流量至上的年代，新闻失去的只是真相吗？

Hi, everyone. And welcome back to America Under the Microscope. 欢迎回来【闲话美国】. Hi, James.

Hi, Lulu, hi, everyone. It's been a long time.

Yeah, I know that you have been busy, but what we gonna talk about today?

Well, I have a question for you.  Do you keep up to date with the news around the world and the country?

I would like to say I am doing that, but just don't test me on any facts. Okay?

How do you like to get your news?

Nowadays is really mostly on my phone. I do have news apps. I also get it from like social media, for example like WeiBo or even Wechat public accounts. I think most people are doing that right now. I don't watch TV to get news.

I see. Today I kind of would like to talk about the media in America, kind of like how do Americans get their information.

That sounds like a very interesting topic.

First of all, how do people get their news? I know that you have many different news channels, first of all?

Like you mentioned how you get your news on your phone using apps, that's also true in America as well.  But we have several avenues available.  One such we have are what we call cable news channels.

Cable就是有线.

So what these are the 24-hour news networks. So they have news going all day long.

But it's roughly the same news, right?  Unless there's Breaking News, there's usually just… they just looping the same stuff, 就是滚动播放the same content. No?

Correct. So it's like, if you watch it at 6:00 am and if it's a slow day, you watch it at midnight, they'll be reporting the same stories.

Yeah. I think it's the same with lots of news channels.

It's definitely the same.

And if there is a big event, certainly there be more interesting things going on, but to be fair, most days, not much happens.

Yeah. I’ve been following, so I do get CNN at home. That's one of the big ones, right?

Yes, CNN is one of the big American ones, following this is Fox News and MSNBC, so those are the three big news networks.

These are the channels that every American can get at home without additional cost? or do you have to pay extra for?

You have to pay for a cable subscription.

They're part of like standard cable TV subscriptions, but for a lot of people who now just use streaming, our streaming like TV, they don't have these channels anymore because they're not in like Netflix or Amazon or Apple TV.

就是流媒体stream media. I think that's completely different, it's separate.

But you can watch all of them online.

I think this whole stream media, online media has really changed the way people access information. But more on that later.

Back to these big cable news channels, but it's not just news, right? It's not just a newscaster, they're reading the news. You also have like people call in reporting from like on site, and then you also have people comment on these news.

Right. So as it's 24hours, they need to fill up a lot of time.

True.

So sometimes it's gonna be like, it'll be just regular news reporting. Then they'll have the sports hour or the report on sports. There will be parts where they're reporting on business, then they will have what we call ‘opinion shows’ or ‘talking head shows’.

Talking head?

Or you have this charismatic, this charismatic person sharing their opinions about the recent news stories.

OK, just like news commentator.

Yeah, and sometimes they'll have interviews and things like this. And on top of that they sometimes also show documentaries that the channel produces.

Yeah, honestly I think it's probably also to fill the spot really to stretch the time.

Yeah. It's like we made 24-hour news channel, we need 24 hours of shows. What were we thinking?

Exactly. But one question though, because obviously in China we have a very different way of running our media. All these what you just talked about CNN or Fox, MSNBC, are they government owned or privately owned?

They're all privately owned channels.  America does not have a government owned and run news channel. I see. So all of our big news channels are private.

So basically all of these channels are running just like any other business would. Yeah, that's correct. I see. More of a need to survive really.

And so earlier on, we were talking about people, especially young people, don't watch TV-TV anymore. They would just get everything online, right?

Yeah, they have their phones with them, so it's just way more convenient to use the web. So like you mentioned, you use your phone to get your news. That's actually how most Americans get their news nowadays. They're more likely to use apps to get their information.

Now the most popular apps to get news would not be a news APP, but social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook, Twitter. I think same here. The other day I was asking some of my students and I said where do you get your news? They were telling me Weibo, but technically Weibo is social media not really news APP in that sense.

It does have a lot of news accounts, but it's still social media, right? But do you actually have news apps?

Of course.

Like just owned by newspapers?

Like every single big newspaper have their own apps and online newspapers, like the New York Times, the LA Times. They all have their own APP. You can pay for their subscription and read the articles just like if you could get their newspapers, but not many people read newspapers anymore.

No, especially if you have to pay, I… this is the thing. If I can get it elsewhere, I probably won't really fork out the money to pay for the subscription. I think that's for me. What about you? Do you subscribe to any of these major newspapers?

No, because I tend to use news sources that are free and readable online because I don't want to pay for a subscription for something that 99% of the things they publish I'm not going to read. It's like articles about art in New York. I don't live in New York, so I don't care.

A lot of these they do have like localized information that's for sure.

The other thing is what about these video streaming platforms like YouTube, TikTok?

So one thing that's been happening is instead of like young people watching the news channels for their opinions, it’s people are watching Vlogers on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, or they kind of do the same thing, these people sharing their opinions about news stories and on TikTok, so the course gonna be like short clips which aren't enough to go into detail about anything or a lot of them on YouTube are sensationalized or they add a lot of graphics to make it visually interesting.

Yeah. They want to boost the traffic. 就流量至上的时候, 我觉得世界大同。

I think people everywhere are the same, especially people who get hooked up the TikTok generation or not just the young people just everyone now is hooked on things like TikTok  or YouTube or any of these video streaming sites, especially short videos, like you said sensationalized commenting or comments on news.

But that begs the question, how do we know if the news we read are really what's happening, are the facts? I think that's a big question.  I think we're gonna wrap up here and leave that big question to the advanced episode where we go into news sources and their views and just talk a little bit about fact checking the news.

That sounds good. Yes!

All right. on that note we're gonna say goodbye now. Thank you James for coming to the show. Leave us a comment if you have anything to share about news reading.

Bye everyone. See you in the advanced episode.

See you.