Back when I was a cable cowboy one of my tasks was helping out the people who ran the public, educational and government (PEG) access channels. These were community and government run programming, paid for through subscriber fees that provided local programming for the community. The core of the programming was municipal board meetings and the like. I knew one of the producers fairly well, because she didn't have an engineer and there were many issues with the equipment. One day we got to talking and I called her a journalist, only partially because I was trying to flatter her. I told her that in the age of unlimited bandwidth and storage, there's no reason to ever edit anything other than to put your editorial spin on the topic covered. By covering meetings gavel to gavel, uninterrupted, she was really about the closest thing to unbiased journalism in the city.
FWIW, I'd say the same thing about CSPAN. Problem is, there's no way anyone can consume that much television and still have a life, so for now edited summaries will be necessary. But I'm fairly sure AI content generators will be able to provide a decent summary, complete with as much bias as you wish in the coming years. Now amplify that to every web cam, traffic cam, dash cam, body cam, and doorbell cam, all being accessible to your own AI agent, crawling all that footage all the time. Hurricane blowing in to Miami? Want to see it? No need to send Jim Cantore to describe the wind, we can figure it out thanks. Riots? Citizen journalists upload hours of footage to YouTube now, just need a good way to index, compile and summarize it. That's what computers do really well anyway.
I was once a volunteer reading textbooks onto tape for blind students, and I was assigned a chapter from a journalism text. It was all about expressing your story in terms of stereotypes your reader can quickly understand. :face-palm:
Yikes! Lol. I'm sure if I ever witnessed an editorial board meeting or executive producers meeting for one of these joints, even I would be astonished. We were better off in "yellow journalism" days when at least we all knew that a particular paper had a particular person's position on things.
It's worse when we pretend the news is "objective".
Back when I was a cable cowboy one of my tasks was helping out the people who ran the public, educational and government (PEG) access channels. These were community and government run programming, paid for through subscriber fees that provided local programming for the community. The core of the programming was municipal board meetings and the like. I knew one of the producers fairly well, because she didn't have an engineer and there were many issues with the equipment. One day we got to talking and I called her a journalist, only partially because I was trying to flatter her. I told her that in the age of unlimited bandwidth and storage, there's no reason to ever edit anything other than to put your editorial spin on the topic covered. By covering meetings gavel to gavel, uninterrupted, she was really about the closest thing to unbiased journalism in the city.
FWIW, I'd say the same thing about CSPAN. Problem is, there's no way anyone can consume that much television and still have a life, so for now edited summaries will be necessary. But I'm fairly sure AI content generators will be able to provide a decent summary, complete with as much bias as you wish in the coming years. Now amplify that to every web cam, traffic cam, dash cam, body cam, and doorbell cam, all being accessible to your own AI agent, crawling all that footage all the time. Hurricane blowing in to Miami? Want to see it? No need to send Jim Cantore to describe the wind, we can figure it out thanks. Riots? Citizen journalists upload hours of footage to YouTube now, just need a good way to index, compile and summarize it. That's what computers do really well anyway.
I was once a volunteer reading textbooks onto tape for blind students, and I was assigned a chapter from a journalism text. It was all about expressing your story in terms of stereotypes your reader can quickly understand. :face-palm:
Yikes! Lol. I'm sure if I ever witnessed an editorial board meeting or executive producers meeting for one of these joints, even I would be astonished. We were better off in "yellow journalism" days when at least we all knew that a particular paper had a particular person's position on things.
It's worse when we pretend the news is "objective".