There is of course journalism as a marketing category. Headlines, the fiction that we're reading articles that were written for some local or regional paper paid for by the classified ads, correspondents covering different beats or locations. News channels or timeslots, "this just in," etc. Elon Musk has called X (né Twitter) a new news source, but its mechanism for reconciling claims often still involves citing articles published under the aegis of "news" institutions that seem like they would have been respectable under the old regime as authorities.

But I'm not asking about the third-degree simulacrum of journalism invoked by vaguely newsy websites or brands that mask the absence of an underlying reality. I'm asking about correspondence with the underlying reality that the idea of journalism was originally supposed to represent: the idea that somewhere, some readily intelligible events are happening to people, which many people have an interest in knowing about, so paid specialists go find out what's happening, write it up (or record a verbal or audiovisual description, sometimes with supporting direct recordings of the event), and publish these descriptions of new events periodically, so that they're available for the general public to read about, listen to on the radio, or watch on television.

I've heard some friends suggest that news reporting is mostly no longer happening, despite the continued creation of ostensible news content - e.g. that while you can still get a stream of characters from the New York Times that satisfies the demand for a master signifier of the form "news," you can't find out what's happening in the way you might have been able to a few decades ago. But is this true? If so, what would it look like?

Well, I was vaguely aware that there were big "protests" following the public summary execution without trial of an accused counterfeiter by police officers in 2020, and that there was some violence in Minneapolis. But until I read Lydia Laurenson's article describing why she never published an account of the Minneapolis riots, I had no idea that there had been a days-long total collapse in public order in large areas of the city, such that ordinary citizens had to use informal decentralized communication to figure out which neighborhoods were no-go zones.

My mate was surprised when I mentioned this, that I'd been unaware of the extent of the riots, and suggested that maybe it's because I didn't follow enough racists on Twitter. (I follow Steve Sailer, but he's too statistics-pilled to report much about facts on the ground. Through him I was aware of the post-George-Floyd increase in traffic fatalities, which seems to have happened because police around the country responded to the widespread outrage at public summary executions by refusing to enforce traffic laws. But I was unaware of the extent of the riots.)

To double check whether I'd missed this because of my particular filter bubble, I asked ChatGPT 4o whether the New York Times had covered the riots. ChatGPT claimed the Times had covered the riots, but when asked for examples, could only find articles mentioning "protests" and a retrospective "Why Minneapolis Burned" that focused on the causes but not the events they were causes of. When I pointed this out, it kept insisting that the riots had been covered somewhat with reporting on property damage. When I pointed out that this wasn't the same as covering the underlying collapse of public order (e.g. whole neighborhoods that were not safe for ordinary citizens to go outside in), it claimed the Minneapolis Star Tribune had covered more, but again was unable to find examples covering more than property damage. It only admitted that this wasn't the same thing as covering the riots themselves when I pointed out this was like covering a war in terms of broken windows.

By contrast, the Institute for the Study of War – which I found through one of the few (though amateur and unpaid as far as I can tell) news websites left, The Ethereal Voice – has in fact been covering real and purported events in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with more context than I have the spare attention to track, including maps of occupied territory, and advances and attempts by each party. If I lived in Ukraine, this would be extremely valuable information, the analogue of which I do not have about my own country.

There's some sort of fight supposed to be going on between agents of the Federal US government and protestors, rioters, or both, in or around Los Angeles. But when I tried to look up news articles about it, all I found was coverage of what various government figures were saying about the conflict - not an attempt to form an organized picture of what's going on. If any of my readers know where to find this, I'd love to know.

Zvi Mowshowitz is publishing regular roundups of AI news, but it's largely written for people who are already familiar with enough technical details of the field that it's difficult for me to make sense of. On the other hand, my father, who's hardly an off-the-grid news recluse, had not heard of ChatGPT (or LLMs) until I told him about it a couple of weeks ago.

When Shawanna Vaughn's nonprofit (mentioned in The Debtors' Revolt) bought a plot of agricultural land on which to develop a rehabilitative private prison / farm, she found that the effect of notional legal suppression of racial discrimination in real estate just means that if you buy land in a racist municipality, you don't really get to use the land, you just get harassed and slow-walked by the authorities about permitting, taxes, and regulatory compliance until you give up and sell; you might be able to leverage racial discrimination laws to sell at a profit but it's still a time loss and you don't get to do the project. Maybe there are some articles about individual stories related to this, but I'm unaware of any public effort to make sense of the overall situation.

I can't really blame the journalists, or the news publications, or even the competition from Craigslist and news aggregators that vastly reduced the profitability of local Classified ads. It seems like the demand for the product largely isn't there, for reasons that have more to do with cultural decay than emerging technology.

Consider this article about a pilot who was scapegoated for a technical problem with the F-35, which I also found via The Ethereal Voice. It seems like they fired a talented pilot in order to shunt bad vibes about the F-35 onto him. This is a dynamic I'm only now really coming to understand. 

