Let me break down how the media industry works nowadays since there’s a lot of confusion in these comments.
Most media organizations have a small number of in-house journalists on verticals that make sense.
The rest of the content is curated and brought in from content partners and written outside of the news organization.
In practice they function more like a social media feed than traditional newspapers. I’m no fan of CNN, but this isn’t exactly a scandal, media had to adapt to keep up with so much being on social media these days, they all do this.
The context is that Google has a new "Site reputation abuse" policy that some argue isn't applied fairly between small sites and massive media sites. The policy states:
"Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site."
> That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.
I think a much more simple answer is that syndication has always been hush-hush because branding and brand trust is a key part of media marketing. Your local newspaper in the 90s had a ton of syndicated stories too but it was all published under your local paper's hometown moniker.
I literally worked for a “home town” newspaper in the 90s and knight ridder in the early 2000s. This is not in any way comparable to syndication. Syndicated stories have an accurate byline, the publishing paper paid for syndication/content, advertising is not involved in syndicated content, and the costs are not tied to duping end readers.
Moreso this (at the time) was literal school content on media literacy. High school english classes would _get newspapers_ in order to talk about the different types of articles and content.
Major US newspapers in the 21st century did. But regardless, many of them were opaque in nature. "Via AP" may check the box of attribution but is lost on a reader of average literacy.
This was not used to commingle authority vs the stories they reported themselves, and is in no way comparable to what cnn is doing, ie leveraging their site rank to juice traffic to trash content for ad dollars.
I wonder about the relationship between those two, column attribution in 90s newspapers doesn't have much to say about the incentive to stay quiet to avoid publicly announcing you're violating Google's rules in 2024.
That aside, I'm not sure the assertion about 90s papers is accurate. There was syndication, of course, but that was attributed. Let's say there were articles written by other people published under the names of local writers. That sounds theoretically possible, but something that'd be well known. Let's say there were articles attributed to the paper at large. I don't recall that.
Syndicated material was disguised all the time. Ask most people and they think that most of the stories in their local newspaper are written by people that work there.
> The average American reader didn’t necessarily notice the way syndicates and chains had come to dominate the news. Syndicates were careful to sell their material to only one newspaper per city. While syndicated features usually carried a small copyright symbol, the name that followed that symbol could be deliberately opaque. Readers wouldn’t automatically know that “King Features” denoted Hearst material, or that “NEA” indicated content from the Scripps chain. Local papers sometimes purposely disguised syndicated material. The Milwaukee Sentinel bought a comic strip from the New York World syndicate in 1918, for example, but retitled it “Somewhere in Milwaukee.” The same paper told readers to send in their letters for Dorothy Dix as though she could be reached in Milwaukee, and not in New York City, where she lived and sold her work to the Ledger syndicate.
Local newspapers didn't want to plainly advertise that a gigantic chunk of their content came from thousands of miles away. It undermines their value proposition.
Likewise, CNN probably likes that a huge chunk of featured content on their page is driving them revenue but doesn't look like a big ad to their audience.
That might have been true in the early days of the telegraph, but for as long as I can remember (and up until we cancelled our subscription), the bylines in our local paper were extremely clear on this point. Anything that was not local had a byline with the name of the reporter, their city, and “via Associated Press”, or similar.
"King Features" in the above quote is a contemporary example. Regardless, my point is not that these syndications are impossible to identify (as is the same with CNN's featured links), but that they are similarly opaque. Syndication as a concept isn't something that is obvious to a person of average media literacy, and neither is a tiny byline that states "via AP".
To me, it's clear that is attribution, and not attributing, or actively misattributing via signing your brand to other companies output, is the key to the article.
And under work-for-hire arrangements, putting your name on something that someone else wrote is not even necessarily incorrect, either. Not every case of reprinting stories in a newspaper is a big reputable newspaper printing a story by a big reputable news syndicate who is licensing the story to multiple customers.
I write copyrighted material all day, but since it is for hire, the person who has hired me owns the copyright to it, and puts their name on my work. And US law provides no right for me to be attributed.
I appreciate the criticism of CNN in this case, but I just don't think this is somehow an egregious outlier in the history of media practices.
When I came into my former company, I took a fairly hard line that I wanted bylines on stuff I wrote--which wasn't the norm at the time but I mostly got because I was somewhat known and browbeat people into it. Still did some ghostwriting for various execs and for web copy that wasn't bylined.
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In the authors previous post he goes into Forbes marketplace which is the same company doing this garbage content farm for CNN that they have already been doing for Forbes.
The content farm company is now trying to buy the original Forbes company.
So when our media companies become small subsidiaries of affiliate content farms then yea I think it’s a bit disturbing.
Au contraire, the fact that news is no longer news is the biggest news there is.
Sure, the mere fact that the news is no longer news, is old news. But how and why it is happening is big and un-reported news.
When six companies control 90% of the news outlets, that is unprecedented concentration and loss of the diverse viewpoints necessary for a robust society.
When those corporations which normally sell-off any lossmaking division instead hold loss-making 'news' divisions in a now-chronically lossmaking industry, the payoff is not some potential future profits; the payoff is in influencing public opinion to favor policies advantageous to your larger corporation.
So, of course the how and why it is happening is unreported by the organizations that are making it happen.
> loss of the diverse viewpoints necessary for a robust society
This isn’t wrong but let me put a finer point on it: when BigCompany Inc starts dumping sludge into your town’s lake, you need independent journalists to figure that out. Corporate talking heads aren’t going to do that. And certainly not the people running a link farm.
What news is reported is as important as whether the facts are true. The easiest path to propaganda is to simply report other, more convenient, facts.
The news industry was always a low profit business even in the best times, so one should ask why it is so interesting for powerful people. The answer is the same in the past as it is today, it just takes a little of critical thinking to understand.
Yeah, a lot of people pay for deeper content. I basically hang out on yahoo finance all day (crazy awesome site), and they make a lot of news feeds available to their subscribers. But it takes quite a big commitment to subscribe at a level where you get all the news and analyst reports in a timely fashion. Google News feeds have been declining in quality and don't find them valuable anymore. Hacker News is one of the sites I scan for news. I check it all, and I belong to Ground News as well.
Well… that’s the crux of the discomfort. These brands’ newsrooms do in fact have those people. That’s the reason their names inspire trust.
Now, they’ve decided to cash out that trust by lending their names to sleazy content farming affiliate marketer types.
For now, that’s valuable, since people (and Google) trust the names based on what they used to do—and they distrust the rest of the endless chorus of hucksters. But sooner or later, the world realizes there’s no longer good reason to trust those names. They’re just snake oil (and CBD gummy) salesmen like the rest.
And then we’re left without popular institutions that are trustworthy when we need to understand complicated and true things about the world. And we’ve punished people (and Google) for even trying to place more weight on honest reportage and institutional signals of expertise.
Traditional newspapers would get stories from things like AP, and then the editors would decide what to run. They’d also have reporters that wrote local stories, etc.
I’d argue that any news site that has eliminated all those roles is already out of business and is simply burning down their brand at this point.
As Obama famously quipped during his last Whitehouse Correspondent dinner:
Even reporters have left me. Savannah Guthrie, she has left the White House press corps to host the Today show. Norah O’Donnell left the briefing room to host CBS This Morning. Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN.
These aren't news sections that are being outsourced, they're things like "The 9 best leggings on Amazon, according to fitness experts¹" and "Best pet insurance companies of September 2024²".
I'm pretty sure I saw a "Forbes" guide on how to beat some video game quest at some point, or some other video game thing people would have been searching for at the time. I understood it to be SEO spam but this whole comment section puts it into better context.
Click forbes.com, then hamburger icon, then scroll the list to the “advisor” or “health” news sections.
Sample sections from advisor:
- Cheap Car Insurance
- Pet Insurance
- How Much Is Pet Insurance?
- Cheap Pet Insurance
Under health, they have a sub-section “best cbd gummies”. I clicked on a few articles and they’re outsourced(?) amazon affiliate spam that claims Forbes actually tested the products.
The health section is served from forbes.com, but the navigation is different and includes a “back to forbes.com” button.
In some other parts of forbes.com they have clear disclaimers, like:
Innovation -> SAP Brand Voice | Paid program
So, they’re definitely trying to pass off the marketplace content as legitimate news sections.
I don't buy the claim that this is trying to pass as news. It just looks like 90% of the other review pages on the internet. Here's what I'm seeing:
At the top of the page I see an Advertising Disclosure link. After that I see a byline for the actual human freelancer that wrote the article.
After that I see a huge call-out that "Commissions we earn from partner links on this page do not affect our opinions or evaluations. Our editorial content is based on thorough research and guidance from the Forbes Health Advisory Board".
Below that is a "Featured Partner Offer" with an info popover that reads "Partner Offers feature brands who paid Forbes Health to appear at the top of our list. While this may influence where their products or services appear on our site, it in no way affects our ratings, which are based on thorough research, solid methodologies and expert advice. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services". The offer contains no rating or editorial text.
Below that is the methodology: "To determine the best CBD gummies, the Forbes Health editorial team analyzed data on over 100 CBD gummy products ... then ranked the CBD gummies based on price, potency, flavor options available and whether its ingredients are all natural, organic, gluten-free and/or vegan-friendly." They don't claim to have tested all of them.
>It just looks like 90% of the other review pages on the internet.
90% of websites are not in the top 10% of mainstream media big budget brand reputation... so if the top 10% look like the other 90%, that says something, and it's not good.
These sort of pay-to-play review marketing didn't originate on the internet. These are copies of arrangements that print media invented. My hometown newspaper had this kind of stuff too.
Many publications have long relied on outside contributors with various degrees of transparency and conflicts of interest. When blogging was the hotness, as an analyst, I contributed to CNET (unpaid; they paid some bloggers but I didn't want that conflict of interest). After CBS bought them and the whole blog climate changed (and I moved to a vendor), I stopped doing that. But a ton of that sort of thing went on in the tech trade press--some good and some almost certainly not so good.
The key difference is that ProPublica is a non-profit. There are very few non-profit investigative journalism orgs in the world, but their funding is fundamentally different than for-profit news orgs. They rely on public grants to keep things running, so therefore, they don't have to abuse their brand in similar ways.
That's also why they publish only a couple of stories per day instead of hundreds, why they never cover breaking news, why there's a donate button (as opposed to now-standard paywalls), why there's no ads, why the interface appears cleaner etc. If we were talking about tech companies, it'd be like comparing Wikimedia/Mozilla/Internet Archive to traditional for-profit tech companies. To an untrained eye there is no difference, but a somewhat trained eye quickly realises that their incentives are completely different.
(Disclaimer: I work for a different non-profit investigative journalism organization.)
It's also why ProPublica's content niche is so small. They don't cover anything except corruption and abuses of power. No sports, no celebrity news, no news about new movies or music, etc. They can't afford more, and their charter doesn't allow it anyway.
They are funded by NGOs controlled by billionaires, so in the end there is a number of things they cannot investigate if they want to maintain the NGO money.
Hopefully there are multiple organizations with different funding sources who aren’t beholden to each other, so they can fill whatever gaps in coverage they see. That would be a better outcome than everyone refusing journalism as a career because you will always have a conflict of interest with whoever is paying you.
While this is technically correct, it is the wrong response to GP.
Yes. ProPublica is biased to look in certain directions. Every single reporter, editor, publisher, is biased in this way. The answer to this is more, not less.
FIRE rose from decisions the ACLU took about representing cases. This is a fundamentally good thing, speaking as a diehard ACLU supporter.
Speaking as a huge fan of ProPublica, I'm hoping that they're investigating all of the supreme court justices (for example), because we won't pass laws to reign in judicial corruption without bipartisan action. But if they aren't, I desperately hope that there's a market for a conservative-focus investigative outfit that can stick to the facts like ProPublica.
I think you're misunderstanding what's happening here.
In traditional journalism using wire stories (or "curated content partners"), the publisher (Forbes, CNN, etc.) pays for the content.
In the case of CNN Underscore, the "content partners" are paying CNN to use their good name to peddle advertorial content. Like if I want to run a cryptocurrency scam, I can pay CNN or Forbes to run a story on their website touting the benefits of my fake product. To a non-observant reader, it will appear to actually be coming from CNN or Forbes.
This is a long way from CNN running something from the Associated Press or Reuters.
Isn’t even new. Demand Media was doing this 10+ years ago and sites like USA Today were buying content. These days you have companies creating their own sponsored content with platforms like Ceros and the sites just embedding it and cashing the checks. Of course the sites do the bare minimum legally required to disclose its sponsored content.
> Let me break down how the media industry works nowadays
How free* media works. The media landscape has sadly divided into assuming only those who can pay for news want to be informed or have their views challenged. The poor get ads and echo chambers.
I had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal for awhile and while I can't say that's what the GP is referring to, it absolutely sounds like the kind of deluded crap a WSJ subscriber would say to justify spending $40/mo on that crap to themselves :D
I think "non-echo chamber content" is only valuable as long as all of it is similarly high quality. In my opinion, reading diverse but low quality content (e.g. filled with misinformation, a lack of concrete information, and a lack of sensible reasoning) is not helpful.
That’s not a fair comparison, The New Yorker has always had a different relationship with its writers. A freelancer who writes for The New Yorker is likely a highly respected journalist/author/other luminary. Their staff writers are, I believe, technically contractors as they’re not W2 employees.
Contractor-written slop at these content farms, as described by TFA, have nothing in common with how content works at The New Yorker.
This is not at all the same thing. The New Yorker pays its freelancers. In the example in the article, the money is flowing from the content producer to the publisher, meaning it's an ad.
No, AP sells stories that other outlets choose to buy and run based on editorial judgement, Marketplace buys access to brands with reputation and publishes its own material under those brands; its not at all the same model.
I disagree that it does not venture into scandal territory due to the fact that CNN is a news organization that is constantly defending their integrity.
They are presenting content as their own under questionable sources that they don't reveal. It proves they are being less genuine when doing so makes them money.
The contract reporters are also personally liable for what they submit. So there is absolutely zero incentive to risk going deep on a topic, let alone investigate anything.
Yes, and to add there's nothing wrong with it. The editor is responsible for curation. This has been a practice for many decades, there are news agencies primarily focused on selling syndicated content produced by their own journalists such as Associated Press or Reuters. You'll find this content in all newspapers even the best. Generally unless it's an exclusive or breaking news, there's a good chance it'll be syndicated at some point.
