If they cite their sources, next time you might just check the sources instead of them, or be able to tell when they're making shit up, or be able to see what they're careful not to say. Hiding the sources and being the middleman for truth gives journalists continued employment and increases their value.
> next time you might just check the sources instead of them
That’s really not the point of journalism.
Not every story makes it to HN’s front page let alone every document. That kind of filtering for interesting info has real value as I don’t want to read every court document, press release, etc for relevant information.
It seems you think most journalists are benevolent. The parent poster is making the point that some journalists seek power by filtering and manipulating the conversation. That also seems reasonable. You can look at some cases of hoaxes perpetuated by the media that were clearly designed to create controversy and enhance the writer’s profile at the expense of what actually happened.
Providing summaries of stuff that happened for people who don't have time to actually look at original sources or sort the wheat from the chaff but still want to pay attention is a useful service, but an awful lot of what passes for journalism these days is just a train of people summarizing or rewriting another person's summary of a rewriting of a summary. If you check multiple news sites on a regular basis, it's easy to find nearly-identical articles popping up with little-to-no difference in content that masquerade as original or at best obliquely name drop another outlet or journalist in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph near the end of the article.
Sure, and well before LLM’s computer programs were writing junk articles on what happened in a football game and such. But how companies fill a 24/7 news cycle is only vaguely related to journalism. The AP news wire has done wonders to these companies bottom line by minimizing the need for actual reporting vs simply repackaging existing content.
Still someone needed to find the underlying interesting bit of information before everyone else could add their own spin to it.
I think this is the reason why articles about recent research in 99% of cases don't cite the research itself past something vague like 'Researchers from Harvard University have discovered..'.
It's maddening when you then have to look for the paper using the article's few hints, but usually turns out that the paper's claims are far more careful/'smaller scale' than the news article's claims.
If researchers in a university lab in China do something, the attribution might just be ‘China has invented…’
The next time you roll your eyes at the nonsense a White House press secretary says at a podium, remember that overseas it might just get reported as “The United States today announced…”
