96
votes
It's time to change how we cover Elon Musk: After a weekend of whoppers about X and fighting Mark Zuckerberg, the press should take a more skeptical approach
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- It's time to change how we cover Elon Musk
- Authors
- Casey Newton
- Word count
- 799 words
It's not just Musk though is it?
Let's really push forward with stop just giving dreadful human beings and their sycophantic followers platforms in which to spew whatever it is they're grifting on now.
That requires media outlets to kind of sync up on that, and you're just never going to get that.
The death of classified ads and print advertising really injured the business model for most news organizations. Publishers, editors and journalists are operating on much slimmer budgets and leaner staffs if the news sites still exist.
That said, the article makes a good point and care should be taken.
@akir
I often wonder if we just got used to "On the internet" = Free.
I read ArsTechnica for example, I don't subscribe and I have uBlock Origin... so, they kind of get no viewership from me. But there again I do sub to NewScientist, NewStateman, NewHumanist (SO MANY NEW'S), MCN and a few other brands that get me info on the hobbies and interests that I have.
But trying to sub at £60 per quarter just isn't sustainable.
And ads are the absolutely goddamn worst.
I think if the free expectation hasn't been there from the beginning we would have evolved an easier way. Package deals where you could read x articles from this list of websites in a month or a year, one click to buy this one article for $y, or spend $z per year to read any article on this list of websites for a penny. The entire Internet would be a different place.
The way it is now, it would cost a fortune to support every random website I click on from a link I found, plus they always come with automatic renewals.
I seem to remember that there was a start-up who was offering something like this, where you could buy some credits from them and you could spend one to read an article from any of the publishers they had deals with.
None of the sources I paid any attention to signed up with them, and since I haven't heard of them since then I can only assume they went out of business. Now I can't even remember their name.
Scroll was one such service that was acquired by Twitter in 2021 and shut down.
I believe you might be thinking of an old Google service! I even remembered what it was called:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
Based on your comment, GPT-4 surfaced something called Blendle which I hadn't heard about: https://blendle.com/ - But it's pay-per-article.
Blendle experimented a bit with both subscription and pay-per-article, if I recall correctly. But it failed to catch on. One of the reasons was you had to read the articles in their app/website and some major publications objected to that. They wanted to control the whole user experience.
The real problem is and always has been that nobody can decide whether we're orchestrating a communist revolution or not.
Is the system going to be paid for by volunteers? If not, then the money has to come from people with ulterior motives; calling them "bad actors" is a bit unfair when they've explicitly paid upfront for your soul. What were you expecting?
Yeah. That's my problem as well on the renewals front.
I also think it's because there's so much garbage online now. Imagine paying 25p for an article that's AI generated?
Craigslist and then Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, Ebay and other platforms took over classified ads.
Exactly, it's Trump etc all over again. And by "all over again", I really mean "it never stopped and this is how anyone polarizing is covered now" which is incredibly dangerous.
It's just every celeb if I'm honest. I don't care about the vast majority of celebrities. They're vapid, boring, uninteresting airheads often talking more about their latest company and brand than anything meaningful to mankind.
Well sure, but not every celebrity is a sociopath that's actively destroying the US like Trump is. It's one thing when tabloids print all kinds of useless garbage, but it's a bigger problem when the country's leading media institutions can't even responsibly report on things Trump, Musk, etc do anymore.
Of course not. But let's be honest... what do they contribute in their current form? They're not sociopaths, but they're probably just selling you something.
"Oh Ryan Reynolds is such a good man", cool... so is Jeremy at number 12 down the road.
It’s not very practical since he owns a platform and he does newsworthy things. But on Tildes we could try to avoid sharing links to stories along the lines of “Musk said something outrageous.” Musk saying something outrageous isn’t itself news since he does that all the time.
We could also avoid having debates about whether Musk is terrible and just take that for granted. (This doesn’t mean everything he does has only bad effects, though.)
Under this framework, the linked story doesn’t really count as news so it’s a little dubious to be discussing it, but here we are.
Such as?
For example, I don't think it would make have made sense to pretend the Twitter takeover wasn't happening, though how that happened week-by-week might be left to specialist coverage. Also, his companies do newsworthy things? SpaceX is in the news a fair bit. He might fund a new initiative that becomes newsworthy?
That time he created his Hyperloop idea in order to torpedo some rail project that was being suggested?
Not the Hyperloop itself, but the context of the effort is newsworthy imo.
You're operating under the assumption that the "press" has a goal of delivering factual news and being a service to the people.
Most media exists to sell ads and make money, as well as deliver propaganda to people, every new year this becomes more and more true and media loses more and more credibility. They're going to keep printing every single Elon Musk quote until people stop clicking on them
Just last week, even NPR ran the story about him just threatening a lawsuit against those disinformation researchers. I.e. literally a story about nothing. Can you imagine if they covered every random "I don't like you" letter anyone wrote?
I don't think it's possible to deplatform these guys. They just bring too many clicks.
