I've personally been aware of the back story and facts behind maybe a dozen different US network news reports. In several cases I knew the people being interviewed.

Every single time, the news, as reported, contained glaring factual errors or lies by implication that were introduced to make more of a story. In many cases it wasn't an issue of a reporter misunderstanding the story, but rather an issue of "let's take these facts and meld them into a more compelling story."

That kind of blatant disregard for truth and pandering for ratings has no place on public airwaves.

I can confirm this. I was involved in an incident once. The TV news reporters all came out and covered it. That evening, I watched the reports on the same event from 3 channels. They all got the basic facts 100% wrong, and each channel had a different set of those wrong facts.

It wasn't even an issue of bias, or making the story more compelling. It was simply slap-dash, string any-old list of crap together, run it, and move on to the next item.

It was an eye-opening experience for me.

I'm thankful that the city I live in has no media coverage. We've had police standing off with a guy barricaded in his own home on our street and nothing even touches the news even though they shut off the area for 5 hours.

I have no clue why, I think it might be because you can find police dispatch feeds for every neighboring city except ours. That's the only thing I can think of as I live in a very affluent area and the most we've ever got was the local paper covering a drive by shooting (I live in Canada so it's virtually unheard of, especially in my area - first in 15 years or something)

A number of studies have consistently shown that TV news makes people dumber: more misinformed, more irrational, more confused, and less able to draw reasonable conclusions or make good decisions.

It seems I cannot reply to TeMPOraL, but here are some citations:

Iyengar, S. 1991. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press.

Iyengar, S. et Kinder, D. R. 1987. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press.

The New Videomalaise : Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust DC Mutz - American Political Science Review, 2005 - Cambridge Univ Press http://www.jstor.org/pss/30038915

My M.Sc. in PolSci was useful after all... A third of my master thesis is on that very subject, but it's in french...

Oh my god, the political coverage is the absolute worst. I am embarrassed by the system of politics the US has slipped into.

I had friends in high school who had post-middle-age parents who were absolutely insane politically. Magnets covering their fridge, signs in their yard, on their walls; their house was just full of propaganda. And they would sit there after school watching the fucking news and getting outraged every time they were supposed to. It's clockwork for these news channels.

You have described my parents. I can't stand to be in the same building with them when they talk about anything politics related.

It's really sad to see

For future reference if you want to reply to a comment with no reply option click the comment link and you can reply from there.

Please don't do this regularly, though. The reply option is missing on posts for a time to attempt to reduce bad behavior, and even though it's a bit leaky through the permalink page, using that a whole lot may prompt pg to close the leak. In general, I only use it when I will not be able to reply for hours if I wait 5-10 minutes (about to start a drive, or be in meetings, or whatever).

If you're not using it for mischief, I don't personally see the harm in it - the "missing" link is still fulfilling its purpose of discouraging "evil" impulses by making it just that little bit harder to carry them out.

Define "bad behavior".

People were arguing with each other and creating deeply nested comments, ignoring all other discussion. The delay exists to give them a chance to cool down and reconsider the wisdom of arguing.

The site will permit one to reply after a bit of time. If it is delaying you, it's probably best to use that time to improve your comment by citing sources or editing it to be clearer and more concise, rather than using the cheat to post straightaway.

Petty back-and-forths that don't add any value for everyone else.

> A number of studies have consistently shown that TV news makes people dumber

While I believe that and I like the conclusion, my inner rationalist screams:

[citation needed]

:).

Fox News != all tv news. Reproduce that study using, say, BBC News or Al Jazeera English (or even better BBC news and Al Jazeera English) and we'll talk.

Not saying those channels are perfect, but not all TV is created equal.

It's true that there is quite a variety but I'd venture to guess that most US TV news clusters closer to Fox than it would to BBC/AJE.

I think only part of the problem with mainstream TV news is inherent in the medium. There's a lot of effort put into making it infotainment.

That particular type of TV news. Not all TV news.

The medium is not the same thing as the type of content.

> The medium is not the same thing as the type of content.

True, it's a generalization, but it's a useful generalization if majority of content specific to a given medium seems to have the same properties.

Agreed. Take http://www.democracynow.org/about for an example.

