PBS also did a recent live stream on the topic of science communication with some notable YouTubers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPKxk3s-8Yc

The production crew would have used "fixers" to get insight into good locations for filming and other things of interest. Whatever fixer they used was probably just friends of and/or part of this "wrong" crowd. Bourdain and his producers made a lot of shows over the years, some are going to be better produced while others are flawed. How it goes. Bourdain and his team weren't perfect — doesn't make them inauthentic at a wider perspective.

Not only this, but depending on which season of which show of his, there may have been other reasons for why spots were chosen. For instance there was at least one season of No Reservations where episodes were themed with the location as a backdrop. The episode he had in my hometown caused a lot of locals to complain that he wasn't choosing the best spots, but the point was the whole episode was a narrative and the spots chosen fit the narrative.

Ahh tv, always the narrative…

Not sure an AI curation machine is a solution to the points OP is making.

Let's be honest -- at that point you don't have a business anymore and aren't an "entrepreneur".

Let's be more honest: if the power is on, the sheriff isn't locking your doors, but customers can't reach your web presence, the problem isn't really "the entrepreneur".

> yet are trivially outcompeted by just a mom who puts in the hours with a curriculum from the internet.

Oh come on. A quick read on Wikipedia will even tell you the research on outcomes is fraught with biases and lacking evidence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

Thankfully, my reading of the research didn't begin or end with "a quick read on Wikipedia"

That’s not how it works at large news orgs. Journalists will enter their articles in a CMS. From there it will get put into a workflow and seen by one or several editors who will edit things for clarity, grammar, style, etc. Links will get added at some point by an editor or automated system. There is no cabal of journalists scheming to keep links out of articles because “culture”.

If there were a culture of always including the original source, or journalists massively advocating to include the original source, then surely the CMS would cater to it. I think it's safe to draw the conclusion that most journalists don't care about it.

There’s a lot of rightly deserved criticism of the media but the OP describing journalists as conspiring to keep links out in the fear of being fact checked by readers is simply false and indicative of not having any experience at a large news organization.

But there has to be some reason for original source links never appearing in journalist articles.

It's not historically done. Printed newspapers obviously didn't have links and neither did televised news. Even when the news media started publishing online, it's not like the courts were quick to post the decisions online.

And there's also the idea that you should be able to at least somewhat trust the people reporting the news so they don't have to provide all of their references. --You can certainly argue that not all reporters can or should be trusted anymore, but convincing all journalists to change how they work because of bad ones is always going to be hard.

There is also the added pressure that some organizations quietly pile on editors to keep people from clicking out to third parties at all, where their attention may wander away. Unless of course that third party is an ad destination.

Reputable news organizations are more robust against such pressures, but plenty of people get their news from (in some cases self-described) entertainment sites masquerading as news sites.

Is it because journalists think of their special talent as talking to people to get information (which is a scarce and priviliged resource), versus reading and summarizing things that we all have access to?

So they rarely are forced to do anything but state the name of who they interviewed, and that's it. And puts them in the habit of not acknowledging what they read, as a source?

They certainly can put links in stories and frequently do, just not to primary sources.

> To me, the interesting question is, what can we do to fight back?

Well for starters: consume less, vote, volunteer, get outside, engage with your local community, etc. Just be mindful that it’s easy to get discouraged when you are seemingly trying to take on the world. Small steps matter in the grand scheme of things.

Your GH profile says you are the CEO of Enatega. If you are going to do self promotion around here at least be transparent about it. https://github.com/SharanGoharKhan

Why wouldn’t AI handle the work of the contractors?

For the time being, AI doesn’t have good access to a lot of things: customers, information in 3rd party systems, etc. Even when we give access (with MCP, for example), current AI has trouble locating the right information to solve a problem.

So I still need an engineer to find out why the distributed system isn’t performing correctly, or to create a new component that is coherent with the rest of the existing UI. The difference is that any particular engineer will find more success tackling a wider range of goals.

Lots of people don't dare do things in production, even the ones with some other specialized technical experience.

One could argue nature solved it by evolving homo sapiens.