Useful study. UK-based.

The "authenticity" thing of podcasters is only meaningful if the podcaster was there. Sometimes that happens, and those are the good ones. There are good protest videos. Not many war videos. Secondary sources are just pundits, of which we have too many. It's easy to be an influencer who covers entertainment - entertainment wants to be watched. It's hard to be an influencer who covers, say, unemployment. It's possible, but you have to go and talk live to people who just got laid off. That's reporting.

It's not the delivery system. It's whether the source goes out and pulls in news. Most don't.

“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." - City Editor of a Chicago newspaper, 1918. Look at a news story and ask "did this begin with a press release or a speech?". If so, it's publicity. HN had an article from a few days ago about "CEO says" journalism. It's worse on the political front.

Democracy requires that a sizable fraction of voters know what's really happening. This is a big problem.

Influencers can be controlled. Dubai has cracked down on war reporting by the large number of influencers there.[1] Right now, Iran claims a missile hit on an Oracle data center in Dubai. The UAE denies this. Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-...

• rdevilla

  today at 7:29 PM

  > 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.

• rectang

  today at 6:50 PM

  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.

  • i80and

    today at 6:53 PM

    "Access" is the filthy dirty word here. Can't be anything other than a stenographer because you might lose your ACCESS, with which you can do MORE stenography.

    It's a sickness.

"Young people are consuming news less frequently than older people. Around two thirds (64%) of 18–24s consume news on a daily basis, compared with 87% of people 55 and over."

I used to watch the news quite a bit in my 20s--40s or so. Read a newspaper almost every day, watched the evening news. Now 20 years later? Not at all. Traditional news sites, most newspapers, and TV news shows are all rage bait and narrative spinning. None of what they talk about affects my day to day life in the slightest way. So I spend my time on things that are more enjoyable.

A big problem is that the product of "access journalism" is untrustworthy.

In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.

Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.

• thesumofall

  today at 6:48 PM

  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, …

  • rectang

    today at 6:58 PM

    It's not that the random YT channel is actually more trustworthy, but that it exposes the audience to adversarial perspectives which mainstream access journalists hide — thereby eroding the trust of young audiences for mainstream journalist outlets compared to previous generations for whom such adversarial perspectives were less available.

    • justonceokay

      today at 7:20 PM

      I miss when Christopher Hitchens could get on CNN as a self-identified socialist and have 10 minute discussions /in good faith/ with callers who disagreed with him. Sometimes he would put us silly Americans in our place, sometimes (less often) he would end up looking the fool. And he kept doing it regularly for a decade. Imagine that happening today

• Barrin92

  today at 7:27 PM

  >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.

I feel like the best advice I could give to young news audiences is to stop. Just stop. What little value the news may offer to make you a more informed citizen is completely outweighed by all the negatives.

Or if you must watch the news, local only.

• Animats

  today at 6:49 PM

  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...

• kevin_thibedeau

  today at 6:15 PM

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

• thesumofall

  today at 6:52 PM

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

• littlexsparkee

  today at 6:15 PM

  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.

• modeless

  today at 6:23 PM

  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.

  • littlexsparkee

    today at 6:33 PM

    Prediction markets miss all the experts, whether academic or laypeople wonks, who simply don't care to have a financial stake in the decision. I can't imagine how it'd be representative. In any case, the people weighing in are getting their information from somewhere and it's not thin air. How can you understand an issue without knowing motivations/vested interests from all sides, history leading up, etc?

    • modeless

      today at 7:52 PM

      If I have a specific interest in a topic I could do extensive research over many hours and come to my own conclusions. But if I have a passing interest, as with the vast majority of news headlines I see, then reading or two news articles, is far more likely to give me a biased and ultimately incorrect take than looking at a prediction market, which takes all the available information and condenses it into one number that matters.

    • sefrost

      today at 7:09 PM

      Polymarket publishes accuracy statistics

      https://polymarket.com/accuracy

      • littlexsparkee

        today at 7:19 PM

        Thanks - I wish it could be drilled into by category, i.e. what are the stats for categories of import (filter out sports, crypto, etc). My worry is the average could appear rosier if the share of trivial events are high.

  • slg

    today at 6:44 PM

    I don't know if it's just getting older or some deeper change in society, but more and more the reading of how my peers view the world depresses me. Even beyond the specific issues with prediction markets, there is a whole lot more to understanding our world than merely knowing the rough odds of possible outcomes.

• techgnosis

  today at 7:31 PM

  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.

• tigerlily

  today at 6:11 PM

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

  • littlexsparkee

    today at 6:18 PM

    That, and being prepared - either let macro phenomena like recession, AI, etc wallop you in the face or be able to spot it in the distance and adapt.

