The News and Commentary
I've been a news junkie since Watergate. News magazines made a fortune from my habit until the WWW came along. Now I cycle through 5 or 6 "mainstream" news sources like CBC and Wapo. I like Yahoo quite a bit for aggregating news from many sources. (feels a bit guilty since I don't think the sources get paid for their work).
Along with the news came a lot of commentary that 'explained' the news. For a long time I thought the commentary was secondary to the news. That is, the news is like raw sense data that commentary interprets and makes meaningful. But there is a heavy selection process that chooses just what to present as news. Part of that selection is stuff like pressure from owners but the news also has to be attractive so that people are interested enough to read it.
The need to be attractive causes the news to be presented as a story just because a story is easier for our brains to understand than a bare list of facts. For instance the meaning of a list of fires changes when we learn that the fires are connected. The organic role of commentary is to provide that story.
Back in the day newspapers restricted explicit commentary to the Opinion Page while the news was presented along with ads and announcements of various sorts. Websites have a different way of presenting information but still commentary was a bit walled off from the news.
Lately a new kind of publication has emerged. Popular commentators are splitting from the news and setting up their own ways of reaching the public. I've been reading Paul Krugmann at the NYTimes for decades now. He had policy disagreements it seems and left to set up his own substack, Jennifer Rubin at Washington Post has done a similar thing.
They each charge a subscription fee to read their content. I've subscribed to both and unsubscribed the NYT and Wapo. There are lots of free sources of news - CBC is pretty good for a Canadian - but there aren't many people telling an useful story about what the news means.
The news carried in newspapers had a kind of unifying effect since everyone was getting basically the same information. Well it wasn't benign. But the effect was that that all the anglo people like me got the same sort of news from anglo publications controlled by the local billionaire. Saint John had about 40% of the population that was francophone. You;d never know it by reading the news or going to a bookstore or library.
With the internet - we have a much wider variety of information sources at our fingertips. In particular we get a wide range of commentaries about that information. We kind of run into a situation that Quine noted: there are many possible stories about any set of facts. How do we tell which story is right?
We won't find the answer in the news.
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.