It looks like you mean: "Let me break down how a certain portion of the media industry that I'm familiar with works."
"The media industry" is vast, complex, diverse, and far more interesting than internet content farms, poorly-run legacy brands, or even most of what's on the internet.
It's a scandal that a single website is masking multiple privacy policies behind different pages, making it impossible for their users to understand what they have consented to.
Yeah, I read this blog post and thought throughout the whole thing, "Is this person just completely unaware of how the media and branding industries work?" He tries to make it out to be some great "scandal" when literally tons and tons of media brands outsource sections of their website.
Now, to be clear, I'm not exactly excusing CNN for this, but literally for years now I've rolled my eyes at the extremely spammy/low quality/clickbait ads that have appeared on CNN articles online. The fact that they've outsourced part of their "Underscored" site, which isn't exactly journalism to begin with, is not something I care about. And in case you missed it, journalism has had a blood bath over the past 25 years. While I think what CNN is doing in terms of affiliate ads is scammy, can I really blame them? Hardly anyone wants to pay for journalism these days, but journalists still want to eat. At least with these clickbait ads I find them so low quality that they don't confuse me into being "real" articles.
'They all do this' isn't a good excuse when 'this' is deceiving the consumer. I am so sick of marketing/branding people faking everything, and wish they could all be shipped off Golgafrincham.
You’re omitting how much influence / censorship our government have over these institutions now, and how much they apply pressure to prevent dissenting voices and opinions from reaching the main stream.
I’ve heard that a while back Google had a change to their algo that heavily prioritized widely used websites as “trusted”. The very most well known sites in the world, such as cnn.com, would be treated as the best results for anything they contained.
In response, many of the most used web sites flooded their own sites with transparently fake product reviews full of SEO phrases about “we spent N weeks testing K products to root out the very best” and very little else. The actual reviews would be pretty much copy-pasted from the description provided on the product producer’s site.
And, that’s how Google made itself useless for finding product reviews.
The above poster speaks to the crux of the issue. CNN, Forbes and other sites are doing things that a normal webmaster could be nuked from orbit for, after a "manual review". Yet, these are the manually curated sites which Google claims have high trust signals.
There are a few disparate incentives. One is a political desire to buttress the "official truths" of the legacy media. The other is a market incentive for the dying legacy media sites to earn revenue.
There is a third, related market incentive for the dissatisfied media consumers. CNN isn't as compelling as it was two decades ago. Eyeballs and ears are naturally straying towards the perceived value of alternative media sources. Therefore, to continue the ancien regime, it becomes necessary for Google to prop up CNN and others.
There is a possible world where Google creates value by indexing and sorting through a decentralized and open Internet. This chain of events does not support that. The trend is for gatekeepers to panic. The search results have been sabotaged as a result.
Is Google more valuable as a gatekeeper for established institutions? Can that amount to more value than the potential ad revenue of a larger web? Time will tell.
I feel gaslighted when "fake news" is brought up by people, that consider CNN etc to be somewhat reputable. Like, the atmosphere on those sites are surreal nowadays. There are fake news, fake ads etc.
Like a article with a picture of some fat person, a picture of a child star, and the headline "you can't believe how child star whatever looks like today!". But the fat person is not the former child and nowhere to be seen in the article, etc.
These are the same sites that platform the doom-mongers warning us of the dangers of "disinformation" and appealing for censorship. The viewers may merely be victims of the propaganda. Those disseminating the propaganda should be held to a higher standard.
> I’ve heard that a while back Google had a change to their algo that heavily prioritized widely used websites as “trusted”.
They super-obviously did that some time around ‘08 or ‘09. Basically just gave up on the cat-and-mouse game they’d played with spam for years, based on actual content and (what they hoped they managed to suss out as) organic linking, and switched to heavy reputation- and size-weighting instead. It was a giant shift in their search’s behavior and unlike anything they’d done before, not subtle at all.
This is an interesting claim. What evidence do you have for it? I don't mean this argumentatively, but rather that I'd like to read more and learn for myself.
Before Google, unscrupulous web sites would try to SEO themselves into the top page of search results with repeated META tag bombs or sometimes just good old fashioned whitefonting. One of the innovations of PageRank was that more widely linked-to web sites would be ranked as more authoritative, doing an end run around the kind of keyword spam that plagued the early web. If the most widely linked-to web sites wish to play ball with SEO marketroids, that undermines the trustworthiness that PageRank assumes for those sites.
The upshot of this is that no system is impossible to game.
What signals do you think Google should be using instead?
I presume they made the change because their search results were filling up with blogspam, and there was no algorithm that could detect a high-quality review from a spam one.
So what do you think would have been the right approach?
People pointing out problems are not obligated to provide solutions. I don't know where this idea comes from, but it's just wrong.
If there was a solution to this problem from the search engine's point of view 5 years ago, which I do not stipulate but let's roll with it, there isn't one now. ChatGPT can overcome basically all detection techniques when combined with the current amount of efforts already largely successfully avoiding detection, and it will continue to get better. There are no signals for random unattested web content that will separate what we want from stuff constructed to look like what we want but with embedded motivations or content we don't.
A web of trust may be inevitable, but it's not like that can't be attacked either, especially past the first hop. It seems inevitable that slowly but very surely our trust is going to get pulled in much, much more tightly than it is now. I don't see much that can be done about that, even in theory. It was a historical accident that we ever could trust random websites to not be 100% focused on their own interests, simply because the tech to do that wasn't there yet. Now it is, and we will be entering a world where we can not trust any free resources, whether we like it or not.
> People pointing out problems are not obligated to provide solutions.
And nobody said they were obligated to. So I don't know what you think you're responding to.
I assume it's OK to ask people what they think a solution should be, though?
Seems like a pretty natural, conversational follow-up, if you ask me.
Presumably if you know a situation well enough to criticize, you have at least some ideas of what alternatives might or might not be better. Or can elucidate why you think there might not be any better ones.
Or do you think the entire act of asking questions is "just wrong", to use your phrase?
It is an extremely common tactic used to shut down conversations about problems. If that wasn't what you were doing, I apologize to you for being wrong this time, but I don't apologize for making the mistake in the first place, because it's fairly well-founded based on extensive experience.
> a world where we can not trust any free resources
Or paid ones, really. If you think a company is trustworthy, that means a) you believe it cares about losing you as a customer, or b) you believe the company has the obligation or the luxury of acting with integrity (or the people working there do).
Especially with news media, none of these things are likely to be true. For paid news I’d just expect less typos but not more integrity.
EDIT: If Google decides to ever remove this useful feature as well, here's an archive link showing what the results used to look like at the time of posting: https://archive.is/5KwA6.
I don’t use Google, but I used to pay for Apple News.
Apple uses algorithmic ranking by story, and pays news sites by article views. It is basically all spam. If you block the spam sites, their stories still show up in your feed with a note that you blocked the site.
Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization, like podcast apps do. They should steer you back to reading the sources you’ve opted into, and mix in a bit of stories from related news organizations, not stories with high content similarity, or high “trending” scores.
(As far as I know, Apple News+ is the only product still operating in the paid news aggregator space, but if there’s another one, I’d love to hear about it.)
I've been using Feedly for a bit now after something changed with the Google aggregator that Android has available as an option on the home screen changed something and became impossible for me to filter out certain sources from (maybe related to the engine changes discussed in this thread and in the article?)
It's solidly...okay. It's very good aggregating everything I want, and for the most part it's able to avoid things that I'd absolutely not be willing to overlook, but it has some quirks in terms of the filters weirdly not working for me on fairly benign topics (no matter how much I try, I can't get it to stop showing me content from various sports like soccer, basketball, and golf despite the only sport I care about being baseball). They seem to really hype their AI features in the app, which is a little weird because I don't care how they aggregate behind the scenes and they shouldn't need AI to be able to filter articles they literally already tag as "golf" when I have "golf" listed in my filters as "never show", but it's not annoying enough that I've bothered trying to find an alternative yet.
> Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization
Doesn't this immediately turn into the kind of problem TFA is bemoaning? Once a news organization gets traction (opt-ins in this case) on a platform, they'll inevitably start selling space in their feed to one or more crappy aggregators. To the C-suite this looks like free money, since somehow they always manage to convince themselves that the brand damage from it will be minimal or at least manageable.
IMO the internet is just a bad place to look for reviews nowadays, unless you really trust someone and know they aren’t being paid to review the product.
Likewise Amazon reviews I consider mostly fake.
For products I want to buy I look at what brick and mortar stores sell, they have skin in the game and can weed out the truly bad.
DoubleClick slowly killed Google search because the best way to make money in display ads is to run clickbait.
In the one hand, Google paid good quality websites more money for trash content and engagement bait than quality content. So they adapted to that new market reality.
Meanwhile, the real money maker - Search - gradually got filled up with lower quality content and now it’s imploding.
Google buying DoubleClick has a lot of parallels to what happened with Boeing.
Whether they do or not, Wirecutter was such a successful format that everybody else copies the style when when writing fake reviews. The giveaway is when every item in a category happens to be the best at something that could be read off the spec sheet and they never actually recommend one: This one has the best sound quality, this one is the budget pick, this one is best for people with cats, this one has more battery life, etc.
I was under the impression that the generic "news"/"information" on many sites is purchased (or otherwise obtained through some kind of business relationship) from some other organization.
And I just don't get this perspective from the article:
"For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?"
I guess I can't figure out what the problem is supposed to be here. I don't think there's necessarily a problem with fleshing out a site with generic content. I would guess CNN has an agreement with the content provider on the general character of content, and can surely opt out of things they don't want to be associated with.
FWIW, I opened "CNN underscored money" and at the top of the page it says:
"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN Newsroom. CNN earns a commission from partner links on the site but the reporting here is always independent and objective." (plus there's an "advertiser disclosure" link but I didn't click on it).
> FWIW, I opened "CNN underscored money" and at the top of the page it says: "Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN Newsroom.
You are effectively saying 'what's the big deal if they admit it'. The big deal is that that's not what they're admitting. CNN Underscored is a separate team within CNN, running an in-house content farm, and that's what they're admitting to. CNN Underscored Money is an entirely separate company, running a third-party content farm, which they are going to lengths to hide the separation from CNN Underscored.
Google's TOS permits you to run terrible content farms. It even permits you to rehost third-party terrible content farms with zero oversight. But it does not allow you to claim this content as your own and hide its third-party origin, if you rehost it with zero oversight.
>"For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?"
Anytime I hear outrage rhetoric i lose all interest in the author's words.
Its like they have completely forgotten what relativity is.
What would you consider the relative element in this scenario that explains the decision then? Or was your point simply that emotive language automatically discredits a speaker's point?
> Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site.
It means that consumers will be shown reviews written by affiliate marketers rather than real people because the affiliate marketers get to leech off of Forbes's, CNN's, or USA Today's domain reputation. Despite this, Google is either unwilling or unable to derank major sites over this issue.
For the CNN Underscored Money example, none of the writers or editors on the site work for CNN. They're all contractors who work for Marketplace, an affiliate marketing company. The site is hosted on completely separate infrastructure from CNN Underscored, just skinned to look similar to it. They even have a different privacy policy just for CNN Underscored Money. If CNN had major oversight or control of the content on CNN Underscored Money, you would think they would host it themselves rather than allowing an affiliate marketing company to independently operate the category.
> They're all contractors who work for Marketplace ... The site is hosted on completely separate infrastructure from CNN Underscored, just skinned to look similar to it. They even have a different privacy policy just for CNN Underscored Money.
But those things have nothing to do with whether or not CNN has involvement and oversight over the CNN underscored content.
I have no idea myself, but you certainly can't infer it from irrelevant facts.
I haven't had cable for a long time so I can't say anything about the quality of the programming on the CNN channel. However, cnn.com has been full of affiliate links and barely detectable "sponsored" stories for years.
Its particularly comical because many of the recommendations, including from the US government, for identifying fake or untrustworthy news sites include factors that would indicate CNN's site is fake.
A hard one to define is a common recommendation is that a legit news site will look and feel professional. A more specific one is that a fake news site will be filled with a large number of ads. That doesn't even touch on the other factors like unbiased articles that share both sides of an issue.
Let's be real, CNN, Fox News, etc are all fake/propaganda. On Fox News, Trump can do nothing wrong, Biden can do nothing right. On CNN it's nothing but sunshine and rainbows for Harris/Biden and the opposite for Trump...I mean look at this story title from CNN's current frontpage: "Roy Wood Jr. reacts to Trump’s ongoing McDonalds remarks"
I'm an independent and as far as I can tell there is zero attempt at unbiased factual reporting of the news.
Funny you mention that. I've been experimenting with reading only Wikipedia as my source for news. I agree it seems to be an excellent source.
What I can't figure out is how it seems to still be so neutral, given that it's completely open for anyone to edit. Seems like it would be quite cheap for an organization to edit things to their liking.
Is it simply that most people don't get their news from Wikipedia, and so it's not a primary target for manipulation? Is it already awash in self-serving content and I just haven't noticed?
The short version is that you can make Wikipedia report the way you want, but you need to be strategic about it. Wikipedia reports information from "reliable sources", so instead of editing the information directly, you need to insist that the sources that agree with you are reliable and the sources that don't agree with you are unreliable. If you succeed at this, then getting the information you want into Wikipedia is just straightforward following of Wikipedia's written policy.
For mainstream folks, perhaps. The second you even go slightly outside of what the media has declared kosher it goes off the rails. Take RFK’s page, for instance, which is just a collection of inflamed opinions soured from “reputable“ news outlets.
Yes, the top chain in the talk page is exactly what I’m referring. And, as expected, the fair critique of the article for violating wiki guidelines has been shot down by passionate editors who want to push their narrative.
Wikipedia is free for everyone to edit. The policies are strongly aligned with the pursuit of truth. Both parties can have truths in their favour, if editors are in a left wing bubble they may just be more exposed to truths from a left perspective. Here's where you can help! If you identify bias, feel free to remove charged language, and add new ideas with reliable citations. Here's a list of sources considered reliable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AReliable_sources%2...
Extensive discussions of the decision making process for each source is documented in this list.
But please, keep lying about how CNN doesn’t criticize Harris/biden! It fits into the destabilizing narrative that “the media” is “corrupt” or “bought and paid for”.