One of the biggest reasons why I'm not a bigger news consumer is that it seems that scrutiny is an increasingly uncommon quality. This might be the inexperience of youth talking, but decades ago I seem to remember that publishing rumors was the mark of an inferior newspaper trying to do everything they could do to get readers. Nowadays it seems like everything is a gossip rag; unfortunately, those types of stories do sell.
I feel that news publishers should really do more to become arbiters of truth. Outside of the opinion pages, even very liberal papers use such soft language to call out people who are openly lying about things. So often I see them print that a statement is "inaccurate" or "does not match the record". They need to use words that succinctly transmit the gravity of their statements. They need to use "false", "untrue", or if they know that they knew better at the time, flat-out say "lie".
At some point the importance of being first superseded that importance of being accurate. I think it started with the 24 hour news cycles and was exacerbated by real time communication tools like social media.
One thing I really like about being subbed to Wikipedia Current Events is that some days, a lot shows up, and other days, like 2 things happened. And I know if I was following any news org, even ones I respect, the 2 news days would be just as full as the 25 news days in terms of their homepage. They'd find some way of justifying their front page.
Maybe they're afraid of being sued for libel?
But yes, I agree with everything you said. They need to be more direct - don't hold back when calling out lies. Why be subtle about it? Don't write that "Elon Musk said a thing and stuff". Write that "Elon Musk lied for the 117th time"
archive link, as well as reprint in The Verge
Good liars use double speak to elude outright contradictions of reality. They exaggerate their claims and downplay criticisms. There’s a certain reliance on plausible deniability. They con you into thinking it’s your duty to provide evidence to dispute their claims.
Musk went full on to off the rails in front of the world back in 2018 during the Thai cave rescue. Maybe in general the press should be skeptical of narcissists and billionaires.
I think a good press would be skeptical of everyone. Every person has their own personal motives and incentives behind their actions and choices. It's important for the press to ask questions that identify any ulterior motives of people, governments, companies, and agencies, regardless of their wealth or status.
Basically our news media is lagging. I don’t even want to try to type up what I think the causes are.
This is so fucking true too. There are so many articles and little "news flash" type of stories in this format and it is exhausting to me. Stop just parroting everything these psychopaths say! I have become so disillusioned about journalism because of this type of stuff that only appeals to the lowest common denominator. That isn't to say that there isn't still good journalism, because there absolutely is, but it's always this outrage bait that gets the attention. Ugh!
The number one type of "news story" that irritates me these days are the ones that have titles like "People are <feeling> at <concept>!" and it's just a bunch of tweets from random people.
And not just random people, but random people with like 4 followers each.
Since an article like that wouldn't even be accepted into a school newspaper I am left to believe that they are nothing but propaganda designed to give "legitimacy" to certain complaints or paint certain groups as unreasonable/dangerous/etc. Then certain outlets with an agenda start a feedback loop to amplify the basic nothing-burger original article until suddenly there are "dozens" of articles about said topic.
I saw it alot during the Occupy Wall Street and the police brutality protests. Articles would fly around based off literally 1 tweet from some rando with less than a dozen followers and with no retweets talking about how cops shouldn't exist or something. It could have been a well done troll post, it could have been poorly done sarcasm or maybe they honestly felt that--it could very well have been a planted tweet. Then a bunch of articles would apear all quoting each other until there were many articles to say "that's what they want!" and then it became a talking point for Tucker.
Hmmm, A tweet by A random internet person with significantly more "articles" talking about it that people who would have even viewed it otherwise becomes a talking point on a major
newspropaganda channel to froth people up..I can't stand Musk, but the only thing stopping me ditching Twitter is that, for me, there isn't a better way to follow the news.
I'm interested in UK politics, so I created a list of British political journalists, and I scroll that feed to find out what's going on.
I tried to create the same thing on Mastodon, but the journos on my Twitter list just aren't there. Not to mention how user-unfriendly and glitchy it is. Same goes for other alternatives too - they're just not there yet. I look forward to when they are.
Certainly feels like there's a changing of the social media guard in the air, though.
I don't know how widespread RSS feeds are anymore, because I've never actually used it. But would you not be able to curate a similar feed to what you've got going, through tags on news sites? Say, subscribe to a "British politics" tag from the BBC and whatever other outlets of your choosing. Or do specific journalists bring something special to the table?
Good question. There are certainly journalists and commentators whose takes I find more interesting and useful than others. It's mostly the commentary, analysis, and further reading I'm interested in, rather than what the news event is itself.
Journos will use whatever is easiest and quickest, with the widest reach, and at the moment that's definitely still Twitter. I'd much rather use a decentralised system, but I guess for most journos they're just interested in the best way to get a message out rather than how the system behind it works.
I think it would be good to stop talking about him altogether, except when his actions truly have global consequences, which doesn't happen that often.
Don't feed the troll, as the saying goes.
The talent that Trump, Musk, and others like them have is the ability to generate profit for the modern media, which in turn generates attention for their causes, and by extension revenue for them.
Keep the media happy, they keep you happy. It's called a promoter, and they've existed since forever. However these days with various interactions between corporations and governments they've become disproportionately influential
This is the first time I've seen it referred to this way. Makes me think of when Prince changed his name.