What Is Wrong with the News?

Their monetization models rely heavily on advertising and sensationalism, and much of it is the journalistic equivalent of SEO spam. Boring, sober analyses don't sell clicks anymore, so it's all hyperpolarized doomsday headlines.

That, and also seeing how disempowered the average American has become in terms of their ability to actually make any difference in the political or corporate world. It's just a dog-and-pony show in these waning days of democracy combined with ever-more-powerful corporate interests... the news really just serves as a way to reaffirm how helpless the overwhelming majority of us really are, no matter if it's the latest hot-button political topic, layoffs, return-to-office mandates, etc. The news helps the elites mirror each other's strategies and behaviors, while doing little more than instilling a sense of cyclic doom and gloom for the average Joe.

They don't call it "doomscrolling" for nothing.

I've lost my trust because it appears that wealthy owners (and publishers) put a distinct pro-wealthy people slant. Beginning in 2005, when NYT was revealed to have spiked the story of NSA mass surveillance, to the squelching of presidential endorsements, we've seen a lot of it.

It's also true that a lot of anti-oligarch news gets published, there's some bells you can't unring. If news orgs published only Baghdad Bob type lunacy, they'd loose all credibility. Framing and selective publishing can do the trick.

What do you consider "the news"

Skimming the Infotainment dopamine sites for fun but not for news. There has never been a news site and probably won't ever be in my opinion. Not newspapers, radio, television, scrawling on cave walls. Everyone has multiple agendas, hidden agendas and some more obvious.

Somewhat off topic from your question I enjoy when people make a mashup of all the "news" sites repeating the exact narratives they were given verbatim whilst playing circus music.

Example [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo [video][2 mins][warning: does not contain circus music]

The vast majority of it is non-actionable (to me) information. It's exhausting to follow and impossible to remember, except perhaps as tidbits or "moving average". Professional journalism and its products have a place, but not in my head right now.

There is however great value in its archives, e.g. for contemporary historians and journalists painting a bigger picture or consulting decision makers. Can't compute history from today.

And of course there's possible problems with bias, agendas, etc. But that's history science 101.

Journalists are interviewing each other, which is then presented as news and facts. Most journalists seem to have stopped presenting facts and fact based analyses anyway, and instead apparently want to involve themselves as a person and pass on their worldview (or that of their employer) instead. Or they simply pass on what is distributed by Reuters and co., without further research and analysis. I'm not interested in that and I'm not paying for it.

Only a small number of publishers completly lost my trust. fox news and the whole murdoch empire, axel Springer AG are the most prominent.