Also, if you want unbiased media, CSPAN is that. No bias except from how the camera is physically pointed into congress. You won’t watch it because it’s too boring and despite all the hatred your profess to have against biased news, the idea of news not as entertainment is alien to you.
Arguing that news outlets have a bias does not mean they are 100% biased. You will find examples of articles and segments against Harris on CNN, you will also find articles and segments against Trump on Fox News. It isn't the norm though.
The most telling for me is generally the photos picked by a news outlet. On CNN for example, photos of Harris (and Biden) are almost always picked to show them in a favorable light. They'll be shot standing at a podium with an American flag behind them and a big, natural looking smile on their face. Photos of Trump are from off angles with an angry look on his face, often taken mid speech where a face will look more contorted than when smiling.
Are news outlets 100% biased mouthpieces pieces? Of course not. But they have a strong bias towards one party or the other and they don't try very hard to hide it.
Saying stuff this obvious to debunk it's like AI skeptics saying "AI can't solve X" when it's literally trivial to try their query and then the AI system straight up just solves it.
Let's look at some recent CNN photos of each of them!
First, part of my claim is that you absolutely can find examples where CNN puts Harris or Biden in a bad light. To properly debunk me you would need an analysis of how frequently they show either party candidate in a good vs. bad light.
Second, and more importantly, you're trying to debunk what I clearly stated as my experience of viewing CNN. I didn't claim it to be a universal truth, only a pattern I have noticed when I have taken the time to browse CNN's site.
Debunking is useful when someone is proposing an argument as a scientific, or logically based, argument. Its pretty useless when the statement is only based on personal, anecdotal experience.
Are you saying that if I don't enjoy watching live video of e.g. an anthill 24/7 then I am actually not interested in unbiased media and crave drivel like CNN? That's... one way to reason I guess.
The better analogy would be "If I don't enjoy watching a live video of an anthill 24/7 than I am actually not interested in studying or learning about ants".
To which my response is "those who don't do, teach" and to point you to in-fact, do your ant observational studies anyway (i.e. watch CSPAN) because it really, really is the only way to stop seeing quite as many shadows on the wall and see a tiny glimpse of how politics actually works.
Seriously, most of the folks making real discovery today in some animal studies field is doing it from long periods of observational studies in the field. Books from academics are so full of lies due to publish or perish, academic careerism, widespread, systemic, structural, and at the highest levels academic fraud/dishonesty, and more.
Watch CSPAN, or you will be lied to. Sorry not sorry that it's boring as shit. That's the reality of politics, it's mostly boring.
I am so glad I decided to tune out of this election cycle. Is anyone really undecided? If you're not, just don't watch. I have no idea what Trump is saying about McDonald's and I like it that way.
Elections are all about turnout. Hence, election campaigns mostly aren't about convincing the undecided. They're mostly about motivating and energizing your voters to show up on election day (get out the vote!), and demoralizing and confusing the other side's voters to stay home (you're principled, but your candidate is un-yoursidesian and cannot be trusted).
I'm going to vote, as I always do. I don't need manufactured outrage as a motivator. Unfortunately that is what ad-driven social media and news needs to get eyeballs, so it's all we've got.
I know it's fun to hate on media but CNN is actually really solid. I watch the broadcast rarely but I visit the site. They have enormous breadth of coverage that includes international news as well as fluff like celebrity gossip. They have a ton of real reporters and are on the ground everywhere something is happening. I see sensationalized stuff sometimes but they're still highly factual and fair. I'm not sure what people think the alternative is. We wouldn't know anything if not for commercially successful news businesses. None of the Internet media critics actually gather any news for themselves
I was never much of a Twitter user, but I have a really hard time believing that any social network incentivizing short comments and social validation through likes/shares and an algorithmic feed will ever be a reliable source for unbiased views.
That site is, and always has been, full of hot takes and sensationalism which are often out-of-context or misleading. Regardless of viewpoint. And most evidence shows it is a top target for intentional disinformation attacks by institutionally-sponsored troll farms. It is very easy for people to end way down the rabbit holes of an echo chamber on that site and find themselves exposed to niche accounts that don't receive any fact checking or counterarguments.
There are SEO agencies that do this as a model. I know because I have been pitched by them.
1. You run a content website with a strong domain rating.
2. They approach you with an offer of creating a subsite (your brand + advisor, marketplace, etc) on your domain
3. They write all the content and completely manage the subsite - you have 0 risk (aside from brand risk)
4. You split the affiliate revenues from the subsite
5. The internet is now full of shitty content shilling diet pills and google can't figure it out
In related news, almost everything you can find through a Google search is unmitigated crap. Finding it on Google is an indictment of the quality. Back in the day, something like Wikipedia was what people dreamed the Internet would be. How naive of us.
I half expect to start seeing new incarnations of things like Prodigy or Compuserve spin up, aiming to provide an Internet-within-Internet type of experience. Without advertising, purely pay-to-play. Sure, a lot of regular people will never pay for such a thing, but I bet there are enough of us that will pay for good quality content (and shielding from crap) that it could be viable. Maybe the 'net gets balkanized and the 'free' part left as a wasteland.
(or maybe I'm just a grumpy old man and I should go get a cup of coffee and quit my bitching)
> Finding it on Google is an indictment of the quality. Back in the day, something like Wikipedia was what people dreamed the Internet would be.
Well there is good news: Wikipedia is still around and it's as good as ever.
I share your sentiments about Google results. I've thought before about setting myself up a little terminal which denies access to everything on the web besides Wikipedia and .edu. That's where most of the good stuff online is. (ok, maybe Atlas Obscura and Sheldon Brown's bicycle page are allowed too)
In 2005, some scammy ad company paid me to do similar stuff - let them completely control some pages on a high ranking domain. Google figured it out after a few months and blacklisted my entire domain until I removed them. Crazy that this is still an issue.
I’ve noticed that certain companies become too big to fail, and then they just start breaking the rules.
For instance, Experian stole my credit card number once. The fraud department at my national megabank said that Experian was responsible for over half their case load.
You’d think that the credit card processing networks would have blocked the Experian payment processing account at that point. I think they would have blocked pretty much any other company on earth.
The only reason to pay any attention to CNN, USA Today or Forbes is to understand what's on the minds of the corporate oligarchy in the United States. They're just propaganda feeds, the modern version of the tin-horn propaganda blared out by speakers installed in Red Square in Moscow in the 1970s.
This doesn't mean the stories published are false, or even inaccurate - but there's a big negative space in their media coverage. E.g. if culture war issues are amplified, but there are no stories on industrial policy, infrastructure problems, manufacturing job and supply chain analysis - that's deliberate. No, it's not 'what the public wants', it's what the owners of these media outlets want their readers to be thinking about.
Publishers sometimes have advertorial divisions. This is not a new phenomenon. No, this does not prove true your favorite candidate’s lies or alternative realities.
It is not about a particular politician--or are you reading this a particular way because of a truth about your favorite candidate you know, but do not want to be said?
See also partisan views from this thread (as opposed to this non-partisan comment):
A large media organization on two tech stacks for the web presence is not really evidence of anything. Any large organization struggles to maintain cohesive infrastructure. Especially if they've acquired sub brands. Or just because different editorial teams have different requirements. That's not to say CNN money isn't shady but this isn't proof of anything.
Where do you think people should get news? Most of the non-mainstream news is somehow worse and finding knowledgeable direct sources isn't really practical for people.
The top comment in this hn post from a few years ago really stuck with me. I'll paste here.
"Seems an appropriate time to post my favourite piece on news addiction by Charles Simic in the NYRB.
"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life...""
I agree that choices are limited. Nonetheless, the days of trusting "the news" media are long gone, at least for now. You can get *information* from CNN, etc. but that doesn't make it news, nor does it mean you're getting the full story and proper insights.
Listen. Think about what is said. Think harder about what is not said. Check another source. Repeat.
Yes, sadly it's a cliche but you have to "do your own research" and most people don't have the time or don't want to spend their time that way.
Maybe there are still some monthly periodicals that do in-depth news, since they aren't trying to get an exclusive or be the first to break the story they would not be so motivated to just vomit clickbait continuously. But I don't know who they are.
I've largely just stopped paying attention. It's sad in a way, as I grew up with the lesson that paying attention to the news and current events was important. But it's all garbage now.
I'm no different than anyone else in that I don't have a lot of time. Where I have noticed I'm different is how closely I listen, how critical I am of what I hear, and how often I question what I did not hear. The other difference is, my BS detector for editorial - positioned as "news" / "journalism" - is very well oiled. I accept opinion - I have no choice - but I don't in my mind treat it as fact.
Most people seen to get caught up in looking for confirmation bias that they abandoned critical thinking. Most people hear what they want to hear, and the media is more than happy to feed them that comfort.
Let me give you an example, a couple of weeks ago I saw a story that the Sahara Desert (Africa) is greening. I noticed that from a number of different sources and each source used the same phrase for this[1]: "unusual weather patterns". Huh? Why is greening from "unusual weather patterns" but when there's damage it's *always* from "climate change"? No one I know caught the Orwellian sleight of hand.
Along the same lines, The Washington Post ran a story last week about the science of climate. It was even shared on HN. No one seemed to notice. Odd because it effectively said, up to now there was no definitive study on the history of the earth's climate. So up to now what were all "the experts" basing their "science" on then? Hearsay? Mindless parroting? Worst was this study effectively made a case for climate change might not be human-made, simply because over time climate has been very dynamic and at time extreme. Per this study and the graph it publish there is no "normal".
These were both in plain sight. And yet crickets. Maybe I should stop thinking and put more time into keeping up with the Kardashians?
[1] The fact that they used the same phrase also told me, they invested zero resources in this story and were merely parroting the narrative provided by the news service they were using. Note: This approach by definition is not journalism.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
I do not believe centralized content distribution channels will ever act as a reliable source of information.
Find distribution channels that keep you plugged into the zeitgeist; some form of streaming our collective consciousness.
And then do your own research on the topics that matter to you.
YouTube - tons of YouTubers who are independent, X - raw, fast, first hand news, Not saying don't go to mainstream news, just know the bias they may have.
Also make sure you take those same youtubers as what they are; raw, independent, and with less accountability than larger platforms insofaras accuracy of content. That isn't to say a smaller creators/channels are bad or not worth while, but being aware of context as you consume is important. We've unfortunately stopped caring about accuracy or accountability in many instances.
So for YouTube I haven't been able to find quality reporting for the most part (outside of an occasional niche issue).
For X my experience is that it's essentially impossible for me to vet personal accounts that people have. Also it runs into the issue where everything is just anecdotal so it's easy to get an inaccurate picture from that sort of information. This is without even getting into the huge problem with bots and even state level disinfo on X (and social media in general). Not that I don't use it at all, it's just not trustworthy or accurate for most things.
Edit: not that "mainstream media" doesn't have some of these issues. It's just not as bad as some of these other sources and it's much easier to get a sense for specific organizations than trying to understand the bias and veracity of a myriad of YouTubers and random people on X. Like it's much easier to understand the biases and issues of Reuters than a bunch of YouTubers and random people on X so for basic information I will go to places like Reuters first.
Edit2: for issues with YouTubers you have to remember they make money through engagement (and real news is less engaging). I think this is a lot of what's killed traditional media so I doubt YouTube, which is if anything more tied to this, is unlikely to be better. Then also look at the recent Tenet Media scandal. Like yeah I get some news from YouTubers but it's a real minefield when it comes to good information.
honestly the base concept of 'mainstream media' is simply dumb. It's just a convenient way to group 'the other guy' up with conveniently ignoring 'not mainstream' media doing the same or worse.
"they control the media you can't believe anything they say!" being spewed on the platform with by-far the largest market share/reach.
IMO it does. It’s reflective of these news organizations not caring about their brand reputations and instead just looking at the $$$.
Having an entirely separate staff, with a separate website, publish content under your name without your input ought to be a five alarm fire for editorial staff. But there’s some affiliate cash up for grabs so some senior exec somewhere okayed it.
There’s a tech angle here too: if it weren’t for SEO they might we’ll be operating out of cnnunderscore.com or whatever, but the SEO juice of a page on cnn.com is too tempting to pass up.
Doesn't Google also punish small sites that do similar things? Like if I made a site that was sincere as an individual where I review kitchen utensils where I add affiliate links I'd be penalized, but the larger established domains are allowed to do the same thing without Google punishing them?
Bingo. All the small shops who were doing actual reviews got wiped out, and this blog is basically documenting the new age of parasite spam eating the web and raking in millions.
Online reviews are completely gamed IMO. My wife still looks at them, talks about the "highly rated" stuff she finds, and I tell her it's all fake she doesn't believe it.
I have been telling my mum the same thing and she don't listen. Googling for reviews used to work very well to like 3-10 years ago. I don't speak English nativly, and I suspect that it worked better in my native tongue for way longer then English. It is like it takes time for it to sink in for people, when they are trusting a process or institution.
I wanted to buy a ultra-sonic cleaner for my garage/workshop. I need it to clean out parts. I searched for reviews on Youtube, and I noticed that the big "ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon" manufacturer Vev[*123]or seem to more or less have donated a cleaner to about every workshop genre Youtuber in the last 1 to 3 years. Or paid them to shill. Dunno.
I mean I was flabbergasted to the extent of the manipulation. I didn't think it was this bad. And I did end up buying their cleaner ...
Monoculture in journalism definitely matters. News media has a profound ability to shape and direct the discourse in society writ large, and the slow consolidation of news media in some countries is extremely problematic because it enables private individuals to exert undue influence in pursuit of their agenda that may or may not be at odds with the public interest.
In Canada, for example, it's hard to throw a stone and not hit a foreign-owned PostMedia news outlet.
What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
When I consider events or situations I've had direct knowledge of, or where I've had access to direct witness accounts and raw footage that I trust, some of the worst reporting in my opinion has been from CBC News. With CBC being a Crown corporation, CBC News could perhaps be considered the most inherently "Canadian-owned" of the mainstream news outlets.
On the other hand, for such situations, I've generally found reporting from Postmedia's various outlets to be among the most accurate, complete, and objective of that from the mainstream outlets, even if it may be considered foreign-owned.
>What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
As we've seen time and time again, the content produced is only "valid" if your personal interests happen to align with those of Rupert Murdoch, or whomever.
