Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "I'm a Journalist Who Hates The News" video.

  1. Whatever one may think about him and his works otherwise, on this he is quite correct.
    4
  2. Depends on your dialect at this point. (Also, the word "oft," rarely used these days but closely related to "often," would like a word.) Unlike many other things that people insist are acceptable, this matter has no impact on one's intelligibility.
    1
  3.  @JH-tc7wb  problem is, they get their money from advertising. Advertisers pay based on how many people are watching and how often their adds are shown. This encourages short content segements that are almost entirely taken up by recaps and "coming up next" bits, and long and/or frequent ad breaks, and news chosen based not on what you need to know, but what they can best draw out the hype for while expending as few resources as possible to get (which in practice cones down to flat out making things up more often than one might hope). And if that's Not the case it's because they're entirely bought and paid for by usually unspecified interests. Generally speaking, well run state owned news networks tend to avoid those pitfalls, and have known and predictable biases that are easier to compensate for, and actually have Less interest in exploiting psychological weaknesses in their audience. The problem comes when it shifts from "public information resource" to "ruling party propaganda organ". (I think the short terms between elections are one of several factors that helps New Zealand avoid that problem.). Better, stil, it's very easy to work around the biases simply by watching the equivalent news from two or three countries whose areas of interest don't overlap (opposite positions aren't as helpful as you'd think. Different degrees of investment in the issue has a bigger effect.). Unless said foreign news is being censored by your government, but that tells you what you need to know all by itself. (The TV news here does have its issues, but quality of reporting isn't a particularly big one. The writers being overly fond of puns and dad-jokes on the other hand...)
    1