source: colleague was a core engineer there
And I remember back when Google Video was a thing that Google was indexing feeds of TV channels' subtitles. I remember there was a search engine at one point for subtitles? Presumably they still index live TV subtitles and content both to support YouTube TV but also to feed content into their YouTube Content ID program... I wonder if anyone's comparing TV subtitles to speech-to-text output to catch differences in either.
Here's an article about Google's early Video Search product for captions: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/08/brief-history-of-go... Apparently displaying and searching captions to the public for free lasted barely 6 months... Here's a screenshot showing a search result: https://informitv.com/2005/01/25/google-video-search-for-tel...
I don’t think they have any plans to do anything other than what they do now (selectively offer playback to subscribers who opted in before the broadcast), but makes you think it’s a solved technical problem that governments and other players are also probably doing.
Take a look at the stations, they are all owned by Sinclair:
Fox 29, San Antonio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KABB
Fox 66: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSMH
KATU 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KATU_(TV)
CBS 4, El Paso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDBC-TV
KGAN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGAN
etc.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/propaganda-public-diplomacy_b...
In any case, that law/amendment has nothing to do with the video in this post. The reason all these stations are saying the same thing is not because of the government, it is because they are all owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, and those who run that company wanted to push this message.
Honestly, the quality of "government propaganda" from VOA is better than what we get from Sinclair.
Imagine you are a local news studio. You went from being responsible for 30 minutes of content a day to (often) upwards of two hours. And you only have a skeleton crew of on staff writers. To stretch the time, corporate offers a library of "stock" news stories and scripts to choose from.
I am told that local studios still have a lot of choice on what they use, but yeah, you're going to find a bunch of different studios grabbing the same script and not making any changes. Grain of salt.
A couple of years later I wrote a script to consolidate stories from news sites across my state and display them with a nice UI, since I have family all over the place and want to keep up with what's going on. The majority of stories were duplicated across all of them, and local news had become the filler content. Even for stories of national importance, they can be interpreted in so many ways that you'd expect different people in different areas to have different analyses of the facts (which is what used to happen), but that doesn't exist anymore. With the pushback against "fake news", official news sources are the only acceptable source of information, and those are monopolized by an increasingly tiny minority of people. BTW I don't put "fake news" in quotes to say that it doesn't exist, but that it's a catch-all term for propaganda that goes against the official propaganda.
1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#2018_...
https://www.google.com/search?q=mass+shootings+surge+as+nati...
Also, the following quote is just utter BS, trying to draw a distinction where there is none:
> Reminder: "While it is extremely dangerous to our democracy..." the US is actually a Constitutional Republic.
Of course I feel a little bad telling people this because it's pretty easy to avoid. Once TV news becomes unpopular they'll probably start shoving the same stuff into something that was previously mostly free of that kind of thing.
Not all news stations are the same, not all countries have the same TV news.
It is easy to just give up and think that you cannot trust anyone. But, the reality is that there is many journalists that care and try to create high quality news. To put them all in one bag is not fair, nor helpful.
The problem lies in finding the high-quality journalists. A default assumption of “TV news is crap” is warranted by the signal-to-noise ratio. Nobody’s putting them in the same bag; they are already there and must be sorted out. And that takes time and attention that is already scarce for most people.
I don’t know if there is a viable solution to this that doesn’t start with journalists themselves. As you say, some have a great record. IMO part of that is, and will increasingly involve, more extensive provenance and supplementary documentation for the stories they report, whenever possible.
What’s really scary is when mainstream media outlets from a variety of corporate entities all repeat the exact same talking points that are exactly in sync with one political party.
This is not the same one that I have seen before, but here is another that I just found: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21271137/amazon-propagand...
There are a bunch more examples if you do a little research.
That's just being totaly unrealistic. The news agencies like AP report news where forced must-run scripts from agenda pushing corporate owners cannot even be considered the same ballpark as "not much different"
>The reality is that local TV never did anything by themselves
If you are referring to local news reporting on anything outside the local area, then of course they don't do much themselves. If they had first party reporters outside of their local area, they'd no longer be a local news. This is why local news have partners in other markets, or other agencies like AP.
Lots of people like to point to AP or Reuters as examples of copy-paste news programming, but that ignores the primary difference: affiliates select which AP or Reuters stories they want to air and/or publish.
Others compare TV networks like ABC or CBS requiring shows to be aired at certain times, but none of the networks mandate local news coverage like Sinclair does.
It was.
There were (and still are) multiple “lab leak” theories that are in widespread circulation, ranging from “it is possible that there was accidental infection at a research facility” all the way to “it is a bioweapon”
The scientific community has always discounted the latter.
Also, science is evidence based, and so many scientists are (rightly) hesitant to make conclusions (and to support others conjecture) unless they have some sort of evidence to support it. China knows this, and knows they can avoid bad publicity altogether by limiting the evidence that is released. Scientists are not in a position to make political accusations in the absence of other information. “We don’t have any evidence to support that theory” is perfectly reasonable scientific statement, regardless of the political realities.
Anyway, one of the problems with media consolidation is that people don’t hear competing narratives, so whatever narrative a small group of people decide on is what ends up feeling true to people.
You can discount it from the lack of evidence. I can be considered again once some evidence is available.