CBC definitely has its own problems but being beholden to the biases of the billionaire class isn't one of them.
From what I'm to gather by reading Part One, the author runs his own affiliate link SEO sites and is mad that big-name brands are doing it better by leveraging business deals and brand recognition.
It's disclosed on a banner across the top of literally every cnn-uncensored page that's being 'outed' here. He could have saved the entire research/dig by simply screenshotting the top of any of the pages. That wouldn't have the same energy or 'Ahah!' though.
Wikipedia is the most reliable source of news/perspective on issued but it can get contaminated if entities given the "reliable sources" label republish unreliable or biased dreck.
Indeed.It's a nice effort...but specially for these two organizations, is a bit like taking a sinking ship and before it disappears underwater...Deciding to set it on fire...:-)
I am absolutely shocked to read the replies from everyone thinking "journalistic integrity" was a thing practiced by American Media. Clearly, everyone runs the same stories, same soundbites, same focuses. How could one think "the news" nationwide across 1000s of different outlets just happened to hone in on the same dozen-or-so topics on a daily basis.
My local paper was sold to Gannett (USA Today) a few years ago. It's a complete shadow of what it used to be (to be fair the decline started long before the sale, as with many local papers). They are down from a full newsroom to a handul of local reporters, I'm not even sure all of them are full-time. Most of their content is just USA today stories or news from other Gannett papers.
There are a couple of bloggers who cover local government, otherwise there's really no in-depth local reporting on anything anymore.
I can't speak for every local but the "local paper" where I live is effectively the RSS feeds of the local CBS & NBC news stations' websites and the reporting is actually quite good, or at least, it's a LOT better than receiving no local reporting.
The actual local paper is as you describe. I don't understand why local TV has weathered the digital transition better, exactly, but I find that I get a LOT of the local coverage that I want this way and I'm eager to recommend this to strategy to others (as you can see)
CNN is the most popular news website in the US by a huge margin and they are confident enough in their position that they're going to start testing out a paywall next month.
I am seeing questions about why this is a big deal?
The issue is that CNN is using their domain authority to boost this drivel affiliate Money content, and hiding the fact that they are doing it by using layer 7 routing to cloak the site. If CNN used a subdomain, e.g. money.cnn.com, Google could learn that this content should be judged independently from the rest of the site.
This money content isn’t competing fairly. Google is being tricked to think these Money articles should have the same inherent authority as other CNN articles.
Where this impacts the consumer is that the first articles for popular search terms aren’t the best, but instead written by content marketers chasing the highest affiliate. This crowds out legitimate sites (e.g. in depth reviews of the best mortgage lenders) because they can’t hope to rank higher than CNN for the same term.
At the very least, this “path based” cloaking of content authorship should be detectable by Google, but it’s a game of whack a mole, unfortunately.
I think if you had a human curate the best content written for these popular SEO’d search terms, they’d be able to find the diamonds from the rough. That gives some hope that algorithms can improve to rank the most useful content for readers.
It’s also why Reddit is so popular as a source of content in Google.
I'm guessing that Forbes Marketplace offers revenue sharing with each website they make this deal with, so it's profitable for all parties. Is there actually an issue here - legal or ethical or deceptive? This seems like business as usual. Is the main complaint that the integrity of these news websites is weakened by having affiliate marketing? Asking seriously because while no one likes ads, I'm trying to understand what the moral/ethical implication of this is, if any.
It's good research but whatever you think about the value of the content on those sites, I think the word "fake" in the headline is misleading clickbait.
These sites are officially linked to from the parents (CNN and USA Today in this case), with whom they no doubt have a revenue-sharing agreement. They're very real in all senses of the word. The third party in question (Forbes marketplace) is not trying to fraudulently set up some parallel CNN and USA Today websites without their authorization.
I'd be interested to see whether the Federal Trade Commission sees a problem with privacy policies and disclosures varying on the same website. I think there's a case to be made that the differences in data gathering fall short of informed consent and that the unified branding for different entities constitutes deceptive advertising.
And what happens when an organism (Google) becomes overrun with parasites? It dies because it can no longer sustain the functionality that is essential to life. That is, unless it suddenly grows an immune system.
Gannet and CNN are already bottom of the barrel for journalism. Both are just rewritten wire articles at best. Both companies were obsolete 10 years ago at best.
It does not bother me that the Money and Shopping sections of CNN are run with content by another firm that specializes in interest based articles while the core of CNN remains focused on world news.
The plot thickens! Also wouldn’t this present some sort of a conflict of interest as each of these sites (Forbes, CNN, USA Today) are now competing with eachother for SEO?
There are liability issues for any sort of "money" or finance paper that don't exist for regular news reporting.
Under regular news reporting journalists have no legal obligation to their readers or the truth. They can say anything they want, essentially. It can be accurate, or not. It can be the truth, or not. It really doesn't matter. You can be lying for personal profit or political effect or any reason you want and it really isn't something you can get sued over. Just have to avoid tripping over defamation laws.
Where as if you are dealing with financial reporting there is legal liability. It is possible to get busted for committing fraud, it is possible to get sued for misleading information.
So keeping these sides of the business completely separated is probably a good way to limit liability.
"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN newsroom. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a commission."
There is no gotcha here, completely agreed. Having done content in the early web, it was very common for sites to buy sections and placements from each other as money was available, especially on competitors. It always irked editors at selling companies, but it happened nonetheless.
Everyone who uses the web visually scans pages to hone in directly on where they think the content is. The question isn't whether or not whoever added that disclaimer meant for it to be visually ignored (they did), the question is whether they did eye-tracking testing to make sure it's ignored (yea, probably).
The disclaimer is disingenuous, because they're trading on the idea people will ignore it, while they can turn around and say everyone is in group of people who not only read the text, but also understand what "independently from the CNN newsroom" is a euphemism for.
the disclaimer is at the top of every page, and OP here is pretending his sleuthing anything other than an (idealogically/politically motivated?) disingenuous hit piece.
"look at the HTML it catches the lie!" - meanwhile, the 'lie' also exposed in clear text in a banner across the top of page. 1337 h4xing indeed.
Yea... I think I'm failing to understand the Gotcha here. If you go to underscored main page; It's disclosed in a banner across the top of every underscored page.
I agree them functionally selling ad-space is annoying; but it's also exposed in clear text as such at the top of every underscored page and article.
I disagree that this is a nothingburger. I would say it's more like the side of fries you get with your nothingburger.
It's an expose showing how deep the rabbit hole goes on this one topic, a reminder that people with money are using their money to make more money by taking control of the internet, to keep all eyes on them, to lie, cheat, manipulate, and inveigle their way into your eyeballs by any means necessary, and that they will continue to do so as long as there is a penny to be made by it.
It shows that Google is implicitly permitting this system of deception, that there is a financial conglomerate that is eviscerating the corpse of a once-proud financial giant like FORBES in order to wear its skin and work its mouth like a Muppet advertising face creams and cockroach repellents.
If you're not viscerally affected by this inhuman grotesquery, you are made of sterner stuff than I. It's appalling and a powerful metaphorical reminder of our individual insignificance against the power of money, how nothing is sacred, and nothing is safe and sane on the internet.
I noticed a steep dive in CNN news quality post acquisition. (Around when they fired a bunch of reporters people for claiming Trump lost in 2020 instead of hedging their statements).
Anyway, I’m not surprised. As far as I’m concerned they’re already out of business (just like National Geographic, which currently employs zero staff writers).
CNN has been in decline since they started. ca 2000 their content was a shocking amount of what we call clickbait now with the wording and often misrepresentation we've come to expect. They've surprisingly improved but I abandoned them over 20 years ago as anything I consume because of it.
Their TV network has always been terrible, but in the early teens, their website seemed reasonably well run.
I wouldn’t seek it out, but it wasn’t on my short list of sites to avoid in news aggregators and HN like it is today.
(I’ve never heard of the reporters they fired for being too liberal, but that event marked a sharp change in their strategy, where they said they wanted to target Fox News and Newsmax fans, and that they were changing their reporting standards to cater to those audiences.)
Also posted a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466 In case you're interested in what was discussed before on this topic.
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590466 - Sept 2024 (297 comments)
Let me break down how the media industry works nowadays since there’s a lot of confusion in these comments.
Most media organizations have a small number of in-house journalists on verticals that make sense.
The rest of the content is curated and brought in from content partners and written outside of the news organization.
In practice they function more like a social media feed than traditional newspapers. I’m no fan of CNN, but this isn’t exactly a scandal, media had to adapt to keep up with so much being on social media these days, they all do this.
The context is that Google has a new "Site reputation abuse" policy that some argue isn't applied fairly between small sites and massive media sites. The policy states:
"Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site."
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.
> That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.
I think a much more simple answer is that syndication has always been hush-hush because branding and brand trust is a key part of media marketing. Your local newspaper in the 90s had a ton of syndicated stories too but it was all published under your local paper's hometown moniker.
I literally worked for a “home town” newspaper in the 90s and knight ridder in the early 2000s. This is not in any way comparable to syndication. Syndicated stories have an accurate byline, the publishing paper paid for syndication/content, advertising is not involved in syndicated content, and the costs are not tied to duping end readers.
Moreso this (at the time) was literal school content on media literacy. High school english classes would _get newspapers_ in order to talk about the different types of articles and content.
Every syndicated story had a byline indicating syndication.
Major US newspapers in the 21st century did. But regardless, many of them were opaque in nature. "Via AP" may check the box of attribution but is lost on a reader of average literacy.
Newswires were well understood entities for all newspaper readers for more than 100 years.
That’s giving an awful lot of credit to “all newspaper readers” there.
Certainly as a kid/teen, I didn’t understand it; I suspect plenty of adults didn’t either.
This was not used to commingle authority vs the stories they reported themselves, and is in no way comparable to what cnn is doing, ie leveraging their site rank to juice traffic to trash content for ad dollars.
Yeah; and they were generally extremely high quality.
40 years ago maybe. Now it's written to a 5th grade level and bloated with explain like I'm five filler.
I wonder about the relationship between those two, column attribution in 90s newspapers doesn't have much to say about the incentive to stay quiet to avoid publicly announcing you're violating Google's rules in 2024.
That aside, I'm not sure the assertion about 90s papers is accurate. There was syndication, of course, but that was attributed. Let's say there were articles written by other people published under the names of local writers. That sounds theoretically possible, but something that'd be well known. Let's say there were articles attributed to the paper at large. I don't recall that.
Syndicated material was disguised all the time. Ask most people and they think that most of the stories in their local newspaper are written by people that work there.
> The average American reader didn’t necessarily notice the way syndicates and chains had come to dominate the news. Syndicates were careful to sell their material to only one newspaper per city. While syndicated features usually carried a small copyright symbol, the name that followed that symbol could be deliberately opaque. Readers wouldn’t automatically know that “King Features” denoted Hearst material, or that “NEA” indicated content from the Scripps chain. Local papers sometimes purposely disguised syndicated material. The Milwaukee Sentinel bought a comic strip from the New York World syndicate in 1918, for example, but retitled it “Somewhere in Milwaukee.” The same paper told readers to send in their letters for Dorothy Dix as though she could be reached in Milwaukee, and not in New York City, where she lived and sold her work to the Ledger syndicate.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-syndicated-column...
Local newspapers didn't want to plainly advertise that a gigantic chunk of their content came from thousands of miles away. It undermines their value proposition.
Likewise, CNN probably likes that a huge chunk of featured content on their page is driving them revenue but doesn't look like a big ad to their audience.
That might have been true in the early days of the telegraph, but for as long as I can remember (and up until we cancelled our subscription), the bylines in our local paper were extremely clear on this point. Anything that was not local had a byline with the name of the reporter, their city, and “via Associated Press”, or similar.
I was a longtime newspaper person and I agree that things like AP attribution were generally pretty clear. I doubt the average reader noticed.
I don't think the news wires fooled people into believing their local paper had journalist present covering the election in Mozambique.
There was no name underneath the short. Just AP, Reuters or whatever. It was pretty clear.
"King Features" in the above quote is a contemporary example. Regardless, my point is not that these syndications are impossible to identify (as is the same with CNN's featured links), but that they are similarly opaque. Syndication as a concept isn't something that is obvious to a person of average media literacy, and neither is a tiny byline that states "via AP".
To me, it's clear that is attribution, and not attributing, or actively misattributing via signing your brand to other companies output, is the key to the article.
Print media does it (and things worse than this) too:
https://pressgazette.co.uk/comment-analysis/national-press-b...
And under work-for-hire arrangements, putting your name on something that someone else wrote is not even necessarily incorrect, either. Not every case of reprinting stories in a newspaper is a big reputable newspaper printing a story by a big reputable news syndicate who is licensing the story to multiple customers.
I write copyrighted material all day, but since it is for hire, the person who has hired me owns the copyright to it, and puts their name on my work. And US law provides no right for me to be attributed.
I appreciate the criticism of CNN in this case, but I just don't think this is somehow an egregious outlier in the history of media practices.
When I came into my former company, I took a fairly hard line that I wanted bylines on stuff I wrote--which wasn't the norm at the time but I mostly got because I was somewhat known and browbeat people into it. Still did some ghostwriting for various execs and for web copy that wasn't bylined.
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Also for non-print media, famously exemplified by Sinclair and This Is Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5mlx_DnIEo
In the authors previous post he goes into Forbes marketplace which is the same company doing this garbage content farm for CNN that they have already been doing for Forbes.
The content farm company is now trying to buy the original Forbes company.
So when our media companies become small subsidiaries of affiliate content farms then yea I think it’s a bit disturbing.
The news is the news: it isn't news that the news isn't news anymore.
Au contraire, the fact that news is no longer news is the biggest news there is.
Sure, the mere fact that the news is no longer news, is old news. But how and why it is happening is big and un-reported news.
When six companies control 90% of the news outlets, that is unprecedented concentration and loss of the diverse viewpoints necessary for a robust society.
When those corporations which normally sell-off any lossmaking division instead hold loss-making 'news' divisions in a now-chronically lossmaking industry, the payoff is not some potential future profits; the payoff is in influencing public opinion to favor policies advantageous to your larger corporation.
So, of course the how and why it is happening is unreported by the organizations that are making it happen.