It's not exactly a coverup of any specific facts. It's more that the blame is being treated as a metaphysically independent conserved quantity such that if they shame the pilot, they feel like this protects the F-35's reputation, even though I don't think this affects the statistics, it just tries to derail investigation by creating a situation where if anyone looks into this particular incident, their curiosity is redirected to "what did that man do wrong? Is it really his fault?".

I'm also reflecting on the Hollywoodized sense I grew up with, of what a piece of investigative reporting like this is supposed to do - I had the sense that it's:

1. Coverup prevents pronormative action.
2. Journalist exposes coverup and crime.
3. Corrective action is taken.

But by now it seems like the sequence of events is more like:

1. Coverup is business-as-usual even though that makes no sense.
2. Journalist exposes coverup and crime.
3. Now people have heard about one more example of coverups and crime, maybe a comedian also talks about it, that's it, end of story.

I'm not even sure how to use this knowledge, except to trust raw incident rates over incident rates adjusted for "user error" or other mitigating factors, when assessing the reliability of manufactured products. Since at least if people start crashing airplanes on purpose that's a self-limiting problem.

There's attention demand for news content product, but not really an intelligible widespread intent to make use of the information in the news. This has got to make it demoralizing to try to report on the news, so we get less reporting on what happened and more gossip, which is apparently what the eyeballs and clicks want. The reporting I found on the LA riots is one example. Another is this Wired article my mother recently shared with me about the LMHR (lean mass hyper-responder) study.

As it happens, this is a story I'd been following independently. The context is that engineer Dave Feldman developed an explanatory theory of high measured levels of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol in the blood, which implied that while under some circumstances it's produced by, and therefore an indicator of, metabolic dysfunction, under other circumstances it's perfectly adaptive and therefore not indicative of a problem. Specifically, he proposed that while metabolic dysfunction can cause backlogs of multiple sorts of energy substrate including the fat carried by LDL, lean active people on a ketogenic diet are using more fat for energy, so their healthy bodies pumps more cholesterol-containing lipoproteins through the blood. The contrary established view in cardiology is that LDL in the bloodstream causes blockages in the arteries, no matter how good a reason it has for being in the bloodstream.

Dave Feldman proposed, raised funds for, and sponsored an experiment - to be performed by academically credentialed third parties - to test his hypothesis. He recruited a population of people on ketogenic diets with the "lean mass hyper-responder" blood profile (high HDL, high LDL, low triglycerides), and matched each with someone in a preexisting longitudinal study measuring coronary artery calcification (CAC), with similar LDL levels and other measured traits. Both his recruits and the members of the preexisting study would have their CAC measured twice, at a significant interval of time, and his study would compare the two groups. If LDL predicted CAC progression in the regular group but not the LMHR group, this would favor Feldman's hypothesis. If it predicted CAC progression about equally well in both groups, this would support the establishment's theory.

What seems to have happened was that CAC progression was surprisingly high in both groups, swamping the measured difference between the groups in a way that was hard to interpret. But you'd know hardly any of this from the Wired article, which uncritically reports what various people are accusing others of, and how various people defend themselves, without asserting any opinions on base reality or the factual plausibility of different claims. The reporter (or their editor) doesn't seem to feel any responsibility to describe what happened in material reality, except what people are saying about each other. In other words, the main thing I learned from the article were:

1. The study finally got published.
2. Wired is a gossip rag.

Then there's Cade Metz, a reporter on tech for the New York Times. I first learned about him when Scott Alexander got upset that a Times article about him was going to report his full legal name. In the process of writing that article, Metz interviewed Michael Vassar. Metz's questions were entirely focused on who was socially connected with whom, and he seemed completely uninterested in the content of those connections, i.e. what people thought they had in common to communicate about, which from Vassar's (and indeed any valid) perspective was necessary to understand anything important about these connections. Eventually, Vassar asked Metz how he'd adjudicate a fact claim. The answer: experts. What are experts? Whoever is vouched for as an expert. Pure postmodern social construction. What makes an article good reporting? Fairness. What's fairness? If all sides get the chance to defend themselves. Absolutely zero recognition of any underlying reality about which an accusation might be made, or communication attempted.

You can also read Zack Davis's interview with Metz. When Metz reached out to me in the process of working on a book on the idea of general intelligence, I formed the same independent impression; if I asked him about his interest in the topic, his perception of my relevance, etc, the answer was entirely in terms of social reality. What was really striking about this was the perfect serenity with which he was enacting a pseudoperspective which functionally constitutes total and perfect aggression against anyone who cares about anything. I didn't think it was worth my time to proceed.

Is this a hit piece against Cade Metz? No. He's doing the job institutions like the New York Times hired him to do. Is this a hit piece against the Times? No. It's just the news.