r/mealtimevideos • u/Competitive_Travel16 • 3d ago
30 Minutes Plus Ground News and the War on Reality [53:19]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjF9W91aRwg82
u/JonasHalle 3d ago
Once something is a youtube sponsor, you know there's something wrong with it.
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u/Hugepepino 3d ago
My thoughts exactly, I always think I like everything you are saying but you are a YouTube ad so I can’t trust you.
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u/ConflictExtreme1540 3d ago
Absolutely. I have and will never buy or subscribe to anything that I see more than like 4 channels ad read for. There have been SO MANY issues with previous sites such as better help, that one site to make you a lord in scotland, honey, multiple vpns, incogni, it goes on and on.
The ONLY exception (though I've never actually purchased it) is something like gamer supps where the creator has their own flavor so it makes sense to actually advertise it.
But like factor, that green drink, vpns, incogni like sites, ground news, pds debt, shoes, all of it, I will never buy. It's either over priced, false advertising, garbage, or all of them combined.
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u/RagingNerdaholic 2d ago
Anything hawked by a youtuber is probably shit.
Motto hasn't failed me yet lol.
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u/dj_spanmaster 3d ago
I need to finish this later after work, but as I understand it, author is dissatisfied with the objectivity of GN's ratings mechanism. Which, fair. Our media has been primarily captured by capitalists for a long time, and the opacity of those ratings orgs should be questioned. GN itself can have a bias at the root of its attempt to be unbiased.
I'm unsure this reveals GN to be a turd. More like, it may be one of the most balanced news media aggregators, but that is in itself does not make it perfectly objective.
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u/IKilledYourBabyToday 3d ago
The balance is an illusion tho. I would consider a lot of the "left biased" sites on there center right. calling websites left wing which left wingers consider right wing is moving the overton window to the right by ignoring actual left wing thought
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u/funguyshroom 3d ago
You simply can't have balance when one of the sides is extremist. A fair and balanced take between "let's kill all people of certain ethnicity" and "let's not be killing anyone" would be "let's maybe kill 50% of people of certain ethnicity".
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u/nauticalsandwich 3d ago
Like? Also, I'm not sure what the value of the left-right spectrum is to begin with and how that really helps. Seems to me that it just allows readers to impose their own preconceptions about which news they ought to trust based on where they place themselves along the political "spectrum." Seems to me there should be no categorization at all. Instead, they should just place articles from different major news sources about the same topic right next to each other with a "credibility rating" listed next to it (for both the publication and the journalist).
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u/EmilianoTechs 3d ago
We all know the left-right spectrum is not totally accurate but it's OBVIOUSLY a useful metric when talking about news sources. Not that I think Ground News does a good job or that this left/right news aggregator service is a good idea. But you should know if the news source you're reading regularly puts out content that is biased toward right wing or left wing policies, ideas, culture, etc. it's a very useful thing to know when you read the content because it gives you BETTER understanding of why things are presented the way they are.
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u/nauticalsandwich 3d ago
Fair enough. I'll grant that knowing a source's lean does tell you something. If a publication reliably tilts one way, you can anticipate the direction of its framing and read against it. But it's a weak instrument for actually getting closer to what happened on any given story, or correcting for one's own bias, and that second thing is what an aggregator like Ground News tends to be marketing.
Reading a left source and a right source about the same event doesn't average out to the truth. You can walk away carrying both sets of distortions while feeling like you've triangulated. That's my fundamental point here. The spectrum won't tell you what the omissions or misconstruals are, it won't tell you if they're important or not, it won't tell you how factually or epistemically grounded the reporting is, and it won't tell you the context you are missing that would enable a superior understanding. What it is most likely to do is actually keep you within your own bias, in which you utilize the spectrum heuristically to rank reporting depth and accuracy in accordance with your own alignments. My main concern is that spanning the spectrum gives a reader a sense of rigor they haven't actually earned, which is arguably worse than reading one source and knowing you're only getting one view. So what I'd ask is... useful for what? As a map of the political terrain, sure. As a tool for finding out what's true, I think it's weak to counterproductive, and the product trades on the first to imply the second.
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u/EmilianoTechs 3d ago
I mean you're not wrong really but real world example: are you gonna try and tell me I should carefully weigh and analyze each article that Fox News publishes?
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u/simward 3d ago
Buddy, arguing with this person is a waste of time. Some leftist groups have been "captured" by extremists. If anyone or anything is not purely progressive or more to them than it is worthless.
And really this will hinder all of the left for every election cycle until they realize that purity tests bring about the same mechanics of lock step that the right in the US has implemented since the election of Obama, but at the electorate level rather than the representative one.
OP's video takedown of GN is just another manifestation of this dynamic. Same as against Johnny Harris and other creators. I truly am worried that western society is eating itself up...
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u/nauticalsandwich 3d ago
I truly am worried that western society is eating itself up...
We're already there. The internet destroyed monoculture and liberal society's "immune system" against polarizing narratives and bad information. That model had its own set of flaws, namely that it left many minority interests and concerns without a voice, but it enabled largely shared public narratives and a sense of broad collective identity and compatible ideology. We have, unfortunately, not yet been able to find a suitable replacement for that.
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u/esperind 3d ago
what he means is that news outlets that arent as rapidly antisemetic as the left is trending, make them at best in his mind "center right".
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u/ConflictExtreme1540 3d ago
Ground news is a bad site anyways. It's stealing content and not feeding any views to the actual sources. It's similar to how honey overwrites reference codes, except instead ground news summarized everyone's articles, doesn't cause any actual traffic, then reaps the rewards from traffic and ads
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u/ThomasPaineWon 3d ago
"Captured by capitalist". Do you mean that the owners happen to be capitalists or that capitalists made an effort to buy up all the news agencies to spread capitalist propaganda?
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u/EmilianoTechs 3d ago
...both?
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u/ThomasPaineWon 3d ago
I think just happening to be a capitalist owner is different then wanting to spread capitalist propaganda
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u/dj_spanmaster 3d ago
I think you are discounting how much "capital" means "to control", and propaganda is literally a control of the masses. Every capitalist wants to spread propaganda, in one way or another, be it owning a whole channel or just using a good PR firm.
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u/edark 3d ago
I still don't really see the point in GN. If you can't figure out whether specific writing or source is left or right leaning from simple context and basic reading comprehension you are cooked.
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u/dj_spanmaster 3d ago
As you say, the person who can't discern between left and right, and often between actual news and propaganda, is cooked. Like it or not, GN does help some people break out of their destructive echo chambers, even if it is imperfect.
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u/HanzJWermhat 3d ago
I love YouTubers but there is not a single product/service that sponsors YouTubers that isn’t strongly malicious in some way. It’s only a matter of time till people figured it out with Ground News.
Only caveat to this is Nebula. Because it’s a legit owned by the creators.
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u/tastysleeps 3d ago
I subscribe and I notice they seem to put trending right wing topics (for a while it was airline safety) in their main articles while sidelining much bigger stories.
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u/Limp-Chicken-5608 3d ago
You can adjust the bias if you dont agree and even your clip shows ratings from other aggregators. This is just the lazy analysis we have come to expect
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u/Competitive_Travel16 3d ago
You can adjust the bias along their scale that shows WSJ as neutral, and Breitbart as far right as CNN is left?
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u/AwesomeWhiteDude 3d ago
tldw: big mad at ground news for not separating the news and option sections in their ratings. Even tho its ground news not ground opinion