> loss of the diverse viewpoints necessary for a robust society
This isn’t wrong but let me put a finer point on it: when BigCompany Inc starts dumping sludge into your town’s lake, you need independent journalists to figure that out. Corporate talking heads aren’t going to do that. And certainly not the people running a link farm.
What news is reported is as important as whether the facts are true. The easiest path to propaganda is to simply report other, more convenient, facts.
The news industry was always a low profit business even in the best times, so one should ask why it is so interesting for powerful people. The answer is the same in the past as it is today, it just takes a little of critical thinking to understand.
Good old days?
https://todayinhistory.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ea30f...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGLtwVmWwAAia-Y?format=jpg&name=...
Yeah, a lot of people pay for deeper content. I basically hang out on yahoo finance all day (crazy awesome site), and they make a lot of news feeds available to their subscribers. But it takes quite a big commitment to subscribe at a level where you get all the news and analyst reports in a timely fashion. Google News feeds have been declining in quality and don't find them valuable anymore. Hacker News is one of the sites I scan for news. I check it all, and I belong to Ground News as well.
Can you show me where the garbage content is? They seem to all have experts that have written in these areas for decades.
Well… that’s the crux of the discomfort. These brands’ newsrooms do in fact have those people. That’s the reason their names inspire trust.
Now, they’ve decided to cash out that trust by lending their names to sleazy content farming affiliate marketer types.
For now, that’s valuable, since people (and Google) trust the names based on what they used to do—and they distrust the rest of the endless chorus of hucksters. But sooner or later, the world realizes there’s no longer good reason to trust those names. They’re just snake oil (and CBD gummy) salesmen like the rest.
And then we’re left without popular institutions that are trustworthy when we need to understand complicated and true things about the world. And we’ve punished people (and Google) for even trying to place more weight on honest reportage and institutional signals of expertise.
Top google result for "best pet insurance" and "best CBD gummies" are Forbes (actually Forbes Marketplace), and they've moving into sports betting.
https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/
That's what I mean, he doesn't look at the content itself
There are still counterexamples:
https://www.propublica.org/
Traditional newspapers would get stories from things like AP, and then the editors would decide what to run. They’d also have reporters that wrote local stories, etc.
I’d argue that any news site that has eliminated all those roles is already out of business and is simply burning down their brand at this point.
As Obama famously quipped during his last Whitehouse Correspondent dinner:
These aren't news sections that are being outsourced, they're things like "The 9 best leggings on Amazon, according to fitness experts¹" and "Best pet insurance companies of September 2024²".
¹ https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/fashion/best-leggings-on...
² https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/pet-insurance/best-..., https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/best-pet-insurance
I'm pretty sure I saw a "Forbes" guide on how to beat some video game quest at some point, or some other video game thing people would have been searching for at the time. I understood it to be SEO spam but this whole comment section puts it into better context.
Click forbes.com, then hamburger icon, then scroll the list to the “advisor” or “health” news sections.
Sample sections from advisor:
- Cheap Car Insurance
- Pet Insurance
- How Much Is Pet Insurance?
- Cheap Pet Insurance
Under health, they have a sub-section “best cbd gummies”. I clicked on a few articles and they’re outsourced(?) amazon affiliate spam that claims Forbes actually tested the products.
The health section is served from forbes.com, but the navigation is different and includes a “back to forbes.com” button.
In some other parts of forbes.com they have clear disclaimers, like:
Innovation -> SAP Brand Voice | Paid program
So, they’re definitely trying to pass off the marketplace content as legitimate news sections.
Your deduction from this that they are trying to pass of the content as news is actually crazy.
I don't buy the claim that this is trying to pass as news. It just looks like 90% of the other review pages on the internet. Here's what I'm seeing:
At the top of the page I see an Advertising Disclosure link. After that I see a byline for the actual human freelancer that wrote the article.
After that I see a huge call-out that "Commissions we earn from partner links on this page do not affect our opinions or evaluations. Our editorial content is based on thorough research and guidance from the Forbes Health Advisory Board".
Below that is a "Featured Partner Offer" with an info popover that reads "Partner Offers feature brands who paid Forbes Health to appear at the top of our list. While this may influence where their products or services appear on our site, it in no way affects our ratings, which are based on thorough research, solid methodologies and expert advice. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services". The offer contains no rating or editorial text.
Below that are the reviewed items, which have ratings and editorial text. Some of the text is linked to full reviews of specific products (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/health/cbd/cbdfx-gummies-review/).
Below that is the methodology: "To determine the best CBD gummies, the Forbes Health editorial team analyzed data on over 100 CBD gummy products ... then ranked the CBD gummies based on price, potency, flavor options available and whether its ingredients are all natural, organic, gluten-free and/or vegan-friendly." They don't claim to have tested all of them.
Again, this looks like 90% of the other review pages on the web, including things Forbes already publishes (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article...).
>It just looks like 90% of the other review pages on the internet.
90% of websites are not in the top 10% of mainstream media big budget brand reputation... so if the top 10% look like the other 90%, that says something, and it's not good.
That sounds like an obfuscated way of saying that pre-internet brands shouldn't be allowed to compete with tech bros.
News sections are outsourced to AP's essaybots.
These sort of pay-to-play review marketing didn't originate on the internet. These are copies of arrangements that print media invented. My hometown newspaper had this kind of stuff too.
Many publications have long relied on outside contributors with various degrees of transparency and conflicts of interest. When blogging was the hotness, as an analyst, I contributed to CNET (unpaid; they paid some bloggers but I didn't want that conflict of interest). After CBS bought them and the whole blog climate changed (and I moved to a vendor), I stopped doing that. But a ton of that sort of thing went on in the tech trade press--some good and some almost certainly not so good.
The key difference is that ProPublica is a non-profit. There are very few non-profit investigative journalism orgs in the world, but their funding is fundamentally different than for-profit news orgs. They rely on public grants to keep things running, so therefore, they don't have to abuse their brand in similar ways.
That's also why they publish only a couple of stories per day instead of hundreds, why they never cover breaking news, why there's a donate button (as opposed to now-standard paywalls), why there's no ads, why the interface appears cleaner etc. If we were talking about tech companies, it'd be like comparing Wikimedia/Mozilla/Internet Archive to traditional for-profit tech companies. To an untrained eye there is no difference, but a somewhat trained eye quickly realises that their incentives are completely different.
(Disclaimer: I work for a different non-profit investigative journalism organization.)
It's also why ProPublica's content niche is so small. They don't cover anything except corruption and abuses of power. No sports, no celebrity news, no news about new movies or music, etc. They can't afford more, and their charter doesn't allow it anyway.
They are funded by NGOs controlled by billionaires, so in the end there is a number of things they cannot investigate if they want to maintain the NGO money.
Hopefully there are multiple organizations with different funding sources who aren’t beholden to each other, so they can fill whatever gaps in coverage they see. That would be a better outcome than everyone refusing journalism as a career because you will always have a conflict of interest with whoever is paying you.
That's not how grants work, they don't come with a "you can't report on us specifically" clause.
While this is technically correct, it is the wrong response to GP.
Yes. ProPublica is biased to look in certain directions. Every single reporter, editor, publisher, is biased in this way. The answer to this is more, not less.
FIRE rose from decisions the ACLU took about representing cases. This is a fundamentally good thing, speaking as a diehard ACLU supporter.
Speaking as a huge fan of ProPublica, I'm hoping that they're investigating all of the supreme court justices (for example), because we won't pass laws to reign in judicial corruption without bipartisan action. But if they aren't, I desperately hope that there's a market for a conservative-focus investigative outfit that can stick to the facts like ProPublica.
There is no such clause because that would be unlawful, but there is certainly the "unwritten clause" of whether the NGO likes your work or not.
It's common wisdom that you "don't bite the hand that feeds you".
But it could be that if you don't follow the unwritten rules, you don't get another grant next year.
I’ve seen a lot of non-profit journalism outfits coming out of the woodwork.
I think you're misunderstanding what's happening here.
In traditional journalism using wire stories (or "curated content partners"), the publisher (Forbes, CNN, etc.) pays for the content.
In the case of CNN Underscore, the "content partners" are paying CNN to use their good name to peddle advertorial content. Like if I want to run a cryptocurrency scam, I can pay CNN or Forbes to run a story on their website touting the benefits of my fake product. To a non-observant reader, it will appear to actually be coming from CNN or Forbes.
This is a long way from CNN running something from the Associated Press or Reuters.
Isn’t even new. Demand Media was doing this 10+ years ago and sites like USA Today were buying content. These days you have companies creating their own sponsored content with platforms like Ceros and the sites just embedding it and cashing the checks. Of course the sites do the bare minimum legally required to disclose its sponsored content.
> Let me break down how the media industry works nowadays
How free* media works. The media landscape has sadly divided into assuming only those who can pay for news want to be informed or have their views challenged. The poor get ads and echo chambers.
Lots of people pay for The New York Times and they still operate their affiliate link site Wirecutter.
Who is the mythical non-echo-chamber informative challenging news source?
propublica.org is pretty good.
They wrote that these things can be found in paid sources.
I had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal for awhile and while I can't say that's what the GP is referring to, it absolutely sounds like the kind of deluded crap a WSJ subscriber would say to justify spending $40/mo on that crap to themselves :D
That would be an aggregator, like allsides.com
I think "non-echo chamber content" is only valuable as long as all of it is similarly high quality. In my opinion, reading diverse but low quality content (e.g. filled with misinformation, a lack of concrete information, and a lack of sensible reasoning) is not helpful.
Even prestige publications like The New Yorker use freelancers. This is the same thing, it’s just lower brow content.
That’s not a fair comparison, The New Yorker has always had a different relationship with its writers. A freelancer who writes for The New Yorker is likely a highly respected journalist/author/other luminary. Their staff writers are, I believe, technically contractors as they’re not W2 employees.
Contractor-written slop at these content farms, as described by TFA, have nothing in common with how content works at The New Yorker.
The New Yorker gets high tier freelancers, other outlets get dogshit freelancers. It’s the same underlying model.
This is not at all the same thing. The New Yorker pays its freelancers. In the example in the article, the money is flowing from the content producer to the publisher, meaning it's an ad.
They have literally run “native ads” for a decade which are ads specifically designed to appear to be content from New Yorker writers.
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/the-new-yorker-jumps-into...
Also not good, but also not at all like freelancing. Freelancers are paid. Advertisers pay for placement.
You mentioned what is or isn’t an ad, my point is the distinction is a lot less clear than you think, and it always has been.
While it’s good more people understand the business of news, this is all out in the open and has been for years.
Isn't this literally the business model of AP News (Associated Press)?
https://apnews.com
They sell stories to other news outlets to publish on their own website.
No, AP sells stories that other outlets choose to buy and run based on editorial judgement, Marketplace buys access to brands with reputation and publishes its own material under those brands; its not at all the same model.
Yes, and Reuters, and this predates the internet.
I disagree that it does not venture into scandal territory due to the fact that CNN is a news organization that is constantly defending their integrity.
They are presenting content as their own under questionable sources that they don't reveal. It proves they are being less genuine when doing so makes them money.
The contract reporters are also personally liable for what they submit. So there is absolutely zero incentive to risk going deep on a topic, let alone investigate anything.
Yes, and to add there's nothing wrong with it. The editor is responsible for curation. This has been a practice for many decades, there are news agencies primarily focused on selling syndicated content produced by their own journalists such as Associated Press or Reuters. You'll find this content in all newspapers even the best. Generally unless it's an exclusive or breaking news, there's a good chance it'll be syndicated at some point.
Let me break down how the media industry works
It looks like you mean: "Let me break down how a certain portion of the media industry that I'm familiar with works."
"The media industry" is vast, complex, diverse, and far more interesting than internet content farms, poorly-run legacy brands, or even most of what's on the internet.
Freelancers have existed since the dawn of journalism.
"interesting" isn't the word I would have chosen
What you’ve described does indeed sound scandalous irrespective of its scope.
It's a scandal that a single website is masking multiple privacy policies behind different pages, making it impossible for their users to understand what they have consented to.
This doesn't make it acceptable. We can want better.
Yeah, I read this blog post and thought throughout the whole thing, "Is this person just completely unaware of how the media and branding industries work?" He tries to make it out to be some great "scandal" when literally tons and tons of media brands outsource sections of their website.
Now, to be clear, I'm not exactly excusing CNN for this, but literally for years now I've rolled my eyes at the extremely spammy/low quality/clickbait ads that have appeared on CNN articles online. The fact that they've outsourced part of their "Underscored" site, which isn't exactly journalism to begin with, is not something I care about. And in case you missed it, journalism has had a blood bath over the past 25 years. While I think what CNN is doing in terms of affiliate ads is scammy, can I really blame them? Hardly anyone wants to pay for journalism these days, but journalists still want to eat. At least with these clickbait ads I find them so low quality that they don't confuse me into being "real" articles.
'They all do this' isn't a good excuse when 'this' is deceiving the consumer. I am so sick of marketing/branding people faking everything, and wish they could all be shipped off Golgafrincham.
I’m super confused as to why this is worth a blog post, let alone the conspiratorial tone.
This seems to be a case of knowledge without context being a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.
You’re omitting how much influence / censorship our government have over these institutions now, and how much they apply pressure to prevent dissenting voices and opinions from reaching the main stream.
The passive voice shit from the past couple years has gotten truly audacious and increasingly infuriating
I’ve heard that a while back Google had a change to their algo that heavily prioritized widely used websites as “trusted”. The very most well known sites in the world, such as cnn.com, would be treated as the best results for anything they contained.
In response, many of the most used web sites flooded their own sites with transparently fake product reviews full of SEO phrases about “we spent N weeks testing K products to root out the very best” and very little else. The actual reviews would be pretty much copy-pasted from the description provided on the product producer’s site.
And, that’s how Google made itself useless for finding product reviews.
The above poster speaks to the crux of the issue. CNN, Forbes and other sites are doing things that a normal webmaster could be nuked from orbit for, after a "manual review". Yet, these are the manually curated sites which Google claims have high trust signals.
There are a few disparate incentives. One is a political desire to buttress the "official truths" of the legacy media. The other is a market incentive for the dying legacy media sites to earn revenue.
There is a third, related market incentive for the dissatisfied media consumers. CNN isn't as compelling as it was two decades ago. Eyeballs and ears are naturally straying towards the perceived value of alternative media sources. Therefore, to continue the ancien regime, it becomes necessary for Google to prop up CNN and others.
