> Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah.

Why is any of that necessary? LLMs can just synthesize a story for the press de novo, without reference to prior developments or indeed any 20th century style on-the-ground reporting. Reporters should in fact be pleased that this meaningless drudgery has been automated out of the profession.

Besides, whatever "facts" are presented will be labelled as fake news by its detractors, who will not have their own internal narratives swayed in the slightest. The rest will rest easy in their confirmation bias, it now being confirmed once more.

I would argue that reading discussion of "CEO says" "journalism" on HN will often better inform you than reading a mainstream journalist puff-piece interview of a CEO. Many journalists will not provide adversarial viewpoints, because to do so would stanch the flow of interview subjects.

I don’t know. Is a random YT channel more trustworthy considering their reliance on sponsorships? And once they do interviews, they face the same issue

I also just don’t see interviews being a big audience draw (at least for text-based news). It seems there are so many other, bigger problems than the issue of access: lack of revenues, lack of interest in quality journalism, …

>when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.

sure because they're just making shit up. If you don't have access to a source you're by definition speculating. The fact that they can do it in an abrasive way or in attack mode is a performance of authenticity, not actual reporting. You believe them because they're "just like you".

It's the biggest curse of our time and emotional manipulation. Journalists sometimes have to navigate how they talk to people but a skilled reader can at least extract real information from it even if it requires reading between the lines. The Youtube 'reporters' add nothing, it's entertainment. They're popular to the extent that they reinterpret publicly available information in a way that confirms the biases of their audiences.

The journalist pays for access but the youtuber pays with audience capture, the difference is consumers of mainstream journalism are aware of it. Someone who reads an interview in the NYT with a mainstream politician know in advance that they'll have to be critical, 18 year old's watching youtube don't. Youtubers are infinitely more deferential to their audience than a journalist is ever going to be to an individual subject because the latter is professionally employed and the former is a cancelled subscription wave away from flipping burgers.

There are solid news sources, but they're hard to find and differ by the subject.

For example, war maps are hard to find. Al Jazeera publishes maps of what's been hit in the Middle East, which makes sense because their readers are on the receiving end. understandingwar.com contributes to an interactive war map.[1] (The site says to view it with Firefox; Chrome has bugs on mobile.)

ops.group, which is for people operating aircraft internationally, has a frequently updated map of where to avoid and what the problems are.[2] They have a GPS spoofing map. A sizable chunk of Eurasia is currently unsafe for aviation. "For flights between Europe and Asia, the normal Gulf corridor is effectively unavailable. Overflying traffic is rerouting either north via the Caucasus-Afghanistan, or south via Egypt-Saudi-Oman." Nobody wants to overfly Afghanistan. Almost no ATC, no radar, and an emergency diversion to Kabul means dealing with the Taliban. "For most operators, landing at an Afghan airport would be akin to ditching in oceanic airspace."

You have to dig that hard to find out what's going on. Neither the mainstream media nor the podcasters and influencers go that far.

[1] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/089bc1a2fe684405a67d67f...

[2] https://ops.group/blog/middle-east-airspace-current-operatio...

Local US television news is coöpted by conservative media empires that routinely insert propaganda pieces into the stations they control.

And with that dismantle the fourth power which is nothing without an audience? Just let the powerful do whatever they want to do?

There's some drawbacks to the news, certainly, but I can't imagine not being aware or interested in what's happening around the world. Surely it's better to follow AP and Reuters and tune the rest.

Agreed, watching national or world news is useless. If you want to know what is likely to happen instead of what someone wants you to think will happen, we now have prediction markets. Whenever I see a headline I'm curious about, now instead of reading the article I just go to a prediction market and check the probabilities.

How else are young people supposed to cultivate their own cynicism though?

This is bad advice. Local news is not some noble pursuit. It's helpful but so is national news. It's good to know how the world is evolving. Burying your head in the sand is not a solution.

It's not really a challenge of reaching those students, the outlets that could otherwise reach them just simply aren't interested in spreading that particular news, because it goes against their ideological beliefs.

And if you ask yourself "wait, why wouldn't they want to inform people of a NASA moon mission?", you're really behind the ball on what's going on.

If it was information that they actually wanted to spread, it would be spread wide and far and reach those students.

Perhaps I would have heard of this moon mission if HN wasn’t busy inundating me with politics and AI product threads.

I feel like I vaguely remember hearing about it a while back, with little fanfare, and then not again until just yesterday.

In that time I’ve learned of all kinds of crazy developments in politics and AI companies here on HN

Taking a stance frames results for the writer, such that they are less likely to write about points of the opposing side or express skepticism towards findings on theirs. I'd rather understand the situation regardless of how much it advantages my preference than gain a false understanding. Most issues are nuanced yet interest in covering things in this manner seems to be more rare over time. You have to hope you can cobble this together by looking at both sides, establish what's true, perhaps if lucky run into an insider / impartial sources (which is why I come back to HN).

This is tangential, but what you wrote about nature reminded me of a biology professor once saying how at least in nature it seems like other animals generally kill in a quick, efficient way where hopefully the prey won’t suffer too much.

"taking a side is willful ignorance"

So is "neutrality." Neutrality is at best just a third perspective obtained through distance. A foreigner who reports on an ethnic genocide can in many cases be neutral because they're distant from it, but as they learn more about it they'll almost certainly adopt a position, losing their neutrality as their distance to the issue shrinks. Much worse is when the perception of distance coincides with an unspoken bias on an issue. How can an American who grew up in America be neutral on racism and what does that mean?

Attenborough narrated documentaries are filled with death and carnage, shot by the most patient cinematographers in the world. What a nonsense take.

> “Most people across generations favour the idea of impartial news, but young people more often (32% compared with 19% of those 55+) think it ‘makes no sense for news outlets to be neutral on certain issues’, such as climate change or racism.”

The 55+ are just lying, or have a very different scale where neutral falls somewhere else.

No other demographic is more religiously willing to believe anything a fat TV news retard tells them than old people in America.