Citation(s) please, and does it apply to all countries' tv? I would like to believe that proper news don't yield more misinformed people. (How does this differ from reading a news article on internet?)

Please post a URL to any of these studies so I can send it to my Mom. I'm not joking.

http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/ Pt. 1 http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/outfox/ Pt. 2

http://digitaljournal.com/article/314919 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/21/fox-news-viewers-le... etc.

Except that all local TV news coverage on the major networks is bad almost without exception and cable news has degraded into celebrity news, opinions from Facebook and Twitter and heavily biased, uninformed opinion segments. If you get your news from a television news show you are likely becoming less-informed and more prone to emotional response.

PBS is one of the few organization that still broadcasts real journalism in the US and it is under constant attack by brain-dead politicians, cable news blowhards and some portion of the population whose minds have been dulled by television news.

PBS may do ok on the coasts where they have offices, but they (and NPR) are pretty horrible with reporting in the plains states. Their story on Wiliston ND was so full of errors and stock footage[1] it was amazing. NPR blew the figures on the SD Child Welfare study. They have an agenda that gets them market share and control costs the same way every other ``News'' organization does.

[1] look reporters, ND does not have wandering buffalo herds everywhere, you can stop using the same stock footage anytime.

There's not really another good way to signify ND, though. It's very hard to set up an interesting photograph or stock footage scene in an area that is totally flat, with no natural or man-made landmarks. American Public Media, which makes a lot of NPR content, is based in St. Paul.

Western ND (where Williston ND is) is not "totally flat", it has the badlands. How about show that actual town when talking about it instead of stock buffalo footage? Its like every Native American story shows a Pow-Wow instead of the community the story took place in.

They could have done Lake Sakakawea but it's still hard to get an interesting scene there. Really dramatic badlands imagery would have to come from somewhere like Teddy Roosevelt national park, which is 2 hours away. Arguably, that sort of footage is just as cliche as bison. I think the bison are more representative of the state as a whole. (NDSU seems to agree with me)

The reason they didn't show the town is probably because it is totally ugly. Do you have a link to the episode online? I can't find it.

It was on a couple of months ago, and I cannot seem to find it online either - err. It was a housing piece (boom town / gold rush angle). So, the town is ugly, it is what the report was about. Spend every second giving me the feel of the place of the story and not one second on the irrelevant.

// as a UND graduate I find NDSU's choices to be poor :)

what the heck people, down vote trolls not people trying to make a point, even if you disagree with it. redouble isn't trolling.

> In conclusion, TV news should be ended in all forms.

Even though it sounds a bit broad, I'll second the idea behind it as I understand it.

> Wow. I agree there's a lot of misinformation and poor reporting on TV news, but that's like saying the Internet should be ended because of the poor quality of slashdot comments.

There's too many misinformation and poor reporting on TV and no way to distinguish truth from falsehood. You wouldn't trust a person who verifiably lied to you 70% of the time. That's why you don't trust YouTube comments. It's a waste of brain resources to even try.

The same thing happened with newspapers and major news station. Even most news from news sites that end up on HN get debunked in comments after few hours by people who actually know the domain.

I personally don't know who to believe now - everyone on "popular news" seems to try either to steal attention, or to advertise something. And the truth suffers.

I for one would be willing to pay a modest fee for news that was consistently accurate and relevant (ie, made sure to catch important developments that are typically ignored by other new sources). Any suggestions?

Pay for The Economist? From the articles I have the expertise to judge, they're occasionally insightful and always seem to have at least a tenuous grasp on issue at hand. Which is in sharp contrast to the reporting in other general news sources, which is often hilariously wrong. Only publishing once a week leave a lot more time for fact checking.

Private intelligence?[1] They tend to put a much larger emphasis on delivering good information over writing an engaging story. They do focus almost entirely on geopolitical news, though.

Stratfor and KGS both offer free access to a limited set of their analysis.[2,3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_intelligence_agency [2] http://www.stratfor.com/ [3] http://www.kforcegov.com/Services/IS/NightWatch.aspx

For that analogy to be correct, shitty TV news stories would have to be a relatively small proportion of total TV news. That's not my experience.

Compromise: let's just end any subsidies, bandwidth licenses, etc. so we're at least not supporting it...

Ironically, it's a TV show we're talking about here.