There is a possible world where Google creates value by indexing and sorting through a decentralized and open Internet. This chain of events does not support that. The trend is for gatekeepers to panic. The search results have been sabotaged as a result.
Is Google more valuable as a gatekeeper for established institutions? Can that amount to more value than the potential ad revenue of a larger web? Time will tell.
I feel gaslighted when "fake news" is brought up by people, that consider CNN etc to be somewhat reputable. Like, the atmosphere on those sites are surreal nowadays. There are fake news, fake ads etc.
Like a article with a picture of some fat person, a picture of a child star, and the headline "you can't believe how child star whatever looks like today!". But the fat person is not the former child and nowhere to be seen in the article, etc.
Those sites are as reputable as pornsites.
These are the same sites that platform the doom-mongers warning us of the dangers of "disinformation" and appealing for censorship. The viewers may merely be victims of the propaganda. Those disseminating the propaganda should be held to a higher standard.
There is this establishment push to push news down our throats as people turn off their outlets.
Like algorithmic feeds in general. And e.g. the Windows startmenu and what not.
Tradionally people chose what news publishers to follow. Like, it was one newspaper that you liked politically or journalisticly.
News used to be opt-in and you chose your affiliation. The angle of the publisher was known.
Nowadays it is a joke. A washed out joke. You need to go for the more radical political papers to get what most papers used to be in the 90s.
> I’ve heard that a while back Google had a change to their algo that heavily prioritized widely used websites as “trusted”.
They super-obviously did that some time around ‘08 or ‘09. Basically just gave up on the cat-and-mouse game they’d played with spam for years, based on actual content and (what they hoped they managed to suss out as) organic linking, and switched to heavy reputation- and size-weighting instead. It was a giant shift in their search’s behavior and unlike anything they’d done before, not subtle at all.
This is an interesting claim. What evidence do you have for it? I don't mean this argumentatively, but rather that I'd like to read more and learn for myself.
Before Google, unscrupulous web sites would try to SEO themselves into the top page of search results with repeated META tag bombs or sometimes just good old fashioned whitefonting. One of the innovations of PageRank was that more widely linked-to web sites would be ranked as more authoritative, doing an end run around the kind of keyword spam that plagued the early web. If the most widely linked-to web sites wish to play ball with SEO marketroids, that undermines the trustworthiness that PageRank assumes for those sites.
The upshot of this is that no system is impossible to game.
What signals do you think Google should be using instead?
I presume they made the change because their search results were filling up with blogspam, and there was no algorithm that could detect a high-quality review from a spam one.
So what do you think would have been the right approach?
People pointing out problems are not obligated to provide solutions. I don't know where this idea comes from, but it's just wrong.
If there was a solution to this problem from the search engine's point of view 5 years ago, which I do not stipulate but let's roll with it, there isn't one now. ChatGPT can overcome basically all detection techniques when combined with the current amount of efforts already largely successfully avoiding detection, and it will continue to get better. There are no signals for random unattested web content that will separate what we want from stuff constructed to look like what we want but with embedded motivations or content we don't.
A web of trust may be inevitable, but it's not like that can't be attacked either, especially past the first hop. It seems inevitable that slowly but very surely our trust is going to get pulled in much, much more tightly than it is now. I don't see much that can be done about that, even in theory. It was a historical accident that we ever could trust random websites to not be 100% focused on their own interests, simply because the tech to do that wasn't there yet. Now it is, and we will be entering a world where we can not trust any free resources, whether we like it or not.
> People pointing out problems are not obligated to provide solutions.
And nobody said they were obligated to. So I don't know what you think you're responding to.
I assume it's OK to ask people what they think a solution should be, though?
Seems like a pretty natural, conversational follow-up, if you ask me.
Presumably if you know a situation well enough to criticize, you have at least some ideas of what alternatives might or might not be better. Or can elucidate why you think there might not be any better ones.
Or do you think the entire act of asking questions is "just wrong", to use your phrase?
It is an extremely common tactic used to shut down conversations about problems. If that wasn't what you were doing, I apologize to you for being wrong this time, but I don't apologize for making the mistake in the first place, because it's fairly well-founded based on extensive experience.
> a world where we can not trust any free resources
Or paid ones, really. If you think a company is trustworthy, that means a) you believe it cares about losing you as a customer, or b) you believe the company has the obligation or the luxury of acting with integrity (or the people working there do).
Especially with news media, none of these things are likely to be true. For paid news I’d just expect less typos but not more integrity.
It's really easy to find real reviews. The magic trick is -affiliate -amazon. You can add other qualifiers as well.
Try it: https://www.google.com/search?q=macbook+m3+pro+review+-affil...
Reviews financed via affiliate links are just camouflaged ads. So Google should offer a filter to remove all of them.
I add similar qualifiers to almost all of my searches. They make the web feel like it's 2010 again.
Awesome tip. I made a Kagi lens with these settings:
https://kagi.com/lenses/0MqOTt5t5MajrIkHAqHEgDeoKzF1a4TS
(Can’t share example results since Kagi doesn’t let you share results from lenses)
The results would only be notable if they were substantially better than the Google results.
Doesn't Kagi currently pay to access Google's index?
I think so, but they do rerank the results. The only major engines that run their own indexes are Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu.
EDIT: If Google decides to ever remove this useful feature as well, here's an archive link showing what the results used to look like at the time of posting: https://archive.is/5KwA6.
That seems to be a great tip. Thanks.
I don’t use Google, but I used to pay for Apple News.
Apple uses algorithmic ranking by story, and pays news sites by article views. It is basically all spam. If you block the spam sites, their stories still show up in your feed with a note that you blocked the site.
Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization, like podcast apps do. They should steer you back to reading the sources you’ve opted into, and mix in a bit of stories from related news organizations, not stories with high content similarity, or high “trending” scores.
(As far as I know, Apple News+ is the only product still operating in the paid news aggregator space, but if there’s another one, I’d love to hear about it.)
I've been using Feedly for a bit now after something changed with the Google aggregator that Android has available as an option on the home screen changed something and became impossible for me to filter out certain sources from (maybe related to the engine changes discussed in this thread and in the article?)
It's solidly...okay. It's very good aggregating everything I want, and for the most part it's able to avoid things that I'd absolutely not be willing to overlook, but it has some quirks in terms of the filters weirdly not working for me on fairly benign topics (no matter how much I try, I can't get it to stop showing me content from various sports like soccer, basketball, and golf despite the only sport I care about being baseball). They seem to really hype their AI features in the app, which is a little weird because I don't care how they aggregate behind the scenes and they shouldn't need AI to be able to filter articles they literally already tag as "golf" when I have "golf" listed in my filters as "never show", but it's not annoying enough that I've bothered trying to find an alternative yet.
I have to say showing you content from blocked channels is the most user hostile thing I encounter on a daily basis.
The contempt for one’s users is such a defining feature of this era of late-stage tech.
> Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization
Doesn't this immediately turn into the kind of problem TFA is bemoaning? Once a news organization gets traction (opt-ins in this case) on a platform, they'll inevitably start selling space in their feed to one or more crappy aggregators. To the C-suite this looks like free money, since somehow they always manage to convince themselves that the brand damage from it will be minimal or at least manageable.
It sucks.
> If you block the spam sites, their stories still show up in your feed with a note that you blocked the site.
Users' respect for Apple is matched in magnitude by Apple's disrespect for users.
IMO the internet is just a bad place to look for reviews nowadays, unless you really trust someone and know they aren’t being paid to review the product. Likewise Amazon reviews I consider mostly fake. For products I want to buy I look at what brick and mortar stores sell, they have skin in the game and can weed out the truly bad.
DoubleClick slowly killed Google search because the best way to make money in display ads is to run clickbait.
In the one hand, Google paid good quality websites more money for trash content and engagement bait than quality content. So they adapted to that new market reality.
Meanwhile, the real money maker - Search - gradually got filled up with lower quality content and now it’s imploding.
Google buying DoubleClick has a lot of parallels to what happened with Boeing.
> was no algorithm that could detect a high-quality review from a spam one
In that scenario, the search engine could show an empty page plus their screened ad network results.
Perhaps a link for querying Reddit or other social media.
For the most profitable/contested review queries, some combination of algo and paid humans for feedback/curation.
> there was no algorithm that could detect a high-quality review from a spam one.
I really hope for them it does exist because otherwise Google is screwed.
The right approach would’ve looked something like what the author of this article did. None of it was that technically complicated.
These days I ask chatgpt what the people of reddit think.
> we spent N weeks testing K products to root out the very best
Does the Wirecutter no longer actually do the leg work?
Whether they do or not, Wirecutter was such a successful format that everybody else copies the style when when writing fake reviews. The giveaway is when every item in a category happens to be the best at something that could be read off the spec sheet and they never actually recommend one: This one has the best sound quality, this one is the budget pick, this one is best for people with cats, this one has more battery life, etc.
Is "fake" the right word?
I was under the impression that the generic "news"/"information" on many sites is purchased (or otherwise obtained through some kind of business relationship) from some other organization.
And I just don't get this perspective from the article:
"For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?"
I guess I can't figure out what the problem is supposed to be here. I don't think there's necessarily a problem with fleshing out a site with generic content. I would guess CNN has an agreement with the content provider on the general character of content, and can surely opt out of things they don't want to be associated with.
FWIW, I opened "CNN underscored money" and at the top of the page it says:
"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN Newsroom. CNN earns a commission from partner links on the site but the reporting here is always independent and objective." (plus there's an "advertiser disclosure" link but I didn't click on it).
I just don't get what the problem is here.
> FWIW, I opened "CNN underscored money" and at the top of the page it says: "Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN Newsroom.
You are effectively saying 'what's the big deal if they admit it'. The big deal is that that's not what they're admitting. CNN Underscored is a separate team within CNN, running an in-house content farm, and that's what they're admitting to. CNN Underscored Money is an entirely separate company, running a third-party content farm, which they are going to lengths to hide the separation from CNN Underscored.
Google's TOS permits you to run terrible content farms. It even permits you to rehost third-party terrible content farms with zero oversight. But it does not allow you to claim this content as your own and hide its third-party origin, if you rehost it with zero oversight.
>"For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?"
Anytime I hear outrage rhetoric i lose all interest in the author's words.
Its like they have completely forgotten what relativity is.
What would you consider the relative element in this scenario that explains the decision then? Or was your point simply that emotive language automatically discredits a speaker's point?
My eyes read it as reality. I think it fits too.
The problem is that Google defines what these sites are doing as spam: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
> Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site.
It means that consumers will be shown reviews written by affiliate marketers rather than real people because the affiliate marketers get to leech off of Forbes's, CNN's, or USA Today's domain reputation. Despite this, Google is either unwilling or unable to derank major sites over this issue.
RE "...with little or no first-party oversight or involvement..." and "...without close oversight or involvement of the host site..."
Why do you think there isn't oversight or involvement from CNN?
For the CNN Underscored Money example, none of the writers or editors on the site work for CNN. They're all contractors who work for Marketplace, an affiliate marketing company. The site is hosted on completely separate infrastructure from CNN Underscored, just skinned to look similar to it. They even have a different privacy policy just for CNN Underscored Money. If CNN had major oversight or control of the content on CNN Underscored Money, you would think they would host it themselves rather than allowing an affiliate marketing company to independently operate the category.
> They're all contractors who work for Marketplace ... The site is hosted on completely separate infrastructure from CNN Underscored, just skinned to look similar to it. They even have a different privacy policy just for CNN Underscored Money.
But those things have nothing to do with whether or not CNN has involvement and oversight over the CNN underscored content.
I have no idea myself, but you certainly can't infer it from irrelevant facts.
Absolutely, spot on. These publishers aren't just letting anyone post. If you actually check, the writers are legit experts in their fields.
Take a look at the authors and their LinkedIn profiles—they’ve been covering these topics for years
Which of these authors have LinkedIn profiles documenting their employment history?
I haven't had cable for a long time so I can't say anything about the quality of the programming on the CNN channel. However, cnn.com has been full of affiliate links and barely detectable "sponsored" stories for years.
Its particularly comical because many of the recommendations, including from the US government, for identifying fake or untrustworthy news sites include factors that would indicate CNN's site is fake.
A hard one to define is a common recommendation is that a legit news site will look and feel professional. A more specific one is that a fake news site will be filled with a large number of ads. That doesn't even touch on the other factors like unbiased articles that share both sides of an issue.
Let's be real, CNN, Fox News, etc are all fake/propaganda. On Fox News, Trump can do nothing wrong, Biden can do nothing right. On CNN it's nothing but sunshine and rainbows for Harris/Biden and the opposite for Trump...I mean look at this story title from CNN's current frontpage: "Roy Wood Jr. reacts to Trump’s ongoing McDonalds remarks"
I'm an independent and as far as I can tell there is zero attempt at unbiased factual reporting of the news.
> unbiased factual reporting
I don't think that has ever existed, but the closest I've found is Wikipedia. It is surprisingly detailed, particularly on current events.
Funny you mention that. I've been experimenting with reading only Wikipedia as my source for news. I agree it seems to be an excellent source.
What I can't figure out is how it seems to still be so neutral, given that it's completely open for anyone to edit. Seems like it would be quite cheap for an organization to edit things to their liking.
Is it simply that most people don't get their news from Wikipedia, and so it's not a primary target for manipulation? Is it already awash in self-serving content and I just haven't noticed?
You might enjoy this story: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
The short version is that you can make Wikipedia report the way you want, but you need to be strategic about it. Wikipedia reports information from "reliable sources", so instead of editing the information directly, you need to insist that the sources that agree with you are reliable and the sources that don't agree with you are unreliable. If you succeed at this, then getting the information you want into Wikipedia is just straightforward following of Wikipedia's written policy.
For mainstream folks, perhaps. The second you even go slightly outside of what the media has declared kosher it goes off the rails. Take RFK’s page, for instance, which is just a collection of inflamed opinions soured from “reputable“ news outlets.
It can get polarized within the mainstream, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_U.S._executive_br...
In your opinion, what is some misinformation on RFK's page?
Have you read the discussions on the talk page?
If your concern has not been extensively discussed, have you raised it on said page?
Here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.
