theses on a philosophy of news (2020)

Posted by eustoria 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by Peteragain 1 day ago

It's rambling, but highlights a point. The big picture IMHO is that news as we ingest it is like history. History is viewed through a lens of the present and its concerns. News is viewed through the same lens, filtered by the concerns of, not journalists, but what journalists think we are concerned with. Real journalists (IE investigative) don't present "facts", but interpret "facts" against a world view. Good journalists state how they do that. Just to put the cat out and see what happens, Michael Moore is definitive at this, irrespective of whether or not you agree with his world view, at least you know what his world view is. I've just had a piece of Reform UK advertising through the mailbox, and it is printed in the format and style of news. Nice trick. I guess that is what 70 million GBP of overseas funding buys you.

Comment by soperj 1 day ago

> Michael Moore is definitive at this

Is he though?

I thought it was pretty well known he's manipulated timelines, selectively edited interviews and staged things.

He puts his world view first and makes the facts fit that view.

Comment by Peteragain 13 hours ago

He's not the only one. And as I said you at least get told his bias. The BBC (see the trump court case) edited time lines and claim to be unbiased. The idea (not mine; "critical discourse analysis" I think) is that all news is biased and the right way to report is to state the bias up front.

Comment by mentalgear 22 hours ago

claims as these require sources .

Comment by ChrisArchitect 21 hours ago

(January 2020) OP.

Oh what little insight they had into how bad things were knowing what was to come.

Comment by motohagiography 23 hours ago

i tune out when i see criticisms of opposing ideology because the very concept itself requires one.

when you have an ideology, everything becomes an ideology, and this serves only to reinforce its own cycle of criticism. thinking in terms of ideologies is just a materialistic mind virus.

the essential ingredient of news or a story is conflict, and "ideology" just synthesizes and manufactures conflict to hang the facts and events of the day on. This false, solipsistic foundation is why the news is garbage.

im glad we have fun podcasts as a kind of replacement social fabric because they are based on sincere interest and desire, whereas the news was a system of braying, histrionic criticism in a permanent power struggle.

the old news establishment were impostors, and a kakistocracy of compromised pretenders. I say good riddance to them.

Comment by UncleOxidant 22 hours ago

> when you have an ideology, everything becomes an ideology

Who doesn't have an ideology? Everyone has a framework through which they view the world. The trick is recognizing the ideological framework of the media which you are consuming.

> im glad we have fun podcasts as a kind of replacement social fabric because they are based on sincere interest and desire

I'm pretty sure that's not always true.

Comment by motohagiography 19 hours ago

my argument is that ideology is not a substrate, its is a construct, and an entraining or zombifying one.

the basic problem is that rooting consciousness in language is inferiorizing, and then iterating this yields the narrow cone of "everything is ideological" which conflates it with perspective, experience, and the rest of the whole shebang.

it becomes relevant with AI and machine alignment because as they are not conscious, this prison (to us) of language is (for now) their substrate, and interestingly a lot of our garbage ideas about how to entrain humans with narratives may become tools for managing these super powerful language machines.

however, it requires that as humans, we "pop" up a level in our own ideas of consciousness if we are going to learn to manage these new mechanisms.

these days i ask people, if you were an agent, what would you do next? the analogy is worth reflecting on because we didn't have this meta understanding of unconscious but autonomous agents until recently. indont think we have found a new kind of consciousness, but we have found something that forces us to reflect on our own. it begins with recognizing that ideology was not a substrate.

Comment by gyanchawdhary 22 hours ago

very well said!

Comment by 21 hours ago