ShiftyNJ Wrote:If you enjoy NPR check out their new-ish app NPR One. You can listen to any NPR station and they have featured news stories and interest pieces, which supposedly become tailored to your taste over time (I haven't used it enough to experience that really)
Well when I am inclined to listen to the news while driving I usually opt for NPR, not these stations that are so-called News/Talk which feature people like Rush Limbaugh and friends....Shawn Hannity it's not news and hardly news entertainment if you ask me, but people listen to that crap and take it as God said it himself..
I'll check it out one of these days when I get time...
"I’m not expecting to grow flowers in a desert, but I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime" Check out my stuff!
The "tailored to your taste" part is a bit bothersome when using the web. What If my taste changes? What if I want to walk around and see that six shown above as a nine? What if I just want to know what the other guy is thinking, in his words?
Last week I clicked on something by mistake and have been fed ads for the damned thing ever since. Now I know this is marketing (of a sort) but it does not appeal to my sense of independence. When the tactic is applied to news it becomes downright creepy.
I mean the Washington Post is obviously just fake news ran by sissy liberals who just need to get over it, but I did find this interesting and related to the conversation on the so called problem of the lying media....
Quote:Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.
The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?
Quote:“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.
Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments.
There's also a British documentary called The Century of the Self which focuses on how psychology affected both marketing and partisan politics that I'd highly recommend. It ends at about the year 2000, but these tricks didn't stop there, they continued to evolve, and to use computer profiling to better target their audiences, and then using things like social media to help the target audience get the message (because people will pay for fake news, propaganda, and downright urban legends if it supports their views, and they'll also spread them to those who are very likely of a similar mindset), often while data mining the said social media as well to develop profiles on individuals that are then sold to marketers, political campaign managers, and even to landlords to determine how trustworthy you are on paying rent.
As for partisan politics, this guy talks about Cruz and Trump using his company (though you can bet other politicians will be using them in the future as well) in such a way:
And even kids get into the act selling Americans (and anyone else) whatever it is they want to hear:
Quote:"The Americans loved our stories and we make money from them," he boasts, making sure I see the designer watch he's fiddling with. "Who cares if they are true or false?"
Quote:Goran began putting up sensationalist stories, usually plagiarised from right-wing American sites, last summer.
After copying and pasting various articles, he packaged them under a catchy new headline, paid Facebook to share it with a target US audience hungry for Trump news and then when those Americans clicked on his stories and began to like and share them, he began earning revenue from advertising on the site.
Goran says he worked on the fakery for only a month and earned about 1,800 euros (£1,500) - but his mates, he claims, have been earning thousands of euros a day. When I ask him if he worries that his false news might have unfairly influenced voters in America, he scoffs.
"Teenagers in our city don't care how Americans vote," he laughs. "They are only satisfied that they make money and can buy expensive clothes and drinks!"
There's more on how click-bait has become the best way to spread news as well, but that's another topic. Long story short, it's much like the newspapers before subscriptions changed how papers and magazines conducted themselves (never perfect, but not as ridiculous as they used to be, or how news has become again), to get paid they have to grab your attention, and fake news sells even better than actual news, and with less work.
I'm partial to Secular Talk on youtube, he posts several videos a day. Russia Times is good for most things, except news about Russia. Vice is still a fairly good source to get information from.
I would not trust news from most newspapers, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, well you get the idea. Doesn't mean totally dismiss it, but you may need to take the stories with a grain of salt depending on topic.
LJay Wrote:Last week I clicked on something by mistake and have been fed ads for the damned thing ever since. Now I know this is marketing (of a sort) but it does not appeal to my sense of independence. When the tactic is applied to news it becomes downright creepy.
My BF's sister was in town visiting and asked me to do her a favor and print out a return form for something she had ordered online. Ever since then my web browser typically shows ads for the cheapest cheesiest women's fashion that I have ever seen. That would all be fine if I were a drag queen on a very modest budget, but I am neither.
InbetweenDreams Wrote:Well when I am inclined to listen to the news while driving I usually opt for NPR, not these stations that are so-called News/Talk which feature people like Rush Limbaugh and friends....Shawn Hannity it's not news and hardly news entertainment if you ask me, but people listen to that crap and take it as God said it himself..
I'll check it out one of these days when I get time...
I should clarify, NPR run a lot of series and if you listen to a whole program they are likely to put the next week's episode in your queue, etc. You can still browse and listen to whatever you want, they just suggest the things they've seen you paying attention to in the past.
Quote:All of which makes a key point: Coverage of Trump is often treated as a proxy for how the press thinks of Trump’s supporters. That might be unfair to national reporters chasing down a controversial president. But the disconnect is exacerbated by the fact that far too many Americans don’t have a local press that understands them, and thus all their news comes with a heap of condescension.
Reporters don’t like it when these voters talk down “the media,” as if they’re all part of one monolithic blob. But to those who used to have local news and reporters who lived among them, that’s precisely what the national press is.
Reporters, then, must invert the classic environmentalist trope of “Think globally, act locally.” At the very least, to bridge the yawning trust gap, journalists — even those who act globally — should think locally.
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