Yes, the top chain in the talk page is exactly what I’m referring. And, as expected, the fair critique of the article for violating wiki guidelines has been shot down by passionate editors who want to push their narrative.
I'm confused. All I saw was someone trying to push their own agenda, and editors preventing it. Did you see something else?
You find? I usually find it more and more edited to favour left-wing and work views on current and political events.
I just go to severs social media sites so I get at least both biases
Wikipedia is free for everyone to edit. The policies are strongly aligned with the pursuit of truth. Both parties can have truths in their favour, if editors are in a left wing bubble they may just be more exposed to truths from a left perspective. Here's where you can help! If you identify bias, feel free to remove charged language, and add new ideas with reliable citations. Here's a list of sources considered reliable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AReliable_sources%2...
Extensive discussions of the decision making process for each source is documented in this list.
There's always Conservapedia if Wikipedia isn't working for you!
You might have some luck with news wire services such as Reuters or the Associated Press.
You massively overstate the political bias that CNN has. I can find articles that are critical of Biden/harris all day on CNN!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13868889/cnn-attack...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/14/politics/fact-check-harris-ca...
But please, keep lying about how CNN doesn’t criticize Harris/biden! It fits into the destabilizing narrative that “the media” is “corrupt” or “bought and paid for”.
Also, if you want unbiased media, CSPAN is that. No bias except from how the camera is physically pointed into congress. You won’t watch it because it’s too boring and despite all the hatred your profess to have against biased news, the idea of news not as entertainment is alien to you.
Arguing that news outlets have a bias does not mean they are 100% biased. You will find examples of articles and segments against Harris on CNN, you will also find articles and segments against Trump on Fox News. It isn't the norm though.
The most telling for me is generally the photos picked by a news outlet. On CNN for example, photos of Harris (and Biden) are almost always picked to show them in a favorable light. They'll be shot standing at a podium with an American flag behind them and a big, natural looking smile on their face. Photos of Trump are from off angles with an angry look on his face, often taken mid speech where a face will look more contorted than when smiling.
Are news outlets 100% biased mouthpieces pieces? Of course not. But they have a strong bias towards one party or the other and they don't try very hard to hide it.
Saying stuff this obvious to debunk it's like AI skeptics saying "AI can't solve X" when it's literally trivial to try their query and then the AI system straight up just solves it.
Let's look at some recent CNN photos of each of them!
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/gettyimages...
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/20240921-po...
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/2024-09-26t...
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/gettyimages...
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/20240721-02...
(sources)
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/27/politics/cnn-poll-harris-trum...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/27/politics/harris-southern-bord...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/29/media/abc-presidential-debate...
Two issues with you trying to debunk me here.
First, part of my claim is that you absolutely can find examples where CNN puts Harris or Biden in a bad light. To properly debunk me you would need an analysis of how frequently they show either party candidate in a good vs. bad light.
Second, and more importantly, you're trying to debunk what I clearly stated as my experience of viewing CNN. I didn't claim it to be a universal truth, only a pattern I have noticed when I have taken the time to browse CNN's site.
Debunking is useful when someone is proposing an argument as a scientific, or logically based, argument. Its pretty useless when the statement is only based on personal, anecdotal experience.
Are you saying that if I don't enjoy watching live video of e.g. an anthill 24/7 then I am actually not interested in unbiased media and crave drivel like CNN? That's... one way to reason I guess.
The better analogy would be "If I don't enjoy watching a live video of an anthill 24/7 than I am actually not interested in studying or learning about ants".
To which my response is "those who don't do, teach" and to point you to in-fact, do your ant observational studies anyway (i.e. watch CSPAN) because it really, really is the only way to stop seeing quite as many shadows on the wall and see a tiny glimpse of how politics actually works.
Seriously, most of the folks making real discovery today in some animal studies field is doing it from long periods of observational studies in the field. Books from academics are so full of lies due to publish or perish, academic careerism, widespread, systemic, structural, and at the highest levels academic fraud/dishonesty, and more.
Watch CSPAN, or you will be lied to. Sorry not sorry that it's boring as shit. That's the reality of politics, it's mostly boring.
False equivalence. One of those had to pay 700 million because it doesn't know how to stop lying.
Don't... don't come to HN for reasonable conversation about these things.
I am so glad I decided to tune out of this election cycle. Is anyone really undecided? If you're not, just don't watch. I have no idea what Trump is saying about McDonald's and I like it that way.
Elections are all about turnout. Hence, election campaigns mostly aren't about convincing the undecided. They're mostly about motivating and energizing your voters to show up on election day (get out the vote!), and demoralizing and confusing the other side's voters to stay home (you're principled, but your candidate is un-yoursidesian and cannot be trusted).
I'm going to vote, as I always do. I don't need manufactured outrage as a motivator. Unfortunately that is what ad-driven social media and news needs to get eyeballs, so it's all we've got.
I'll sum it up for you:
"Vote for the person we picked for you because they're not Trump."
I know it's fun to hate on media but CNN is actually really solid. I watch the broadcast rarely but I visit the site. They have enormous breadth of coverage that includes international news as well as fluff like celebrity gossip. They have a ton of real reporters and are on the ground everywhere something is happening. I see sensationalized stuff sometimes but they're still highly factual and fair. I'm not sure what people think the alternative is. We wouldn't know anything if not for commercially successful news businesses. None of the Internet media critics actually gather any news for themselves
X.com is the only reliable source of news now as people from all political views do independent reporting there and Community Notes fact checks them.
I was never much of a Twitter user, but I have a really hard time believing that any social network incentivizing short comments and social validation through likes/shares and an algorithmic feed will ever be a reliable source for unbiased views.
That site is, and always has been, full of hot takes and sensationalism which are often out-of-context or misleading. Regardless of viewpoint. And most evidence shows it is a top target for intentional disinformation attacks by institutionally-sponsored troll farms. It is very easy for people to end way down the rabbit holes of an echo chamber on that site and find themselves exposed to niche accounts that don't receive any fact checking or counterarguments.
They're called "native ads" designed to flow inline with their actual news but they're also labeled as sponsored content if you just look carefully.
There are SEO agencies that do this as a model. I know because I have been pitched by them.
1. You run a content website with a strong domain rating. 2. They approach you with an offer of creating a subsite (your brand + advisor, marketplace, etc) on your domain 3. They write all the content and completely manage the subsite - you have 0 risk (aside from brand risk) 4. You split the affiliate revenues from the subsite 5. The internet is now full of shitty content shilling diet pills and google can't figure it out
In related news, almost everything you can find through a Google search is unmitigated crap. Finding it on Google is an indictment of the quality. Back in the day, something like Wikipedia was what people dreamed the Internet would be. How naive of us.
I half expect to start seeing new incarnations of things like Prodigy or Compuserve spin up, aiming to provide an Internet-within-Internet type of experience. Without advertising, purely pay-to-play. Sure, a lot of regular people will never pay for such a thing, but I bet there are enough of us that will pay for good quality content (and shielding from crap) that it could be viable. Maybe the 'net gets balkanized and the 'free' part left as a wasteland.
(or maybe I'm just a grumpy old man and I should go get a cup of coffee and quit my bitching)
> Finding it on Google is an indictment of the quality. Back in the day, something like Wikipedia was what people dreamed the Internet would be.
Well there is good news: Wikipedia is still around and it's as good as ever.
I share your sentiments about Google results. I've thought before about setting myself up a little terminal which denies access to everything on the web besides Wikipedia and .edu. That's where most of the good stuff online is. (ok, maybe Atlas Obscura and Sheldon Brown's bicycle page are allowed too)
In 2005, some scammy ad company paid me to do similar stuff - let them completely control some pages on a high ranking domain. Google figured it out after a few months and blacklisted my entire domain until I removed them. Crazy that this is still an issue.
I’ve noticed that certain companies become too big to fail, and then they just start breaking the rules.
For instance, Experian stole my credit card number once. The fraud department at my national megabank said that Experian was responsible for over half their case load.
You’d think that the credit card processing networks would have blocked the Experian payment processing account at that point. I think they would have blocked pretty much any other company on earth.
> The fraud department at my national megabank said that Experian was responsible for over half their case load.
Wait, what? This is beyond wild. How did you know it was Experian? Have you since found any other evidence for this?
The only reason to pay any attention to CNN, USA Today or Forbes is to understand what's on the minds of the corporate oligarchy in the United States. They're just propaganda feeds, the modern version of the tin-horn propaganda blared out by speakers installed in Red Square in Moscow in the 1970s.
This doesn't mean the stories published are false, or even inaccurate - but there's a big negative space in their media coverage. E.g. if culture war issues are amplified, but there are no stories on industrial policy, infrastructure problems, manufacturing job and supply chain analysis - that's deliberate. No, it's not 'what the public wants', it's what the owners of these media outlets want their readers to be thinking about.
Publishers sometimes have advertorial divisions. This is not a new phenomenon. No, this does not prove true your favorite candidate’s lies or alternative realities.
You’re the only one bringing up politics
It is not about a particular politician--or are you reading this a particular way because of a truth about your favorite candidate you know, but do not want to be said?
See also partisan views from this thread (as opposed to this non-partisan comment):
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=41670882
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=41671053
A large media organization on two tech stacks for the web presence is not really evidence of anything. Any large organization struggles to maintain cohesive infrastructure. Especially if they've acquired sub brands. Or just because different editorial teams have different requirements. That's not to say CNN money isn't shady but this isn't proof of anything.
What can you expect from main stream media? It's mostly either propaganda or commercials wrapped up as new stories.
Where do you think people should get news? Most of the non-mainstream news is somehow worse and finding knowledgeable direct sources isn't really practical for people.
The top comment in this hn post from a few years ago really stuck with me. I'll paste here.
"Seems an appropriate time to post my favourite piece on news addiction by Charles Simic in the NYRB. "I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/
Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life...""
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23938007
I agree that choices are limited. Nonetheless, the days of trusting "the news" media are long gone, at least for now. You can get *information* from CNN, etc. but that doesn't make it news, nor does it mean you're getting the full story and proper insights.
Listen. Think about what is said. Think harder about what is not said. Check another source. Repeat.
Yes, sadly it's a cliche but you have to "do your own research" and most people don't have the time or don't want to spend their time that way.
Maybe there are still some monthly periodicals that do in-depth news, since they aren't trying to get an exclusive or be the first to break the story they would not be so motivated to just vomit clickbait continuously. But I don't know who they are.
I've largely just stopped paying attention. It's sad in a way, as I grew up with the lesson that paying attention to the news and current events was important. But it's all garbage now.
I'm no different than anyone else in that I don't have a lot of time. Where I have noticed I'm different is how closely I listen, how critical I am of what I hear, and how often I question what I did not hear. The other difference is, my BS detector for editorial - positioned as "news" / "journalism" - is very well oiled. I accept opinion - I have no choice - but I don't in my mind treat it as fact.
Most people seen to get caught up in looking for confirmation bias that they abandoned critical thinking. Most people hear what they want to hear, and the media is more than happy to feed them that comfort.
Let me give you an example, a couple of weeks ago I saw a story that the Sahara Desert (Africa) is greening. I noticed that from a number of different sources and each source used the same phrase for this[1]: "unusual weather patterns". Huh? Why is greening from "unusual weather patterns" but when there's damage it's *always* from "climate change"? No one I know caught the Orwellian sleight of hand.
Along the same lines, The Washington Post ran a story last week about the science of climate. It was even shared on HN. No one seemed to notice. Odd because it effectively said, up to now there was no definitive study on the history of the earth's climate. So up to now what were all "the experts" basing their "science" on then? Hearsay? Mindless parroting? Worst was this study effectively made a case for climate change might not be human-made, simply because over time climate has been very dynamic and at time extreme. Per this study and the graph it publish there is no "normal".
These were both in plain sight. And yet crickets. Maybe I should stop thinking and put more time into keeping up with the Kardashians?
[1] The fact that they used the same phrase also told me, they invested zero resources in this story and were merely parroting the narrative provided by the news service they were using. Note: This approach by definition is not journalism.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
I do not believe centralized content distribution channels will ever act as a reliable source of information.
Find distribution channels that keep you plugged into the zeitgeist; some form of streaming our collective consciousness.
And then do your own research on the topics that matter to you.
YouTube - tons of YouTubers who are independent, X - raw, fast, first hand news, Not saying don't go to mainstream news, just know the bias they may have.
Also make sure you take those same youtubers as what they are; raw, independent, and with less accountability than larger platforms insofaras accuracy of content. That isn't to say a smaller creators/channels are bad or not worth while, but being aware of context as you consume is important. We've unfortunately stopped caring about accuracy or accountability in many instances.
So for YouTube I haven't been able to find quality reporting for the most part (outside of an occasional niche issue).
For X my experience is that it's essentially impossible for me to vet personal accounts that people have. Also it runs into the issue where everything is just anecdotal so it's easy to get an inaccurate picture from that sort of information. This is without even getting into the huge problem with bots and even state level disinfo on X (and social media in general). Not that I don't use it at all, it's just not trustworthy or accurate for most things.
Edit: not that "mainstream media" doesn't have some of these issues. It's just not as bad as some of these other sources and it's much easier to get a sense for specific organizations than trying to understand the bias and veracity of a myriad of YouTubers and random people on X. Like it's much easier to understand the biases and issues of Reuters than a bunch of YouTubers and random people on X so for basic information I will go to places like Reuters first.
Edit2: for issues with YouTubers you have to remember they make money through engagement (and real news is less engaging). I think this is a lot of what's killed traditional media so I doubt YouTube, which is if anything more tied to this, is unlikely to be better. Then also look at the recent Tenet Media scandal. Like yeah I get some news from YouTubers but it's a real minefield when it comes to good information.
You suggest that I get my news from a place that vehemently pushes flat earth videos to me because I happened to watch a video laughing at them?
YouTube has an extreme bias to pushing conspiracy theory content.
Welcome giant sweeping generalizations that are unsupported by data nor stringent arguments.
honestly the base concept of 'mainstream media' is simply dumb. It's just a convenient way to group 'the other guy' up with conveniently ignoring 'not mainstream' media doing the same or worse.
"they control the media you can't believe anything they say!" being spewed on the platform with by-far the largest market share/reach.
A few years ago I went online and looked at the articles my local paper was putting out in the 1800s.
There weren’t any.
Instead they had little blurbs, online they’d be called “tweets” or “posts” mostly submitted by readers.