    • lotsofpulp

      today at 6:26 PM

      The "news" warns people about impending recessions every single day. You can open up the Stocks app right now and there will be multiple conflicting "articles" on the SP500 having reached its top or bottom.

      Other than news about mortgage rates dropping and trends in payrates for various careers, I see almost nothing actionable in the news for 99% of people.

      • littlexsparkee

        today at 6:38 PM

        The benefit of media literacy is being able to tell apart issues of import vs false alarms. That career ladders could be changing due to AI; food and oil could spike / be unavailable due to Hormuz so stock up ahead of time; financial risks of BNPL, meme stocks, and crypto; and potential recession due to hiring patterns, AI bubble, private credit - those are not actionable?

It is not about sources choices. Young people must read books. Everybody should read books. Books on liberty, like "1984" or authors like Michael Ende. Also books on history (and prehistory). That is the thing that really matters and the only via to avoid echo chambers.

Anecdotally, that literally only one of my college age students knew about the Moon mission was wild.

I genuinely now believe that a real barrier to (the terrible idea of) reinstating the draft is that it would actually be difficult to find and inform the public about it, in a believable way.

• today at 7:02 PM

• guzfip

  today at 6:54 PM

  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

  • irishcoffee

    today at 7:01 PM

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

    Personal accountability can still be something we all strive to honor. Blaming a news aggregator website for your own ignorance is a hell of a thing.

>> ... Meeting the needs of this segment is crucial, not just for the current stability of the journalism industry, but also for the future of democratic societies as young individuals transition through adulthood

Sure buddy. Keep telling yourself that.

Mainstream media can't die quick enough.

[dead]

“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.”

Unfortunately it’s documentarians such as David Attenborough that carefully curate a picture of nature as some playful, curious thing. It would behoove schools that prepare students for post-secondary education to put on actual video recordings of how animals go at it and how the strong kill the weak (and their offspring) in the most savage and cruel of ways with complete disregard. And then ask them if they would rather not know this is how the world really is. Because that’s what taking a side means here, is being wilfully ignorant.

• littlexsparkee

  today at 6:26 PM

  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).

• layman51

  today at 6:17 PM

  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.

  • rectang

    today at 6:24 PM

    Humans are by far the most vicious animal species, because the sophistication with which they apply torture is off-the-charts. Felines and orcas may consume their prey alive or play with them, but it's not in their capacity to keep their victims alive indefinitely with the express goal of inflicting maximum suffering.

• squibonpig

  today at 7:16 PM

  "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?

• decae

  today at 6:19 PM

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

  • supliminal

    today at 6:21 PM

    No, it is unfortunately very romanticized and carefully narrated. It gives a very skewed impression of reality. It is closer to a staged scene and less of a documentary, which is why some of those cinematographers wait for so long. Actual nature, and its cruelty, is so banal as to be boring that without the storytelling, you wouldn’t want to see it.

    I suggest you see some raw video footage, without music, additional sounds, careful DOF camera work and color correction, of one animal killing another. Watch the whole thing if you can sit through it - it takes quite awhile for an animal to die while it’s screaming in pain unable to move.

    • albumen

      today at 6:29 PM

      I agree that attenborough’s documentaries are carefully composed, presumably to be suitable for a British family audience of the 1970s. You seem to uncharitably ascribe intentional malice to this approach rather than it being a product of its time and cultural values. For what it’s worth, I think his documentaries have done much more good (in raising awareness of the natural world and the need to conserve it) rather than harm.

      But what I don’t understand is that you quote the OP article re climate change and racism, but then go off on a tangent re Attenborough? Sounds like you have an axe to grind.

      • supliminal

        today at 6:51 PM

        It’s a fair criticism but I don’t have an axe to grind here. I do enjoy the docus and many of the other documentarians could learn a lot from the lack of drama/theatrics in Attenborough’s work.

        What I am getting to is that by taking a side on these matters we implicitly think one is wrong, one is right, and by shunning/ignoring that magically the wrongs can be righted. I bring in nature to question this line of thinking: the moment they “fix” nature, they’ll fix racism and other things they seem to think are wrongs to be righted. Because if they knew how deep this rabbit hole goes, and once they see what kind of planet they have to contend with, it may make them realize how their $current_issue is a tempest in a teapot.

        In other words: you can take a side all you want, and then what.

        Epstein should have been a wake up call that rules and laws made by man are fictitious.

        • hackable_sand

          today at 7:33 PM

          Idk if anyone has told you this before but race is a human invention.

• guzfip

  today at 6:59 PM

  > “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.