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The whole newspaper using comments as reliable source has to do with the whole part of "Discussion" pages that news sometimes have, however in paper news those are generally curated, as in not every little piece of gak is printed and generally writing down a cohesive argument takes time and effort and leads in general to a higher quality.

With social media however the "entry-bar" has lowered and now you get the unthought out gak in the droves it exists.

Course that also has to do with our general lack of capable communication in the social media space.

TL: DR: Lazy newspaper prints from social media directly due to shaving costs and having no curation means gak like this get's through.

FWIW, there also used to be a separation between the type of media that included vox populi paragraphs (local rags, fascist redtops, the Daily Mail) and proper news sources.

The only time you ever used to hear from 'the man on the Clapham omnibus' on the Beeb was during the crappy local news segments; your Look North and what-have-you.

Something interesting I have noted of late is that some outlets are moving away from individual opinions, at least that aren't directly involved in stories. My local paper will grab comments from people at the scene of stories and whatnot, but wont solicit them from random people on just any subject, and have recently completely shut down their comment system, the latter of which was loooooooooong overdue as there was literally nothing of value in any of the comments (which were all obvious bot/astroturf accounts of a singular political nature, or raw unfocused vitriol, and very little else).

 Vaktathi wrote:
Something interesting I have noted of late is that some outlets are moving away from individual opinions, at least that aren't directly involved in stories. My local paper will grab comments from people at the scene of stories and whatnot, but wont solicit them from random people on just any subject, and have recently completely shut down their comment system, the latter of which was loooooooooong overdue as there was literally nothing of value in any of the comments (which were all obvious bot/astroturf accounts of a singular political nature, or raw unfocused vitriol, and very little else).

Well thank god for that!

Seriously, the bottom half of the Internet is the worst. The Comment section is literally where brain cells go to die.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
FWIW, there also used to be a separation between the type of media that included vox populi paragraphs (local rags, fascist redtops, the Daily Mail) and proper news sources.

The only time you ever used to hear from 'the man on the Clapham omnibus' on the Beeb was during the crappy local news segments; your Look North and what-have-you.

And here we have the culture clash.
Here in switzerland any good papper has such a paragraf, sometimes two,generally curated but Still has it.

Funny thing is Twitter isn't even a fairly neutral site. Not saying any site is but years back it used to be fun and then became a cesspool for fanatics like Tumblr and 4chan. I used to know fairly apolitical people on Twitter that spoke to most people become fairly political and generally not responding to anybody except very close knit friends or nobody at all.

Using responses from Twitter as people's opinions is like going to Tumblr or 4chan. I don't use it much but at least Facebook has some variety of opinion.