That was journalism in a midwestern city in the 1800s.
That sounds interesting. Can you share?
A good article about a somewhat similar scheme by Taboola https://www.readmargins.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-chum-...
Interesting find, serious question: does it matter?
IMO it does. It’s reflective of these news organizations not caring about their brand reputations and instead just looking at the $$$.
Having an entirely separate staff, with a separate website, publish content under your name without your input ought to be a five alarm fire for editorial staff. But there’s some affiliate cash up for grabs so some senior exec somewhere okayed it.
There’s a tech angle here too: if it weren’t for SEO they might we’ll be operating out of cnnunderscore.com or whatever, but the SEO juice of a page on cnn.com is too tempting to pass up.
Doesn't Google also punish small sites that do similar things? Like if I made a site that was sincere as an individual where I review kitchen utensils where I add affiliate links I'd be penalized, but the larger established domains are allowed to do the same thing without Google punishing them?
Bingo. All the small shops who were doing actual reviews got wiped out, and this blog is basically documenting the new age of parasite spam eating the web and raking in millions.
Online reviews are completely gamed IMO. My wife still looks at them, talks about the "highly rated" stuff she finds, and I tell her it's all fake she doesn't believe it.
I have been telling my mum the same thing and she don't listen. Googling for reviews used to work very well to like 3-10 years ago. I don't speak English nativly, and I suspect that it worked better in my native tongue for way longer then English. It is like it takes time for it to sink in for people, when they are trusting a process or institution.
I wanted to buy a ultra-sonic cleaner for my garage/workshop. I need it to clean out parts. I searched for reviews on Youtube, and I noticed that the big "ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon" manufacturer Vev[*123]or seem to more or less have donated a cleaner to about every workshop genre Youtuber in the last 1 to 3 years. Or paid them to shill. Dunno.
I mean I was flabbergasted to the extent of the manipulation. I didn't think it was this bad. And I did end up buying their cleaner ...
*123 I just don't wanted to SEO help them.
Not all of those sites were innocent of doing it the correct way.
Maybe not, but Google, with its monopoly, should play fair and not pick favorites because it increases their ad dollars bought.
How do you now they are completely separate? Or that there is no oversight?
Answer: You don't know. You're just speculating.
Monoculture in journalism definitely matters. News media has a profound ability to shape and direct the discourse in society writ large, and the slow consolidation of news media in some countries is extremely problematic because it enables private individuals to exert undue influence in pursuit of their agenda that may or may not be at odds with the public interest.
In Canada, for example, it's hard to throw a stone and not hit a foreign-owned PostMedia news outlet.
I don't particularly care who owns such outlets.
What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
When I consider events or situations I've had direct knowledge of, or where I've had access to direct witness accounts and raw footage that I trust, some of the worst reporting in my opinion has been from CBC News. With CBC being a Crown corporation, CBC News could perhaps be considered the most inherently "Canadian-owned" of the mainstream news outlets.
On the other hand, for such situations, I've generally found reporting from Postmedia's various outlets to be among the most accurate, complete, and objective of that from the mainstream outlets, even if it may be considered foreign-owned.
>What matters to me is the validity of the content being produced, regardless of who produces it. If foreign-owned outlets do a better job than locally-owned outlets at providing factual, complete, and as-objective-as-possible reporting, that's fine with me.
As we've seen time and time again, the content produced is only "valid" if your personal interests happen to align with those of Rupert Murdoch, or whomever.
CBC definitely has its own problems but being beholden to the biases of the billionaire class isn't one of them.
> slow consolidation
Move slow, break countries.
From what I'm to gather by reading Part One, the author runs his own affiliate link SEO sites and is mad that big-name brands are doing it better by leveraging business deals and brand recognition.
Great. So he's well-motivated to dig up and publicize hitherto-unknown (or barely-known) shenanigans from Forbes etc al, and he knows where to look.
If he wasn't going to investigate this, who would? CNN? USA Today?
> publicize hitherto-unknown (or barely-known) shenanigans
It's disclosed on a banner across the top of literally every cnn-uncensored page that's being 'outed' here. He could have saved the entire research/dig by simply screenshotting the top of any of the pages. That wouldn't have the same energy or 'Ahah!' though.
It matters because we consider them reliable sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Wikipedia is the most reliable source of news/perspective on issued but it can get contaminated if entities given the "reliable sources" label republish unreliable or biased dreck.
Yes I’d be disturbed if my news source was run by Forbes Marketplace. But it would explain a lot.
Propaganda source
Indeed.It's a nice effort...but specially for these two organizations, is a bit like taking a sinking ship and before it disappears underwater...Deciding to set it on fire...:-)
I am absolutely shocked to read the replies from everyone thinking "journalistic integrity" was a thing practiced by American Media. Clearly, everyone runs the same stories, same soundbites, same focuses. How could one think "the news" nationwide across 1000s of different outlets just happened to hone in on the same dozen-or-so topics on a daily basis.
Who in the hell reads CNN, USA Today or Forbes?
They are all rags.
usatoday owns soooo many local newspapers. Where I live if I want local news it's either them or my local NPR station and pretty much nothing else.
My local paper was sold to Gannett (USA Today) a few years ago. It's a complete shadow of what it used to be (to be fair the decline started long before the sale, as with many local papers). They are down from a full newsroom to a handul of local reporters, I'm not even sure all of them are full-time. Most of their content is just USA today stories or news from other Gannett papers.
There are a couple of bloggers who cover local government, otherwise there's really no in-depth local reporting on anything anymore.
I can't speak for every local but the "local paper" where I live is effectively the RSS feeds of the local CBS & NBC news stations' websites and the reporting is actually quite good, or at least, it's a LOT better than receiving no local reporting.
The actual local paper is as you describe. I don't understand why local TV has weathered the digital transition better, exactly, but I find that I get a LOT of the local coverage that I want this way and I'm eager to recommend this to strategy to others (as you can see)
These SEO garbage subsites rank high in Google results. That's the point of the article.
CNN is the most popular news website in the US by a huge margin and they are confident enough in their position that they're going to start testing out a paywall next month.
Source?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/27/24255900/cnn-paywall-digi...
I am seeing questions about why this is a big deal?
The issue is that CNN is using their domain authority to boost this drivel affiliate Money content, and hiding the fact that they are doing it by using layer 7 routing to cloak the site. If CNN used a subdomain, e.g. money.cnn.com, Google could learn that this content should be judged independently from the rest of the site.
This money content isn’t competing fairly. Google is being tricked to think these Money articles should have the same inherent authority as other CNN articles.
Where this impacts the consumer is that the first articles for popular search terms aren’t the best, but instead written by content marketers chasing the highest affiliate. This crowds out legitimate sites (e.g. in depth reviews of the best mortgage lenders) because they can’t hope to rank higher than CNN for the same term.
At the very least, this “path based” cloaking of content authorship should be detectable by Google, but it’s a game of whack a mole, unfortunately.
I think if you had a human curate the best content written for these popular SEO’d search terms, they’d be able to find the diamonds from the rough. That gives some hope that algorithms can improve to rank the most useful content for readers.
It’s also why Reddit is so popular as a source of content in Google.
I'm guessing that Forbes Marketplace offers revenue sharing with each website they make this deal with, so it's profitable for all parties. Is there actually an issue here - legal or ethical or deceptive? This seems like business as usual. Is the main complaint that the integrity of these news websites is weakened by having affiliate marketing? Asking seriously because while no one likes ads, I'm trying to understand what the moral/ethical implication of this is, if any.
It's good research but whatever you think about the value of the content on those sites, I think the word "fake" in the headline is misleading clickbait.
These sites are officially linked to from the parents (CNN and USA Today in this case), with whom they no doubt have a revenue-sharing agreement. They're very real in all senses of the word. The third party in question (Forbes marketplace) is not trying to fraudulently set up some parallel CNN and USA Today websites without their authorization.
Milking old established brands such as Telegraph, Guardian and the likes with affiliate and sponsored content has been going on for ages in the UK.
I'd be interested to see whether the Federal Trade Commission sees a problem with privacy policies and disclosures varying on the same website. I think there's a case to be made that the differences in data gathering fall short of informed consent and that the unified branding for different entities constitutes deceptive advertising.
Buy placements on another content website is as old as the web itself. Not sure what the shock here is.
Nice bit of sleuthing here, well done. Anyone know where those search traffic graphics are made from?
ahrefs by the looks of it
And what happens when an organism (Google) becomes overrun with parasites? It dies because it can no longer sustain the functionality that is essential to life. That is, unless it suddenly grows an immune system.
Gannet and CNN are already bottom of the barrel for journalism. Both are just rewritten wire articles at best. Both companies were obsolete 10 years ago at best.
It does not bother me that the Money and Shopping sections of CNN are run with content by another firm that specializes in interest based articles while the core of CNN remains focused on world news.
The story is that it goes against google's guidelines and yet it continues to outrank sites that are within google's guidelines.
The plot thickens! Also wouldn’t this present some sort of a conflict of interest as each of these sites (Forbes, CNN, USA Today) are now competing with eachother for SEO?
Eh, I never considered the Underscored sites to be a part of the main site anyway. I just think of them as “Outbrain”-type subsites.
This just confirms it.
I feel the title of the blog entry is maybe a bit “extreme,” but it does show some well-done sleuthing.
Media companies have had to drastically change their business models, lately, and this is just another part of it.
what if i told you Forbes 30u30 was paid advertising?
Way back when I remember cnnmoney.com was a separate company to cnn owned by the same people who owned forbes
CNN became unreliable and started turning out propaganda years ago. Monetizing it is just the next step.
CNN is first a chumbox marketplace.
So, what's the big deal? We've seen this same sort of thing happen with literally thousands of news media sites over the last 10 years.
Seems the real intention here is say that since there are affiliate ads and advertorials on the site, the entire site is somehow "fake news".
That's quite a stretch.
A fake news site would say something like Covid is "just the flu". Or maybe, let's say, endorse lies about an election being rigged.
Or focus on new conspiracy theories. Every. Single. Week.
Neither site does anything like that — No reputable news organization would ever do something that irresponsible, right?
That would be fake news.
There are liability issues for any sort of "money" or finance paper that don't exist for regular news reporting.
Under regular news reporting journalists have no legal obligation to their readers or the truth. They can say anything they want, essentially. It can be accurate, or not. It can be the truth, or not. It really doesn't matter. You can be lying for personal profit or political effect or any reason you want and it really isn't something you can get sued over. Just have to avoid tripping over defamation laws.
Where as if you are dealing with financial reporting there is legal liability. It is possible to get busted for committing fraud, it is possible to get sued for misleading information.
So keeping these sides of the business completely separated is probably a good way to limit liability.
So?
Every news site has advertising sections
https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/about
"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN newsroom. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a commission."
There is no gotcha here, completely agreed. Having done content in the early web, it was very common for sites to buy sections and placements from each other as money was available, especially on competitors. It always irked editors at selling companies, but it happened nonetheless.
Everyone who uses the web visually scans pages to hone in directly on where they think the content is. The question isn't whether or not whoever added that disclaimer meant for it to be visually ignored (they did), the question is whether they did eye-tracking testing to make sure it's ignored (yea, probably).
The disclaimer is disingenuous, because they're trading on the idea people will ignore it, while they can turn around and say everyone is in group of people who not only read the text, but also understand what "independently from the CNN newsroom" is a euphemism for.
the disclaimer is at the top of every page, and OP here is pretending his sleuthing anything other than an (idealogically/politically motivated?) disingenuous hit piece.
"look at the HTML it catches the lie!" - meanwhile, the 'lie' also exposed in clear text in a banner across the top of page. 1337 h4xing indeed.
> "Every news site has advertising sections"
Ahem, bbc.co.uk/news * *?
* Note, not bbc.com ;-)
* Also, editorially, BBC News has also gone a little downhill in recent times. But it's all relative.
Yea... I think I'm failing to understand the Gotcha here. If you go to underscored main page; It's disclosed in a banner across the top of every underscored page.
I agree them functionally selling ad-space is annoying; but it's also exposed in clear text as such at the top of every underscored page and article.
Giant nothingburger.
I disagree that this is a nothingburger. I would say it's more like the side of fries you get with your nothingburger.
It's an expose showing how deep the rabbit hole goes on this one topic, a reminder that people with money are using their money to make more money by taking control of the internet, to keep all eyes on them, to lie, cheat, manipulate, and inveigle their way into your eyeballs by any means necessary, and that they will continue to do so as long as there is a penny to be made by it.
It shows that Google is implicitly permitting this system of deception, that there is a financial conglomerate that is eviscerating the corpse of a once-proud financial giant like FORBES in order to wear its skin and work its mouth like a Muppet advertising face creams and cockroach repellents.
If you're not viscerally affected by this inhuman grotesquery, you are made of sterner stuff than I. It's appalling and a powerful metaphorical reminder of our individual insignificance against the power of money, how nothing is sacred, and nothing is safe and sane on the internet.
"but everyone does it" is about the most pathetic, incurious defense you could muster
ok and?
I noticed a steep dive in CNN news quality post acquisition. (Around when they fired a bunch of reporters people for claiming Trump lost in 2020 instead of hedging their statements).
Anyway, I’m not surprised. As far as I’m concerned they’re already out of business (just like National Geographic, which currently employs zero staff writers).
CNN has been in decline since they started. ca 2000 their content was a shocking amount of what we call clickbait now with the wording and often misrepresentation we've come to expect. They've surprisingly improved but I abandoned them over 20 years ago as anything I consume because of it.
Their TV network has always been terrible, but in the early teens, their website seemed reasonably well run.
I wouldn’t seek it out, but it wasn’t on my short list of sites to avoid in news aggregators and HN like it is today.
(I’ve never heard of the reporters they fired for being too liberal, but that event marked a sharp change in their strategy, where they said they wanted to target Fox News and Newsmax fans, and that they were changing their reporting standards to cater to those audiences.)
The steep dive in quality of the mainstream media started with the invention of the 24-hour news cycle. Focus shifted from quality to quantity.
https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2020
Many would agree that the official CNN and USA Today are already "fake" in a sense.
yep and so is the stat showing cnn is the top news source.
That's why my main source of meaningful news is X.
Just follow a few high quality independent journalists and also let the open-source algorithm rank content to show you.